Especially including the earth-bound minerals, is there a better way to get large heavy objects onto the surface of a planet that a "Kinetic Lance" (Peter F. Hamilton) or "Rod" (Neal Stephenson)?
Why send the raw minerals down to earth? Many items could probably benefit from zero-gravity manufacturing facilities. Then you air-drop the finished products.
Most of the stuff that we land on planets is designed to be as light as possible. The proceeds from asteroid mining are going to be mighty heavy. I doubt manufacturing enough parachutes would make any sense.
Then again, those aren't really necessary. Just build the goods to capsules that have aerodynamics and maximum mass so that they'll slow down to a reasonable terminal velocity in atmosphere, and there's no reason you cannot just drop them on some area with a solid enough ground. (And no inhabitants).
Peter F Hamilton addressed this in one of his novels; one of the Commonwealth Saga books I think.
Essentially, his imagined industry uses solar energy to melt ores; these are then formed into a metallic foam and shaped into a stable aerodynamic shape (a sort of blunt wedge).
They are then deorbited to land far out to sea.
Because it's metallic foam, it has a high drag-to-weight ratio (hence lower terminal velocity) and it floats.
Some of the ore is lost to ablation during re-entry, but ... so what? There's plenty more where it came from.
It wasn't the Commonwealth Saga, it was the Night's Dawn series, and I was wondering if someone else would mention it. It's pretty resource-intensive, but we're talking about freaking asteroid mining, so the woo-woo SF aspects of it suddenly feel a little more plausible.
- Replacing terrestrial mines with asteroid mines.
- Bring an asteroid to L5. Mine. When done you have a place to live.
and it becomes weaponized.
Anything moving fast enough is a potential weapon. We need to get used to this idea now.