The Lack of Space Travel

I don't know about gold but He-3, ultra-pure aluminium, magnesium, titanium are all potential exports. With solar furnaces smelting metals in near vacuum, then shooting the loaded containers to Earth with electromagnetic mass driver...

Regards

I don't know about gold but He-3, ultra-pure aluminium, magnesium, titanium are all potential exports. With solar furnaces smelting metals in near vacuum, then shooting the loaded containers to Earth with electromagnetic mass driver...

 

Regards

Also uranium's been found, along with silver. Gold has not yet, but it's probable.

Although realitically, if you want to mine precious metals that aren't fissile, your best bet is asteroids. Lot less of a gravity well to haul materials up out of.

Step 1 locate all nearby asteroids (Ross being for this)

Step 2 Missions to asteroids with the least Delta-V.

Step 3 Mine those suckers out.

Step 4 Establish colonies in the hollowed-out asteroids. Think "New York" but with buildings in 3 dimensions allowing for a much more sizeable population.

Talk of the devil, as they say... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/02/asteroid_impact_2040/

On the subject of space travel or lack of it - somehow, people's (mine included) attention span, when it comes to the ISS, is very short. Yes, it's going 'round in circles; yes, there is space for only a few people. But, every now and again, as I come across a recent photo of it, I can't help but notice - it's a bloody marvelous piece of engineering and quite an achievement to have put *that* into orbit. In fact, some years ago few people would have believed such pictures showed a real object and not some kind of illustration to a sci-fi novel.

Regards

I suppose, after 3.5 years a double post can be forgiven. At least I hope so

As a bunch of nice photos of the Antares disaster, just released by NASA, goes to show - some reasons for the apparent lack of space travel... is just it's still bloody difficult at times:

The whole article is here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/07/nasa_images_of_antares_rocket_exploding/

Regards

Ah! Nice results for Amazon's [kind of] phallic rocket test

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Love the part where the propulsion unit lands on its feet after the flight... The future for Amazon's deliveries to remote places?

Regards

Hell-to-the-yes! Really hope that's a sign of good things to come! And I have to agree with you about the phallic-shape...the tip came off though...

I thought it said "Trust 110,000lbs" I dunno if I want to trust 110,000lbs. XD This looks cool though. X3

@Vappy: Dammit, banned for double posting, you disgrace, how do you sleep at night? XD You monster.

Neat photos though. Crazy how satellites are!

It said "thrust", my dear! Though, given its phallic allusions you would probably want to trust something of that shape with a thrust of 110,000lbs even less

@Binky - I suppose that's the dangers of using pyrotechnics for circumcisions...

Alright, I think I've spilled my load of profane jokes for now. Sorry...

Apologies for the double posting, Ma'am! Now I see that the allowed time between posts is somewhere between 2 weeks and 2 years. I suppose I should split the difference and wait for a year? That sounds safe enough...

Regards

That was one nice landing... It's sad that it took them this long to make something that would actually do it. (we've had the capability for decades)

So after having troubles of the explosive sort back in June, Elon now managed to one-up Jeff (instead of preceding him as he probably hoped to do):

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For context, SpaceX's Falcon 9 delivered 11 Orbcomm satellites to LEO and the first stage came back and landed 9km south of the launch pad. This is "more" than Blue Origin's rocket did because the latter only went straight up, whereas the Falcon also went sideways to put the second stage on an orbit-reaching trajectory, and so had to retread that distance before landing (edit: more accurate graphic):

The Falcon's first stage is also quite a bit taller than the New Shepard. The full launch can be seen in this video (landing at 32:25, warning: loudly raving SpaceX employees):

If SpaceX are able to reuse first stages without extensive refurbishment like the Shuttle, this could bring prices for space launches down by a fair amount, since the fuel alone costs only about $200,000 per Falcon 9 launch (for a current total launch cost of around $60M, the rocket itself costing $16M).

And now - the first reuse of a previously landed rocket...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35391326

We really have a new Space Race now - I love witnessing it unfold...

Regards

Even so, it's still bumming me out that we've been able to do this for decades, but haven't until now.