AsterAnts

I think that we are co-mingling two subjects in this thread.
How to move raw material from a useless place to a useful place. What to do with raw material at the useful place.
It maybe that nothing is done with the raw material. It is used simply as mass say on a teather. Or if there is sufficent manufacturing capability it can be fashioned into increaseingly complex components.

What would we do if there was a selection of asteroid material available at one of the L points? Nobody would say, "Let's go build Pentium 4 chips out of this material". We would obviously be hard pressed to do any useful processing for a long time.

I tend to think that we should waste some time and money captureing lunar & asteroid material at an L point and then experimenting on manufacturing techniques. What we have now is multiple chicken and egg problems inside multiple shells. We need to discuss topics with some assumptions as givens otherwise the conversation slides through a rehash of all the dependancy problems.

I like the concept of asteroid capture and started a project on it at www.InnerTransit.org earlier this year.

Mitchell James
www.InnerTransit.org (Homebase for web based collaborative engineering)
www.InnerTransit.net (email for distributed organizations)