[zeugma]

Somebody needs to be offering legitimate and affordable mineral claims to help fund this sort of thing. Obviously the primary financier of the mission would get the biggest share. Its a shot in the dark but lots of people play the lottery.

Yup.

Here's the Big Problem™: there is already a treaty covering space and everything in it, signed by the globalists and socialists in your government that considers all the mineral wealth in space to be the property of "all mankind". So in order to "legally" do anything like mine an asteroid, you'll have to pay off the criminals that run the U.N. I can't remember the treaty name, but it is written very similar to LOST. There are folks out there with very long time horizons who have been planning for just this type of thing, and they are going to want their cut.

[cripplecreek]

We signed the outer space treaty which doesn’t say much about private ownership in space but the moon treaty does. However we didn’t sign the moon treaty but our lack of opposition has in a sense made it defacto international law.

It does need to be overcome but it appears that many of the people working toward private space endevors are more optimistic than they have been in the past.

[RoosterRedux]

there is already a treaty covering space and everything in it...

Like that is going to hold up in court.

If I remember correctly, I laid claim to everything in outer space and beyond back in 1955.;-)