text: Asteroid mining has also been seriously considered. A NASA design study evaluated a 10,000-ton mining vehicle (to be assembled in orbit) that would return a 500,000-ton asteroid fragment to geostationary orbit. Only about 3,000 tons of the mining ship would be traditional aerospace-grade payload. The rest would be reaction mass for the mass-driver engine, which could be arranged to be the spent rocket stages used to launch the payload. Assuming that 100% of the returned asteroid was useful, and that the asteroid miner itself couldn't be reused, that represents nearly a 95% reduction in launch costs. However, the true merits of such a method would depend on a thorough mineral survey of the candidate asteroids; thus far, we have only estimates of their composition. One proposal is to capture the asteroid Apophis into Earth orbit and convert it into 150 solar power satellites of 5 GW each or the larger asteroid 1999 AN10, which is 50 times the size of Apophis and large enough to build 7,500 5-gigawatt solar power satellites