A new company is planning to launch a series of a space ships designed for surveying and mining asteroids within our solar system. While it'd take 2 to 4 years to do this, it is rather cool. With extra resources provided from space it may become more viable to explore our solar system.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21144769

This sounds like a huge waste of money... Those metals would need to be soooooooooooooooooo useful, and sooooooooooooooo expensive to actually make a profit and continue mining.

Although, it'll be cool to see what's out there.

The only way space mining could be profitable is if we had a larger space station or used a smaller planet as a base and construction site, which would mean that getting out of earth's gravity wouldn't take as much fuel.