The iridium is located throughout a 1.1 km diameter asteroid.
Having it mixed in with a whole bunch of rock or whatever else hardly improves the situation.
Maybe not. The original asteroid would presumably be composed primarily of worthless slag, which could be used as expendable reentry heat shielding (like meteorites that reach the Earth’s surface). Have a parachute system on the actual payload and the rest either burns up or splashes into the ocean.
Rats. Imagine what I could have done with 70,000 tons of explosive space modulators…
At first I thought you meant deliver it all in one big drop. That would be … challenging.
Once I twigged that you’re suggesting bringing the thing to a reasonable Earth orbit then disassemble it there, refining and separating the iridium payload and using the other constituents for ablative heat shield or container structure or whatever, then the idea made more sense. 
I’ve deliberately avoided mentioning the SF medium I found this in because it is spoilery, but it is from the latest episode of For All Mankind. In that alternate 1993 there is a small multinational colony on Mars. The asteroid (discovered via telescope) is a Jupiter Trojan that has been kicked out of orbit and is headed towards the inner solar system. The plan is to redirect the asteroid into Mars orbit and disassemble it there.
I’d break it up into 70,000 easily manageable plot devices.
You get new sunglasses, & you get new sunglasses, & you get new sunglasses.
I’d use it as armor for a few hundred hovertanks, form a mercenary unit commanded by a sociopath with a name that’s suspiciously on point, then make sure to do nearly as much damage to the governments that hire me as to their enemies.
The problem with hovertanks is that they are extremely susceptible to wind shear, so your army could simply be defeated by reversing power suppy to a set of windmills and blowing all the precious iridium armoured vehicles away.
I have the slightly more boring solution, I would keep all the iridium and tightly control the market, De Beers style and become rich beyond my wildest dreams.
I’m with you snake. What’s it called? Muldoonthief’s Armored Relief?
Bang Bang, Fizz Fizz, oh what a relief it is
Honestly, I just want to fire a belt fed projectile weapon that shoots relativistic rounds composed of just a few atoms.
Correct, and that’s undoubtedly what they would do. The diamond market is that way with the release of diamonds being carefully controlled.
That’s brilliant. And yes, definitely save some Ir for powergun barrels.
And you don’t think De Beers’ diamond-coated hover tanks are the stick that keeps everybody else in line?
You might want to be careful with that relativistic projectile stuff: Relativistic Baseball (xkcd.com).
I think diamond may not be very good for armor. The main value in most most metal armor is its ductility: ability to flex on impact. Diamond is very hard but not very flexible and is more likely to shatter than deform. I suspect that tanks that shatter when hit hard would kind of be less than ideal.
You’re making some big assumptions about whether or not De Beers has been secretly hoarding super-ductile diamonds.
Long live the Solomani! Down with the Zhodani!
Vilani: “Am I a joke to you?”
(Explaining the in-joke, because ruining jokes is what I do: Zhodani, Solomani, and Vilani are three interstellar cultural branches of the human race in the Traveller science-fiction role playing game.)
Now I want to do it even more