Carbon could also be used as a fuel, NASA scientists speculate, and the process would turn the carbon into nitrogen, the most abundantelement in the atmosphere.
Executives said Tuesday they're also developing a foundry designed to produce metal parts from nickel, an elementabundant in asteroids, and operate in space, and a class of "Harvestor" craft to extract valuable material from the asteroids.
The most compelling case for asteroid mining is for a yet-undesired element that turns out to be not abundant in the earth's crust and becomes suddenly valuable because of some future technological advance.