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Finally, about asteroid mining... asteroid mining is a completly crazy idea. I don't think it will ever be able to compete with Earth-based mining operations, simply because its too hard to get the stuff back to Earth in bulk. Only five tons a day from an elevator and a few dozen billion dollars for the mining operation, and the millions/billions a year used to push the stuff back to Earth? Not unless Greenpeace gets the UN to ban mineral mining or somthing.
The only hope for mining minerals from asteroids is to bring the asteroid to a large "heavy" space elevator station in GEO, and send down alot more than five tons a day... even then, it will be very hard to justify the massive cost of pushing an asteroid into Earth orbit! ...No. If we want humanity to exploit the wealth of the solar system, we have to bring humanity to it, not it to Earth. After all, people don't weigh that much...
- I wish, that is, I hope that I'm able to disagree. Naturally, it's not a matter of bringing down bauxite or iron ore, nor pushing asteroids around (wherever did you get that idea?), but going to NEO's and the Main Belt to acquire high grade rare metals able to compete with Earth production, possibly refined supra Terra. Typical ore concentrations in asteroids are ten times the ores on Earth and once you climb out of the well the rest of the trip is relatively easy.
What I fear is that demand might not be able to increase fast enough when markets are flooded with platinum group metals, which currently go about $20 000 a kilogram. So there is a need for staple demands on the products.
Indeed, to make profits on the margin, what you need is a correspondingly cheap and reliable transport system, no less than a trans-gravity railroad. If such is an impossibilty to establish, however, yes then there's nothing to do about it, but that simply implies also that space will never hold any value for Earth.
So what if you can spend space resources on building orbital stations or struggling habitats on Greenland Mars? Mars may pay back sometime in the future. Maybe. But it's on Earth that the we are right now, so are the consumers and the investment capital.
The fur, tobacco, sugar and indigo and the gold of the Incas is of no use if it stays in the Americas. Either you link the economy of space to that of Earth or the economy of space and thus expansion into it will never develop into a reality.
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