Cool story, thanks for posting. Could do with some references showing your sources of information, for folk that might want to read more.

As indicated in your article, the question by conventional business is always an analysis of return on investment.

Businesses and individuals with revenue from the only source that is free, solar power, can begin to put that limitation behind.

The new consideration then becomes how much solar power needs to be utilised to obtain enough revenue to fund a task.

That makes an awful lot of new projects that might previously have been unviable, possible.

So the real innovation that will surely lead to much more activity in space, including things like asteroid mining, is expanding our use of the oldest off-planet resource we know; the sun.