alt Hacker NewsSpace iron? Earth's crust is full of it, it will never make economical sense to bring it from space. You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
Some very rare elements or tritium maybe, but this is is a big maybe.
One of the points of space economy is that rocket needs to leave earth only once. After that the equipment would just be mining and sending stuff back using pretty unlimited solar and nuclear energy thus the amortized cost of the mined material would be going down to pretty much 0 which in the long run may work even for iron.
Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally. The same thing will be with mining as the cost structure - absence of environmental, regulatory and political costs in particular and much cheaper energy (solar and nuclear) - is much better in the space than on earth. Also scale - you can easily find asteroids where you can have a mining operation 10x or even 100x the largest earth operation - and scale drives cost down. The earth based operations will just lose the competition.
>You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)