Let's hope Elon Musk doesn't find out about this. With his ambition and penchant for moon(mars?)shots he might just try redirecting this asteroid. Plus he owns a rocket company, so he's got more means to pursue such a goal than anyone else. But I'd sleep better knowing there isn't a 200km wide chunk of solid iron being redirected in our general direction by programmers who maybe fat-fingered a critical part of the data/algorithm somewhere.
The only remotely realistic way to capture an asteroid is to start with one that's already in a temporary, unstable orbit.
If asteroid mining is ever economical, it will either be for relatively small masses of extremely valuable minerals (not iron) or to build things in space that are meant to stay in space.
Is it? The IPT can theoretically go anywhere inside Saturn's orbit (maybe it was only Jupiter?). It's entirely possible to reach some pretty valuable asteroids in that range. Send an IPT with mining equipment, leave the equipment behind and fill the ship with the processed or semi-processed precious metals. 50 tonnes could be turned into a cool billion dollars[1] without absolutely destroying the market (ease them in slowly).
There's risks, but that's sort of Elon Musk's thing. And the money would help cover this Mars colony plan.
[1] ballparking using the going price of gold and platinum of around $1200 USD/ounce.
I don't think Elon Musk's thing is risks... his thing is goals. He's not building rockets because it's risky, he's taking risks to make humankind multiplanetary. He's not starting a car company because it's risky, he's making cars to accellerate the transition to sustainable energy.
What's the goal for getting 50 tonnes of gold and platinum to Earth? Cash? Musk is just raised $1.2 billion for Tesla this week, no asteroid required.
He borrowed $1.2 billion. He took on an incredibly large debt. No one ever got rich applying for credit cards.
The purpose of getting 50 tonnes of rare earths is to pay back those debts, and pay for the next big project that needs a billion dollars.
Lowering the cost of rare metals would also be a big boon for humanity. Mining in Earth is not an industry known for its safety or cleanliness, and lower prices of those metals would bring down the cost of many technological innovations to levels that more people can have them.
I see asteroid mining as not just a profitable thing, but a project worthy of doing at a level beyond finance.
According to Bloomberg, Musk sold 250 million dollars worth of Tesla shares and emitted 750 million dollars in convertible debt. That's not exactly the same as borrowing 1.2 billion dollars.
Yes. The company is piggybacking on the millions of dollars and man-hours that went into past government research on space exploration. It is going out of its way to recover and reuse equipment that went through the extremes of being shot into orbit and reentering the Earth's atmosphere to lower costs.
Just as you're piggybacking on the countless cash and man-hours that humanity spent developing computing and network tech, as well as literacy programs, just to post comments online.
If you feel your posts are your own work in spite of all the piggybacking you do to post them, do give Musk some credit for actually doing the work no one ever did.
I know Musk is a sacred cow around these parts, but maybe you should reread my post as an explanation as to why I don't believe SpaceX is in the business of taking on such risks instead of a polemic against an HN ubermensch.
Reminder: any such numbers are purely theoretical, and based on an infinite market capable of absorbing infinite amounts of product at current pricing levels. That is not the world we live in.
The first line of the article is: "The solution to all of Earth’s metal problems, or the space rock that would completely obliterate the world economy"
The important thing to note here is that "precious metals" and "rare minerals" really aren't. Given advanced enough technology, they become abundant.
That happened with aluminum - they used to make very expensive jewelry out of it, till we learned how to mine it efficiently, and now it's $1.9 per kilo.
I expect the same to happen to gold, silver, platinum. Diamonds are already on their way.
Monetary gold (the thing that controls the price of gold, ie, the precious metals spot prices) and precious jewelry is about half of the usage of today's newly mined gold, industrial and electronics taking up the other half.
Over human history, about 165 thousand metric tons (or 182 thousand short tons, or about 5.3 billion troy ounces) of gold have been mined, or at a spot price of $1200, almost $6.4 trillion dollars of gold. 33 thousand metric tons of it is currently held by banks and individuals as monetary gold.
Gold mining produces 2.5 to 3 thousand tons of gold each year.
But get this: if we melted the entire planet down, there would be single digit or possibly low double digit quintillions of metric tons of gold. In other words, we have mined less than a trillionth of the gold.
What keeps gold prices so far up is it costs about $1000 per ounce to mine, although this is dropping due to larger and larger mining machines and more automated processes that involve less people.
Outside of electronics, gold has no real world usage. Monetary gold and jewelry are largely artifacts of the past, imo. Once we eliminate those, the continued fast pace of growth of industrial and electronic consumption will be handled for quite some time, and also drop the price of gold significantly.
>Gem-quality diamonds grown in a lab can be chemically, physically and optically identical (and sometimes superior) to naturally occurring ones. The mined diamond industry has undertaken legal, marketing and distribution countermeasures to protect its market from the emerging presence of synthetic diamonds.
[...] many others were worried about the absolute collapse in commodity prices that would have occurred if it were suddenly easy to get all the iron and nickel we’d need for centuries.
Worried? Because of falling prices? Looks like someone didn't pay attention during economics 101 or is afraid of going out of business.
What does dependent mean? There are 8 countries with more than 10 % of their GDP from mineral resources. They are in order of decreasing share Togo, Suriname, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mongolia, Chile, and Zambia. Togo has the largest dependency with 16.1 %. Chile is by far the largest economy with a GDP of 240 billion Dollar followed by Congo, Zambia, and Mongolia with 35, 21, and 11 billion Dollar.
So depending on the exact composition, some countries might experience some pain. But space mining would not arrive over night, missions have to be planed, infrastructure must be build, and long distances have to be traveled. So there would almost certainly be some time to get prepared for the arrival of cheap cheap metals from space.
Shift the economy towards other sectors? That happens all the time. A prime example are oil states currently trying to lower their dependence on oil. What would be the alternative? Not innovate? No, let's not invest in renewable energy, that will hurt coal, oil, and gas producing countries, let's just keep burning fossile fuels? That's just the way it is, the world changes constantly, adapt or fall behind.
I don't think some of those places have "other sectors" that can be shifted to. I'm not arguing for burning fossil fuels, but shrugging and telling people already past the edge of desperation to "adapt" is cruel and unreasonable.
The highest dependency on mineral resources is 16.1 % and it seems unlikely that the entire sector would get killed, i.e. if the asteroid contains mostly iron and nickel, then only those parts would be affected. Without running the actual numbers it's hard to tell if some countries would get hit unreasonably hard. But even if, we could still opt to support them. We could have a tax on space mining operations and spend the proceeds on support for affected countries. So this should at best be a question of how, not if.
By the way, I don't think space mining will be of any practical relevance in the foreseeable future. I would also much prefer if we would learn to operate economically with the resources we have instead of just reaching for more resources. So I have no real skin in the argument, I just found this position against space mining unjustified.
I understand where you're coming from, I'm just enjoying the discussion as well. I think you're right, it's definitely feasible that we could ease the impact of such mining, but I worry that we wouldn't. The countries you've listed are ones that most people shrug and feel badly for, but don't really do much to change. They've been basket cases for longer than most have been alive, and the reasons why are complicated and largely older than anyone alive.
I worry that it would be cheaper and more profitable for some to simply write them off. You're right however, that it's not a problem with space-mining, it's a problem with people.
We see precipitous price drops all around us. Like the price of data storage (hard disk), bandwidth or transistors. Local price drops are even more common, for example the price of coal at the gate of some mines. There are some houses in Italy and Detroit with a price tag of zero.
There's a huge difference between providing a stable source of iron from a mine, and dumping on the market, all at once, what would take ten years to mine.
If you were certain you'd get it back to earth, you could offset this effect by slowly selling futures contracts. But if you then fail to bring back the iron you'd just cause he opposite problem: a sudden increase in scarcity (when you default on your futures contracts), rather than a sudden increase in abundance.
I believe the solution is to partner with an insurance company, but I'm not sure anyone is large enough to cover the amounts we're talking about here. The amount you could bring back safely would probably mostly be limited by the insurance premium you can afford to pay.
What rubbish! A commodity only has value in a form and location where it is under demand. There is no way iron will ever be delivered to the surface of the Earth from an asteroid in a way cost-competitive to terrestrial mining. So the effective value with existing markets is zero.
The article suggests that the metals would be useful for construction of orbital structures, so the comparison to terrestrial mining costs doesn't relate to their argument.
I would argue that actually it does - in order to bring the world commodity market crashing, as is suggested by the article, it requires iron coming down to earth and bringing mass down the gravity well, safely, requires either a great deal of energy or something like a space elevator.
Under the assumption that no space elevator exists, then this argument is spot on. The iron outside of earth's gravity well would be cheap for building in space, the iron on earth would be "cheap" for building on earth.
Commodity movement in either direction wouldn't make sense, so two distinct markets for iron would exist.
Gravity is a conservative force, so bringing the metal down with a space elevator will release exactly the same amount of energy as just crashing it into the surface. The rate may be different (though how would you dissipate that energy ? Note that there is essentially zero thermal contact with the athmosphere or anything else on a space elevator except at the bottom 20km or so)
That's one of the reasons why space miners are proposing to just crash the asteroids into desert areas.
As though deserts were somehow magical "dead zones" we could afford to lose. On the other hand, we might reach a point where controlled ET impacts could be the only near-term way to generate the net cooling we need to survive climate change. Wouldn't that be a treat for a method of geoengineering!
A more realistic idea would be a Lunar base, probably automated. We crash asteroids into Luna, break them and process them there, then either rail-gun them into Earth orbit for an elevator grab, or a controlled descent into water.
That minimizes the Delta-v all the way, while still making concessions to a realistic need to process this stuff before "importing" it... i.e. crashing or "snatching" it.
Why is that necessary ? We can control the speed of asteroid impacts without crashing them into the Moon.
Nobody (I hope) is suggesting just putting an asteroid on a crash course with earth. Rather the idea is to bring the asteroids in an orbit around the earth and/or the moon and then leave them there, biting off small chunks and deorbiting them one at a time. So what would impact would be something like 10-100 tons at a time, in 10 tons-at-a-time chunks, maybe even less (enough weight so they survive reentry, or maybe we package them to "fly"/crashland like the space shuttle)
So capturing an asteroid refers to moving them into a parking orbit around earth, nothing more.
And don't worry. Earth orbit is an unbelievably big place. If you don't want to be at special places (like geosync orbit, or just as close as possible), there is no shortage of space whatsoever.
Why take the risk? If anything goes wrong you either lose the asteroid with unpredictable results, or worse, it crashes uncontrollably. With the moon, you really don't have to care. It's also a useful "base" for any other exploration or industry we'd care to have, without having to overcome the Delta-v of something like Mars.
I don't think you quite realize just how much energy we're talking about here. Most asteroids have enough mass, which at a realistic speed could shatter the moon.
If we shatter the moon, well, let's put it this we : at that point we're fucked. As in close to end of human race fucked. There will be worldwide constant meteor showers for years, which will impact with enough force to penetrate nuclear bunkers. Oceans will boil for years.
For iron maybe. Some metals are worth orders of magnitude more relative to their weight. Which would maybe make this economical. The article didn't elaborate much on it's composition of rarer metals though.
Once an industry exists transporting commodities to Earth, it will improve over time. Maybe eventually it will be economical for iron. Or maybe it could justify the cost of a space elevator.
Or just drag it into orbit under the guise of space mining, then drop large chunks of it on governments you don't like. Unstoppable once nudged into a drop. Completely annihilate your enemies.
The US had a military program like that: orbital "arrows" that would hit a target on surface in an unstoppable way. But a few literal kilotons is a different deal.
The idea of warfare using "mass drivers" has been studied for quite a while. It means that the first nation to do this is essentially unstoppable and can destroy whatever they want. Including all life on earth.
By contrast, for nuclear weapons, lots of people seem to believe that they can destroy all life on earth, or at least all animals, and they most definitely can't. They release lots of energy, but not enough. Mass drivers, however, are in fact capable of doing it.
Dense. Great thermal properties, unlike say lead, steel, or iron which would burn up on re-entry. Kind of the ultimate fuck-you to the life when you think about it...
...First because of the obvious utility for anyone who has them, and is willing to use them as you say.
Second, because it would cost sooooo much to lift those heavy bastards, their casing, and the fuel to keep them up there into orbit.
That's... a pretty big rock. Honestly, that's more like a sci-fi candidate for "bubble-forming" with some hypothetical fusion-powered reaction, and I don't mean deuterium-tritium fusion either.
That is a fantastic parable for greed and endless hunger if I ever imagined one: that tasty asteroid looks so good, let's just bring it a little closer.
You seem to imply that there's something bad or dangerous about greed and endless hunger. Without those, there would be no life. You could almost say they're the meaning of life. Perhaps a more direct parable would be "A poor person starves to death by not trying hard enough to find food."
Landing is very hard. Getting into a medium-high orbit is not. Such an orbit might be sloppy, but it won't decay.
Yes I know about the mars climate orbiter, but that was a very low orbit because of the use of aerobraking, and it was small enough that extra fuel would more easily go unnoticed.
If you're already in orbit around something (Earth, Sun, etc.) then it's pretty expensive and hard to crash into the thing you're orbiting, but if you're trying to go from one body to another there's lots of ways you could drive straight into the thing by accident.
A minor miscalculation on a slingshot approach sends you straight into the planet instead. That we hit Mars with the lander by accident should demonstrate it's not only possible, it's actually not that hard.
I particularly liked how they capitalized it in the middle of sentences. The spellchecker was just doing its job, forcing the capitalization of a notable Roman historical figure.
"It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved."
Okay I have an important question about mineral rights. If something is in space, who do the mineral rights belong to? Whoever nabbed it? Or is that just uncharted and untested?
We certainly haven't tested it. Right now all extraterrestrial bodies and even empty space are international commons by the terms of th UN outer space treaty, which has been ratified by all space-going powers. However a nation can withdraw from the treaty with 1-yr notice, so this is of questionable value in predicting what will happen when we can make economic use of these resources.
I have property in my own person, hence the labor of my body and the work of my hands are my property. What I remove from a state of nature and mix my labor with, becomes my property. That's how asteroids and planets ought to and will become property.
See Chapter V of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Of Property.
What, is someone suggesting moving a 200KM asteroid closer to the earth? With what? A really big H-bomb?
It might be nice to go take a look, and it may be useful someday, but short of fusion drives, we're not going to be moving asteroid-sized hunks of iron around the Solar System.
Maybe with a solar powered ion thruster. One has already been run for 6 years non-stop. [1]
Also, an asteroid is made of reaction mass. That's not in short supply like it is with a normal rocket.
Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force to move large distances in space.
An asteroid is made of physical matter, yes, but it's not made out of the noble gas xenon, which NEXT used. Skimming the electric propulsion doesn't reveal any high-isp thrusters designed to use powdered asteroid.
Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even
touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going
somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force
to move large distances in space.
This is... true... but your intuitions as to the forces involved are badly off. Let's run the numbers for 16 Psyche real quick. Assume you're putting together an asteroid tug that has an array of a thousand NEXT thrusters, and the 10 megawatt solar array you need to power the thrusters. Assume they're making a solid 50km/s exhaust velocity, the top end for ion propulsion. And, just for fun, include 10,000,000,000,000 metric tons of xenon. This is a pretty big spacecraft, but it's a thousandth the size of 16 Psyche. (2.27×10^19 kg)
Light off the thrusters, and run them until they use up all the xenon. It'll take a while. 63,218,390,804 years, in fact. (870 tonnes per 5.5 years) But, good news! After that burn, you've added 0.05km/s to 16 Psyche's orbital velocity. Delta V between the belt and Earth is around 5km/s, so you'll need to do that about a hundred more times.
There are better candidates for asteroid capture than 16 Psyche.
Imagine how powerful whoever controlled this would be. In one stroke they could decimate economies that either have a lot of gold or whose central bank has a lot of gold. I'm just surprised the military, Cia or some other deep state agency isn't already on good.
16 Psyche's mass is 2.27·10^19 kg and its orbital speed is 17.34 km/s.
Earth's orbital speed is 29.78 km/s.
So a perfect orbital transfer (not even possible) to get 16 Psyche into Earth's orbit would take an impulse of at least (29780.0 m/s - 17340.0 m/s) · 2.27·10^19 kg = 2.82388·10^23 kg·m/s.
A Saturn V rocket produces 3.51·10^7 N of thrust.
So it would take one Saturn V rocket 8.0452·10^15 seconds to move 16 Psyche, or 2.5511·10^08 years.
If we had 1 million Saturn V rockets, it would take just over 255 years.
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[ 10.8 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadIf asteroid mining is ever economical, it will either be for relatively small masses of extremely valuable minerals (not iron) or to build things in space that are meant to stay in space.
There's risks, but that's sort of Elon Musk's thing. And the money would help cover this Mars colony plan.
[1] ballparking using the going price of gold and platinum of around $1200 USD/ounce.
What's the goal for getting 50 tonnes of gold and platinum to Earth? Cash? Musk is just raised $1.2 billion for Tesla this week, no asteroid required.
The purpose of getting 50 tonnes of rare earths is to pay back those debts, and pay for the next big project that needs a billion dollars.
Lowering the cost of rare metals would also be a big boon for humanity. Mining in Earth is not an industry known for its safety or cleanliness, and lower prices of those metals would bring down the cost of many technological innovations to levels that more people can have them.
I see asteroid mining as not just a profitable thing, but a project worthy of doing at a level beyond finance.
Yes. The company is piggybacking on the millions of dollars and man-hours that went into past government research on space exploration. It is going out of its way to recover and reuse equipment that went through the extremes of being shot into orbit and reentering the Earth's atmosphere to lower costs.
If you feel your posts are your own work in spite of all the piggybacking you do to post them, do give Musk some credit for actually doing the work no one ever did.
That happened with aluminum - they used to make very expensive jewelry out of it, till we learned how to mine it efficiently, and now it's $1.9 per kilo.
I expect the same to happen to gold, silver, platinum. Diamonds are already on their way.
Over human history, about 165 thousand metric tons (or 182 thousand short tons, or about 5.3 billion troy ounces) of gold have been mined, or at a spot price of $1200, almost $6.4 trillion dollars of gold. 33 thousand metric tons of it is currently held by banks and individuals as monetary gold.
Gold mining produces 2.5 to 3 thousand tons of gold each year.
But get this: if we melted the entire planet down, there would be single digit or possibly low double digit quintillions of metric tons of gold. In other words, we have mined less than a trillionth of the gold.
What keeps gold prices so far up is it costs about $1000 per ounce to mine, although this is dropping due to larger and larger mining machines and more automated processes that involve less people.
Outside of electronics, gold has no real world usage. Monetary gold and jewelry are largely artifacts of the past, imo. Once we eliminate those, the continued fast pace of growth of industrial and electronic consumption will be handled for quite some time, and also drop the price of gold significantly.
Read More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond
Of note:
>Gem-quality diamonds grown in a lab can be chemically, physically and optically identical (and sometimes superior) to naturally occurring ones. The mined diamond industry has undertaken legal, marketing and distribution countermeasures to protect its market from the emerging presence of synthetic diamonds.
Worried? Because of falling prices? Looks like someone didn't pay attention during economics 101 or is afraid of going out of business.
So depending on the exact composition, some countries might experience some pain. But space mining would not arrive over night, missions have to be planed, infrastructure must be build, and long distances have to be traveled. So there would almost certainly be some time to get prepared for the arrival of cheap cheap metals from space.
By the way, I don't think space mining will be of any practical relevance in the foreseeable future. I would also much prefer if we would learn to operate economically with the resources we have instead of just reaching for more resources. So I have no real skin in the argument, I just found this position against space mining unjustified.
I worry that it would be cheaper and more profitable for some to simply write them off. You're right however, that it's not a problem with space-mining, it's a problem with people.
If you were certain you'd get it back to earth, you could offset this effect by slowly selling futures contracts. But if you then fail to bring back the iron you'd just cause he opposite problem: a sudden increase in scarcity (when you default on your futures contracts), rather than a sudden increase in abundance.
I believe the solution is to partner with an insurance company, but I'm not sure anyone is large enough to cover the amounts we're talking about here. The amount you could bring back safely would probably mostly be limited by the insurance premium you can afford to pay.
Under the assumption that no space elevator exists, then this argument is spot on. The iron outside of earth's gravity well would be cheap for building in space, the iron on earth would be "cheap" for building on earth.
Commodity movement in either direction wouldn't make sense, so two distinct markets for iron would exist.
That's one of the reasons why space miners are proposing to just crash the asteroids into desert areas.
As though deserts were somehow magical "dead zones" we could afford to lose. On the other hand, we might reach a point where controlled ET impacts could be the only near-term way to generate the net cooling we need to survive climate change. Wouldn't that be a treat for a method of geoengineering!
A more realistic idea would be a Lunar base, probably automated. We crash asteroids into Luna, break them and process them there, then either rail-gun them into Earth orbit for an elevator grab, or a controlled descent into water.
That minimizes the Delta-v all the way, while still making concessions to a realistic need to process this stuff before "importing" it... i.e. crashing or "snatching" it.
Nobody (I hope) is suggesting just putting an asteroid on a crash course with earth. Rather the idea is to bring the asteroids in an orbit around the earth and/or the moon and then leave them there, biting off small chunks and deorbiting them one at a time. So what would impact would be something like 10-100 tons at a time, in 10 tons-at-a-time chunks, maybe even less (enough weight so they survive reentry, or maybe we package them to "fly"/crashland like the space shuttle)
So capturing an asteroid refers to moving them into a parking orbit around earth, nothing more.
And don't worry. Earth orbit is an unbelievably big place. If you don't want to be at special places (like geosync orbit, or just as close as possible), there is no shortage of space whatsoever.
If we shatter the moon, well, let's put it this we : at that point we're fucked. As in close to end of human race fucked. There will be worldwide constant meteor showers for years, which will impact with enough force to penetrate nuclear bunkers. Oceans will boil for years.
If only rockets had regenerative brakes!
Once an industry exists transporting commodities to Earth, it will improve over time. Maybe eventually it will be economical for iron. Or maybe it could justify the cost of a space elevator.
The idea of warfare using "mass drivers" has been studied for quite a while. It means that the first nation to do this is essentially unstoppable and can destroy whatever they want. Including all life on earth.
By contrast, for nuclear weapons, lots of people seem to believe that they can destroy all life on earth, or at least all animals, and they most definitely can't. They release lots of energy, but not enough. Mass drivers, however, are in fact capable of doing it.
Dense. Great thermal properties, unlike say lead, steel, or iron which would burn up on re-entry. Kind of the ultimate fuck-you to the life when you think about it...
...First because of the obvious utility for anyone who has them, and is willing to use them as you say.
Second, because it would cost sooooo much to lift those heavy bastards, their casing, and the fuel to keep them up there into orbit.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
But this asteroid has radius of ~250km, so getting that into earth orbit was a bit out of the scope of the mission to begin with.
you're feeling bad about desires I guess
The amount of fuel needed to park it in a perfect orbit is more than to park it in a sloppy, potentially decaying one.
Landing is very hard. Getting into a medium-high orbit is not. Such an orbit might be sloppy, but it won't decay.
Yes I know about the mars climate orbiter, but that was a very low orbit because of the use of aerobraking, and it was small enough that extra fuel would more easily go unnoticed.
A minor miscalculation on a slingshot approach sends you straight into the planet instead. That we hit Mars with the lander by accident should demonstrate it's not only possible, it's actually not that hard.
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
See Chapter V of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Of Property.
What purpose does the US government have when the exploitation of this celestial resource is clearly in the province of private industry.
Planetary Resources has a reasonable approach. http://www.planetaryresources.com
It might be nice to go take a look, and it may be useful someday, but short of fusion drives, we're not going to be moving asteroid-sized hunks of iron around the Solar System.
Also, an asteroid is made of reaction mass. That's not in short supply like it is with a normal rocket.
Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force to move large distances in space.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html
Light off the thrusters, and run them until they use up all the xenon. It'll take a while. 63,218,390,804 years, in fact. (870 tonnes per 5.5 years) But, good news! After that burn, you've added 0.05km/s to 16 Psyche's orbital velocity. Delta V between the belt and Earth is around 5km/s, so you'll need to do that about a hundred more times.
There are better candidates for asteroid capture than 16 Psyche.
By which process will bringing back large amounts of gold "decimate economies"? And which economies, specifically?
16 Psyche's mass is 2.27·10^19 kg and its orbital speed is 17.34 km/s.
Earth's orbital speed is 29.78 km/s.
So a perfect orbital transfer (not even possible) to get 16 Psyche into Earth's orbit would take an impulse of at least (29780.0 m/s - 17340.0 m/s) · 2.27·10^19 kg = 2.82388·10^23 kg·m/s.
A Saturn V rocket produces 3.51·10^7 N of thrust.
So it would take one Saturn V rocket 8.0452·10^15 seconds to move 16 Psyche, or 2.5511·10^08 years.
If we had 1 million Saturn V rockets, it would take just over 255 years.