4 ms·

There's no air.

• willismichael 14y ago
  Exactly, I almost facepalmed when I realized the absurdity of a vacuum hose... although I do wonder if something along the lines of a CO2 compression canister would work to blow away dust. I'm assuming that it would be prohibitively expensive to have to constantly ship compressed gas to the mining site though.
  • pavel_lishin 14y ago
    That's why you'd just ship an asteroid that's already made of gas and liquid, and mine that for your gas. "Evaporate some more nitrogen off that asteroid, Joe, we need to blow this dust away."
• B-Con 14y ago
  And to be specific, vaccums work by creating a low pressure locality inside of a gas. Same principle behind a backwards fan. Push the gas one way, you create a small low pressure point that other gas then fills. In a vaccume-cleaner the region of gas that can rush in to fill the low pressure point is at the end of a nozzle. Really, you're not vacuuming up objects, they're just along for the ride in their immediate atmosphere. (...And in space, you have no atmosphere to manipulate.)