Vacuum Vapor Deposition

RE: RE: "> This is SOOOO complicated. ..." What if the asteroid develops a
leak? Then you have a solar-steam rocket that will go who knows where! Jay
Huebner
A LEAK? I HAD EXPECTED THE ENGINEERS RESPONSIBLE FOR
DOING THE DEED WOULD KNOW HOW THICK THE EXTERNAL WALLS
MUST BE TO PREVENT SUCH AN "ACCIDENT". MAYBE 10 METERS
OR SO,,,PERHAPS WE'LL HAVE TOO EXPERIMENT WITH SMALL
ROCKS TO GET IT RIGHT BEFORE WE ATTEMPT A FULL BLOWN
ASTEROID. WELL, THAT'S WHAT ENGINEERS DO. HELL, IT
WORKED FOR THE ROMAN BRIDGE BUILDERS. GARY 7

You have made a lot of assumptions about the nature of asteroids. The rocks
the Roman bridge builders used were formed on a planet where there is 1 g of
gravity, which nicely separates materials based on their density, so few
natural rocks have empty cavities inside them, although of course some do
from running water, miners, etc. Many asteroids may be just loose rubble
piles. Some are known to have large linear faults, perhaps bisecting them,
with only their weak gravity holding them together. Most asteroids are only
known by the sun light they reflect to telescopes from far away, and we
don't even know their shape. We have images which resolve the features of
maybe 10 or so out of hundreds of thousands. So, it would be prudent not to
start planning the engineering of these mostly unknown objects until the
basic science of discovering what they are is done. There are those, like
spacedev.com, which would like to help with this work. Jay Huebner