[Kelly_2000]

"Asteroid mining will be very lucrative."

i doubt it :-) the cost of mining and returning said minerals to earth would be counter productive and cost more than the minerals are worth here on Earth

[Strategerist]

i doubt it :-) the cost of mining and returning said minerals to earth would be counter productive and cost more than the minerals are worth here on Earth

That's obviously true, but based on previous threads people have this vast emotional attachment to the idea that mining asteroids will be economically viable.

[Antonello]

>"Asteroid mining will be very lucrative."

i doubt it :-) the cost of mining and returning said minerals to earth would be counter productive and cost more than the minerals are worth here on Earth

That could completely change if/when a Space Elevator becomes a reality.

[bobdsmith]

i doubt it :-) the cost of mining and returning said minerals to earth would be counter productive and cost more than the minerals are worth here on Earth

Let me respond to this with a really unrealistic senario.

What if we find an asteroid made of minerals noone has ever seen before? and by chance those minerals turn out to be really really expensive? And what if we found out how to build a perpetual motion machine that gives us infinite energy for nothing? And what if we also built teleporters that used that energy to teleport spaceships into orbit and back?

Not so sure about the lack of profitablity it astroid mining now are you?