Industry in Space 1

[Charles_West]

It seems to me that the necessary first step for a permanent human presence in space is to secure an abundant supply of a structural material and a way to shape it. Such a material could be used to create industrial fixtures such as pressure tanks, rollers, molds and more.

Though there have been many efforts to answer these questions, I would like to propose a few concepts that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere (I will put each in its own thread to avoid confusion).

Here is the (perhaps far out) idea of melting an entire (or large piece) of an iron/nickel asteroid for the purpose of letting the component minerals mix. Even though this may reduce the average strength of the material, it would hopefully ensure the uniformity of properties (via diffusion) necessary to use the materials for production. The key questions here is how much power (in the form of sunlight) would have to be given to an asteroid of a certain size for the thermal equilibrium to melt most or all of the asteroid components and how long it would take to reach that equilibrium. I do not have the needed skill in thermodynamics to answer this question, but hope that someone here might.

Thoughts?

[joertexas]

It seems to me that the necessary first step for a permanent human presence in space is to secure an abundant supply of a structural material and a way to shape it. Such a material could be used to create industrial fixtures such as pressure tanks, rollers, molds and more.

Though there have been many efforts to answer these questions, I would like to propose a few concepts that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere (I will put each in its own thread to avoid confusion).

Here is the (perhaps far out) idea of melting an entire (or large piece) of an iron/nickel asteroid for the purpose of letting the component minerals mix. Even though this may reduce the average strength of the material, it would hopefully ensure the uniformity of properties (via diffusion) necessary to use the materials for production. The key questions here is how much power (in the form of sunlight) would have to be given to an asteroid of a certain size for the thermal equilibrium to melt most or all of the asteroid components and how long it would take to reach that equilibrium. I do not have the needed skill in thermodynamics to answer this question, but hope that someone here might.

Thoughts?

Considering that a mirror of practically any imaginable size can be placed in space, I'm willing to bet that the power can be had.

JR

[Rhyshaelkan]

Sorry for necro-posting. But that is one thing I love about space. The sheer magnitude of it. Any structure in micro-g will benefit from few constraints to size.

At Earth's orbit around the Sun sunlight is measured at somewhere around 1377 watt's per square meter. That wattage could be focused to an area of a square cm. Imagine a thin aluminum foil mirror of 1km² focusing all that wattage down to 1m²*. Due to our sun, power is near limitless in the inner solar system.

Probably not our first mission. But certainly something that will come up quickly. After we build up


*For kicks I ran some numbers.
1km² = 1000000 sq m
Thus a mirror 1km² could focus 1377*1000000= 1.377 giga-watts of sunlight to a rather small area.