While you were busy doomscrolling, humanity just entered the era of asteroid mining.

On Thursday night, a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket launched into orbit with multiple payloads, including AstroForge's revolutionary asteroid-mining probe.

From Gizmodo:

If successful, Astroforge's Odin spacecraft will set a record as the farthest-traveling privately built vessel in history. Odin's flight plan calls for it to complete a five-day journey towards the Moon, using its gravity to propel itself towards an asteroid called 2022 OB5, a candidate for future mining due to its possible metallic composition.

2022 OB5 passed within 700,000 miles of Earth in 2022. It's small - only 10 to 40 feet in diameter.

The Odin payload is scheduled to land on the asteroid in December 2025.

CEO Matt Gialich said he'd take the blame if the mission fails, but was excited about the possibilities if they actually manage to do the impossible.

If all goes well, in several decades time you just might think of this launch as a turning point, when you're sitting in your Moon base living room, admiring your watch made from asteroid-mined platinum.

Odin wasn't the only payload on SpaceX's rocket, however. Athena, a moon lander built by Intuitive Machines for NASA, is on the way to the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines became the first private company to land on the moon last year (although the lander flopped over on its side).

Athena is set to land on the Moon's South Pole region, specifically an area called Mons Mouton. The lander is equipped with a drill and mass spectrometer, which it will use — if all goes well — to search for and measure chemical components like water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus that could support future crewed exploration of the Moon.

Athena also has a small robot named Grace that will detach and land in a shadowed crater to take photos.

As if that wasn't enough, the SpaceX flight also carried NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, a satellite that will map ice (water) on the Moon, which will help in future efforts to extract the water for human missions. It also carried the Chimera GEO 1 Orbital Transfer Vehicle, a prototype space "tugboat" that can use thrusters to divert collisions between satellites in orbit.

Here's video of the payloads deploying:

Two other landers - Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Japan-based ispace's Resilience, were also on the way to the Moon, having been launched on a Falcon 9 rocket in January.