Who's first?

Okay, here is a different strategy. There are many
types of asteroids. One way of classifying them is
based off their spectral type (based off of telescopic
spectroscopy that tango and i have mentioned
previously).

The most common of all NEA are C-Type (roughly 75% of
all NEAs) and S-Type (17% of all NEAs). C-type are
carbonaceous chondrites and based off meteorite
samples, they contain NO volatiles (this includes
helium-3). S-type are silicateous asteroids with a
high metal content (mainly nickle and iron). M-type
is another asteroid which is made purely of
nickle-iron and these are rarer still.

Why do I bring this up? Because you need to
understand where to go for different materials. If
your looking for volatiles, none of these are very
good. Though some C-type asteroids may contain water
(the classification of asteroids is kinda iffy). What
you are really wanting are the elusive dormant comets.
I only say elusive because they have not been found
yet, mostly due to the fact that they would have a
dark albedo and thus be very hard to discover using a
telescope.

Anyhow, to understand the advantage of different
locales, you need to understand the resources at each
of them. For instance, the Moon has lots of oxygen,
silicon and aluminum (for a good listing of crust
composition, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon).
However, it is very poor in nickle (which is needed
for steel) so for that you would need to go to an
asteroid.

Many asteroids on the other hand are very poor in the
three ingredients that make up the majority of the
moon, so you would go there for those.

Anyhow, I highly recomend you learn more about the
geology of these places. A good start is wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid) and
www.permanent.com.

Good luck,

Ryan Z

--- George Perkins wrote: