Minerals, however, do not decompose. A 100 block of gold you could just throw at a specific location and then re-"mine" after the somewhat violent landing, noth

Minerals, however, do not decompose. A 100 block of gold you could just throw at a specific location and then re-"mine" after the somewhat violent landing, nothing will be wrong with it, aside from significant melting at the edges. (and in the "nothing wrong with it" assessment, the same cannot be said of the landing site, but there are plenty of places where that wouldn't be a great issue, e.g. one of the huge deserts like the Sahara, Inner Russia/China or Australia). Note that to an extent you can control the blast. So a 100 ton "mining ball" would not nearly have the same impact energy as a 100 ton asteroid, and even compared to the average meteorite it would be on the extreme slow end. There's a "minimum" blast that's essentially unavoidable, but it's not that huge, only a few square kilometers, and slowing things down to that speed is not hard if you take your time. Only if you want to return things intact do you need to go through the expensive process. Obviously doing the above method with an astronaut would be frowned upon. It's also been studied what happens if you want to go further. If you're willing to wait ~10 years, returning near-earth things to earth by crashing into it is incredibly cheap. If you're willing to wait ~100 years, from almost any point in the inner solar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... In the longer term I would argue that the economy will move to space. For most production processes weightlessness, and vacuum environment (not to mention infinite expansion space and infinite energy) would help a lot.