Asteroid use

The mischiefmaker in me suggests that there are plenty of technologies which
will stuff up the NMD... Rob Zubrin pointed out - albeit in a different
context - how small solar sails will do the job without invoking 1000MT
asteroids....

If you read what i write, you'll see that i'm not talking about moving
asteroids around willy nilly (indeed: if the primary resource being sold is
power [very likely in the earliest days of spacemining], you don't have to
move the asteroid around at all)... in situ processing on Earthgrazing
asteroids in Earth resonant orbits does away with the bulk of mass movement;
& allows cost effective asteroid stripping.

In re: Mars as a factory site: very ordinary; except for in situ
consumption... the gravity well may be smaller than the Earth's; but that
doesn't mean it's actually small. Luna is a better choice; but if real space
settlement is the goal; you need to kick the planetary chauvinism & look to
the interiors of rocky asteroids for unlimited living space.

All the best,
Robert Clements

> MW: I'm against spending any tax payer money to send
> humans to Mars just to look for life. Mars has the
> chemicals that the Moon needs for satellite
> manufacturing and launching. And once we have a
> permanent industrial presence on the Moon and Mars
> then the asteroids will be easy pickin's and the human
> economy will grow from a multi-trillion dollar one to
> a multi-quadrillion dollar economy. And a
> multi-quadrillion dollar economy will easily be able
> to afford to build islands in space.
>
&