Re: Humans doomed without space colonies, says Hawking

From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Oct 18 2001 - 04:08:28 MDT


On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Andrew Clough wrote:

> still seems a good investment. I suspect that we could get an astroid into
> medium Earth orbit with not too much equipment mass. On the other hand,

A cubic mile of nickel iron, with a delta vee of how many km/s? 5, 8?
That's a lot of driving mass, even assuming plasma drive speed of exhaust.
Would make more sense to turn the asteroid into 1-10 um foil, and use
photonic pressure to kill enough delta vee for a gravitational capture.

> getting the stuff mined and down to Earth would be tough.



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