Living quarters for the construction crew.

> > if we can build a robot to explore the surface of mars with no
> > actually hands on controls, we can build robots that can mine
> > an asteroid under close watch.

Mike Combs
>The two activities may not be directly comparable. Plus, anybody from
>the Mars Society would argue vigorously that Spirit and Opportunity are
>not doing as good a job exploring Mars as would two people in their
>place.

Absolutely. Thank you. As to safety, it's still a question of economics. If
we send people, it's horrendously more expensive, but we get back so much
more science, that maybe the investment versus robotics is paid off. (Even
better if they're building lasting infrastructure, instead of expendable
junk, collecting science).
And Spirit and Opportunity are not "hands off" robotics -we've never had
anything even slightly like that. They have to be told where they're going
from one communications window to the next, and they're held in place when
there's no chance for communicating with them. They don't rove on until they
stumble into something interesting, because they'd "stumble" into a rock too
big to safely drive over and tip themselves over dumbly driving on, with no
regard at all for being increasingly off-balance. They almost lost the
Pathfinder/Sojourner rover that way: at the next update from its cameras,
they found that it was tipped dangerously, and it took them most of a Sol
figuring out how to safely recover it.
It takes days driving it over flat ground a few hundred meters, and in the
first day, an astronaut would have suited up, been there, done many times
better science, and come back and written her report and slept a night, and
done other things.

The best we can look forward to -barring major unforeseen advances- is
tele-robotics like this. If they're as far out as an NEA or Mars, then it
takes a while going around -longer than the achingly slow drive times would
indicate.
If not our Moon, then a harnessed/captured NEA is the best thing we could do
for good quality resources in near-Earth space.
As to mining an NEA, I like the image from a page at permanent.com: de-spin
& bag it, and send rovers into it, anchored to nets stapled across the body,
and kick up dust to be collected inside the spinning bag. Any harder chunks
in it are dealt with, but a nice fragile extinct comet core would be just
about right.