ot: 1 min of silence

[El_Phil]

Hope I'll give you. I think we can discount the ESA, lets be honest they do struggle to get a rocket working properly. Chinese who really knows?

But we are talking a massively expensive project with no real benefit. There's almost nothing you couldn't get out of unmanned missions that a manned mission could do. I mean before attempting anything manned virtually bullet proof tech. would be needed, so just stick that in an unmanned probe and you slice costs by several orders of magnitude.

I think the moon race sums it up, the US loafs up there and.... Doesn't send men back because there's no reason to go. The moon race at least had the vauge justification of beating the Soviet Union, advances in missile technology, etc.

The only reason to go to Mars is the prestige or because its there. Hell of a reason for spending trillions of dollars.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Why go into space? I think this explains it:

Subject: Re: Manty Money
Author: Graydon Saunders
Date: 01 Apr 2005 06:48 PM
On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:56:13PM -0500, honorverse Listmanager
scripsit:

[below]

> From: "Jonathan Briggs"
[snip]
> "Precious" metals are pretty to look at and hard to find or make for
> yourself. Metal is also good because the government can't just make
> more of it on demand. But, if paper money has those same qualities then
> it is equivalent.

Keep in mind that the tech level in the Honorverse is such that they
bulk-process asteroids.

Which, going by asteroids in this solar system, means they use platinum
for cheap cafeteria spoons and gold for costume jewelry.

1 cubic km of asteroidal nickel iron is a sphere 620 m in radius; it has
a mass of something like 24 billion tons, and if it's 0.02 % gold,
you're left with a mere 4.8 *million tons*.

[El_Phil]

Mining asteroids? *cough* b***ocks *cough*

Sorry about that but I am a minig engineer and the idea is ridiculous. The costs will be brutal, certainly epically in excess of any deposit on earth. Hell getting gold out of seawater would be cheaper.

Assuming dirt cheap space flight and all the other odds and ends to get enough gear to the asteroid, or move the asteroid to your mining site, you face two major problems.

1. Nickel-Iron compounds are very very tough. How on earth are you going to cheaply break them up?
2. So you have your small chunks of nickel-iron. How do you get the gold out. Any recovery process relies on communation (breaking down the ore) which as we've established is difficult/expensive and then there's actually getting to the gold.

Now of course the tech. for all this probably will be developed, but frankly my money would be on other planet mining happening. Mercury probably would be the best prospect, lots of solar energy and it's very dense which would suggest lots and lots of heavy metals in the crust.