Take a look at the costs, you'll find it's absurd.
Going up and down the gravity well is expensive as all hell. You'll never make that back no matter what you find on Ceres or the Moon. Even if it were already stacked in refined bars waiting for you to pick them up!!
OK as a fully subsidized mission with no profitability other than a technology subsidy, sure. But as a proper business? No way.
At least not until we get that space elevator built
Going up and down the gravity well is expensive as all hell. You'll never make that back no matter what you find on Ceres or the Moon. Even if it were already stacked in refined bars waiting for you to pick them up!!
OK as a fully subsidized mission with no profitability other than a technology subsidy, sure. But as a proper business? No way.
At least not until we get that space elevator built
There are several projects to build a space elevator until 2050.
I think cost estimates were around 50-100 billion $ with usage of graphene or similar super materials.
It's hard to put a cost estimate on something that doesn't exist. No material has been found which has anywhere near the required strength to weight ratio.
This is wrong. Super materials that have a a high enough tensile strength already exist.
One of them is graphen. With a taper ratio of 1 and at GEO (around 36.000 km) the burden on graphen would only reach 87% of its tensile strength.
Edit the energy balance sheet of a space elevator doesnt have to be negative.
You could use gravity on the way to back to earth to recollect the energy needed to move the elevator upwards.