Rubble piles, shattered planetary cores, and time capsules from the solar system's first morning — some passing closer than the Moon this week. Below: the live feed, and the economics lens that turns rocks into business cases.
Miss distance in LD — lunar distances, where 1 LD is the gap between Earth and the Moon (~384,400 km). Anything under ~20 LD is a neighbor.
2026-Oct-25 08:13 · 24–53 m diameter · 16 km/s
2026-Oct-26 19:23 · 332–741 m diameter · 20.4 km/s
2026-Oct-26 06:21 · 521–1164 m diameter · 23.1 km/s
2026-Oct-24 15:44 · 51–113 m diameter · 12.6 km/s
2026-Oct-27 21:17 · 8–19 m diameter · 8.7 km/s
2026-Oct-25 22:26 · 41–91 m diameter · 10.8 km/s
2026-Oct-25 07:40 · 32–70 m diameter · 15.1 km/s
2026-Oct-26 13:24 · 7–16 m diameter · 3.5 km/s
2026-Oct-25 11:48 · 184–411 m diameter · 26.6 km/s
2026-Oct-24 04:30 · 21–47 m diameter · 9.9 km/s
2026-Oct-27 02:12 · 16–36 m diameter · 19.9 km/s
2026-Oct-26 05:14 · 113–254 m diameter · 8.6 km/s
PHA = potentially hazardous asteroid (orbit within 0.05 AU and absolute magnitude 22.0 or brighter). Data: NASA NeoWs / JPL CNEOS. Each row links to the JPL small-body record.
Three companies are actively flying toward this — AstroForge (platinum-group metals), Karman+ (water for orbital refueling), and TransAstra (capture and tug systems). Three different answers to the same question: what's actually worth retrieving?
The honest math: delta-v prices the trip, not distance. Supply elasticity prices the cargo — return 100 tons of platinum and the price you modeled is gone. The near-term case is volatiles for in-space use, not metals for Earth. The cards on the right carry the full chain of reasoning.
A ~226 km metal-rich world — possibly the exposed core of a shattered protoplanet. NASA's Psyche spacecraft arrives in 2029 to find out what it actually is.
Open cardA carbonaceous rubble pile that gave us 121.6 grams of pristine early solar system — organics, hydrated minerals, and a 1-in-2,700 impact question for 2182.
Open cardThe main belt's dwarf planet: ~940 km across, roughly a quarter water by mass, with salty brines still seeping to its surface. The belt's natural depot.
Open cardThe first asteroid ever orbited and landed on — in 2001, with a spacecraft never designed to land. Proof that NEA prospecting is solved, decades-old engineering.
Open cardEarth's PGMs mostly sank into the core; some asteroids carry concentrations above the richest mines. The catch: return too much and you crash the price.
Open cardWater is propellant, shielding, and life support in one molecule. The near-term asteroid-mining business case is volatiles for in-space refueling — not platinum for Earth.
Open cardForged in neutron-star collisions, delivered to Earth's crust by late impacts. Gold's scarcity is an astrophysical accident — all of it ever mined fits in a ~22 m cube.
Open cardThe fusion endpoint and the most load-bearing element of civilization. Iron cores trigger supernovae; iron asteroids are exposed hearts of shattered protoplanets.
Open card01
Build a first-order asteroid mining business case: pick a real NEA from today's feed above, assume Falcon-Heavy-class launch costs (~$1,500/kg to LEO), water extraction at 1% of asteroid mass, and price the water against launch cost. Where does it break even?
02
Model the supply-elasticity trap: estimate the price impact of returning 50, 100, and 500 tons of platinum to Earth against ~190 tons of annual mined supply. At what return volume does revenue peak?
03
Design the depot architecture: if water can be staged at a Lagrange point, which missions become cheaper, by roughly what delta-v margin, and who pays first?
Paste into any agent. For the full knowledge chain: platinum-group metals → water ice → gravity & orbits.
Where this is going
A full asteroid-economics engine — JPL small-body data, modern launch costs, scenario sliders, exportable feasibility memos — is on the roadmap, built in the open and exposed as MCP tools so your agents can run the numbers too.
