[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Chris T

Ah, asteroid mining ... that staple of many a sci-fantasy universe. Would you still be 450x richer than Bill Gate$ after deducting overheads from any revenue you make ouf of mining the asteriod, that's the real question ...

Not for the first mission, no. It'd take several such missions to recover your costs, as with any investment project into which you're sinking sums of 10, 12 or possibly even 15 figures. But once you did recover your costs, if you had the patience to wait a decade or so, you would be richer than Bill. The overall cost would depend, more than anything else, on a) how close this asteroid's going to come to Earth, and b) how long it's going to be close. Until someone invents the science fact equivalent of an impulse drive, the biggest slice of any space mission budget will be eaten by the fuel costs.

The cheapest way to do it as far as I can see would be to: send several unmanned fuel tankers up to the International Space Station, creating a fuel dump; refit a number of Shuttles for mining and operations beyond Earth orbit (since the Shuttle isn't really designed for anything other than LEO - Low Earth Orbit - missions); fill said tankers with mined material as they're emptied; send the tankers back to Earth; remove the minerals and refill them with fuel; and so on until the asteroid's gutted. Then just sit back and use a computer to count the money, because there sure as hell wouldn't be any other way to count it. It would cost nothing to send the tankers back, except the tiny amounts of fuel for steering thrusters to set them on course for re-entry and splashdown in, preferably, a shallow ocean/lake/whatever. That's because the Earth's gravity will do all the work; effectively, the tankers just fall down the planet's gravity well, for free.

The question is: is any investor or government going to have the cojones to do it? I hope so. Perhaps a small-scale mission, maybe even using an unmanned probe, could be launched as a feasibility study. But the mathematics were worked out years ago, when it was first discovered that asteroids are often rich in minerals; it can be done. There's nothing in the laws of physics - or even economics - that says it can't. It's more a matter of engineering than anything else. As with many possibilities, it's only a fantasy until someone does it. The idea that virtually anyone in the world could communicate in real time with anyone else in the world, even in opposite hemispheres, was once a fantasy...but now we take it for granted. One day, the same will be true of asteroid mining.