Okay except one thing. Colonization won't pay for anything. Mining of asteroids will pay for everything. Explore asteroids to find good ones to mine. Everything else is secondary.
Okay except one thing. Colonization won't pay for anything. Mining of asteroids will pay for everything. Explore asteroids to find good ones to mine. Everything else is secondary.
Good point, but mining asteroids won't pay for anything either. No matter how rich a "strike" of metals an asteroid miner might find, the metal has to be delivered to Earth somehow, and it's always going to be less cost-effective to deliver metal from space than getting the same metals to market by traditional methods would be.
Colonization is an investment, not an expenditure. What we're aiming for her is not creating income from space, but creating markets in space. Since human beings are the source of all wealth, the only way to create wealth in space is to establish permanent human colonies there.
But what incentive is there to live in space? What resource exists out there that we can't get here? Just one thing: freedom -- the freedom to do what you want without interference from The Man. Groups that do not wish to live according to the restrictions of our shrinking Earth could literally own their own worlds, and run them however they saw fit. Since there are enough resources in even a small asteroid to support a colony of thousands of people, there's no reason groups deemed "too dangerous to live" here on Earth couldn't buy, settle, and establish their own societies inside asteroids. Want a whites-only fascist state? An all-black Afro-Utopia? A lesbian gynocracy? A polygamist paradise? A world without Armenians? A 100% Turk-free polity? A kingdom of your own? Well, with space colonization, you can have it! X-COM finds an asteroid suited for settlement, the Department of Space Colonization surveys and assays the "territory" and places it under legal U.S. claim (a treaty would have to be in place to establish the legal structure for this), the asteroid is auctioned off to private colonizing groups in parts or as a whole, and the group that wins buys the equipment, builds or leases a ship to take it and the colonists to their new property, and establishes the colony. Once up and running, colonies would have the option of becoming Territories of the United States or paying the costs of the survey and plat and "seceding" from the rest of the human race. The only law to which such independent colonies would be this: A) no colony shall commit any act of aggression against any other party in space, and B) No party in space shall cause any object to assume a trajectory that crosses the orbit of Earth. S-COM (the "Space Navy") would exist to enforce this two-part law. Other than that, people in these colonies would be left alone to do as they please.
That kind of freedom will sell, guaranteed -- but we have to develop an infrastructure to make it possible. That development is a task that would be ideally suited to the U.S. Government. Once we have people living in space, we'll have markets in space, and thus someone for asteroid miners to sell things to.