> Lets review "ants" for the Moon versus NEO's: Round trip time, 1 week
> versus several years. Knowledge of resources, detailed (nearly 1000
> pounds studied in terrestrial labs from Apollo and Luna missions) versus
> speculation.

Nope. We've been to one, the earth has been hit by loads, and there
are spectroscopic analyses of several. We've sampled comet material
and done more spectro on that too. We know where the material
originally comes from (supernova remnants, and some clues as to how
formation of these objects happens.) It's not like we know nothing.

> Volatiles, known at surface at both poles versus unknown
> and unlikely but maybe (hopefully) internal.

Yeah, but the abundance is believed to be parts per million at the
poles.

> Suitable location
> for infrastructure, nearby (on lunar surface) versus hopefully in some
> cis-lunar orbit(s).

There's no infrastructure on the moon right now. The delta-v to the
moon is 4100 m/s. That means that atleast 2/3 of your mission there
is fuel. To land takes a further 2100 m/s. That means that maybe a
1/3 of the remaining mass is more fuel. We are now down to 1/6 of
the LEO payload. So if you launch 20 tonnes to LEO, you can soft
land only 3 tonnes on the moon. That's peanuts. Unless you luck out
on the fuel front, you can only return 1/2 tonne back again to LEO.

Contrast this with AsterAnts. You launch 20 tonne payload. You now
have 30 AsterAnts in space (say), you can send them out in 30
different directions. If they find that their target is bad, you
revector it to another target or you switch it off and forget about
it. If you find a good target you grab it and use an ion drive to
drag it back to LEO, where you can look at it, and process it
there. [If the number of AsterAnts sounds doubtful, check out the
mass of Deep Space 1, only 486kgs!]

Anyway, that's the rough sketch; to be honest, it sounds too easy-
what am I missing?

> Lots of NEO's doesn't make getting to one or moving
> it to a better orbit easier. Finding one in a convenient orbit would be
> great and I would support going after it, but that would not make the
> others easier to get.

We've already been to one NEO though.

> I think investors will chose the Moon, if they
> will invest in any of these space resource schemes. It might even be
> that taking asteroids to the Moon, after a lunar infrastructure is
> developed, will be the how asteroids will be harvested. An accident
> crashing one into the Moon would be easier to insure against than
> crashing one into Earth. Such a crash could make Sept. 11, '01 seem
> tame.

We aren't talking about bringing an asteroid all that near to the
earth, and we are talking about ion drives which give the lowest
imaginable thrust- we'd know weeks in advance if something was
going wrong. And the mission can be calculated so that the orbit
never, ever intersects the earth, under any foreseeable
circumstance. And another thing- we are talking about really small
payloads- 1 tonne or so; that's only a few tens of centimeters
across; skylab weighed much more than that; this is no dinosaur killer.