3554 Amun, a $20 trillion dollar rock

You may have heard of this asteroid.

It got my attention when I read Mining The Sky.  John S. Lewis, the author of the book, calculated its value at $20 trillion.  He says that there are more metals on this asteroid alone than what have been mined in the history of mankind.

One detail that escaped me was how easy it may be to get to it.  It is a Near Earth Asteroid, with an orbital period around the sun which is quite similar to the Earth's.  With a space sailing ship, you could get there with no propellant and land there with little propellant.  You could also leave there with little propellant, and return to Earth with no propellant.  It looks ready made for a great big mining and construction project.

The mining project can finance the construction project.  Since it is made mostly of iron and nickel, these metals can be separated from the more valuable platinum group metals (pgm), and then used for the construction project.  The valuables can be sent to Earth to defray the costs of construction of a large torus made of the iron nickel mass left over from the pgm separation.  The large torus can be towed to the Earth Moon Lagrangian Points 4 or 5.  Or make two of them and send one each to each.   Perhaps you could send one to Mars and another to Venus.  Colonies could be started in those places as well.

Once the torus is back near the Earth, it can be pressurized and made habitable.  Perhaps thousands can live in each one of these mini-worlds.  There may be enough metal in the asteroid to make many of these.  That's one way to colonize space and make it financially worthwhile.

Update:

The reason for building the massive torus structure on the asteroid?  Well, taking back only a small portion of the mass, which is the precious metals, would entail mining through enormous amounts of mass anyway.  You may as well  "do something" with all that mass.  Most of it is iron and nickel, so the thing you could do is make a structure out of that, hence the torus.

Making the torus itself may be possible with the use of a spider fab type device.  It would simply make it as separate sheets of metal, or all in a single piece.

The spider fab can't make structures this big?  Well, there's an idea out there to make an Arecibo type dish in space, which is 1000 ft in diameter.  I'm thinking that something bigger than that might be built as well.

Update:

This is like terraforming an asteroid--- the series I wrote about.

Update:

Here's a page from the pdf file linked to up above in green.

It shows the spider fab bot applying a reflective membrane on the Arecibo dish in space.  The same principle can be applied for solar sails and making a torus.