Going by TFA there's almost twice as much worth of metals than water available on this thing, so why would you focus on only getting the water for apparently the only use of making rocket fuel?
Indeed, as you noted in your followup post, it's all just conjecture. It's unlikely to be just water, and it's unlikely to contain no water at all. I chose the number that was more favorable to my position, which was perhaps not totally honest. Don't expect rigorous number-crunching from back-of-napkin calculations performed in support of posts in long slashdot threads.
So basically what your saying is go get this thing and either mine it in space or put it in an orbit that works for us and use it solely as a fuel source for rockets? That's the only use you seem to be focusing on.
Both, really. Tow it to Earth orbit, then proceed to mine it in Earth orbit. I'm only focusing on mining water because it's the only non-sci-fi resource we need in orbit right now. Sure, some time in the future we might have use for other volatiles or maybe metals or I don't know what, when we're trying to build superstructures in space. But that's not today. Today, we don't have much going on in space, so we don't really have many immediate uses for unprocessed (or minimally processed) resources in space. We do however have an immediate need for water. Water as fuel, drink, and shielding. Talk of mining other resources is akin to futurism (which is cool, but not the basis for a sound business plan today).
I mean all you have to is zap it with electricity right?
You need to melt it first. To do that, you need to contain it, under pressure, since water doesn't have a liquid state in the vacuum of space. Then when it's liquid, indeed, you just zap it. Hydrogen will appear at the cathode, oxygen at the anode. Keep them separate and you're done. Of course, you may want to purify the water first, to preserve your electrodes. That complicates things a bit, since now you're talking about potentially doing fractional distillation in a weightless environment. But indeed, this isn't rocket science. It's not a project for the high school science fair, but it's not rocket science either.
Having a great fuel supply available in space is great for the rockets (presuming they don't start using a different fuel in the future).
Indeed, that's a real risk. The water-in-orbit market might collapse a bit if water were no longer useful as an economical fuel source. That's not going to happen for as long as we're using chemical rockets, though. There's no chemical fuel energy-dense enough to warrant lugging it up out of this gravity well. Even if we figure out amazingly awesome chemical fuels, the cost of launching them from Earth will make it unlikely that they'll be cost-competitive with space-sourced electrolyzed water.
But you still need to either make a processing plant on the asteroid (big bucks) or develop a bunch of space trucks (big bucks) to fetch to somewhere where there is processing plants.
The former, not the latter. The planned asteroid capture mission(s) have shown that it's probably not that hard to lasso ourselves a nice rock and put it in Earth orbit. Of course, these plans all hinge upon some rather shaky assumptions about asteroids. I grant that there is a chance that it could be much harder than we expect. But our expectations are still "it shouldn't be that hard". I agree that perfecting the technology to do all this in space will cost big bucks, and then working out the kinks until it's economically viable will likely take some time. However, this is about as unambitious as it gets. We're talking about melting the water out of a frozen rock and then applying an electric current through it. This isn't exactly a smelter.
I'll be the first to admit I know fuck all about how to make rocket fuel from water but I assume you need more than a giant cattle prod. You did say you need 'nothing more than electricity' but that's not strictly true is it?
Indeed, see above. However, as far as current technology goes, this system is well within the bounds of what we know we can do today.
That's like saying you need nothing more than steam to generate electricity, and hey, steam comes from water so we can use the water to make the electric to make the fuel from the water. You know what. Sounds like a foolproof idea, I'll race you to the patent shop.
Oversimplification :)
