Investing in the Final Frontier

Los Angeles financier Dennis Tito spent $20 million to visit space. But any investor can buy a stake in the high frontier for a lot less -- 51 cents, to be exact. That was the recent share price of a company called SpaceDev(SPDV Quote). The San Diego aerospace firm wants to launch commercially funded satellites to asteroids in order to survey and eventually harvest their mineral resources. It's a private-sector follow-up to NASA's NEAR probe, which successfully landed on the asteroid Eros in February.

Turns out vast mineral riches lie in the cold depths of space. Thousands of asteroids zip by on orbits that bring them close -- at times uncomfortably close -- to Earth. Just one asteroid with a width of roughly two kilometers could yield an estimated $6 trillion worth of platinum, $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel and $6 trillion worth of cobalt, according to John S. Lewis, who co-directs the Space Engineering Research Center at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Truly astronomical figures to be sure. If you're wanting to invest in something even bigger than the Internet, space could be the place. It's a ground floor opportunity, in fact. Because so far the total size of the commercial space business -- about $96 billion yearly -- seems pretty down to earth. Still, commercial space expenditures already exceed the yearly outlays by governments, according to KPMG. And analysts project future growth at a healthy 20% annually.

An Expanding Universe

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