Mining Asteroids

> I'm just unsure if that level of automation exists at present.<

So am I. But we know that real spacecraft do various things, like
taking a Mars-buggy for a drive with no driver on site. The point of
my tether-based scheme is to break it down into parts that seem no
more complicated than what's already being done.

> I wonder if the Summer Study goes into any detail about why the lunar
> rotary pellet launcher was dumped in favor of the mass driver.

I took a quick look with Google and didn't find any. But I didn't do
any real digging.