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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals

Yeah but some of them are much better source of minerals than any mine on earth. Iridium is hard to acquire here for one thing.

Apparently this one is pretty rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(6178)_1986_DA

The asteroid achieved its most notable recognition when scientists revealed that it contained over "10,000 tons of gold and 100,000 tons of platinum", or an approximate value at the time of its discovery of "$90 billion for the gold and a cool trillion dollars for the platinum, plus loose change for the asteroid's 10 billion tons of iron and a billion tons of nickel."[10] In 2024 the estimated value of 100,000 tons of platinum was worth approximately 3.4 trillion US dollars. The delta-v for a spacecraft rendezvous with this asteroid from low Earth orbit is 7.1 km/s.[11]

Even Australian production of iron ore is barely a billion tonnes per year, that's a lot of iron. Iron is at least digestible by the world economy whereas there'd be a glut of gold and platinum.

I have no problem with waiting. Personally I think that leaving Earth's orbit pre-fusion propulsion is silly. But with fusion propulsion lots of opportunities are opened up, one scarcely needs to worry about delta-v within the solar system.

I mean this is just ridiculous:

On 28 February 2020, NASA awarded SpaceX a US$117 million contract to launch the Psyche spacecraft, and two smallsat secondary missions, on a Falcon Heavy rocket.[48] The spacecraft was successfully launched on 13 October 2023, at 14:19 UTC,[49] with an expected arrival in 2029.

6 years! And by the time you get there nothing can be done, chemical rockets are the astronomical cuck chair. You just get to watch the asteroid tumble on.

What is currently keeping us from fusion torches? What’s the sticking point?

For power generation, I understand that we haven’t been able to get enough power out to pay for the containment fields. I’d naively expect that to be much easier if you don’t actually want to hold on to the reaction. Unless that just gives you an Orion drive instead of a torch…

Edit: atomic rockets has me covered, as always

I keep rooting for a nuclear salt water rocket. In space no one can hear your environmental impact statement.

Once you fire this spray of plutonium salts, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the throttle on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime.

…now get to it.

What an awesome concept, though.

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