Asteroid Mining Venture Backed by Google Execs, James Cameron Unveiled

This has so much potential. Could this be the proper bootstrapping of us up there? (Thanks NASA for all the early scouting!)

This NY Times article has a lot more information: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/science/space/in-pursuit-o....

It's wonderful to see people spending huge amounts of money to expand the reach of humanity instead of our capacity for narcissism. Startups like these give me hope for the future.

Step 1: Become a robot.

I wouldn't say that there's much of a funding barrier in this, many of the people involved have more money than has been transmitted over kickstarter in its entire history :-). I think if you want to really help with this, you should offer to work on the project with them. I'm sure they're going to need a large amount of code written, research done, mechanical widgets made, and so on, depending on your specialty.