Asteroid Mining: Benefits and Pitfalls

Asteroid mining exploration should be supported to ensure minerals and support innovation, but not as a way to sustain the current linear supply chains.

Asteroid mining rendering. Image: Deep Space

Asteroid mining is not a new term or developing idea at all. Already, in 2013, NASA published the article A New NASA Mission Helps Us Learn How to Mine Asteroids. Its mission, OSIRIS-REx, came back with a sample of the asteroid Bennu in 2020.

Though asteroid sampling is not the same as mining them, contempora…