Obama: Why go to an asteroid? Maybe there's gold in them rocks.

[TraderZones]

Quote from tmarket:

That is a good idea except mineral rights claim by robots has never been recognized as legal. The General Mining Act of 1872 states that: "All citizens of the United States of America 18 years or older have the right under the 1872 mining law to locate a lode (hard rock) or placer (gravel) mining claim on federal lands open to mineral entry. These claims may be located once a discovery of a locatable mineral is made. Locatable minerals include but are not limited to platinum, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium and tungsten."

This enterprise requires human exploration and claims of the asteroids. This is about the only justification for further human space exploration that Nasa can come up with, the rest of space exploration can really be done much better and cheaper by robots.

There is a certain brilliance to the idea, though. We could have off-world national wealth. Countries could uncover critical assets, and store them in space, even trading/exchanging them for others. Sort of like a futures contract, etc. Wouldn't have to bring them back here. Of course, you need assaying/verification services. We could have an entire useless business in space, sort of like some of what our governments do here

But seriously, it would be cheaper to stock a small quantity of stuff for space exploration or commercial enterprises, rather than bringing it up from the Earth. gold, silver, iron/steel, rocket fuel components, solar panel materials, for building labs, launchers. If they are going to beam back solar energy from orbiting platforms via microwaves, it would be cheaper to build this stuff from the moon or nearby asteroids and position it around the earth. Heavy parts of satellites, etc. could be fabricated in space.

Some day, in the distant future, as man starts to colonize the Moon, Mars, inner planets, moons of Jupiter/Saturn (some have huge quantities of water and may harbour life: Europa, Enceladys, Ganymede/Callisto (I forget which). mining stuff in space is a lot cheaper from very-low-gravity than bringing it up from Earth...

 

[Lethn]

I think this kind of thing is fantastic though, we are likely to see a massive increase of interest by corporations and governments alike to send more people into space with discoveries like this. I remember before people bitching about how it was worthless to spend that much money to get one person to go that far and back. Look at them now the fools! lol