“This isn’t space mining,” NASA insists.
As if, at this stage of history, government agencies still held a monopoly over truth.
In October 2023, humanity took a quiet but decisive step toward its next economic phase: the extraterrestrial one. On that day, the Psyche spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, bound for the asteroid that shares its name. Officially, its goal is scientific—studying the exposed metallic core of a failed planet, a stellar fossil suspended between Mars and Jupiter.
But the subtext is more explosive than the Falcon Heavy rocket that carried it: capitalism has set its eyes on the cosmos.
And Psyche, with its estimated $10,000 quadrillion in metals, is the new El Dorado.
If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will reach Psyche in August 2029. And although no one will say it outright, that year humanity will attempt something unprecedented: touching the vault of the solar system’s planetary bank.
The Core of Another World… or the Blueprint of Our Future?
Psyche is not just another rock drifting in the asteroid belt. Its composition is extraordinary—almost entirely metals: iron, nickel, gold, platinum. The building blocks of every economic system humanity has ever built.
When the asteroid was discovered in 1852, it barely caught the attention of astronomers. Today, with Earth running out of cheap resources and the climate crisis choking traditional energy systems, the interest has changed dramatically.
NASA calls Psyche a “scientific mission” to understand planetary cores. But behind the academic tone lies the emerging reality: space mining is the next speculative frontier. Not to bring the metals back—yet—but to test strategies, validate technologies, and send a geopolitical message:
We are already digging beyond Earth.
Capital has no homeland—
but it will soon have orbit.
The Real Gold Isn’t Underground—It’s Floating in Space
In a world where artificial intelligence is replacing workers and decarbonization is dismantling old industries, the true scarcity is no longer in mines. It’s in orbit. And the race has already begun.
Bezos, Musk, and state space agencies represent only the surface of a deeper economic transition: the birth of the orbital economy.
If Psyche contains metals in the quantities estimated, the implications are devastating:
- Commodity prices would collapse.
- Gold would lose its status as a scarce asset.
- Platinum and rare metals would flood the market.
- Entire financial systems—currencies, futures, central banks—would enter crisis.
If gold is no longer scarce…
If metal is no longer limited…
What backs global monetary systems?
The Psyche mission won’t deliver final answers, but it will force humanity to confront dangerous questions in a domain without sovereignty, without laws, without citizens: outer space.
History Repeats Itself—Only the Distance Has Changed
Humanity has lived variations of this story:
- The California gold rush
- African mineral colonization
- Lithium wars in the Southern Cone
But never before has greed needed to travel 370 million kilometers to establish itself.
Current space treaties prohibit national ownership of celestial bodies—but they leave loopholes wide enough for corporate lawyers to fly rockets through:
If the place “belongs to no one,”
then extraction is fair game.
The United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan are already crafting their own off-planet resource strategies. This is not science fiction—
it is new geopolitics.
And Psyche is the first stepping stone.
The Real Threat: Bringing the Metals Back to Earth
NASA maintains that Psyche is not a mining mission.
But no agency spends billions to “just observe.”
The real objective is strategic:
- mapping trajectories
- testing navigation algorithms
- validating rendezvous technologies
- establishing operational precedent
All of it aimed at future cargo missions that could return tons of metal to Earth.
And if that succeeds?
The global economic system collapses under an avalanche of abundance.
Gold becomes worthless.
Platinum loses its prestige.
Steel stops being strategic.
Slavoj Žižek once remarked:
Capitalism can survive anything—except its own success.
Psyche could be that paradox.
A Ghost Haunts the Asteroid Belt
Psyche is not merely a mineral body—it is a hypothesis.
A projection of humanity’s anxieties: technological, economic, existential.
But an uncomfortable possibility lingers, one rarely mentioned by NASA or enthusiasts:
What if we’re not the first to mine it?
Its exposed core could be the result of extraction—
not cosmic chance.
Some argue that advanced civilizations do not colonize planets; they harvest them, then disappear.
Exactly as we plan to do.
Digging Upward
While humanity debates inflation, AI, and geopolitical tensions, a probe heads silently toward an object that could rewrite our civilization’s foundations.
Its arrival in 2029 will mark a before and after.
NASA says it won’t bring anything back.
But Psyche is already returning something:
uncomfortable questions.
Who will own cosmic gold?
Are we prepared for a gold rush without geography?
Or are we simply repeating—on an interplanetary scale—the same mistakes that ravaged Earth?
Nietzsche warned that the abyss doesn’t only stare back.
Sometimes, it waits above.
And that’s where we’re going—
to dig in the void.
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