HIS paper presents selected results from the nine-month, Phase 1 NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts
(NIAC) investigation for the Robotic Asteroid Prospector (RAP). The central objective is to determine the
feasibility of mining asteroids. Ideally, this determination should be economic, technical, and scientific to lead to
the conceptualization of robotic and later human asteroid mining missions. The paper distinguishes resources that
can be used in space from those that could be brought back to earth and sold. The economic justification for the
latter is difficult to establish at present. The value of a resource in space should derive from not its value on Earth
but its usefulness in space. This value is analogous to the question: what is more valuable in the middle of Sahara
desert -- 1 liter of water or 1 kg of gold. The paper presents the identified commodity resources available in space
that are of potentially feasible economic interest, as well as a mining architecture and associated technologies for
exploiting those resources.