Making steel

From: Xenophile [mailto:xenophile2002@...]

> Check out the old issues of L-5 News at http://www.l5news.org/

Yes, isn't that a wonderful resource for us? I really hope the owners
of that site get back to the task of scanning and uploaded the rest of
the issues.

> In particular, check out the artical by K. Eric Drexler in the
September, 1976 issue. That year wasn't even over yet
> when new discoveries were already reducing the cost to well below the
NASA/AMES study's $200 billion estimate!
>
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> The metal refining system has also been superceded by this summer?s
work, which demonstrated that the system?s mass
> payback time could be reduced by a factor of four while recovering a
greater fraction of lunar rock as useful materials.
> Partly as a result of the above considerations, the estimated program
cost has dropped by roughly a factor of four.
>
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Yes, I remember once having an exchange with somebody on one of the
space newsgroups who basically said it's too bad that we now know for a
fact that High Frontier was economically impossible. I asked why, and
his response was basically that O'Neill was taking a brand-new,
experimental, NASA-derived method for refining steel from ore, but
applying costs to it derived from the more traditional ways of making
steel which are based on over a century of experience and refinement
here on Earth. Hence the whole thing was bogus from beginning to end.

I expressed the opinion that I couldn't see High Frontier standing or
falling on any one particular method of steel manufacture, and in fact I
was pretty sure that in the time I had been following High Frontier I
had seen the preferred method for refining steel change once or twice.
I'm sure the above was part of what I was remembering.

Regards,

Mike Combs