Technology

60052 readers

2832 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

212

Space is starting to look like the better mining operation (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

107 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If I'm reading the delta-V map on Wikipedia correctly escaping the solar system is cheaper by about 97.7% than shooting something directly into the sun (18009 m/s vs 790371 m/s from launch). Reducing orbital energy is paradoxically really expensive...

Even just getting something to orbit the sun closer than mercury is more expensive than shooting it out of the solar system entirely.

So yeah looking at those numbers I think space mining is a lot more practicable than I though, delta-v from the moon to the kuiper belt (including capture burns in the kuiper belt around asteroids/planetoids) is cheaper than from the earth to the moon, only problem is travel time.