Billionaires decide the time has come to commercialise space:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

If I had the money, I would invest in this.
Good for them, there not listening to the skeptics out there.

The road to space mining will be a rocky one (pun intended).

The sooner we take the first step, the sooner we'll realise our space fairing dreams.

It will always be 'too expensive' or 'not comercially viable' until we get up there and make it cheaper. Good on them for their foresight and imagination. Here's hoping it's not a pink elephant.

Spot on Snowy, the only way for something to become cheaper is to commercialise it.

Space is starting to go that way at last and is slowly coming out of being the sole preserve of governments, hopefully we can start to see some big strides made in the near future.

And now a second company is coming to the party:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21144769

A nice article this one:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130129-asteroid-minings-peculiar-past

There's no adverts on that page. Still don't see why we're not allowed to see it.

I did like the quote at the end...

Quote
This whole business is much too important to be left to the federal Government

And is completely correct, now that space is starting to commercialese I suspect we will start to see more raprid progress over the next 2 - 3 decades due to competition, how long to you think that the big aviation compaines will sit back and allow the upstarts to build a lead over them in this arena!!

Though you're not taking into account the financial failier of all the western economies. 

While it has been deep and hard (hmmm that sounded bad!!) it will pass and plenty of big corporations still have plenty of money snowy