What? A one-way trip to Mercury takes three times as much energy as a trip to LEO and back. If you need energy to produce goods, building power plants on Earth or Moon make much more sense.
Your ideas belong in a soft sci-fi story. The economics and orbital mechanics simply do not work out in favor of a Mercury colony.
A one-way trip to Mercury takes three times as much energy as a trip to LEO and back.
We'd be exporting things/energy from Mercury, not to it, and the energy for the export would also be supplied by the sun through the use of solar sails.
If you need energy to produce goods, building power plants on Earth or Moon make much more sense.
Maybe. I can see how the difficulty of coping with being as close to the sun as Mercury would raise expenses. With selling antimatter, you wouldn't be selling energy so much as energy in a highly concentrated package. Economies of scale are going to come into play in an industry like that, and the ability to harvest more concentrated energy with mostly in-situ resources could be a big advantage. You'd have to bring resources up from the moon and from the asteroids to make the infrastructure to do that profitably in the vicinity of Earth. If you wouldn't have to do that for Mercury, it might be viable.
Your ideas belong in a soft sci-fi story. The economics and orbital mechanics simply do not work out in favor of a Mercury colony.