Citation needed that asteroids are easier to mine. They win on arbitrarily long timelines, but they start to look a lot worse if you want ROI in under 10 years

Citation needed that asteroids are easier to mine. They win on arbitrarily long timelines, but they start to look a lot worse if you want ROI in under 10 years. It takes a ton of energy to reach and return from most asteroids in a sensible period of time. With unlimited time you can use various slow tricks to park them in accessible orbits, but this is a gold rush not a 100 year infrastructure project. O'Neill had it right IMO, Lunar and Martian mass drivers firing up to Lagrange points are going to win. In the early days those bodies win because you can iterate on your mining tech way, way, way faster and keep up with the falling cost curve. In the later days economies of scale win the day.