So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic.

In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.