May soon be reality:
The purpose of Planetary Resources is to seek out and extract resources from near-Earth asteroids. In particular, the company intends to mine water (for space travel purposes as fuel and for life support) and precious metals. In particular, they are looking for platinum group metals - ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum.
There is big money behind the venture:
My biggest initial skepticism would be the investors — with no hope of profit for years, would they really stick with it?But look at the investors: Film maker James Cameron. Google executives Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, and Google investor K. Ram Shriram. Software pioneer Charles Simonyi. Ross Perot, Jr. These are all billionaires, some of them adventurers, and all of them have proven to have patience in developing new ventures. I don’t think they’ll turn tail and run at the first setback.
(Image from NASA)
The Dish 