Polywell on the Moon?

[kunkmiester]

No, sorry, it wasn't, given that the topic is titled "Polywell on the Moon?". Oh well. Assuming Polywell on the Earth, I agree with your statements 100%. Smile

The particular conversation was about shipping the helium to earth for use, but I digress.

As for mining metals, there's also the fact that some asteroids are estimated to have much higher concentrations of the metals than we find here on earth. Metals like gold will probably come in pure hunks, much like on earth, just bigger. Platinum might be in higher concentrations than we think.

Iron is plenty useful too. You can probably do 3/4 of the smelting in space, leaving large hunks of the specified alloy to pick up. Drop them in a shallow part of the ocean, and pick up with a magnetic crane. It would also be useful in space--one of the reasons we're so sensitive about weight is that mass=money, and we're trying to keep costs down. Building the next generation of space stations from iron mined in space would probably be much cheaper than using exotic lightweight materials shipped from earth. You'd still have a mass budget for a space shuttle, but anything that's not trying to go up and down gravity wells would not have nearly as much concern about what it's made of.

[MSimon]

You know I worry about people polluting the clean vacuum of space. How will we be able to restore it to the conditions that existed before the dirty pollution was injected into the clean vacuum?

If you're irrational about the living environment, your a greeny. If you irrationally care about the sold dead environment of space, what does that make you? A voidy? Maybe a blacky? Hm.

On the other hand MSimon, while I think you were injecting some levity, it is a good point that debris in popular orbits can be dangerous. Different relative velocities where different orbits intersect and all that. I assume that by the time we're producing enough debris to be dangerous, we'll have enough infrastructure in place to deal with it.

I remember seeing an article about cleaning orbit with lasers. Everybody likes space lasers.

The place to do the refining is in the asteroid belt (enough solar energy?) or between Earth and Venus.

OTOH if B11 is abundant perhaps refining can be done in the asteroid belt.

[KitemanSA]

You know I worry about people polluting the clean vacuum of space. How will we be able to restore it to the conditions that existed before the dirty pollution was injected into the clean vacuum?

Obviously with a Bissel (a vacuum cleaner, dude! )

[D Tibbets]

You know I worry about people polluting the clean vacuum of space. How will we be able to restore it to the conditions that existed before the dirty pollution was injected into the clean vacuum?

If you're irrational about the living environment, your a greeny. If you irrationally care about the sold dead environment of space, what does that make you? A voidy? Maybe a blacky? Hm.

On the other hand MSimon, while I think you were injecting some levity, it is a good point that debris in popular orbits can be dangerous. Different relative velocities where different orbits intersect and all that. I assume that by the time we're producing enough debris to be dangerous, we'll have enough infrastructure in place to deal with it.

I remember seeing an article about cleaning orbit with lasers. Everybody likes space lasers.

[D Tibbets]

You know I worry about people polluting the clean vacuum of space. How will we be able to restore it to the conditions that existed before the dirty pollution was injected into the clean vacuum?

If you're irrational about the living environment, your a greeny. If you irrationally care about the sold dead environment of space, what does that make you? A voidy? Maybe a blacky? Hm.

On the other hand MSimon, while I think you were injecting some levity, it is a good point that debris in popular orbits can be dangerous. Different relative velocities where different orbits intersect and all that. I assume that by the time we're producing enough debris to be dangerous, we'll have enough infrastructure in place to deal with it.

I remember seeing an article about cleaning orbit with lasers. Everybody likes space lasers.

Debri accumulating in the asteroid belt could be a danger to a space craft. But consider the volumes involved. There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids that can be seen with Earth based telescopes. If you include small asteroids (smaller than a house) there are probably millions. Yet, due to the vastness of space, rarely could you see any but the biggest neighboring asteroids with the naked eye, or even a modest telescope.
As far as dust production that was not confined to the surface of an asteroid, how much would it take to double the dust concentration in local space compared to that which is continually added by comets? I don't know, but I suspect it would amount to many millions of tons. To pollute the asteroid belt region to a density similar to what currently exists in LEO would require considerable effort.
A quick calculation gives a volume of ~ 10 ^9 cubic miles within 500 miles of Earth. A conservative estimate that the asteroid belt is 10 million miles high, 100 million miles deep and has a circumfrence of ~ 1 billion miles gives a volume of ~ 10 ^24 cubic miles. That would be ~ 10 quadrillion times as large of a volume to fill up to reach the pollution level of LEO!

ps: there is already a hugh 'vacuum cleaner' in the solar system. It's called Jupiter. Actually it is more of a slow sweeper. It perturbs orbits enough that unless the particles are in a resonate orbit they will eventually be thrown into the Sun, Jupiter itself, or possibly thrown out of the Solar system . Or, if unlucky, thrown into the Earth.


Dan Tibbets