Asteroid captu or whatever

Alright, some hard science !

Am from over at the NEAMines group, we are working on some of the answers to these questions.

The first question, is why would we go, and the strongest arguments we can summerize are these.

Orbital clean-up. there is just too much debris in LEO now, someone has to clean it up.

On orbit satt service. extending the life of a multibillion dollar satt worth how much?

Energy harvest. solar and later, ring

manufacturing. crystals,drugs, yada yada. Spincasting large structures. DMLD.

What we should be prepping for: Gotta learn to change asteroid orbits anyway, just ask the dinosaurs.

That solar sail and solar satt deployment experience would be awful handy to have if a nearby sun goes postal, would be nice to send a shield out between us to screen out some of the hard radiation. (see mylar and ring satt info)

Ecological. No more mountaintop mining.
Just one 100 klic asteroid may have more metals in it than we have mined in the entire history of mankind.

Wealth. gotta grow that GDP. the paybacks are exponentially greater than the investments.

Frontier. That's why we are here, we like the challenge, and hunger for the new. gotta have somewhere for the young warriors to go, and the geeks to design. otherwise we succumb to malaise or....

Eggs in one basket. we all know this one.

The challenge.

first is cheap access. expensive for human rated, cheap for freight.

The only way to do this realistically is to go the "Depot" route, there is no way you can lift manufactured items, and the fuel to move them around. Gotta build a depot. We are designing one, but i think the best and cheapest is here. "Quicklaunch"
this gets fuel to orbit cheap and easily, and leaves you the cans in a configuration ready to use as shielding.

We are planning on doing smelting in LEO, but i think it more likely to do it at L5, while building a Hab at L4. My favorite Hab is actually Daedlus, tho that is a whole nother discussion.

Since we need materials from Luna and NEA's we can actually lift materials from Luna surface by AL-Oxy rockets. these are el-cheapo solid boosters that are actually just packing a hollow space with AL/o2, and lighting it up. They just did a test launch at a midwest university.
Mass launcher is cheap compared to regular type rockets that need fuels and volatiles, and we need LOTS of shielding. (mylar and water are most efficient tho, see Daedlus for specs)
Have to ruggedize for moon quakes tho, prob have to have "floating" anchors.

There are about 200 easy to access NEA's on regular routes that we could conceivably access, and about 20 that are small and close by on a yearly basis. Easy DeltaV if we have fuel on orbit already.

Problem: most rocks are actually rubble piles. we are discussing how to work with them, and move them, but it is a LOT harder than it first appears.

Energy. This is the big problem right now. There is some new tech coming, like solar panels that catch all wavelengths, not just visible. Outside orbit, looks like the copper ring can generate all you need. Onsite is tougher, but my favorite is to go ahead and use the Triton engines to lift a big mining and smelting rig to Luna, then bring it back there as a power generator, after you use it to chase down some asteroids and move some stuff up from earth orbit.
Yes, they are that good.

I don't think they will let us aerobrake in earth atmo very often, but we can grav sling between earth and luna for low Dv stuff, and when we go out to the belt, we think we can aerobrake and grav at Venus, and have it coast up to earth orbit so we can pick it up the next time we swing by.

There is a lot of info out there, check out our group for more info.

A major space manufacting meeting going down in California halloween weekend too. Link at NEAmines, in mssgs, under "OCT homework"

MOrgan

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "janet_baker76" wrote: