My gut tells me the fixed costs of space mining are huge, but once you pay them, the marginal costs will be tiny.
This seems likely true for other sorts of mining as well; presumably finding oil and drilling to it is more expensive than operating the pump afterwards. This seems less obviously true for recycling or distillation.
My understanding is that ordinary mining suffers from increasing marginal costs as you have to dig deeper and deeper into the earth and/or process veins of ore which are less and less rich.
This seems likely true for other sorts of mining as well; presumably finding oil and drilling to it is more expensive than operating the pump afterwards. This seems less obviously true for recycling or distillation.
My understanding is that ordinary mining suffers from increasing marginal costs as you have to dig deeper and deeper into the earth and/or process veins of ore which are less and less rich.