B2 Reading: The Asteroid Gold Rush
Read the article about asteroid mining and fill in the gaps.
Word Bank
Tap a word, then tap a gap. On a computer you can also drag it.
fuel
gold rush
crash
own
worthless
estimate
rare
samples
rules
deposits
strike it rich
valuable
Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, a giant ball of metal is spinning through space. It is called 16 Psyche, it is about 225 kilometres wide, and scientists think it may be the core of an early planet that broke apart billions of years ago. One famous puts the value of its iron and nickel at $10,000 quadrillion, many thousands of times more than the whole world economy.
NASA has no plans to mine it. Its Psyche spacecraft, launched in 2023, flew past Mars in May 2026 to pick up speed and will arrive in 2029 to study what the asteroid is really made of. But numbers like that have started a new .
Asteroids are full of metals that are on Earth, such as platinum, which is used in cars, phones and medicine. Some also contain ice, which could be turned into water and rocket , so future spacecraft could fill up in space instead of carrying everything from Earth. That may become the first truly business in space.
Getting there is the hard part. Japan and the United States have already brought back tiny from asteroids, and China's Tianwen-2 probe reached a small asteroid near Earth in July 2026 and plans to bring pieces home in 2027. Private companies want to go further. One Californian start-up lost contact with its first asteroid probe in 2025, but it is building a second spacecraft that will try to land on a metal-rich asteroid and measure its .
So could someone ? Not easily. If anyone brought home a whole asteroid full of platinum, the price would , and the metal could become almost . There is another problem too: nobody agrees who can an asteroid, and international law has very few for mining in space.
For now, the real treasure may be knowledge. But if trips to space keep getting cheaper, the asteroid miners may not be dreaming for long.
NASA has no plans to mine it. Its Psyche spacecraft, launched in 2023, flew past Mars in May 2026 to pick up speed and will arrive in 2029 to study what the asteroid is really made of. But numbers like that have started a new .
Asteroids are full of metals that are on Earth, such as platinum, which is used in cars, phones and medicine. Some also contain ice, which could be turned into water and rocket , so future spacecraft could fill up in space instead of carrying everything from Earth. That may become the first truly business in space.
Getting there is the hard part. Japan and the United States have already brought back tiny from asteroids, and China's Tianwen-2 probe reached a small asteroid near Earth in July 2026 and plans to bring pieces home in 2027. Private companies want to go further. One Californian start-up lost contact with its first asteroid probe in 2025, but it is building a second spacecraft that will try to land on a metal-rich asteroid and measure its .
So could someone ? Not easily. If anyone brought home a whole asteroid full of platinum, the price would , and the metal could become almost . There is another problem too: nobody agrees who can an asteroid, and international law has very few for mining in space.
For now, the real treasure may be knowledge. But if trips to space keep getting cheaper, the asteroid miners may not be dreaming for long.