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Thank you for adding some numbers regarding the feasibility of launching the required materials into space. Do you have any thoughts/numbers about how "mining/c

• knappe 2y ago
  So not really. Space mining is a very attractive idea but just not really feasible at the moment. I wrote a paper on attempting to capture the asteroid 433 Eros (a very attractive asteroid due to it's composition of rare metals [Data from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft collected on Eros in December 1998 suggests that it could contain 20 billion tonnes of aluminum and similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum.]) and found that in order to knock it into an orbit around the moon we'd need something on the order of 1 THOUSAND or 10 THOUSAND (I could be off by even another magnitude, the numbers are fuzzy after all this time) tsar bomba grade weapons to effectively knock it out of the current orbit and back into one around the moon. Why the moon? Because throwing a planet killer sized object at the Earth just didn't seem reasonable. I situ mining might make this more feasible, but that has all of its own complications. None of which I would feel confident in saying are feasible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba