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:
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.
:sadness-abysmal:
put it on the moon
everyone wins
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.