In 30 Oct 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 empowers NASA to encourage private space ventures. Not until the 21st centuries the private companies started in a grand scale and gained media attention like Spacex, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Rocket Lab, LinkSpace and many more.

As the emergence of private space companies competing each other, a new ecomnomy came into being.

Asteroids between Mars and Jupiter are in different sizes and found to have minerals. By studying the asteroids through visible and infrared spectrum as well as radar the shape, composition and more can be determined.

NASA has discovered 16 psyche, an asteroid made mostly of nikel and iron. It also has gold. The minerals contained in this asteroid said to be worth $700 quintillion.

A service called Asterank that monitors about 6,000 asteriods in NASA database estimated that more than 500 are listed as more than $100 trillion. Minusing the rocket fuel and operationg costs, the estimated profit on the top 10 asteriods which are deemed to be cost effective is about $1.5 trillion.

Deep Space Industries has developed 3 families of spacecraft havesting asteroids. They are
1) FireFlies which are tasked to fly to the asteroids and examine them.
2) DragonFlies which gather small samples and return them to Earth for analysis.
3) Harvestors which venture out to asteroids and gather them and return to Earth high orbit to process them.

Space mining could revolutionize space exploration in a sense it provide funding and infrastructure in the form of space ports for spaceship refueling and maintenance for the long journey in space to discover new habitable planets.

(Credits: sea.mashable.com, solarsystem.nasa.gov, www.usmoneyreserve.com, en.wikipedia.org)