Sorry, wrong on all counts. :) I will say that one of the reasons I'm skeptical about space solar power is that (IMHO) to make it feasible will require using materials mined from space rather than shipping everything up from Earth - that makes it much more speculative. Others disagree on that. OTOH, solar panels seem to last a lot longer in space, and the sun is always shining. On the third hand, I see a lot of political difficulties.
Mining asteroids for aluminum or iron for use on Earth is not likely to make economic sense for a long time - it's true that shipping from orbit down to Earth is much cheaper than shipping up, but it's still not a win. But other materials do make sense. If you review the plans of Planetary Resources, you'll find that for several rare materials - platinum being the most famous - mining asteroids _potentially_ makes good sense - it's still highly speculative. But the folks who are pursuing this are used to high risk high reward ventures. Platinum mining today is a filthy, dangerous, extremely expensive, environmentally and socially disastrous enterprise. It's almost certainly cheaper to get platinum from an asteroid than from the present mines, even with the terrific cost of the initial infrastructure.
Here's a useful quote, from Wikipedia:
In fact, all the gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, and tungsten mined from Earth's crust, and that are essential for economic and technological progress, came originally from the rain of asteroids that hit Earth after the crust cooled.[8][9][10] This is because although asteroids and Earth accreted from the same starting materials, Earth's relatively stronger gravity pulled all heavy siderophilic (iron-loving) elements into its core during its molten youth more than four billion years ago.[10] This left the crust depleted of such valuable elements[10] until asteroid impacts re-infused the depleted crust with metals (some flow from core to surface does occur, e.g. at the Bushveld Igneous Complex, a famously rich source of platinum-group metals).
"Famously rich" above means, in the "Merensky Reef" zone of the Complex, approximately 10 parts per million of Platinum group metals - that's the whole group, not just Platinum - can be found. This means that a gram of Platinum must be extracted from more than 100 Kg of ore. This is by far the richest part of the richest mine on the planet. Other active mines are processing ores with much lower concentrations.
The top line on all this is that commercial space development is already reducing the cost of space launches. SpaceX is launching for 1/4 of the price of prior vendors, and forcing the prices of every competitor down. Their reusable vehicle technology has the potential of significant further reductions. We still need additional cost reductions, ideally an order of magnitude. There are methods with that potential but it's hard to say which one(s) will get there.