If any of these asteroids have water ice buried that might be a good start. Easier to refine water and carbon into methane for fuel depots in space than other applications. Also drinking water, splitting for hydrogen or just use the ice as a radiation shield all are near term applications that don’t require lots of supporting infrastructure.
I suspect that near term they might make some decent money just returning small samples for labs to analyze. If they can figure out how to do that economically they can likely survive off of grant money from various government entities. Contracting their asteroid lander for various science missions is also a good opportunity.
I remember reading an article from back when Blue Origin was a space mining concern that the first thing to grab is water just to supply the space station. Because it’s so expensive to take water into orbit and retrieving a comet or something else was fairly cheap and could yield billions of water for use by anyone in orbit.
I suspect that near term they might make some decent money just returning small samples for labs to analyze. If they can figure out how to do that economically they can likely survive off of grant money from various government entities. Contracting their asteroid lander for various science missions is also a good opportunity.