3 ms·
It has potential to go off the charts.
by jacobush 7y ago
It has potential to go off the charts.
- paulryanrogers 7y agoDoes it really though? I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to live more sustainably on Earth first.
- pixl97 7y agoSpace is filled with potential fuel.
- ben_w 7y agoSpace economics is… counterintuitive. A while ago I read a blog ranting about how pointless it was to mine He3 from the moon for fusion. A brief summary: * We don’t have fusion reactors * If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants’ atmospheres * He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen * Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells * You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won’t run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe. Unfortunately I can’t find the post whenever I’ve tried searching for it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Gravityloss 7y agoAmerica isn't useless because it takes so much effort to bring everything from England? If you can create solar panels from asteroid materials and use water as propellant, it's relatively easy to move materials around in the solar system. You operate on asteroids so you never need high thrust. Delivery takes time though.