Shuttle over the bridge

And I'm still getting under your skin >:-) All you can resort to is name-calling.

There are ~150 posts on the SED page of my website, most of which are schematics in response to questions posted here... even a couple in response to you.

And everything you ever post here can, at best, be referred to as WIP... or should that be WIMP ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

If people just sat on their asses and never tried to broaden their horizons you'd be living in Europe (probably in Ireland).

That explains it! Isn't Larkin Irish ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

There is a difference between doing individual, pioneering stuff and doing insanely expensive, political, useless stuff. My ancestors didn't need a trillion dollars in government funding to make it to the USA from Ireland and Germany. And they arguably did productive stuff when they got here.

What benefits have we gotten from manned spaceflight? For the resources and lives that we lost?

a...

But going there and looking is going to generate a much more reliable opinion than your guesswork.

If you can put enough mass into space to deflect an asteroid or a comet, throwing in a human or two and their life-support is very likely to be a small - but worthwhile - extra investment.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

OK, now explain what the hell the above means.

It really has little to do with "our state of mind". There is simply nothing else worth doing. Moon? Been there done that - got the moon rock.

No, it was about the cold war.

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

So? Create a startup, haul down the first one, make a mint, then sell off the now-useless company to investors. Isn't that The American Dream?

Anyway, even though they require processing, the pure metal content (what is it, around 20% Ni, balance Fe, plus various amounts of Ag, Au, Pd, Pt, Ir, etc.) will always be worth something. You forget two fundamental rules of economics: one, if you supply 90% of the market, you set your own price, and two, as the price comes down, quantity goes up.

So first of all, at the very least, you can sell the products of your first asteroid at 10 or 20% below current market price and send all the speculators panicking in one fell swoop. Second, all subsequent asteroids are yours for the selling, and if you want to keep selling them at 20% under the conventional rate, that's your business alone.

And for things as useful as gold and platinum, you'd be stupid not to think they'll always be valuable. Can you imagine if iridium were as common as, say, silver?

"Gee, we need a doowhackey that'll withstand 4000 degrees and hexavalent fluorine!" "Naw, just get a foot of iridium tubing from McMaster, it'll do fine."

There are untold possibilities if precious metals weren't. With that much platinum, fuel cells would become economical for the first time in history! Well, maybe...

Sure it is. You obviously don't appreciate how poorly differentiated some ores are. Precious metals are mined out of hard rock, blasted, ground to dust, separated, leached, treated with hot chlorine gas, electroplated and more. The whole process is ridiculously inefficient and highly uneconomical, except for the singular quality of precious metals: they are expensive as hell. That will completely go away once asteroids are being pulled down on a regular basis.

First of all, you pick which asteroid you want, from visual and RADAR observations. Easy to pick out the shiny metal ones. Tow them in and start refining. No mining, no blasting, no cyanide, just metal metal metal.

The fundamental problem with heavy metals is, they all sink to the bottom. What we get from the mantle is a miniscule fraction of what's sunk to the core, eons ago. Asteroids are *made* of primordial cores.

Tim

ga...

More than you got from invading Irak.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That was a great day when I saw the first flight over the Mohave of a shuttle on top a 747.

Greg

If there were benefits from manned spaceflight, nobody here has yet named one.

Keeps you busy ranting rather than claiming circuit design expertise ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Send a robot. For the price of a manned mission, send a hundred of them.

Why? Fairly small Earth-based telescopes, and maybe unmannned ones in orbit, can find any threatening objects. An unmanned spacecraft (or several, for insurance) can rondevous and nuke it. Where would human bodies help in that process?

Humans aren't suited to space travel past LEO using current technology. The radiation alone is too big a hazard.

Please explain the "haul down" part of that plan.

Tow? Explain.

...

re was

The original goal of the Shuttle was to shuttle men and material between earth and the moon. When I was a kid one of the astronauts came to my class and explained it.

Later, per Uncle Lou (JPL), the thing got so feature-heavy it couldn't grunt its way out of orbit, so they scrambled for new reasons to rationalize doing it.

Unc thought throwing flimsy, smelly monkeys into space was the dumbest thing on the planet. Or off, in this case. He preferred instruments-- less hassle, more data, less poop.

He tried convincing some engineers to save big$$$ by switching to standardized fasteners. Instead they spec'd a custom, whiz-bang titanium fastener for the crew hatch at launch, torqued hard. The launch was scrubbed, the magic bolt galled / seized, welding with its (incompatible) mating material, and they couldn't get 'em out for ages. The bolt had to be destroyed, then the Shuttle repaired, a delay of days.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Jobs.

Greg

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

(...)

You know, hock a big chunk of mass not-quite-towards it. As it goes around, momentum is transferred and trajectory changed. Get it just right, with the proper combination of bigness and towardsness, and you can nudge an asteroid into, say, an atmosphere-grazing path, where it dissipates most of its orbital energy, delivering it straight into low orbit (just watched a video about that, neato), or if it's small, just drop it on a collision course towards an unpopulated area.

If you want to be all cost-saving hoity-toity and build a probe that mines and poops bits of the asteroid for reaction mass, or strap an ion engine to it, etc., be my guest.

Come on John, use your imagination.

Tim

It's good to tax people to employ the best engineers and scientists and managers and pilots to waste their time doing something useless, and sometimes dying in the process?

That's like paying five million college graduates to dig holes, and another five million to fill them. Creates jobs!

Sorry, I'm an engineer. Sometimes the numbers just don't work.