An organization called Planetary Resources had their big press conference yesterday announcing their plans to mine asteroids for raw materials that will facilitate private space travel. I mentioned this here and here.
I’ve barely started reading their website, but that’s enough for me to ‘get it’. With other work commitments I will have to get back to this later, but wanted to highlight it now.
An article in The New York Times provides more background – In Pursuit of Riches, and Travelers’ Supplies, in the Asteroid Belt
Here’s the concept in one paragraph from Planetary Resources’ web site – mind-boggling amounts of natural resources have yet to be discovered: