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“Transportation would be cheap for getting resources back to earth—really.”

One Space Shuttle load of Lunar mined Helium 3 may someday be able to fuel a Helium 3 nuclear reactor capable of supplying all of the electrical power needs of the entire United States for one year. If so, the Helium 3 would be valued at more than $1 Billion per ton.

Rare goods that can only be manufactured under the zero gravity conditions of space may be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars per Space Shuttle load. Examples of such products vary from perfectly shaped ball bearings with extraordinary properties of longevity and efficiency to pharmaceuticals to fabrication materials that are extraordinarily lightweight yet super-strong to be used in artificial limbs, exo-skeletons for medical and military applications, armor, industrial shielding, military and civil aircraft fabrication material, and much much more.

All of the products manufactured in space require plant facilities and supplies which will be more and more affordable only after the costs for the energy to lift them out of the Earth’s gravity well have been eliminated by sourcing them from asteroids and the Moon/Luna instead.

This approach is already coming into use by Planetary Resources, who has already launched mission that have developed a means to robotically refuel communications satellites in Earth orbit at far less cost than it would be to replace those satellites because they ran out of fuel for their reaction thrusters used to maintain their orbital positioning. In the future, the fuel for such satellite refueling can come from an asteroid or comet at far less cost than lifting the fuel into orbit from the Earth’s surface.