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Asteroid mining will pay off better if launch costs stay high. Anything produced in space has a huge cost advantage over something launched from the ground at a

• aetherson 10y ago
  Okay, so there's a couple of dynamics that work differently here. There's asteroid mining to source materials for other stuff in space and then there's asteroid mining to source materials for the ground. If cost to orbit is low, then it becomes less worthwhile to source stuff in space for space stuff, because you could just source it from the ground for relatively cheaper. But if cost to orbit is low, it's also lower cost to actually set up an asteroid mining facility and perhaps more plausible that you might economically take stuff from asteroids down to the ground (though huge barriers remain, even for quite low costs to orbit). Also, if cost to orbit is lower, there is more plausibly other stuff actually happening in orbit that might make sense to consume space materials. Right now, the value of "a kilogram of iron" in space is essentially zero, because what you need is not raw iron but some kind of tool, and there's no way to turn raw iron into a tool in space. Water and other volatiles have some minor use, but as long as the number of people in space is, like, six, it's not that big a deal to get them water from Earth. If you had more stuff going on in space, there'd be more reason to try to get low-cost materials in space.