It may be a ways away, but I'm excited for the space rush.. once medium and small size companies can afford space ships to explore the solar system, finding asteroids made of gold. That will be glorious.
This is a really exciting mission, imho - probably one of the most exciting of all current space missions.
The reason is that 16 Psyche is hypothesized to be a very, very rich ball of metal. A million times the material wealth we have here on Earth, in fact. More gold, silver, platinum, iron, zinc, etc. than we can even fathom exists, accessible on our surface here on Earth.
If we arrive and find it full of gold and other valuable metals, I'd imagine the following 10 years afterwards, humans are going to be on a race to get there, set up shop, and start 3D-printing Starships.
Its far-fetched and fantastic, but I could imagine a scenario where this race really takes off. 10 years from now, we might very well have the technology to exploit this gigantic ball of materials in super interesting ways. (Assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion, obviously. Lets just put that aside.)
Imagine, we start moving heavy-metal industries to space. 3D Printers set up shop on the 16 Psyche surface, and starts churning out Starships (which by then should be perfected for human-rated travel around our star system, hopefully).
One can dream. I sure hope I'm alive to see the first pictures of arrival.
Moreover, there's lots of companies in every vertical needed for bootstrapping the industry - ground services, satellites, in-space manufacturing, asteroid prospecting & mining... all in the early stage, all betting on cheaper access to space than it was just few years ago. We're in a critical moment where things suddenly start adding up and - I hope - will form something great!
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This is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.
This is incredible. Yes, it would be insanely cool to live in 2500s with all that privately affordable faster-than-light travel and everything but still... it's very exciting to see the progress being made by private/commercial space programs. I wish them all luck. It must be an amazing feeling to be a part of all this.
This is actually the only thing that's giving me hope that man could really step a foot on Mars or mine valuable resources on asteroids in a (hopefully) not too distant future.
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