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... assuming the price of gold does not fall to almost $0. Anyway, gold has a lot of industrial applications, so it would be nice.

The annual mining of gold is about 3000 tons. In a very optimistic scenario, let's assume a weekly rocket with 20 tons of gold, that increase the annual production in 1000 tons. Probably enough to reduce the prize, but not to $0.

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If the gold is mixed or chemically bonded, you are delivering rock, and there's plenty of gold in the rock beneath your feet, it is just not worth the cost to extract. Surely requiring a high-risk rocket delivery system makes it less feasible... perhaps so much that mining even a pure-gold asteroid would not pay dividends.

Gold mostly appear on Earth as a pure metal or an alloy with Silver (that is also valuable), so I expect that in the asteroid it is in one of those forms. (But I'm not an astrogeologist.)

Anyway, the article is probably too optimistic.

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