SpaceX already has private customers.
http://www.spacenews.com/satellite_telecom/120525-spacex-success-welcome-orbcomm.html
There are plenty of customers for cheap and reliable launch services.
Well, we pay a premium for water that has magical “bottled” properties 
Do you hold air travel to the same standard? Because if so, we’re still waiting on that, too.
No, and we have can’t have a trucking industry without tax-funded roads. Let’s not set the “private sector” bar too high, or we’ll find we have none at all.
It isn’t that far off. You pay a tax every time you buy a ticket. The airlines are taxed every time they take off and land and they are taxed on their fuel. The sky is in effect a toll road.
Federal roads are actually paid for by fuel taxes. They don’t use general revenue funds the last time I looked.
I was actually reading that the federal government might have to raise fuel taxes because higher fuel efficiency standards are decreasing their revenue. Of course they might to a percentage of the price instead of a fixed cost per gallon. Of course we also need something to address electric and natural gas powered cars.
If might be easier to get rid of fuel taxes and just change interstate highways to toll roads.
Never mind revenue, it would be worth raising them just to discourage consumption/driving (see Asphalt Nation, by Jane Holtz Kay); but that would be political suicide, I suppose.
And now, in an achievement nearly as impressive, the SpaceX Dragon returns to Earth!
It would make a lot more sense to eliminate all toll roads and raise the gas tax to make up the difference. Collection mechanisms for gas taxes already are in place, only the filling station or the company that owns it has to worry about that, and the collection process does not become a penny more expensive when the tax goes up (or down); but toll roads require construction and staffing of toll booths. And a gas tax actually makes more sense as a “user fee” – the amount of gas you buy/burn in a year is directly proportional to the use you make of the roads and the wear and tear you put on them (discounting the fuel-efficiency differential between models), and also directly proportional to your carbon footprint (not even discounting that).
There was a book I read once, I think it was called Saturn by Ben Bova, which talked quite a bit about asteroid mining and also space ice mining for water. I think that eventually it can become feasible and even profitable.
That’s from Bova’s Grand Tour series. They’re all worth reading, if near-future intra-Solar-System space travel/exploration/exploitation is a subject of interest to you.
It might be easier, but it is grossly unfair to people who don’t don’t use the interstate highways. It also solves the problem of vehicles that don’t use gasoline or Diesel fuel that aren’t taxed at all, such as electric and natural gas. With current technology all you need are readers at the entrance and exit ramps and you are billed for the mileage with adjustments for vehicle weight. You obviously are unfamiliar with current technology that doesn’t require manned toll booths. In Florida, the mini-transponders are about $5 and about the size of a credit card. The modern readers you don’t even have to slow down when you use the readers. The people who use the cash lane actually pay a surcharge.
Why limit it to the interstates?
Meh. There are people who whine about being forced to pay for all sorts of things they don’t use (schools, veterans hospitals, medicare) or don’t believe in (the Military, NASA, schools, foreign aid).
That entire line of reasoning gets no traction with me.
So people who drive electric cars who use the interstate highways don’t have to pay, but people who use gas cars that don’t do?
All limited access highways would be doable or you talking about surface streets? I live in Orlando and every limited access highway except I-4 is already a toll road.
Well, that’s sort of the point. Mind, it’s not MY point here. However, BG and others are trying to effect change through taxation means by skewing the market (they probably don’t think of it that way since ‘market’ is a dirty word in some circles) by taxing the use of fossil fueled vehicles while not doing the same to all electric vehicles and the like, conferring a competitive advantage they wouldn’t otherwise have. This will make people and I suppose transport companies more willing to switch to technologies that otherwise couldn’t/can’t compete with the current ICE technology on a cost to benefit basis in more than a niche market (of folks who don’t really care about cost to benefit but instead want the status symbol of being one of the cool kids).
Not sure what any of this has to do with asteroid mining, but what the he’ll. 
-XT
No, I mean that I see no reason for one funding-pool for Interstates/turnpikes and another for other roads. Let everyone who pays gas tax pay it and let the money go for all roads.
Back to the OP. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had enough iridium to blanket the entire planet. Imagine if that were safely bought back to Earth? Carve it into pieces, stick a Shuttle- or Apollo-style protective shield and a parachute on the pieces, set the whole to come down in the Australian Outback and Bob’s your uncle. Iridium’s currently over $38M per tonne, so find a chunk of that and you’ve paid for several launches.
Most meteors (which are like asteroids but smaller) that impacted Earth were primarily composed of iron-nickel meteorite material. I don’t anticipate that the billionaire gang will easily find 'roids rich in precious metals and rare earth metals and also passing through Earth’s neighborhood, but I cheer the effort to try.
Mineral rights, mining, and other colonizing efforts are not restricted by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The treaty’s primary purposes were to prevent nuclear weapons in space and sovereign rule over celestial bodies. The USA cannot make Earth’s moon the 51st state (as Newt Gingrich proposed), but governments and corporations can extract minerals from the moon or asteroids without violating the treaty. Nobody can own an asteroid or other body with international recognition.