3 ms·

Nice! Would that fit (unmounted/folded) inside a reasonable number of rockets? Wonder also what’s the plans to process those chemicals to finite products, in q

• AlotOfReading 2y ago
  It's basically the same stuff the rockets themselves are made of. Large towers with miles of plumbing and corrosion resistant tanks.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    I did a lot of analysis for asteroid mining and one of the things I worried about the most was what to do with the volatiles that come out when you start digging into the asteroid (believe it or not some of them have a lot of trapped gas.) In fact you might want to separate the volatiles out first thing but that involves having storage tanks to put them in. Once you got a metals line running it wouldn't be hard to make storage tanks (they don't need to be very strong) but you don't want to waste valuable volatiles plus the volatiles could even be dangerous. On Mars it is different. Water is precious but martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the atmosphere because you are going to get all your carbon from that atmosphere. Either way you are going to need storage tanks for resource extraction, chemical factories and such and the quick way to get them would probably be taking Starships apart at least until they have steelmaking working. Starship can land 100 tonnes on the moon if it can use all its fuel on the way down, it doesn't do much better than the Apollo LEM did if it returns to cislunar space. It's a reasonable plan to land a Starship with a bulldozer on the moon, lay it down into a trench and cover it up with regolith to make a habitat.