New Book on Space Colonies

Finally got some time to do some lookup on this thread
If your looking for more resources on this subject,
John Lewis does touch on this topic a bit in his book
"Mining the Sky".

I have the pleasure of taking a course right now in
extraterrestial resource utilization and we recently
went over this scenario. I've uploaded two slides
from this lecture to the files section which I think
you'll find useful:
http://f5.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/8GZaPwHRK6vxld87by422KXOxQnaNeWl7G5rrJk56-8GcSHqj1FSXv5yRlkoT_X3sda4VbcUHfjvSGz5/platinum_scenario.ppt

Another future gold mine coming from platinum group of
metals is that if we ever move to a hydrogen economy,
palladium prices will sky rocket. The reason for this
is that palladium is makes an effective filter because
hydrogen passes easily through it. This is currently
used in fuel cells today but due to the rarity of this
metal, it is not commonly done. However, should we
start mining LL Chondrite asteroids, this could
change.

It is also important to note that extracting these
minerals will not necessarily crash the market. The
reason for this is that platinum metals are only found
in LL Chondrite (type M and S) asteroids. From what
I've read out there, the percentage of asteroids which
fall in this category range from 1%-15%.

Course if you do find a nice 1km asteroid of this
type, we are talking about $700 billion assuming the
market doesn't drop.

As Andrew pointed out earlier, extracting the material
is a very delicate process. From estimates I've heard
using processes which exist today, we'd be lucky to be
able to extract 500kg per year from a single source.
Unfortunately I only have this as a word of mouth from
a geologist (which I am not) and no data to back up
that number so take it as you want it.

Ryan Z