Asteroid Mining

On 9/30/05, dsw_s wrote:
(...)
> I'm not convinced that the moon is so devoid of economic value. I'm
> not convinced in the other direction either, but a lot of people
> seem to think that the moon is a viable source of materials.
(...)

I am one of those who think that the Moon is viable. In particular, I
have a pet theory that the Moon worked as an "asteroid sponge" - since
you have all those thousands upon thousands of impact craters, then
much likely there is a lot of the original material of the asteroids
buried deep in the center of the craters. So, if you want to mine an
asteroid, you can go to the other side of the inner Solar System or
you can go mere 360 Mm away and mine the bottom of Moon craters. (And
here the significant advantage of Moon proximity rings, unless at some
point in the future we have NEOs stuck at the Lagrangians.)

Of course my pet theory awaits new experiments to be validated - no
one has ever dug the bottom of a Moon crater.

As for Mars, I agree that its economic value will probably be tourism
only, but I don't see the Martians "importing everything" - I think
that Martians would be self-sufficient at least in terms of raw
materials.