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That must be why landing the space shuttle was such an easy and inexpensive problem.
by aetherson 8y ago
That must be why landing the space shuttle was such an easy and inexpensive problem.
- krapp 8y agoTo be fair, the "getting it down" the gravity well is easy and inexpensive, but "landing" it is a different problem.
- aetherson 8y agoThere's nothing like the unique joys of spending tens of billions of dollars and decades to have your metallic asteroid burn up 90% of it's mass on reentry, the rest explodes over a wide area or sinks into the sea, and being arrested for use of a WMD.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoHeat shielding for reentry is a solved problem, you will not lose 90% of anything, or have it explode.
- krapp 8y agoEasy solution - just send down bigger asteroids, and drop them on whomever might object. Easier solution - park the asteroids somewhere and have the nations of the world pay you not to.
- teddyh 8y agoLanding the space shuttle was hard because it used a crappy design for secret reasons. Technicians at the time tried to propose a sensible design instead, but obviously could not override this.
- ben_w 8y agoAlso hard because of the requirement to have crew and not kill them, both of which go away when all you’re doing is dropping e.g. one ton cylinders of mildly purified gold wrapped in a steel tube.