It’s currently hard to know with any certainty what the marginal costs of space mining might be. Currently, everything is manufactured on Earth and then must be launched into space. It’s not clear what the path(s) to escaping that constraint might be and how long they’ll require and at how much cost.
As just one possible cost that might remain relatively high indefinitely is protecting the Earth from ‘mis-delivery’ of mined resources. Being able to ‘land’ large masses on Earth is very powerful weapon! Defending against even accidental ‘attacks’ might remain prohibitively expensive indefinitely.
Also, outside view says there are various companies hoping to do some sort of extraterrestrial mining, so that means some experts must think it’ll be profitable. And surely they’ll have anticipated the objection that the prices will drop once they start producing.
This seems like slightly weaker evidence than it might otherwise be because I’d expect interest in extraterrestrial mining to be caused by much different motivations than terrestrial mining opportunities.
But yes, I’m sure they’re running the numbers for the scenarios in which their additional supply of whatever they’re able to mine causes the relevant prices to drop.
It’s currently hard to know with any certainty what the marginal costs of space mining might be. Currently, everything is manufactured on Earth and then must be launched into space. It’s not clear what the path(s) to escaping that constraint might be and how long they’ll require and at how much cost.
As just one possible cost that might remain relatively high indefinitely is protecting the Earth from ‘mis-delivery’ of mined resources. Being able to ‘land’ large masses on Earth is very powerful weapon! Defending against even accidental ‘attacks’ might remain prohibitively expensive indefinitely.
This seems like slightly weaker evidence than it might otherwise be because I’d expect interest in extraterrestrial mining to be caused by much different motivations than terrestrial mining opportunities.
But yes, I’m sure they’re running the numbers for the scenarios in which their additional supply of whatever they’re able to mine causes the relevant prices to drop.