The new company 'Planetary Resources, Inc', backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and filmmaker/explorer James Cameron with a single goal: To mine near-Earth asteroids for precious resources like rare metals.
Nobody knows exactly how much asteroid wealth exists, but the mineral wealth of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter could be equivalent to about $100 billion for every person on Earth, according to "Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroid, Comets, and Planets" (Addison-Wesley, 1996)
Even smaller space rocks can have mineral prizes worth tens of trillions of dollars. The smallest known metallic asteroid that is an accessible near-Earth object has 40 times as much metal as all the metal in Earth's history
"The near-Earth asteroid population could easily support 10 to 40 times the population of Earth, with all the necessary resources to do that," said John Lewis, Professor Emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona and author of "Mining the Sky."
http://www.space.com/15401-asteroid-mining-huge-dollars-sense.html***Thoughts
Mining the Asteroids!
A SF best seller, while the world is in recession?
