By-Pass the Moon?

Nice to see that this group is active again.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Combs, Mike"
> I think it would always be the case that on an asteroid if you were
> to put something down, it would stay put.

I tend to think of them as spinning rocks, which would centrifuge
themselves apart if they weren't solid. The ones I imagine using
first are, if not quite down to apartment-building size, perhaps in
the range of aircraft carriers. They need to provide enough quantity
to run a pilot program in near-earth space to produce usable
materials, but the smaller you go the more there are, so the more
precisely you can pick your target's composition and initial
trajectory.

> I'm willing to bet people are going to be involved in this
process.
> I don't see encouraging signs that AI will enable a completely
> automated mining facility in any foreseeable future, and, unlike
> Luna, this will be too far out to permit teleoperation from Earth.

I imagine unmanned systems getting the object to near-earth space
without any sophisticated processing. Chunks will be broken off,
pulverized, and subjected to crude separation. The the less-valuable
fraction will be thrown overboard as reaction mass. Spin-gravity
seems likely to be useful in the separation.

But what's the big barrier to a completely automated mining process?
I imagine that complete automation would be less of a problem than
having one shot with no resupply, no replacement parts, no hardware
redesign with reasonable lead time -- in short, no trial and error
beyond what you anticipate and design for before launch.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Dave Handwerk

> Actually the main reason trip times are important are
> the radiation human crews might be exposed to.

The way I envision long-term human habitation beyond earth's
magnetosphere is inside asteroids large enough to provide good
passive-mass shielding. We'll put a few of these objects into
approximate transfer orbits betwen earth and the main belt, choosing
those that are already pretty close to such orbits. We'll separate
each into two chunks tethered together for spin gravity, and set up
living quarters inside one chunk. Then we'll have relatively short
flights first from earth to the transfer asteroid and then from the
transfer asteroid to the destination.