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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