In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit. It doesn’t h

In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit. It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible. Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.