ot: 1 min of silence

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Mining asteroids for goldwould indeed be expensive I agree (or rather go with you, you're the mining student here) but what if you look for other metals? Perhaps the nickel-iron compounds ARE the stuff you're looking for.

And about mining the asteroid:

You don't need to get the asteroid anywhere, just pick a rather large, rather static one at the edge of the Belt and place robotic/remotecontrolled drills there to extract materials. Excess materials (like simple rock) could be vented into space or stored separately, the ores you want could be picked up periodically by (again) robotic/RCed transport shuttles that ferry the cargoes to a space station or colony where it is processes then shipped, or simply shipped out and processed elsewhere.

It could be a massively useful exploit once we exhaust Earth's raw material deposits.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Exhaust? Most of the metal is simply rusting in conveniently-placed piles. Admitadly, we will have a problem with fossil fuels, but, among other things, I saw a show on nova, I think it was, once, about some people who had gotten candlewax to burn at 85% the efficiency of rocket fuel.

[deccan]

Going to space for natural resources is pretty implausible unless some kind of major technological revolution, I'd agree.

In the near future, it'd all be about tourism and vanity.