E
emudude
Guest
Hey,
Just wondering if anyone knew what kind of surveying has been done to date on useful materials in asteroids and comets, and which of these are reasonably close?
It would be very interesting to see a vehicle that takes ~2-3 launches to send from LEO bring back useful materials from one of these objects, and I'm kind of curious as to why we don't shift to a more economical mission such as this...launches for global weather satellite are interesting, but something practical like bringing an amount of frozen water that would normally take 10 or more launches to equivalently bring into LEO is what we really need right now. It doesn't even need to be the manned mission that NASA is pushing for in 2025 to be groundbreaking, a robotic craft would get there much faster and with less fuel spent.
Even more tantalizingly, if we could send a small ice=>water=>'H2 and O2 separation and storage' unit with the craft, perhaps the fuel to send the craft and the object could itself be derived from the object itself.
Just wondering if anyone knew what kind of surveying has been done to date on useful materials in asteroids and comets, and which of these are reasonably close?
It would be very interesting to see a vehicle that takes ~2-3 launches to send from LEO bring back useful materials from one of these objects, and I'm kind of curious as to why we don't shift to a more economical mission such as this...launches for global weather satellite are interesting, but something practical like bringing an amount of frozen water that would normally take 10 or more launches to equivalently bring into LEO is what we really need right now. It doesn't even need to be the manned mission that NASA is pushing for in 2025 to be groundbreaking, a robotic craft would get there much faster and with less fuel spent.
Even more tantalizingly, if we could send a small ice=>water=>'H2 and O2 separation and storage' unit with the craft, perhaps the fuel to send the craft and the object could itself be derived from the object itself.