Asteroid Mining

[gaelic cowboy]

There is not as much need for a reusable ship as you might think lads if humanity got serious about it we might build a space elevator.

It would be an enourmous project but the benefits would be massive if we could make it work, it will probably use some kind of carbon nanotube or the like and the killer app is the ability to send the ore down safely and cheaply from earth orbit.

Without it I would say asteroid mining is a pipe dream unless we can create some kind of cheap less polluting rocket, I would say though that a cheap less polluting rocket is even less likely than the space elevator.