Some corporation is going to be bringing back an asteroid to strip its resources, and something will go wrong, and they'll accidentally do a heckin orbital bombardment of Earth with a giant metal rock. :egg-dog:
Fun fact! This is already the plan. It's not remotely cost effective to deorbit bulk metals & cargo with parachutes & heat shields. Square cube law gets in your way. The semi-serious plans I've heard for asteroid-to-earth mining involve controlled bombardment of a stretch of (soon to be) desert and then trawling the surface for the ejecta.
So yeah, if we actually start mining asteroids this will happen eventually.
Not really necessary on the moon. If we're ever deep enough into granpap's scifi nerd fantasies to need bulk imports to the moon's surface, there's better options. The lower gravity and lack of atmosphere make it so you could build a space elevator out of concrete & kevlar, no messy impacts required. Hell, even if you're doing it with rockets like a dipshit the gravity well is like 1/8th as deep. No idea why you would though, ain't shit on the moon.
Mining is space only sort of makes sense once you have have a reason to build shit in space. Right now we don't have orbital shipyards or a Dyson swarm in construction, and despite all the bullshit bluster there's not a government or billionaire alive that's planning anything that'd require 1/100th of the capacity to make that shit sensible.
The only talks about asteroid mining right now are coming from billionaires riding short-term grifts to get NASA sold off piecemeal, and maybe one or two fart huffers who want to establish a monopoly on gold and rare Earths by threatening to colony drop 16-Psyche onto the bullion market.
By then Earth's layer of pollution will be so thick the comet will burn up in atmosphere, saving us, like in that Simpsons episode.
not even though. it's gonna be some cut-rate consulting firm, working on behalf of a cigarette company, outsourcing the work to some subsidiary of some other company owned by senate majority leader Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I think this is the background plot of the Ace Combat games or something
nah the Americans will accidentally set off a nuclear bomb. Then react to it with nuclear war
Imagine thinking western industry has the capacity to reach into space, when the current multi-trillion dollar enterprises are all desperately focused on maximizing the return of VR and Bitcoins.
The US Space Age is over. We're not going to Tesla our way into the cosmos, much less at an industrial scale. NASA has been in managed decline since the 80s. The Russians have a more advanced space agency than we do, atm. Asteroid mining is a pipe dream for a country that hasn't been to the Moon in over half a century.
None of this shit is going to happen because we're materially bankrupt as a civilization.
I wouldn't bet against capitalists when it comes to finding ways to exploit natural resources. I don't know how they'll do it, but those motherfuckers will find a way.
Capitalism is great at going after low hanging fruit. The moon is anything but.
