If you've read Robert Ringer's Winning Through Intimidation, you'll recognize the term in the title. It's been awhile, so I don't recall the exact definition. However, it is pretty self-explanatory. That is, there seems to be a group of people dedicated to the notion that a particular endeavor is really too hard to even attempt. This creates a self-fulfulling prophecy of people who won't try it because it is just so gosh darned hard. When I read that Asteroid Mining is one of those gosh darned too hard things to do, the term comes to mind.
It is especially true now that SpaceX's Starship has launched for the second time. There seems to be so many who want to discourage the attempt to even launch the thing in the first place. Once it launches, the naysayers latch on to whatever went wrong. It exploded!, they shriek. Yes, it exploded. But the first stage is usually dumped into the sea anyway. An explosion there is hardly a setback. The second stage also exploded, but it reach 90% of orbital velocity for a mission that wasn't designed to reach stable orbit anyway. In other words, it was mostly successful, but you wouldn't notice that if you read the news.
Elon Musk's goals are pretty ambitious, though. He wants to get the cost to launch way, way down. If he gets it down far enough, a space mining mission becomes quite feasible. Consider this: if it costs a few million to get to orbit, then bringing back a half billion dollars in ore starts to make sense.
Musk is actually creating an entirely new economy based upon space. Discouragement is not called for. Instead, people should be cheering him on. But the Discouragement Fraternity doesn't lack members. You can blame that on the amygdala. But not my ADD...
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