You're missing his point entirely. If there's no real market for zero-gravity metals and pharmaceuticals, the whole venture will fail fast because it can't make money.
If all you can do is build more space stuff but the stuff is more expensive than earth stuff then it's not going to work.
People are estimating £1000 per kg to get stuff into LEO. It costs less to get stuff back to Earth.
Surely they only have to beat $50,000 per kg to get the mining equipment up there and get the stuff back and they're in profit.
And they amortise the cost of getting the mining equipment up there over all the kg they mine and return. Since they're talking about 16000000000 kg of asteroid that's a lot of amortising.
And even if it doesn't have direct commercial value it has many other benefits - it is inspiring. Perhaps some children are seeing this and wanting to get into science. That's great.
But maybe I'm wrong, and I really welcome better information.
That only holds up until you start shipping a lot of Platinum down at which point the market crashes. Also, it's £620 or 1,000$ to LEO right now and 100$ /lb to LEO is possible if we scale things up far enough. What NASA found out from the shuttle program is we just don't need that much stuff in space, because once stuff is up there it can stay there for a long time.
Did you like read the thread? Point 6 in cletus' opening argument.
Rare materials will not make you as much money as you can make now because they will become not rare. So you have to make something which only can be made in space or you have to play the De Beers game, be an evil fucker and spend all eternity in hell if it existed.
Platinum is used in a lot of stuff. Catalytic convertors, electronics, but perhaps most importantly in fuel cells. Usage is going to increase dramatically, meaning people will need this stuff. Getting something in space down to Earth surface is not as expensive as escaping Earth gravity.
You really think platinum is going to drop from $50,000 per kg to something like $1,000 per kg before they've made their money back?
If all you can do is build more space stuff but the stuff is more expensive than earth stuff then it's not going to work.