nukes versus oxygen.

> In a message dated Tue, 20 Nov 2001 1:58:53 AM Eastern Standard
Time, king_rodent@... writes:
>
> > The infrastructure to mine either lunar or asteroidal water is
also
> > vaporware and would require a much larger significant capital
cost to
> > qualify and debug.
> >
> Maybe, maybe not.
>
> I really do not know, and it is certainly not obvious.
>
> Does anybody have any numbers either way ?
>
> It would be nice to have numbers broken down by
> recurring cost and non-recurring cost.
>
> Has anybody actually tried to do some proper quantitative
> cost analysis for the two alternatives ?

A manned lunar or asteroidal water mineing mission would be cost
equivelant to a manned Mars shot. Ballpark costs are going to be in
the tens of billions of dollars... minimum. A Nuclear Thermal Rocket
design, test and validation would be an order of magnitude cheeper, a
few billion dollars at the most.

king_rodent (putting the eek in geek)