Asteroid retrieval by rotary rocket, by Jerome Pearson

Why would their shape have to be one of the Platonic solids? They
have a center of mass and a moment of inertia; what else do you need?

You're doing a crude sorting and throwing away the less-valuable
components as reaction mass, with a fair amount of the asteroid, so
pretty soon they're whatever shape you carve and bag them into.

Stop? When does anything ever stop, and what does that even mean?
You put things in different orbits, or you rendez-vous them with
other objects, but there isn't any absolute reference frame to stop
them in. The closest thing would be heliocentric, and your're
certainly not going to stop them in that frame, or you've dropped
them into the sun. To bring them to earth orbit, for any one we
would be interested in, the delta-vee is a tiny fraction of their
total orbital energy.

One big way that the paper differs from my thought is that they're
assuming a crew would be sent, whereas I figured that it better be
all automated, with only a very crude separation and the simplest
available means of throwing the tailings overboard with a decent
velocity.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, cygonaut
>
> I'm not, as yet, ready to support any asteroid retrieval.
>
> Every asteroid is different in size and mass and they're not
perfect
> spheres, cubes or anything shape-specific.
>
> A multiple number of rockets would needed. You not only have to
move it,
> you have to be able to manuever, slow it down, and, if desired,
stop the
> damn thing.
>
> I suggest we take what we can carry within a window of 60 days or
so at
> first.
>
> Any retrieval of entire asteroids can wait.
>
> They're not going anywhere.
>
> George
> http://www.cygo.com/
>
> On 2/5/06, Dan Wylie-Sears wrote:
> >
> > I finally found a paper on the type of design I was wondering
about
> > when I found this group:
> >
> > http://www.star-tech-inc.com/papers/asteroids/asteroids.pdf
> >
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