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Going to the moon to get water and bring it back to earth orbit is going to be much more expensive than sending water from earth for a long time.
by jitl 1y ago
Going to the moon to get water and bring it back to earth orbit is going to be much more expensive than sending water from earth for a long time.
- PaulHoule 1y agoThe image of the really big mass driver that looks like a train you get from O’Neill or Heinlein is obsolete. The US Navy built a 2.5km/s railgun you could fit on a ship. A 3.5 km/s coilgun has to look like the Paris gun to be practical and be able to shoot at a high elevation to hit Earth-Moon L1/L2 or near-Earth space. A railroad car worth of material per day in 1kg or so increments seems plausible. A radiation shield for a deep space station or a simulated asteroid to test mining and manufacturing technology might compete with terrestrial materials. O’Neill’s students never came up with believable catcher and I’ve yet to see one I like. I guess you could get to LEO if you could aerobrake but it looks tough because the outer atmosphere is always changing and a wild shot could trash your target, talk about a space junk problem. The moon has at best a large glacier on it and my guess is Lunarians, if they could vote, would not want to export a gram of it but rather incorporate it into a circular economy.
- numpad0 1y agoyou just let fleet of Boeing 702 go fetch couples of comets and asteroids into L4/L5, build Manhattan sized pressure cookers around each piles, allow contents to come to boil on solar heat, and boom, pressurized habitats