Mining Asteroids

From the New York Times:

On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources Inc. will unveil its plans to mine asteroids that zip close by Earth, both to provide supplies for future interplanetary travelers and to bring back precious metals like platinum.
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He was quick to add that the company’s business premise was not as impractical as it might sound. Because an asteroid is devoid of air and its gravitational pull is negligible, getting there is relatively easy. Unlike landing on the moon or Mars, a robotic mining spacecraft would not need parachutes or a large engine to fly up to and attach itself to a small asteroid.
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“There are probably about 1,500 near-Earth asteroids that are energetically easier to reach than the surface of the moon,” Mr. Anderson said.
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Platinum — which is used for jewelry, electronics components and automobile catalytic converters — fetches about $1,500 an ounce these days, so a single spacecraft would not have to bring back a lot of it for the enterprise to make money. More common metals like iron could perhaps be used as raw materials in space factories, churning out spacecraft and other structures.

I've thought for years that mining asteroids sounded like a good idea.  Many asteroids are full of metals that are extremely industrially useful, but relatively rare on the Earth's surface.  Because of those two factors, they're also expensive.  Even so, I've doubted that mining asteroids could be economically viable.  Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

As I wrote earlier, the private space race is now in full swing.  This shouldn't surprise anyone.  The people who explored the ends of the Earth did so mostly in search of profit, not as part of some giant government bureaucracy.  It stands to reason that space exploration should be the same.