Priveate Space initiative

MARS:
I was under the distinct impression that Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy basically took all the hard science he could find and used it, thereby mentioning all the above ways of getting there and setting up a colony. Its very good, go read it.

yes, the problem with a beanstalk is twofold, getting the asteroid into orbit, a carbonaceous chondrite if i remember correctly, and then spinning it out into threads of tubes of buckminsterfullerite. I think calcualtions have been done as to how long these threads would ahve to be, and we are talking on the order of metres here. You would also need hundreds of htousands of tonnes of carbon and the energy needed to purify it. Essentially, we proved that we can already do long distance robot probes to Mars, asteroids etc, in fact one blasts off soon aimed at recovering a piece of an asteroid, so the techniques need refining. the harder part is getting the asteroid into orbit. A mass driver on teh back woudl be slow and more certain, and need a fair bit of programming and computer ability. Using nukes, well, id rather not think about it. I suppose they could be a last resort. so either way, we know roughly what we want to do, but dont quite have the technology. In other words, it will have to be developed.

See, the problem with space exploration is there is little money to be made out of it. Maybe when we run short of essential metals eg copper, nickel etc then it will be commercially worth it, but until then, its got to be publicaly funded.

AS for radiation, we could use water, very good for neutrons, and concrete made out of bits of asteroid, in fact someone invented foamed concrete stuff that would be very good, stop small meteors, insulate against the hot and cold. But again, its a matter of getting the water and the asteroids into place, which will take high powered robots, please, no von neumann machines, that can locate and build propulsion systems on suitable asteroids.

 

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What's wrong with using nukes?

 

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wrong with nukes- well i was thinking of the launching and propelling of tonnes of nuclear bombs over that distance and their proper detonation.
Do you trust the launch systems enough to launch the necessary number?

 

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We trust them enough to blow our enemies to smithereens.

 

Someone mentioned solar sails and magnetic drives. There is another way, already tested.

Have any of you heard of the ion-drive? It has already been employed on Deep Space 1. This probe's engines work by accelerating charged xenon particals and emitting them at about 68,000 mph. Every school boy knows that momentum = velocity x mass and would point out that xenon ions are very light indeed. This of course is true but the ion drive is designed for slow accelleration over a long period of time. Here is a caption from one of the above links, that helps explain it a little.

I hope you find it relevant and interesting.

 

The problem with ion engines is that they produce very little thrust. DS-1's engine I don't think had more than a few pounds, if that. I could push harder. I don't think that it is practical except for unmanned deep scace probes. People need to get there fast enough that they don't die first, or age a couple of decades.

 

Yeah, one 20,000th of a pound according to the fore-mentioned caption! One guy likened the force to the weight of a piece of paper.

It's a highly efficient engine... If you put out some colonists for several years I wonder how far they could get. (With a bigger ion drive, or more of them)