Maybe asteroid mining is the real economic objective for the Falcon Heavy?
Then we can make Jeff Bezos go get us a comet...
But like the age old adage, you get rich by selling the pick axes, not by mining for gold. Elon probably figures that launches are where the money is, not the actual mining itself.
There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy.
The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.
The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale).
The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell.
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When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important.
Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.
For those curious about asteroid mining per se, there are plenty of ideas being prototyped right now - including the more obvious ones like two-part drills spinning in opposite direction, and the less obvious ones like using concentrated sunlight to heat up the asteroid and collecting the matter that outgasses from the hot spot.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin...
Scroll to page 11 for a picture.
Space mining companies currently have two or three possible products they usually talk about: platinum group metals, helium 3, and water.
Helium 3 would come from the lunar soil. The problem is that it is EXTREMELY rare in the lunar soil, so you'd have to process ridiculous amounts of it. It is ostensibly used as a fusion fuel, but it's actually a tougher fuel to use than deuterium/tritium, and no one has even made D/T fusion breakeven, yet. The only real advantage is that helium 3 produces fewer neutrons than D/T does. But Protium-Boron11 produces even less. And you can make Helium 3 by just making Tritium and letting it decay. So Helium 3 isn't a real market.
Platinum group metals are supposed to be this huge market. But the total value of the platinum market (and the vast majority of the PGM market is platinum by value) is just $5 billion per year. The global commercial space telecom market is already on the order of $100 billion per year. And even here, processing platinum in orbit is a HUGE technical challenge. It's in relatively small concentrations (though perhaps still better than Earth), it's not like there's a big chunk of platinum that you just need to grab.
And water. Water is supposed to be the huge, near-term space commodity. $10,000 per kilogram, "The oil of space." ...except the only current market for water is on ISS, where it is occasionally delivered by Dragon, Progress, and Cygnus. Water is not used for propulsion for any current satellites; instead, they use hydrazine, xenon, or a bipropellant hypergolic combination (usually including hydrazine).
The only other use is for upper stage propellant. But that'd require splitting the water, refrigerating the resultant gases, storing them in deeply cryogenic conditions, then delivering them to the upper stage. This is all possible, but that is only good for a small part of the trip to orbit, the part from LEO to GEO. But the starting assumption of water being super expensive is based on a faulty assumption that launch costs will remain really high, i.e. that reusable rockets won't work. If Falcon Heavy works, the cost to orbit is only like ~$1000/kg to LEO. And if BFR works (first orbital test as early as 2021/2022), costs could be as low as $10/kg. So you have to assume reusable rocketry isn't really viable. But to get water from, say, the Moon requires a reusable launch infrastructure of some kind, usually a reusable lunar lander/ascender. And usually, in order to be cost effective, it has to be totally autonomous. So you're assuming fully autonomous, refurbishment-free launch from the Moon is going to be cheap to develop but reusable rockets on Earth won't. And you're also necessarily assuming that space market growth won't be buoyed by much cheaper space launch, so you're looking at a small part (upper stage propellant) of a relatively small market (the current space launch market, which is a tiny fraction of the space telecom market). And you have to build a bunch of infrastructure on the Moon and in Earth orbit to make it work, it'll probably take over a decade to get working... Why not just invest in reusable rockets on the Earth first?
So I feel like the business case for water mining also doesn't make any sense, in spite of the difference in delta-v needed to reach orbit.
(The caveat to this is if you have a Moon base or something... in which case you already have a need for water on the Moon itself and much of the infrastructure already in place. That is reasonable, IMHO.)
If lifting things from the Earth becomes super cheap (and it most certainly can), then the vast majority of the business case for space mining goes away, and you're left mostly with mining platinum group metals for Earth use (which isn't a very big market). The narrative needs to be rewritten to account for reusable space launch.
I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all.
People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).
Current space industry is dominated by intensively manufactured goods (satellites) that provide enormous value to ground based users. Having literal tons of steel available isn't going to help with the intensively manufactured part.
I can see space hotels or whatever, but that is not a huge market, even with Musky launch prices.
The other day I found an interesting analysis on that, which should answer all your questions: https://medium.com/@centrena/the-cislunar-economy-series-fed....
It enthuses that colonization should be the end goal because it will drive funding. I remain unconvinced that there are actually enough incredibly wealthy people that want to go die in space to drive a vast economy.
There's enough interest, demand and money in current space activities to justify a small cislunar economy; after that happens, well, hard to predict, but I think you're underestimating the amount of people with ideas about what to do in the Solar System.
Getting started, it could be a scheme of space development futures. Bet on the value of things in space, which puts money into the development of more things in space.
By 'in space' of course we mean everywhere in the Universe except tiny 'ol Earth.
Asteroid mining isn't happening in a vacuum (well, it is in a physical one, but not metaphorical). Fortunately, there are people working on using the mined material to manufacture things in space too; missions plans are being sketched around those capabilities.
It'd still be more cost-efficient to e.g. mine for gold under the ocean or in the Antarctic rather than send gear up to space to do that.
If we had a huge solid gold asteroid (how would that occur?) floating in a very close, very convenient orbit then maybe it would be cost-effective to send a ship to connect, re-orbit and land it without vaporizing; but anything realistic simply wouldn't be worth the launch effort&cost.
Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
(This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.
Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home.
PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.
260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.