Also, I went into detail and worked out as much of the math as I could for the launch tube concept I mentioned in the last post, and concluded that it is very possible. It would cost around 3 trillion dollars, using current market prices (realistically, it is a lot closer to 2 trillion, because of economies of scale), it would require building a ramp in Texas up to about 45,000 ft, with a total volume roughly that of Lake Michigan. It would require its own dedicated power plant(s), and the highest angle that would be safe to achieve would be 9 degrees. 60 degrees was way off in my earlier post; it would kill you outright. 9 degrees would make the last ten seconds on the track very uncomfortable at up to 8 downward Gs, but most people can handle it without passing out. So, it's expensive to build, and probably not a pleasant ride.
But, it would work. And afterward, the a trip to orbit would take about 5 minutes (not including the time to board or clear spaceport security), and cost about the same as an intercontinental plane ticket (assuming a high number of daily launches, so that labor and maintenance costs can be distributed between a large number of tickets). Divide the cost across 20 years of construction, and it comes to $150 billion per year, which is only about 1/3 of the annual US military budget. So, basically, we could simply downsize the military by a third, stop involving ourselves in local wars on the other side of the world, and employ the soldiers we send home as construction workers on the project, and we have both the labor force and the funding to accomplish the job. And, in a mere 2 decades, we can have built the largest structure ever created by man, and opened the solar system to exploration and colonization by humanity.
If the cost is still a deterrent in anyone's mind, then consider the sheer value of asteroid mining. When earth was formed, the very vast majority of heavy metals (iron, gold, platinum, uranium, etc) were drawn into the earth's core, by gravity. Think simply of magma; it's a liquid. In a liquid, denser materials sink. So, it makes sense that planets have very dense cores of heavy metals. It also makes sense that the surface, and indeed every part of the planet except the core, should all be depleted of those same metals. Geologists believe that the very vast majority of precious metals and iron in the Earth's crust were actually deposited there long after the planet's formation. By asteroids.
Which leads to an interesting conclusion: asteroids deposited all the precious metals human society has been using for the last ten thousand years by smashing and scattering them across the whole world. So, what would mining be like if the asteroids weren't scattered? The short answer is: easy. Asteroids are usually rocky, or gravely masses. The rocky ones would need to be drilled, but the gravel ones are essentially floating piles of pre-gathered, ultra-rich ore, ready for refinement. In both cases, the gravitational pull of most asteroids is so low that a human worker (not that we will actually use human workers) would be able to lift about 1800 Earth lbs. of rock, and feel it as 60 lbs. of force on Ceres, which is the largest asteroid. On most asteroids, the gravitational pull is so slight that it isn't a matter of how much we can lift, it is a matter of whether or not we can keep from leaping into orbit accidentally. Light gravity poses a few challenges, but in an industry like mining, having nearly weightless rocks is a really big advantage.
So.... How much ore are we talking here? Well, Planetary Resources, a company founded specifically with the goal of going into space and mining asteroids, found a metallic (M-class) asteroid called 3445 Amun.
It is about a mile in diameter, and at current market prices, it contains platinum, cobalt, golf, and iron ore valued at roughly $20 trillion. One asteroid could pay off the entire US national debt, and have 4 trillion left over for my space train, and a city on Mars. And that is just one. The Catch: "at current market prices." Flooding the Earth's supplies of precious metals would send the markets into a massive spiraling crash, and the asteroid would not be worth nearly that amount if it was mined and returned to Earth all at once. The trick is to control supply so that demand remains high, like De Beers did with diamonds (which is defintitely worth the time to research; sinister corporate shenanigans at their best).
That said, since some individual asteroids are thought to contain more iron than has ever been mined in all of history by all of mankind combined, there is real potential to make construction materials and precious metals cheaper than sand. When an economy reaches that point, it is a short step from an elemental economy, where the only things people need to pay for are skills and services. And the best part, from my perspective, is that most of this stuff is already in space. Meaning that we don't have to escape Earth gravity to get it there. This means that to start building cities in space, all we need to launch are is the equipment to mine, refine, and put ore to use. Orbital factories, with asteroid mined materials, could forge an entire space infrastructure without needing to worry about lifting things from Earth. Once that happens, colonizing Mars will be no big deal (realistically, colonizing Mars will already have happened). We will have mastered our solar system. That's worth it, I think.
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