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NASA is funding a study through their NAIC program, called the Robotic Asteroid Prospector], to look at specific spacecraft mission architectures that would look at supporting actual Extraterrestrial resource extraction and assess viability, in the NASA/government-funded way of thinking (which is rather different than the commercial way of thinking, I might add).

"The assumptions lead to a spacecraft design, possibly using a solar-thermal propulsion system, that launches to a NEO from the Lagrange point station, mines and processes the material at the asteroid and then returns it to the Lagrange point for shipment back to Earth. ... the team is trying to find the requirements that would make a robotic asteroid program commercially successful."

I was unable to find a Wikipedia article where this straightforwardly fits, so am adding this comment here.

I've also started a Talk page discussion on Talk:List of Solar System probes. Cheers. N2e ( talk) 14:38, 23 October 2012 (UTC) reply