Hey, I'm all in favor of increasing robotic probes of the asteroid belt--its bound to yield scientific dividends and increase our knowledge of both the history and future of the solar system. But once again, this boondoggle is being justified as some sort of interplanetary mining scheme. It ain't going to work.

As long as we rely on chemical or ionic rockets for propulsion, there is no single commodity in space that can be mined or harvested and then transported back to earth for economic benefit. Its not just a question of dollars and cents, the cost in resources would far exceed whatever we could bring back from these Outlands. Not only is the cost of transporting to earth these ores so energy-expensive (even if they were already neatly piled up in the Belt ready to load up and haul back) but the cost of locating, extracting, refining and transporting these products would be far more than whatever intrinsic value they might have. Even just the preliminary prospecting for these is going to be an extremely expensive operation. Sure, if we had a massive planetary exploration program that could use some of these resources (water, energy, propellant mass, construction materials) it might be useful, but we DON"T have such a program in place. It would be putting the cart before the horse.

The specific mission proposed by Mr Squyres here is not a bad idea, and I support it as a preliminary recon of the belt which has the potential of great scientific and perhaps even commercial payoff. But I also detect the old Heinleinian fantasy here of noble entrepreneurs conquering space for profit, if just the "doomsayers and skeptics would stop interfering". The reason we haven't done any of this yet is that there is no sure profit in it, so these corporals of industry must rely on public funds to finance their pet projects-- and their career choices.

We have no idea what we're going to find in space, what will be of value and what will not. We're going to have to make an investment in basic research to find out what's out there; and I have no doubt we will find things that will not only be worthwhile, but essential to long-term human survival. But mining for space minerals? Everything available in space can also be found here on earth, the only reason we don't mine it here is either it is in remote places too expensive or dangerous to exploit, or buried deep in the earth's crust, or on the ocean bottom, or under the icecaps. or simply dispersed so thinly for any recovery it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources or dollars to even find it, much less collect it.

The true danger of schemes like Mr Squyres is that preliminary probes will yield nothing of value, and future investment in basic research and exploration will dry up simply because the initial efforts were oversold as moneymaking sure-things. They are not. They are very risky enterprises. And our entrepreneurial class needs to understand that entrepreneurs need to take some risks, otherwise they are just sucking on the government teat: socialism for the corporations, free enterprise for everybody else.

I've seen this movie before, and I know how it turns out. Private enterprise saw the enormous profits to be made in thermonuclear power generation, but they were unwilling to make the investment necessary to process and confine fuel waste--they left the more difficult and expensive parts of the industry for government to do, and that never happened. I would hate to see our space program succumb to this same entrepreneurial greed and irresponsibility.

Everybody seems so seduced about turning capitalism loose on space, to bypass the supposed bureaucracy and inefficiency of Big Governmrnt. But space capitalism is entirely dependent on government funding and facilities. They have yet to identify any single project or technology that they are willing to risk their own money on, they are just contractors working on government projects, just like in the Apollo days.