Bush Space Plan Unwise?

Sounds like a lottery game, yes we may find one asteroid that will make
the whole trip worthwhile but will we be finding those on a regular
basis?

Furthermore, it takes very valuable materials to finance a trip and
technology that takes you into the billion dollar financing range, the
biggest oil company on the planet would think about it several time
before signing the dotted line even if told that it would be a "sure
thing" and that is would be impossible for *anything* to go wrong.

How much payload of gold would you need to finance a 2 billion dollar
excursion into space? And then how to you return so much mass of such a
metal? You can't just send it through the atmosphere as is, mind you
that would make the most expensive "sunset" at 2pm that the east coast
ever saw as the gold "evaporates" on re-entry.

And if you don't dump it, then you are carrying that weight, no amount
of parachutes will help you there, the weight will just tear them away,
even if made from iron. You can't flide with that weight (plus the
payload will simply be too huge)

With out current technology I don't see a lot of options.

I don't mean to discredit anything (for anyone), I'm not a scientist,
I'm a different kind of evil, I'm the guy that oversees the purchase of
technology equipment, I need to justify those purchases and I also need
to get them approved by the CTO.

If you think politicians are bad, you've never been in a CTO's office -
those guys go straight for the jugular. If you have one thing that could
cost 1000, 500 and 250$ based on features, no amount of crying will get
you anything better than the 250$ model unless you come up with some
rock-solid arguments that he *understands*, trying to dazzle him with
smoke and mirrors and scientific talk is NOT going to work. People don't
sign checks when they don't understand why... Do you give money to
someone knocking at your door when they only reason is "because"

Karell Ste-Marie
C.I.O. - BrainBank Inc.

From: Michael Mealling [mailto:michael@...]
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 12:15 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [spacesettlers] RE: Bush Space Plan Unwise?

On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 12:06, Combs, Mike wrote:
> From: Karell Ste-Marie [mailto:stemarie@...]
> > Minerals may be enough but I don't suspect so, they can be found on
> earth.
>
> I tend to agree. Even in the case of platinum from asteroids, I'd
> only consider that an outside possibility (and a business far more
> likely in the context of an existing industry to build SPS from
> asteroidal material than outside it).
>

Although, one item of speculation with respect to asteroids is whether
or not they originally went through stratifications/differentiation. On
earth we find deposits of minerals in concentration due to the
'settling' of the earth's strata. In most cases the reason the minerals
are accessible to us is through volcanic action (gold is found in cracks
when it is driven into them by heat from magma). So the question to be
answers is whether or not asteroids have larger deposits of hard to find
minerals simply because they went through the same stratification but
then broke up latter, giving us access to minerals at depths that are
impossible to get to on earth...

-MM