Thanks decimon. Africa (here and there) also has supplies of certain rare-earth elements that are necessary in small quantities for electronics. No surprise that the Chinese have been working on influence in Africa at least since they backed the FNLA in Angola’s civil war. Nowadays they’re getting ready to industrialize certain countries, mainly to build stuff cheap enough to make money selling into the Chinese market. Chinese consumers have money to spend, and like the Japanese, the local capacity builds for export.
One run-of-the-mill metal-rich big asteroid can contain more metals than have ever been mined in Earth’s history. Gosh, what to do, what to do. And Obama is killing the space program as well, gosh, what’s *that* about?
1) He wants to protect outer space from the evil USA capitalists by declaring outer space a national wildlife refuge.
2) He want to claim that he is saving money by eliminating the few useful programs government pays for. It's cheaper for NASA to do Muslim Outreach and support the IPCC than actually explore space.
3) He wants to make the world better by removing the USA from the list of 1st world nations.