If that is true, I'll be appropriately enthralled. I'm assuming some sort of spectrometry has revealed titanium, gold or other similar metal valuable enough to justify the expense.
Mostly nickel and iron -- in purer form than any ore on earth. For an investment of several billions, they expect a return in the low trillions, just on those. If there's anything else in it, that's just a bonus. If, as is slightly possible, it has rare earth elements, we could see the world's first trillionaires.
I expect that about the time they start to actually change the thing's orbit, there will be international protests over aiming something so dangerous at our planet (even though it won't actually be). And once its final orbit is known, I expect claims by some countries over which it will orbit to rights to royalties.
The only unproven technology involved is that of connecting thrusters to an extraterrestrial body -- intercepting, landing on, and communicating with a RC unit have all been done successfully.
Of course there's good news and bad news with such a thing being done: the good news is that the price of iron and nickel will drop, because they'll have so much of it; the bad news is that they could very well gain a total monopoly over those metals by driving the price low enough no one can compete.
I don't think any of the great causes are free of bias, be they for civil rights, ecology, hunger, animal rights, gay rights, or whatever. The fact that the cause is just only encourages biased perspectives that are exaggerated. The main point of the article is the overconsumption by Americans and other Westerners, a point that is well-known.
It doesn't follow that the Earth cannot sustain, but that our use patterns are skewed. Vast amounts of water were recently found beneath Kenya (I think) and there is belief that other such huge aquifers exist elsewhere as yet undiscovered.
Aquifers are short-term solutions to water needs; as the US is showing with the Ogallala, even giant aquifers can be drawn down (trivia: reservoirs built in sand-hill country in Nebraska have been shown to lose as much as a quarter of their incoming water to the ground... thus contributing to replenishment of the aquifer, to the point that some have proposed building flood-diversion projects for that very purpose).
I make no argument that science's discoveries under NASA's banner were frivolous, only that the stated goal of space exploration isn't necessary in order to have great funded science. We have seriously underfunded alternative energy, salt water purification, and other more worthy goals in order to keep shooting bits into space.
It's not so much the funding as the point of view. Medical advances made by and with NASA came in a number of cases because no one had ever thought to ask questions in the "right way", with earth-bound thinking, but when asking from the point of view of astronauts they were obvious. I got a look at this sort of thing in an honors course on Form and Function, where we saw that many times large institutions fail to see things that become obvious when looked at by a selection of small institutions, because the large institution tends to mold people to conform to one viewpoint.
So undersea exploration could conceivably yield similar results, because it requires radically different ways of looking at things; OTOH, there's a lot in common between space and undersea operations, so great expectations may be disappointed.
Oh -- research into alternative energy sources has long been driven by the space effort: smaller power plants, more efficient ones, especially in the areas of solar. For that matter, if you're reading this on a laptop, or any mobile device, thank NASA; if you use any battery-driven power tools, thank NASA; if you like getting your temperature and pulse taken on the end of your finger, thank NASA; if you enjoy the panoramic views of sports events shown on TV, thank NASA; if you think the portable water filters that give potable water from some of the nastiest sources on the planet are great, thank NASA; if you appreciate the fact that mothers the world over can now give their infants a full-nutrient formula without breast milk, thank NASA; and... remember the sports bras revealed when the American women's soccer team won that Olympic medal? thank NASA; if you appreciate grooved pavement that makes roads less slick under heavy rain, thank NASA; if you're impressed by self-righting boats that allow the Coast Guard to rescue people that would have been written off before, thank NASA.
So NASA has been in the lead, often the only leader, in such things as your salt-water purification, and alternative energy, and feeding the world. It's still one of the best investments ever made.
NASA even gave us hang-gliders -- it was one of the first design concepts for getting a space capsule safely back to earth, scaled down by NASA engineers for weekend recreation.
