With the high cost of dead-lifting everything needed from Earth into space,...?

First let me say that I agree this will be the new "goldrush" of this century... but it is slow to gain momentum and I share your impatience.

On the other hand I know that the reason we are not pursuing it immediately is the lack of a proven technology for the cable of a "skyhook" aka "elevator-to-space". Until we have a workable light and strong meta-material which is capable of handling the load, the cost of getting anything *back* from orbit is still prohibitive.

Consider that the planned NASA project to capture and tow a tiny 7 meter diameter asteroid into lunar orbit and to mine it, using robotic technology is estimated to cost $4 billion USD. At that price it is simply not yet cost effective.

In fact at that price it would still be about 10 times cheaper to set up a lunar colony, mine the moon, and fling the locally smelted and processed material into low lunar orbit for pickup using mass drivers.

Until there is a space colony who would be the primary customer however, the economies of scale are not really going to make such a project attractive to investors on Earth.

Yes, but the material mined in space would need a market in space as even returning them to Earth for the market on Earth makes them unprofitable. The mining of material in space must go hand in hand with the construction of spaceships and space habitats, you can't just bootstrap one to make the other more economic.

There are serious challenges to mining asteroids and smelting ore in space. Asteroids have very little gravity so how do you have bulldozers and back hoes? Our current smelting process often uses charcoal from trees so where do we find trees in space. We have to rework the smelting process to work with the materials we can get in space. CAD/CAM and 3D printing promises to bring complex manufacturing to a small infrastructure but ultimately, the more complex the manufactured product, the more likely human intervention would be required and we need to defer human involvement till they can work and live in radiation and micro-meteorite sheltered areas. We have to simplify the manufactured materials requirements for the construction of such shielding. Magnetic shielding only shields versus charged particles and though much of the radiation issues are from energetic charged particles, there are also gamma rays, x-rays and UV which are undeterred by magnetism plus energetic particles above certain energy levels would simply not be deflected enough. Mass is the only reliable shielding.

I think we should just make wires. The manufacturing process is simple as it's just drawing molten or softened metal through a hole. This process is already mechanized on Earth. With wires, we can make cables, again a process already mechanized on Earth. With cables, we can knit or weave complex structures, another process already mechanized. A knitted structure filled with asteroid regolith is an effective radiation and micro-meteorite shield. Structures that need to be airtight can be packed with a combination of aluminum and iron oxide powder to thermite weld the structure solid. We could have simple robots knit torus's or cylinders which can then provide shielded work areas for humans.

Why aren't we doing this? Where's the political gain for public funding? The general public would rather see flags planted on Mars and that's the audience politicians cater to.

Why should we? Everything you said is true, yes, we could do that, but the initial costs would be very high and even the tiny budget NASA has these days is still looked at as suspect by people claiming it would be money better spent on feeding baby turtles or some such.

Until you can come up with a clear motive for space dream, it will remain just a dream.

The gold rush never would have happened either had gold pans cost a million dollars each.

P.S. Greed is demanding the right to spend other people's money, not to make as much as one pleases. Profit makes the world worth living in. Non-profit systems only produce hordes of kids with rice bowls and flies on their faces.

Edit: I gave the second one so you'd know it wasn't just me. I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

In 41/2 billion years mining for the economy will be the last thing on anyone's mind. There is a need to find other livable planets because we will have to live on one. If it doesn't help the survival of our species then funds should not be wasted to line someone's pockets.

Yes you are right. But smart people like yourself don't get to make decisions like that, instead we have congress.

We are too busy fighting useless never-ending wars because people don't have "freedom"