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Fwd: starship-design: AsterAnts



This sounds great -- a (relatively) cheap and easy set of bootstraps
to pull ourselves up with, and since it looks like it could prove
profitable for someone, it might have a chance.

keep looking up,

Curtis

--- "L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net> wrote:
> From: "L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>
> To: "Starship-Design List \(E-mail\)"
> <starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu>
> Subject: starship-design: AsterAnts
> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 17:07:11 -0600
> Reply-to: "L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>
> 
> Abstract
> AsterAnts  is a concept calling for a fleet of solar sail powered
> spacecraft
> to retrieve large numbers of small (1/2-1 meter diameter) Near
> Earth Objects
> (NEOs) for orbital processing.  AsterAnts could use the
> International Space
> Station (ISS) for NEO processing, solar sail construction, and to
> test NEO
> capture hardware. Solar sails constructed on orbit are expected to
> have
> substantially better performance than their ground built
> counterparts
> [Wright 1992]. Furthermore, solar sails may be used to hold
> geosynchronous
> communication satellites out-of-plane [Forward 1981] increasing the
> total
> number of slots by at least a factor of three, potentially
> generating $2
> billion worth of orbital real estate over North America alone. NEOs
> are
> believed to contain large quantities of water, carbon, other
> life-support
> materials and metals. Thus, with proper processing, NEO materials
> could in
> principle be used to resupply the ISS, produce rocket propellant,
> manufacture tools, and build additional ISS working space.
> Unlike proposals requiring massive facilities, such as lunar bases,
> before
> returning any extraterrestrial materials, AsterAnts could
> conceivably begin
> operation with a single spacecraft whose payload is no larger than
> a typical
> inter-planetary mission.  Furthermore, AsterAnts could be scaled up
> to
> deliver large amounts of material by building many copies of the
> same
> spacecraft, thereby achieving manufacturing economies of scale.
> Because
> AsterAnts would capture NEOs whole, NEO composition details, which
> are
> generally poorly characterized, are relatively unimportant and no
> complex
> extraction equipment is necessary. In combination with a materials
> processing facility at the ISS, AsterAnts might inaugurate an era
> of
> large-scale orbital construction using extraterrestrial materials.
>

=====
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