money is in short supply

Brooks,

Soil = sand + water + air + compost + earthworms, only the latter two would have to be brought up from earth. Water from an asteroid, no need to lift much of that. Air = nitrogen + oxygen + some noble gasses, might have to look awhile for asteroids with enough of those, but might be doable. Do you like the brushed stainless steel look for your kitchens, because
stainless steel is iron + nickel, the ingredients of a whole lot of
asteroids. Did you read the plan sent out today about making concrete construction segments from asteroid dust and water? Want rebar? Find an iron asteroid and have your robot smelt and cast.

I know, no current robotic spacecraft can do this. But with NASA budgets and voter sentiments about space exploration as they are now, we've got nothing but time to tinker with these things, and then hope somebody will take the prototypes up to the ISS or Bigelow hab to try them out. We ain't going anywhere off-earth any time soon, not till we can bring the cost down by, oh, say, making most of what we'll need robotically in orbit from NEOs.

Here's another advantage of developing robotic on-orbit construction--no matter what the dominant human space activity is 100 years from now, whether it's tourism, Chinese collectives, squared-jawed American explorers, solar power, permanent habitats, or just what we've got now, mostly robotic exploration, the one thing that they would all want is to buy some of the materials they need to complete their jobs from storehouses already in orbit, so they can cut down on what they have to lift out of the gravity well.

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
From: bhn1700@...
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:51:40 +0000
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: money is in short supply

Yeah even if that's the case it seems a little light. With those 5 tons you'll have to have the ability to land on an asteroid, analyze the asteroids make up. Then process raw material, seperate it, process the ore into exactly what you want, fabricate the actual panels, put the pieces together strong enough to withstand vacuum. (All in near zero g.) Then you'll need air, water, soil, energy systems, waste heat systems, toilets, kitchens and everything that goes in them.

I could maybe see a simple system, such as a drilling robot to get to the center of a 'rubble' pile asteroid and then inflating a 'balloon' to hollow out your space. You'd still need to do everything else after but it would allow you a place to start. But I would think even that would take more then 5 tons.

Brooks

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