PRI_Engineers

Right now, we think we have a okay idea of what there is in various types of asteroids from the 50,000 meteorite samples that have landed on Earth. We expect to mine water out of C-type asteroids for the first product. Water gets used for everything in space - drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, radiation shielding... and is very expensive in space given launch costs.

Structural materials would likely be second - bulk material is expensive in space. After that we would look into mining materials that are scarce on Earth (platinum group metals). Those have industrial uses that are likely to grow as world's economy grows.

TL;DR, water is the first step. platinum later.

Edit: http://i.imgur.com/Km5ou.gif

-MB

I am fairly certain that is where one of our interns learned everything he knows about orbital mechanics. I personally love to play this game with my daughter and watching her reaction to failed launches.

-- RR

It depends on how much Vespene Gas we require.

I have been fascinated by O'Neill colonies since I was a little kid and stared for hours at the amazing artistic visions of the future. Space resources are obviously the key to making this artistic vision a reality. Water comes first, then access to iron, nickel, and cobalt. It's inside those big steel structures where I plan on retiring. -- CV

Warning: long answer. The natural metal in asteroids is more or less a stainless steel. The metal has high nickel content, potentially high cobalt as well as a mess of other metals (PGM, scandium, etc in various amounts). Back in the 1970s, NASA designed a process to extract individual materials from the asteroid material. This system used carbon monoxide to extract pure nickel, iron, and cobalt from native metal.

Once you have those materials, there are a number of processes that would be able to create tailored steels. I caution though, zero-gee smelting is still in early stages and we will be working on solving the issues over the next few years. 3D printing looks extremely promising as a technique to combine the materials.

TL;DR - chemistry and 3D printing

--MB