Space News Letter to Editor

On Friday, May 9, 2003, at 03:43 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> With respect to delta-v disadvantage of the moon, with enough volume
> of material shipped, the implementation of mass driver technology
> will arguably lower the costs of launch and erode the delta-v
> disadvantage of the NEOs. This development further enhances the Moon
> as a "Just In Time" supplier of material that an NEO won't be able
> to match.
>

I am certainly no opponent of lunar mining. However, the mass drivers
envisioned by O'Neill were very large. Multiple towers spread out over
kilometers. Although you get a lot of material once it's up and
running, I'd be more comfortable with a development scheme that could
start returning useful material with a small investment and
incrementally build with parallelism. Retrieving small asteroids, or
little bits of large ones, fits this better. Actually, the first
asteroidal return mission just blasted off, and there are plans for
robotic lunar materials return.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~500 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.