Unfortunately this article overlooks the "startup" costs for developing and deploying the requisite technologies for harvesting the profits (which are significant enough to preclude privatization, IMO).

And there is another more grievous oversight in the article which pertains to the sinister slight-of-hand on the administration's policy: they intend to slough off the cost of developing and deploying what portends to be mankind's greatest engineering feat, while planning to reap the profits: do you really think for one second that good old Uncle Sam will not find away to skim away a hefty share of these (potential) profits? do you think that such asteroids will be corporate or "social" property (read government)?

Tying together one last point, does anyone really believe that this administration has a new found faith in the free markets - or is all of this pandering and innuendo just a red hearing to keep us from sobering up to the cold fact that the promising Constellation project was just killed?