How Much is Asteroid 2021 DA14 Worth? - Some say $195B US

Here is an interesting story that has been making the rounds.  The Asteroid 2021 DA14, you know the one scheduled "not" to crash into earth.  Well, it could be worth a whole lot of money.

Provided we could mine it.

The first story claims that there are enough minerals on that space rock to make the operation viable for consideration.  

Here is the kicker, to make the story readable by the Internet public they combined two things
1) some really big numbers ($200 Billion)
2) something people are talking about  (Asteroid about to miss the earth)

And, it caught my attention.  It also caught the attention of those smart people at Forbes who said (not in their own words) "{insert word} Please, you crazy"

No. The value of any lump of rock is not the value of the metals trapped within it. It is the value of those trapped metals minus the cost of untrapping them. Thus that calculation of value by Deep Space Industries is simply wrong.

So, for example, a mountain of iron ore out in the Australian Outback is not worth the same as that same tonnage of iron ore sitting outside a steel plant in China. We must subtract the costs of tearing the mountain apart, grading the ore, building a railroad to the coast for it, the cost of the ships to transport it to China and, crucially, the cost of the finance to do all of this.

The author goes on to claim that since a space rock cannot be mined we shouldn't compare it to valuable ore but rather worthless dirt we use to bury our poo.

Personally I would like to see a space mining operation. 

Related Web URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13...