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[WillowLuman]

Headlines tomorrow:

RUSSIA DROPS SATELLITE ON BEST KOREA. BEST KOREA RETALIATES WITH TOTAL NUCLEAR WAR.

and then...

BEST KOREA ANNEXED BY SOUTH KOREA. BEST KOREANS CHEER.

Alternately:

SATELLITE DEBRIS USED AS SET PIECE FOR K-POP DANCE VIDEO

Anyway, the ISS will be passing over the American Northwest/North-midwest today. If you're in the area keep an eye (or maybe a pair of binoculars) out!

[Mephansteras]

Update: India's Mars probe hits a small snag, but has enough excess fuel to make up for the lapse.

Kinda reminds me of how things go when I play KSP. Small mistakes here and there, but we usually manage to get where we're trying to go in the end.

[10ebbor10]

Anyway, apparently GOCE came down over the falklands.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

So we've all heard about 99942 Apophis and how it used to be considered a relatively major impact threat. Well, I was reading Buzz Aldrin's new book, and he mentioned that if we followed his plan for space infrastructure expansion we could do a "test run" on asteroid deflection by moving Apophis even though it won't pose a threat.

And I had a thought. What if, guys, what if we capture Apophis in Earth orbit and make a station out of it? It would be about three times as large as the ISS.

[10ebbor10]

Not all that useful actually. Though we don't quite know what it's made of,** we're pretty sure that it won't be strong enough to hold pressure*, requiring us to bring almost the same amount of material up from earth as for an ordinary spacestation. Additionally, we have significant fuel costs to bring the asteroid into an orbit, and will also have significant costs to get anything too it. Fuel costs to bring it in a circularized low orbit would be gigantic.

The only real benefits are additional protection from radiation (no real problem near earth) and micrometeoroids (current stations seem to hold up pretty will). The capability to just process it into a station relies on a good composition. This is however unlikely, as Aphophis resembles a Chondrite meteoroid, which is low in metals, and fairly porous.


*If not the pressure, then the temperature would certainly crack it.
**Suspecting a standard Chondrite meteoroid.

[WillowLuman]

We'll have to save such things when we go adventuring a little further out. Or wait until by some incredible luck we get a natural near-capture and can tweak it.

In the meantime, though the odds are (literally) astronomical, a GRB could strike the Earth at any second, sterilizing the planet, and we'd never see it coming, because by the time you see the explosion the beam is already here. So, I find there's not much point worrying about it. Maybe we could build a passive defense or something, but it's a kind of weird disaster that can never be urgent.

[Gentlefish]

...Because if it was urgent we'd all already be dead.

I was talking to someone today and they believe that we can asteroid mine from earth without a colony on Mars. I think he's wrong. We'd need the colony on Mars to establish a population before we could start hopping on asteroids and tearing them apart for their base elements. Plus mars' red dust would be a great boon do the iron industry.

[WillowLuman]

Why would we need to "establish a population"? We've got billions of people already. It's just a matter of getting some of them out there.

[Gentlefish]

And wouldn't that establish the population? 

[Mephansteras]

I don't see why Mars would be required, although I'm all for a Mars Colony anyway. But mining asteroids is all done outside gravity wells. Unless you're trying to go to and from Mars, you're better off working from Space Stations or maybe a Lunar colony due to the reduced energy cost required.

[WillowLuman]

But why bother stopping at Mars in the first place? I mean, sure, a Mars colony is fine and all that, but you don't need to breed a bunch of people there before you can start mining asteroids. Just send people straight from our home system. We'd already have the infrastructure to support colonies, instead of supporting a colony with our infrastructure until it could support colonies with its infrastructure. Just put base camp on the Moon.

NINJA'd

[10ebbor10]

Besides, why would you send people anyway... Send an automated drone, to bring the asteroid in a nice accessible orbit (doesn't matter if it's highly elliptical, we won't be staying on it long). Humans in space are expensive.

[WillowLuman]

Well, on a large scale you'll probably need a few highly skilled people working a control station/processing near the mining sites, since there's a several minute signal delay between Earth and the asteroid belt. Those robots will be much busier and need more supervision than a rover.

It would take FAR less energy to just send the processed materials back than to drag the asteroid all the way. That and you risk slamming it into the Earth.

[LordSlowpoke]

Well, on a large scale you'll probably need a few highly skilled people working a control station/processing near the mining sites, since there's a several minute signal delay between Earth and the asteroid belt. Those robots will be much busier and need more supervision than a rover.

It would take FAR less energy to just send the processed materials back than to drag the asteroid all the way. That and you risk slamming it into the Earth.

What do you think of launching a few rovers onto the bigger asteroids along with an ore processing plant, then having human operators look for the ore themselves and throwing it into the processing plant?

It'd be better if we could just pick up said processing plant with all the stuff it gathered later and have the rovers launch towards another asteroid on their own power, but that'd also imply they would somehow have to produce their own fuel out of said asteroid. Which I don't see happening, honestly. Maybe if we launched them to Apophis on an intercept course and had them abandon ship as soon as it starts actually getting away from Earth?

[WillowLuman]

Sure, that makes sense, but it depends how big the processing plant is. For any given asteroid, we're probably talking about a human-controlled drone operation, bringing what's necessary to set up a factory and then expanding the facility with in-situ materials.