Asteroid Mining

> What are your thoughts on the time value of money.

Net present value is the one and only correct criterion to use in
deciding whether a project is financially viable. I don't remember
what most of the others are that are listed in the finance books
just so they can be refuted in favor of NPV. One of them is the
interest rate at which a project would be a break-even. It works
only for simple cases in which it's equivalent to using NPV, such as
evaluating a project with one payment and no choices other than
whether or not to do the whole thing.

The other question is what interest rate to use. That's the single
biggest point in favor of government involvement. Governments can
just decide what to do and borrow at their normal rate to do it. It
also varies with how big the project is. You can probably find
optimists and visionaries to finance a $20M project at interest
rates that reflect only the real riskiness of the project. But if
you need $200M, you'll probably have to pay a premium to borrow from
people who face the additional risk implicit in the fact that they
can't evaluate the risk. So cheaper up front is better than it
might look.

>Having your investment tied up for a year while it's in transit.<

... costs whatever your interest rate is. If it saves enough off
your initial cost to make up for that, it's a good deal; if not, it
isn't.

>Having a supplly chain of shipments, like a pearl necklace, strong
out from your NEO where ever its orbit happens to be<

... is not what's proposed. You bring the whole thing, except the
parts of it you threw overboard as reaction mass so that you could
bring it. Then you've got a mass of raw material in earth orbit,
with all the time advantages of the moon and none of the delta-v
disadvantages. Most of your costs are incurred on the same schedule
they would be if that were lunar material.