![]() It’s not a great leap in logic to wonder why we aren’t building spacecraft in space, not just assembling them from Earth made modules like the International Space Station (ISS) but mining, refining and constructing from materials obtained in space. Most concepts of establishing a presence on Mars have a reliance on some sort of self sufficiency for fuel being sourced from the red planet, and with a whole planet to select from, it’s critical to land in the right spot to make the most of local resources. The ideal situation is to build things in space from resources obtained in space, such as asteroids or building stuff on the Moon. SpaceX is planning on building a large rocket called the Big Falcon Rocket that will be topped up with fuel in orbit prior to heading off to Mars, which is a way of getting large payloads put together in orbit. To get to the Moon or to Mars, large payloads are needed to be launched into space. This is the issue that many of the major space entities are grappling with and even reducing costs through the use of re-useable rockets like SpaceX isn’t going to create the magnitude change in cost that will make asteroid mining supplant terrestrial mining. It costs a lot of money to put things into space, around $5000 per kilo depending on whose rocket you use and what compromises you are wiling to take. The current way we mange to do this is by the use of rockets that rely on chemical reaction to produce an enormous amount of heat and gas expansion that we direct downwards, which causes the rocket to go up. You have to overcome the seemingly irresistible pull of the Earth’s gravity, which requires a lot of energy. ![]() The tricky problem about that is that space is hard to get to. Mining asteroids sounds like a very lucrative activity that has almost endless possibilities with the promise of limitless resources.
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