Honestly, there isn’t a big need to mine space because humans only live on a tiny fraction of the planet, called the crust, and that crossed only makes up for about one percent of the mass of the planet.

Humans haven’t even touched 99% of the resources here on earth so you know really space mining is like a fun exercise for imagination but not really useful unless you find amazingly rare minerals, that we somehow really need for something and can’t synthesize on earth, which, I doubt, because, more or less, whatever we find in space, will be able to synthesize on earth for less money than the cost of mine.

When a planet forms, you know the bulk of those interesting heavy materials are in the center of the planet so that’s still where most of earths minerals are and the crust we’ve been mining is just a tiny tiny sample of the real content.

Go look at a picture of the planet and book Halfin the crust really is compared to the mantle in the core and you’ll get an idea about much untapped resources. There are on earth and will remain here on earth for a long time and probably be more accessible than any type of space mining.

At the end of the day, though many people may not like it it’s still kind of hard to find good reasons to establish significant industry or colonies in space when humans are so highly evolved for earth, like conditions and earth has so much more accessible resources than anywhere else in the solar system for humans.

It’s kind of like earth is the jam of the solar system, and there isn’t much more high value targets out there around here. It would’ve been wonderful if Mars was a more earth like an habitable planet, and all we really had to do was get to it and humans could thrive, but it’s a lot more like a giant death trap than an opportunity.

The biggest real opportunities for going to the moon and mars is basically just to look at the rocks and expand our scientific understanding of solar system formation because the mars and the moon don’t have tectonic plates so much weather so the geology there has been preserved for billions of years unlike here on earth, and those are like the best records of the solar system formation, and that’s really the bulk of the value not colonizing super hostile locations and I know that’s not what everybody wants to hear but it’s kind of the same problem that we had in the 60s.