[evgen]

I have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.

[Kim_Bruning]

That's the interesting and confounding part of it. Going up to get them is expensive, sending them back rather less so.

(the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)