Corrected entry: The premise of the plot is that J.J. Hubbard needs to illegally crash the sapphire asteroid on the Moon to make mining the 6,000 tons of gemstone easy & profitable. Eventually it's revealed that the reason the large amount of the stone is so valuable is that it'll make powerful interplanetary rockets practical, and therefore Hubbard's ownership of the sapphire will give him a monopoly on harvesting the vast riches of the solar system. If it'll be so incredibly lucrative, then why does he need to crash the asteroid and risk being caught? It should be worth the cost of just mining it in space.
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Correction: Probably because it is not large enough to have an effective gravitational field to land mining equiment on. Plus, once you start mining, you are decreasing its size\volume making it unstable to mine from. It would be like a dragline digging away at its own base. Crashing it on the moon means they mine 100% of it.
Rlvlk