Talk:United North American States/@comment-3084244-20141024131225/@comment-5135903-20141024203100

As with everything space realted, mining asteroids would mighty expensive, so it probably wouldn't be economical, even against the prices of highly depleted resources on Earth.

The possible 'big moment' for space travel in the future could be the development of materials with a high enough tensile strength to support a 'space elevator'; it has been said that a space elevator could reduce the costs of space launches by up to a hundredfold; then activities such as asteriod mining could become really competitive.

Space elevators only work at (or very near) the equator, as their support is provided by the centripetal force of the Earth's rotation. An interesting consequence of this is that the richest countries of the future could be the ones that have major cities in favourable sites for space elevators; Equador (Quito), Brazil (Belem), Gabon (Libreville), D.R. Congo (Mbandaka), Uganda (Kampala), Kenya (Kisumu and others), Somalia (Kismaayo) and Indonesia (Pontianak and others) could all be home to the spaceports of the future. Brazil and Indonesia seem especially promising given their potential for high economic performance in the future.