With the burgeoning commercial space companies, and the dramatic reduction in the cost of space access developing, the space industry is in the early stage similar to what happened to the aviation industry after getting the government mail contracts. As NASA and other government entities shift gears to ordering contracted delivery of payloads instead of paying for development of new launchers, the industry is free of excessive government oversight.

Most of the near term capitalist activity will continue to be delivery of payloads to near-Earth orbit. Asteroid mining will develop as in-space infrastructure needs demand, as it's much cheaper to find the materials you need "out there" than ship them up from our home planet.

Even precious metals and gems will not pay the cost of mining them in space and returning them to Earth, but minerals that can make it possible to manufacture facilities and hardware for space based habitats will be in demand.

I worked for NASA for 40 years and one of the most interesting projects was advanced mission planning. We studied resources on the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt and while rare earth metals were interesting the most valuable commodity was water. Water in its liquid form is essential to any human activity but it is also bulky and heavy so it is costly to take Earth source H2O to orbit and beyond. Discovery of large quantities of water in near Earth bodies would be a major game changer. Transport of asteroid size "ice bergs" poses a technical challenge but it is not insurmountable. Water also provides the constituents of rocket fuel and oxidizer. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread heavy water would be very valuable but easy access to ordinary water would change the economics of solar system exploration and transport profoundly.

Perhaps we can find some invaluable dilithium crystals! ;)

The professor in the office next to mine has had contracts with NASA and some of its subcontractors for lunar mining and currently the mining of Mars. The amount of equipment, and the energy and mass required to launch both fuel and equipment, are serious limitations on extraterrestrial mining.

So many people like to argue that we need the government to fund space travel because without the government, it wouldn't happen! Well, this isn't reality because it's happening now! Private companies are flying to space and in the very near future we will have commercial flights to outer space. Rocket launches by these private companies are actually tens of millions of dollars cheaper compared to a NASA launch! And right now, private companies are planning on mining asteroids to extract rare earth metals. This is the beauty of capitalism at work and it doesn't cost the tax payers a dime.

Justin Mohr is spot on correct! The private sector will be much more of a change agent for mining resources on asteroids. There are trillions of dollars worth of resources on these celestial objects and the private sector will be the lynchpin for bringing this new found wealth to us.

It will be a game changer for all of the inhabitants of earth being that the resources are vaied and abundant.

Go SpaceX

Space is under maritime law, unless on a nationally owned vessel, which is why space is the future for private businesses with large resources, access to capital, and technical talent.

Sierra Nevada Corporation, AeroJet, SpaceX, and the Bezos company all fit that description. Without bureaucrats, what would have taken NASA 50 years to do is going to be more like 10 or 15. I don't agree with much from Obama, but getting the government out of the rocket building business will ultimately be a good thing.

You prime that pump with government contracts, which he did, now half of their space launches are commercial satellites and it's a lot cheaper than the Air Force doing it at Vandenberg, which was the old route into space.

The Air Force should be doing spy satellites and defense platforms, that's it.

I can name exactly one resource anyone is likely to find on any asteroid--and preferably on comets: heavy water. I think you'll find that cometary or asteroidal ice will have, on average, twice the concentration of heavy waters (HDO, D2O) of the oceans of Earth. That might be important in the development of fusion power.

Building a fleet of ships to go out and get it--now that's something else again. With a skyhook, maybe you can cut the lifting costs down. If you find enough iron and heavier metals on the moon, maybe you can build your fleet in space, using materials taken from space. A lot of maybes.

But don't count on finding heavy metals in the asteroids. I think you'll find they contain nothing but plain ordinary rock, mud, and ice. The ice might be worth getting--just how much worth, depends on the amount of ice and the concentration of deuterium.

Moon mining for everything, absolutely, JOBS,and MORE jobs.
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Assuming that the collectivists don't put a stop to it we will see a burgeoning off world economy. SpaceX will eventually get their reusable rocket right and orbital and sub-orbital joy rides will be replaced by viable commercial ventures in space. There are people alive today that will see the extensive colonization of the Moon and Mars and probably the first interstellar missions'.

beam me up...ready to go...

now, if we could robotically retrieve small asteroids
and park them carefully in some worthy spot on earth
where we could harvest the rare metals ... but what if
we missed with a retrieval and hit a populated area? -- j
.

Thanks for the link...will listen.
Resources are abundant in creation (the cosmos if you prefer) and only the free market can figure out how to take advantage of it.

As always, I would ask for "Wide Scope Accountability" in spite of 110 thousand books sold...it's still not a household term yet.

Eventually, as technology progresses, we will be able to mine the solar system. That's the future. Earth's supply of elements is finite, so asteroid and other planet digging looks inevitable. How it is handled is a question that is not even on the table as yet. There is no doubt that if America goes back to being a Capitalist economy, there will be a battle between the government and private enterprise. If on the other hand, America becomes another People's Republic, then all bets are off. It is doubtful if there would even be any attempt to harvest space rocks.

Not true at all, everything in the universe beyond hydrogen is made from previous generations of stars and novae. The fusion process inside of a star cooks hydrogen into helium, as it ages and runs out of hydrogen, then carbon, iron, and so on.

Everything that is in the earth can be found in asteroids. The light rocky ones break up quickly in our atmosphere, the heavier ones sometimes make it to the surface.

Elements are going to be found, just as in nature - silver, gold, etc. dispersed though, not in veins as we have here because that is formed by flowing water and volcanism.

What you wouldn't find are diamonds or other gemstones, those are made from heat and pressure in the earth.

The earth was made from the same swirling cloud of star stuff that the other planets and asteroids were though, it may have been in heavier concentrations inward toward the sun and lighter outward (hence the gas planets), but doubtful, gravity pulls on all masses equally.

Iridium is an exotic metal that is pretty much only found on meteors that hit the ground for example. We don't find gold because it would vaporize from the temperature of re-entry. Once we harvest in space, it will all be there.

What a waste of time to consider.
With current administration and their cohorts called the congress all mining in the usa will come to a halt so why spend any time let alone money to try to mine what is on asteroids when we aren't mining it any longer on earth. When the economy comes to a standstill who will there be to make the machines that will get humans into space. What a joke.