Why go to an asteroid? Obama has a plan to do space exploration, balance the budget and eliminate the deficit at the same time. A gold bug's conspiracy theory comes true. Eros is estimated to contain $40 Trillion in precious metals. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm
That must certainly be more expensive than any mine on earth. Still, cool, I guess.. I would favor establishing permanent colonies in space instead of just exploiting it.
And how do they plan to get those precious metals to Earth? Maybe we can rocket it down to Earth and cause another dinosaur extinction event And when you try to get them to Earth, most parts of a meteor will explode and disintegrate through the friction of the atmostphere - it is called reentry Or perhaps we could drop it down in 10 foot diameter chunks. But can you imagine the liability of dropping 5,000 pound gold meteors onto the Earth, and having it level a small city? This was the result of approx 60-foot wide meteor - a 3/4 quarter mile wide crater in Arizona [perhaps the speaker is saying, "this used to be a city, but on the positive side, we mined 100 tons of recoverable platinum from it...]:
"And how do they plan to get those precious metals to Earth?" It does not matter whether the gold is buried in your vault or backyard, or on an asteroid in orbit. It is the possession that matters. There will be a space race to get to these asteroids to take possession of them. This time the astronaut will be saying as he or she lands : 'This is one small step for 'a' man/woman, but a giant step for the United States Department of Treasury'.
I would be all for this astroid visit if Obama would be the first one to go (and the engineers didn't give him enough fuel to come back)! Besides, Bruce Willis has already done that.