Asteroid use

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "Darren Brown" wrote:
>
> Tom,
>
> Have you seen this,
>
> http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad12nov97_1.htm
>
> http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/1998-08-25/antimatter.html
>
> http://antimatter.phys.psu.edu/documents.html
>
> Darren Brown

Darren,

Good anti-matter references. Anti-matter is certainly the ideal
future rocket fuel, all we need is the ability to produce it in
quanity and the ability to store it reliably. I predict, however,
that fusion will be demonstrated to be practical by mid-century
because reserach is well along. I recall that the efficiency in
producing anti-matter is about 1/1000th of one percent at present,
and so unless we have an abundant source of energy, producing anti-
matter from electricity will be very expensive, where as fusion
energy uses energy that we can refuel from any gas giant planet.

We are 90% to our goal of fusion energy, and so this is where we
should be doing our hypothetical planning IMO.

Regards,

Tom Tucker