Happy there are people like you @dantethegreat who enjoy this topic. I believe that countries will be coming together to work on this as the necessary infrastructure and technologies are made available as part of the emerging ecosystems that will be built around asteroid mining companies. Which there will be more of in years ahead.

As these companies become profitable, they will provide the demand for Universities to research asteroids more, and educate new students on complementary topics. With the launch and technology infrastructure being built to support such missions, access to study asteroids and do other non-profit studies and operations around them will also become more feasible. So I'm an optimist that this will happen more or less on its own in the next ~10-30 years (which is the time I think it will take for companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries + new competitors, to really get going).

Anyways, working at the European Space Agency myself, I was saddened to see that our proposal to move ahead with the Asteroid Impact Mission AIM did not receive the neccessary support from our member countries. So it will have to wait a few years before Europe makes this a priority within its budgets.

Anyways, I'm happy to elaborate more on where we are today in achieving all of this, and what steps we will have to take, in a blog post myself. Having just posted my first introduction post on steemit I am looking very much forward to discuss these topics. And connect with people like yourself who are curious about it :) Followed you and hope to speak more with you!