My gut tells me the fixed costs of space mining are huge, but once you pay them, the marginal costs will be tiny.
Yes, but is the demand huge enough to pay those fixed costs? If demand is not very eleastic, then no-one will pay them.
To develop the metaphor I used: given the glass a metre away, the lake a kilometre away, and the vast reservoir over the mountain. Suppose that, given a pipeline, the marginal cost for the reservoir is cheaper than the cost of filtering the lake water. That’s as may be, but if we’re a small village (or if we’re just me), it makes no sense to pay the immense cost of the pipeline.
This will change, of course, if space infrastructure can also serve other purposes (in the metaphor, if we have other reasons to build a pipeline or at least explore the mountains).
So would I ^_^
Yes, but is the demand huge enough to pay those fixed costs? If demand is not very eleastic, then no-one will pay them.
To develop the metaphor I used: given the glass a metre away, the lake a kilometre away, and the vast reservoir over the mountain. Suppose that, given a pipeline, the marginal cost for the reservoir is cheaper than the cost of filtering the lake water. That’s as may be, but if we’re a small village (or if we’re just me), it makes no sense to pay the immense cost of the pipeline.
This will change, of course, if space infrastructure can also serve other purposes (in the metaphor, if we have other reasons to build a pipeline or at least explore the mountains).