Quote from: MaNaeSWolf on 04/01/2020 08:08 am...What the hell do you do with 400 000 liters of water in LEO?Water gives you about 89% Oxygen to 11% Hydrogen by massWell, lets say half of starships fuel by mass is LOX. That is 600kg of LOX.We have a working business at just a single LOX refill of starship a year. This in turn makes Starship more economically viable for the Moon and beyond, and halves its refill launch requirements. Starship propellant is close to 80% LOX. Say 950 thousand kg. However you need to factor in also making the propellant to get it to LEO:You can use lunar LOX and LH2 as propellant for tankers. A tanker based on the new Centaur V, would need 51 tonnes of lunar propellant to deliver about 13 t to LEO and return. (Assuming it used aero-breaking to enter LEO. Purely propulsive, it would be lucky to deliver 0.5 t.) To EM-L2 it could deliver about 16 t per round trip. So it would make sense to tank the tanker in L2 or LLO if propellant was needed in LEO. But propellant is possibly more valuable in L2 than LEO.And if you can find carbon on the moon (possibly CO2 or CO in the same polar cold traps), you can also make CH4 using the Hydrogen.
...What the hell do you do with 400 000 liters of water in LEO?Water gives you about 89% Oxygen to 11% Hydrogen by massWell, lets say half of starships fuel by mass is LOX. That is 600kg of LOX.We have a working business at just a single LOX refill of starship a year. This in turn makes Starship more economically viable for the Moon and beyond, and halves its refill launch requirements.
Just fill a cargo SS with coal (100mt) sent to the Moon surface will produce total of 600 to 700mt of LNG and LOX. So for one coal carrier it supplies enough carbon to enable production of propelant on lunar surface for >7 Starship returns fully loaded with cargo or passengers.
By also parking such asteroids around Mars you completely change the optimal system designs for transport.
Just fill a cargo SS with coal (100mt) sent to the Moon surface...
...the resources mars would be interested in harvesting would be of more value to mars for its own use than as an export to earth.
...people struggle to see exponential growth.
Seems this only has a very tenuous link to the scale of Starship/Superheavy operation.
And refining gold on Mars is not going to happen any time soon.
Quote from: Slarty1080 on 04/12/2020 12:14 pmSeems this only has a very tenuous link to the scale of Starship/Superheavy operation.Why tenuous? Revenue potential drives scale. (Time from $8 B to $100 B?)Quote from: Slarty1080 on 04/12/2020 12:14 pmAnd refining gold on Mars is not going to happen any time soon.How long to adapt, say, salt water reactors for Mars?
Quote from: LMT on 04/12/2020 02:40 pmQuote from: Slarty1080 on 04/12/2020 12:14 pmSeems this only has a very tenuous link to the scale of Starship/Superheavy operation.Why tenuous? Revenue potential drives scale. (Time from $8 B to $100 B?)Quote from: Slarty1080 on 04/12/2020 12:14 pmAnd refining gold on Mars is not going to happen any time soon.How long to adapt, say, salt water reactors for Mars?Plenty of other threads that discuss what will be done on Mars. This is not one of them.This thread is focused on how to build Starships, at scale, in order to get there.