ARMAGEDDON Movie Just Got Real! Mining Asteroids For Fuels And Minerals

In Michael Bay’s 1998 pre-apocalyptic movie, ARMAGEDDON, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and their oil drilling crew, went up to space to drill an incoming Asteroid and destroy it before it hit earth.
Something similar may be possible, not the destruction part, but the drilling and mining part.
Via Los Angeles Times, if a new private space venture has its way, they may send people up to space to mine asteroids for fuel and minerals and building spare parts in pace.
Via KTLA, the following are excerpts..

Harvesting the resources available in the giant space rocks flying around the solar system could allow spacecraft to build parts when they break or refill their tanks on the long trek to Mars, Deep Space Industries officials said in a news conference Tuesday at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica.
Deep Space hopes to launch small, low-cost spacecraft called fireflies by 2015.
Weighing about 55 pounds, fireflies would use existing technology and hitch rides with larger communications satellites being launched into space.
These one-way trips would last from two to six months, depending on the distance to the target asteroid, and would cost customers $20 million – with a significant profit margin built in, according to Chairman Rick Tumlinson.
In 2016, the venture plans to launch larger spacecraft called dragonflies, which would weigh 60 to 150 pounds and embark on two-to-four-year missions that would pick up asteroid samples and return them to Earth for analysis.
Eventually, the company hopes to be able to mine these asteroids for resources, both for metals and for fuel, Tumlinson said.

The company is working on the technology and looking for more investors and a headquarters on earth, potentially somewhere near Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
President Obama has instructed NASA to plan on sending an astronaut to an asteroid by 2025, and last year they started planning to launch a telescope to be on the look out for any asteroid that may threaten to hit earth.

May be it’s time we have an ARMAGEDDON sequel based on this new concept.