Spaaaaace

[RickMycroft]

@smulder

but I bet it’s still way cheaper than mining asteroids and sending some shiny rocks back to Earth

And they usually never discuss how they’re going to get that stuff down to the ground without destroying a large amount of real estate.

Here's how asteroid mining will transform the world

I’m back after doing rough figuring for the energy release landing a freighter-sized barge, and… the comment I was going to reply to is gone? sigh Okay, this is scaled up from the PE and KE needed for a Soyuz to ISS orbit. (I’m not going to redo grade 11 physics this afternoon.) 9,000 kg to ISS height = 3.32 x 1010 Joules. Add 5x that for the orbital KE = 1.992 x 1011 Joules. Scale it up to a 90,000 tonne freighter = 1.992 x 1015 Joules. That’s about half the energy released by a 1 megatonn…