Exactly. If we had kept funding NASA up to now, at the levels that reached the Moon, we would be mining asteroids by now. Instead, once the space race was one, there was no purpose so funding was cut. That we do anything with such meager funding is incredible. Imagine if we had vast solar arrays, bases on multiple planets. It is totally doable with current technology, just a matter of funding.
Thought, guess that is the point of this article. There is no demand.
There was no demand, at the absurd travel costs you get when you throw away an expensive rocket with every launch. Now that we're on the verge of mass-produced rockets that are completely and rapidly reusable, the economics are about to change and we might find plenty of demand. (And it's not just SpaceX; Stoke Space for example looks really interesting.)
It makes it cheaper, but still very expensive. A dozen or more launches of very large rockets to ready a payload large enough to do any work in the asteroid belt and come back, and that’d be like a tiny prospector-robot aiming to return a couple kg of material. Doing much more remains locked behind the expensive (to put it mildly) and unproven notion of getting industrial-scale fuel refining working in space (or at least in a much smaller gravity well) with minimal inputs from Earth. There are… a few challenges there.
Guess I was thinking if we did have 50 (from 70's onward) years of massive funding, that cheaper re-usable ships would have been developed earlier. We wouldn't have needed SpaceX, because re-usability would have been achieved earlier.
The Space Shuttle was an attempt, but even that was pretty small funding, and later. If the funding had continued from the 70's onward then even the Space Shuttle would have looked antiquated.
As mentioned there is a huge initial capital cost to enter into the Space Industry, that is why you need government to jump start it. SpaceX is great, but even that is decades later than it had to be.
I think the experience with the Shuttle shows that NASA was fundamentally unable to produce an economically viable product. They simply aren't structured to be able to do that -- the political structure around them prevents it, regardless of the level of funding.
It's the same reason private companies in competitive industries outperform government design bureaus.
If you haven't yet, watch the series For All Mankind. It's a look at how history might have played out if the Soviets had gotten to the Moon first and the space race just kept going. It's really well done, and for any space nut it's an odd mix of inspiring and poignant.
You'd likely start with the near-Earth asteroids. The easiest have the same delta-v requirement as the Moon. SpaceX is planning about a dozen refueling flights for a Moon landing but that's for a hundred tons of payload.
For the main belt, it probably makes the most sense to use low-thrust high-ISP rockets rather than chemical.
There are less than 100 useful elements on the periodic table. Everything else is a molecule that we can make from one of the above atoms. We mine for gems, but even then lab grown gems are competitive in price. We mine for energy (oil, coal). We mine for sand where we mostly care about cheap (specific properties matter, but in general you can find something local that is good enough and transport is cheaper). Most of the rest we are separating out the raw atoms and then recombining into the exact allow we want.
For gems you might be able to sell this is from whatever asteroid. I'm not in marketing but I can see someone paying extra for that.
Everything else either cheap is important - the energy needed to get it to earth counts against you - or we want the raw atoms in pure form.
Space minerals are cheap by the bulk if you use them in space. But that's alao true for fruit of industrialization. Railway and steel mills make more steel mills and railway.
It will take a lot of lifting earth stuff into orbit before we have useful mills in space to refine those metals. Maybe eventually you will be correct, but current human lifetimes space minerals are very expensive.
As disappointed as I am by modern levels of space funding, I think everyone underestimates just quite how hard “produce a closed sustainable ecosystem that lasts two years” is.
If we wanted to spread out, that would be very high on our research priorities and I don’t think right now we have any idea how hard it actually is.
Thought, guess that is the point of this article. There is no demand.