THE MONEY MOTIVE. “The smallest Earth-crossing asteroid 3554 Amun … is a mile-wide (2 km) lump of iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum, and other metals; it contains 30 times as much metal as Humans have mined throughout history, although it is only the smallest of dozens of known metallic asteroids and worth perhaps US$ 20 trillion.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization