There is a definite chicken and egg issue here. Until you’ve established a firm foothold in space, bringing resources back from space just isn’t economical. Likewise, until we have a truly cheap way to get materials from earth into space, it just isn’t worth it, either. Starship or similar will help, but there are long-term problems with using rockets to get stuff into (or back out of) space. But, once we have that foothold, there is a vast amount of resources on the moon and elsewhere that is pretty cheap to get into the neighborhood of earth. There are even ways to do this that don’t use rockets, although we need to do more research to get these right.

Once we have that foothold, and either start colonizing space or make it even cheaper to access than starship hopes to achieve, a decades-long mining operation to free up highly valuable resources to ship back to earth while also freeing up large amounts of resources that would cost too much to ship from earth to build infrastructure in space, could become viable.

I wish I believed that would happen in my lifetime, but I hope it happens in my children’s.