But on the same turn, it's not something you really have to do much of.
There's no achievement, no gain, nothing, from mining everything.
There's probably enough available minerals in the whole game to do all your upgrades 10 times over.
Everytime I go to a solar system to do a mission, I'll just hit up the planets there and drop a couple probes, then move on. Really doesn't take long, but it's still not that exciting.
Then again, the increase of 3rd Person Action in to the franchise has made people forget this is still an RPG, and RPG's have down time with timesink's, it just comes with the genre in order for things to make more sense.