There's gold in them thar asteroids

Well, maybe. Everybody has heard about the Cameron/Page/Schmidt plan to launch platforms with an eye to mining near-Earth asteroids. Naturally the lawyers are interested, and there's some harumphing that this isn't really legal.

Never mind that the presence of mine-able quantities of platinum is extremely speculative, and that if they did luck out and bring home enough to pay for the enterprise the price of platinum would plummet. (Platinum was the example around the water cooler.)

Can the lawyers win this one? Nobody can enforce anything in space. Nobody has the reach to do much of anything outside of low Earth orbit. If CocaCola wanted to spray-paint their logo on the Moon (silly idea, most of the time it would be obscured), a minute after liftoff there'd be nothing anybody could do.

Of course lawyers win. Sooner or later you have to come home, and then what happens to your cargo? Your only hope is to land in a compliant little country whose Colonels won't be tempted to take on your security team. Otherwise, meet taxes, import duties, and fines; and maybe revenue-sharing among the space powers.

So never mind the mining--at least for a decade or two. Or three.

What could be done with platforms? What could be done with space platforms that would pay for their construction and maintenance, on a timescale impatient investors can handle?

The problem I see is that almost none of what they can do best would be that marketable on Earth. Science is wonderful, but I have to admit it doesn't make a lot of money right out of the gate. (A few years down the road, or maybe a lot of years down the road, yes.)

If mining runs into jurisdiction problems, and solar concentrators aren't trusted ("What say we tilt this array a tenth of a degree or so?"), and manufacturing delicate items for harsh re-entry isn't quite as economical as it sounded, what have we got left? Tourism? Colonies?