Crumbles when soft

>Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:21:07 -0000
>
>I'd stick to KISS, if we keep to the idea that the moon base come first
>anyway you'll have plenty of lunar regolith already pre-processed on hand
>there, so melt that with solar furnaces and make ship structural parts out
>of basalt. No mess, no water, no shipping from earth and good solid stuff
>to
>work with. Just throw parts straight up to an assembly facility in orbit
>with a magnetic accelerator, or even better, assemble the ship on the moon
>and take off from there.

I had thought of the melting idea, but I think that from a maintenace stand
point, straight regolith sandwiched between to skins makes more sense. In
addition, the nature of this construction provides a far more robust shell
in terms of impact protection.

>As for propulsion, I was thinking of good old bo-bo-bo-bo-booom nuclear
>propulsion, Phoenix style, may not be as elegant as ion engines but does
>give you all the power you need for a ship made of, basically, stone... all
>rather primitive perhaps but very solid and efficient! :) the only real
>issue is where to source uranium for the fuel-bombs, ship it from earth
>won't be much of an issue in terms of mass, but I can see some problem in
>regular launches of rockets packet full with military-grade fissile
>material... ;)

I'm with you on the nuclear propulsion!

>On the plus side, assuming there are extra planetary sources of suitable
>fissiles it would take only a relatively small mining operation to source
>them compared to any other fuel, in terms of mass anyway... does someone
>knows if there is uranium or something else suitable somewhere in the solar
>system we know of for sure, other than on Earth, that is?

I did a search a while back for heavy element content in meteorites,
assuming that these would reflect possible asteroid contents and hence off
planet availability. It was mentioned some time ago that lots of metallic
stuff could be found in lunar craters as a result of impact events. Alas,
no luck - lots of info on major ingredients, but nothing on the trace stuff.

Val