[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: starship-design: Quiet List





> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: starship-design: Quiet List
>
>
> Seeing as the list has been a bit on the quiet side recently..
>
> I've not seen anything about collisions - the journey would last at least
5
> or 6 years, and in that time a ship might hit an interstellar micro
> meteorite or something...  You would need some impressive equiptment to
see
> (& avoid or destroy) objects a millimeter across, and if that were to hit
> you, it'd just go straihgt through if you were travelling at 0.9c...


If you are lucky it will go straight through...


>
> Also, on a not-entirely-realted topic, I've seen a couple of people say
> that the future of space travel is commercial, and the best source of
money
> I can think of would be to mine a near earth asteroid, and maybe create
new
> alloys of stell etc by producing them in space - but how would you make
> enough money in this? If an asteroid is a couple of kilometers cubed, then
> there would probably be a few trillion dollars of metals in it - the
> trouble being that if I flooded, say, the nickel marker with 10 times the
> world's yearly output, then prices would plummet to next to nothing.  I
> would think that most the money you could make would be by making a blast
> furnace in space, and then making new alloys with differents structures
> which you cannot produce in much gravity..
> any ideas?
>

For more information try reading the articles available at this site:

http://www.permanent.com/index.htm

There is more available elsewhere if you are really interested, but this
makes a good primer. you might also want to check out the SpaceDev's
website - they are actually engaged in making mining of near Earth asteroids
a reality.

Lee