Great Escape

We Need to Be Able to Escape Planet Earth

Why the space age depends on mining

Illustration: Jason Raish

There are untold riches’ worth of valuable metals in space. Consider the near-Earth asteroid 1986 DA, discovered 32 years ago. Radar observations indicated that this rock, two kilometers wide, contained 10 trillion kilograms of iron, 1 trillion kilograms of nickel, 100 million kilograms…