Mining Asteroids

> Jerry Pournelle once told the story of being invited to participate
in a
> NASA study on a self-replicating industrial system for the moon. He
> said they found that replacing 80 to 90 percent of the workforce with
> automation was easy. Automating 80-90 percent of the remaining
fraction
> was exceedingly difficult, and eliminating those last few people was
> darn near impossible.

I'm not talking about a no-humans-in-space scenario. I'm talking
about no humans go to the asteroid in its original orbit; instead we
do only that first 80% there, and the rest we do in earth orbit. The
experiments and trials get done with a travel time lag of hours and a
lightspeed communication lag of at most seconds, instead of months and
minutes.

Machinery can be sent by an efficient orbit, and not use anything up
on the way. Humans have to be sent by a fast orbit, or have more mass
sent with them to sustain them on the way.