In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit.

It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible.

Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.

Reliable, viable Starship means the military can rapid deploy a force anywhere in the world in an hour or two.

That would mean huge savings to the military in naval fleet investment, overseas bases. The military would likely pay SpaceX ongoing contracts of tens of billion dollars per year for that exclusive nation-state capability.

The growing Starlink constellation will sustain huge business.

NASA would fund additional missions with the reduced launch costs.

Space tourism and fast global travel is worth another 10 billion dollars annually.

Then there's space telescopes and instrumentation.

Space industry is completely TBD. Here's a kooky idea: how much is antimatter harvested from the solar wind worth? Near earth asteroid capture and mining may be feasible. Moon mining may be on the table.

Militarization of space is an inevitability, and starship provides the payload to get equipment into space.

Starship might provide the launch ability to deal with space junk.

Anyway, you drop the cost of launch by 10x-100x, THINGS WILL BECOME POSSIBLE.

The asteroid Psyche is expected to have a lot of gold content. NASA sent a probe last year, but it's a long trip and will take until 2029 to get there. Even then it just orbits.

That's nonsense. Sure Psyche has a lot of valuable materials on it, but so do mountains on earth, doesn't mean its great way to make money.

There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine.

The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.

Heavy elements like gold and platinum sank to the center of the earth's core while the whole planet was molten and this is why they are rare near the crust. Asteroids have never been entirely molten, and as such have valuable heavy elements dispersed relatively evenly throughout. In other words, much higher concentrations of valuable elements are expected to be available much closer to the surface of asteroids than on Earth.

I know but that doesnt change what I said.

The composition and purity of asteroids can be vastly different than on Earth.

Most of the value in space resources would seem to be that their mass is already up Earth's gravity well, and less so preciousness.

If you need 1 kg of something in space, the cost is {extraction} + {getting it there}.

For anything raw or low tech, it'd seem way easier not to have to bulk lift it off Earth.

Composition should actually be very similar if not identical. All were formed from the same accretion disk around the sun. Distribution of heavy elements within asteroids will be much different from the planets, however, due to the planets having had or still having molten cores.