[elihu]

16 Psyche is the sort of place I was picturing as a source of gold. I didn't know we knew enough about its structure to say that the gold (if present) would be difficult to get at, but that sounds like an interesting problem.

In retrospect I guess it makes sense that if 16 Psyche is a chunk of planetary core, then the sort of impact that created it would likely have turned it molten, and its internal weak gravity may then have caused all the heavy metals to sink to the middle before it cools.

At any rate, gold mining sounds like an easier problem than, say, trying to manufacture stainless steel in space in a way that makes economic sense. (We'll probably get there eventually if we're going to have any kind of real space economy, but bootstrapping is going to be hard.)