There's also a military angle here. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into Musk's history with Michael D. Griffin from the Reagan SDI/'Star Wars' program.
Obviously a few hundred kg of payload in orbit are not equivalent to the same payload delivered directly to a target.
Then the deputy director of the program met a young man named Elon Musk, and the rest is history.
I’m imagining a launcher in a spacecraft that kicks out a bunch of payloads, one at a time, out the back, into orbits with perigee on or before the ground. (An LLM calculates the needed delta-V at under 200m/s, which is likely quite manageable with a small mass driver-style launcher or a very small rocket.) The payloads will lose a bunch of energy to the atmosphere, but all the remaining energy is kinetic energy delivered directly on target, assuming that you can inexpensively aim the thing at a target. Look up “Rods From God” on Wikipedia — you don’t even necessarily need any explosives.
So the question becomes: how economically can one build the guidance systems, avionics packages, and whatever heat shielding is needed to survive reentry?
(Cold War-era ICBMs with MIRV payloads are sort of in this category, but they treated launch vehicle as disposable, which means that the launch would be far more expensive but the reentry system could likely be a bit simpler as the payloads could be launched from a launch vehicle on a non-recoverable orbit. And it appears that Russia has attacked Ukraine with a MIRV-equipped missile with non-nuclear payloads, so there is precedent.)
I seriously doubt that. Just for example, mining a single asteroid has the potential to flood the market for any number of metals. I don't pretend to know how expensive it would be to achieve that in practice; my point is that there are quite a few different ways to recoup program costs at some handwavey point in the future.
An asteroid is much, much further than that but more important than distance is the delta-V required for change its orbit to reach an Earth orbit. So you not only need to get there, which, as discussed, requires in-orbit refuelling with Starship (or any vehicle), but you have to carry all the fuel you need for the orbital burn to bring it back. The rocket equation just kills this immediately.
You really hope you have to get incredibly lucky that an metallic asteroid is on a near-intercept course with Earth that is just shy or going into orbit. The odds for that are, well, astronomical.
Assuming they deliver the same payload, sure, but that’s very much not the plan.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xa...
No. If it is just $15B I can think of dozens different usecases ranging from military applications(fast transportation, it is the cheapest ICBM) to asteroid deflection to moon mining to science applications to space datacenter.
Are you seriously thinking $15B is big? Artemis by comparison has spent $93B and has cost of $4B per launch.