4 ms·
I wonder what the most efficient way to move bulk amounts of water out of earth's gravity well would be? It's probably mostly like any bulk freight lifted to o
by antepodius 6y ago
I wonder what the most efficient way to move bulk amounts of water out of earth's gravity well would be?
It's probably mostly like any bulk freight lifted to orbit/escape: you could pump it up space elevators, assuming you could get around the problems of making those; An orbital ring is more physically plausible but has a much higher initial outlay. Maybe you could accelerate a stream of it accurately enough that the resulting hail of ice would reach, say, an earth-moon l3/4 point slow enough to be continuously captured and processed.
- hinkley 6y agoOne of the first futurists I read had a bunch of suggestions. The most interesting was combining earth hydrogen with lunar oxygen freed up by reduction operations on moon regolith. More pedestrian was having ships sell their surplus fuel to a transfer station in orbit. If your mission is completely nominal, you will have reaction mass that you no longer need. Better to leave it for the next guy. I'm not sure how you do that in a failsafe way, though. A burst line or a stuck valve could ruin everybody's day. It might require aux tanks that can be removed. For longer missions that might be worth the complexity.
- mncharity 6y agoA LEO-altitude-to-GEO space elevator has been proposed as possible with near-current tech... so perhaps a railgun pop-up to catch an elevator?
- unchocked 6y agoNo need to do that - Ceres is a water world and you can haul it into cislunar space from there.