If they could mine it or re-route it to earth, maybe we could pay off the national debt. Mining in space is not going to come for years. If SpaceX can get their Starship operational and as cheap as Musk want's it, it might pay for itself. NASA builds rockets in SEVERAL congressional districts and states, thus making them very expensive, yet hard to cut the budget because it spends money in all those congressional districts. LBJ did this with NASA. NASA was originally going to use their facilities at Cape Kennedy or at Huntsville for their original headquarters. LBJ moved it to Houston. NASA has facilities in Utah, Alabama, Texas, Florida, California, Mississippi, Louisiana, Ohio, Colorado, and who knows where else, making it hard to cut their budget by consolidating a lot of their spread out areas, and actually building things that are way cheaper. SpaceX proved this with their Falcon 9 rocket running almost everyone else out of the launch business. Lockheed was charging $400 million per launch on their Atlas V rocket and Boeing was charging $500 million on their Delta IV rocket. Both are now obsolete. Falcon 9 charges $62 million for a new rocket launch and $40 million if you launch on one of their used Falcon 9's. They have saved NASA, the Air Force, and others tons of money. This is another reason the Space Shuttle is no longer flying, because they cost $1 billion per launch, and a Falcon 9 can deliver the same payload much cheaper.
