The 200km-wide asteroid, named Psyche, is currently orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
It is made up of various precious metals such as iron, nickel and gold.
Experts believe the iron alone in the rock would be worth $10,000 quadrillion – enough to cause the world’s economy, worth $73.7 trillion, to promptly collapse altogether.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the lead scientist on the NASA mission and the director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Canada’s Global News: "Even if we could grab a big metal piece and drag it back here … what would you do?
"Could you kind of sit on it and hide it and control the global resource — kind of like diamonds are controlled corporately — and protect your market?
"What if you decided you were going to bring it back and you were just going to solve the metal resource problems of humankind for all time?"
Bringing Psyche to Earth is not yet possible as NASA does not have the technology.
Instead the mission, which will launch in 2023, will see a spacecraft observe the asteroid and report back.
But it will take until 2030 for the craft to reach the staggeringly valuable rock.
It comes as scientists baffled as to why there's not more life-giving water on Mars think they may have cracked it.
And a conspiracy theorist claims to have worked out the exact date a fabled hidden planet will destroy Earth – and it’s this year.