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Space Docks, Orbital Refueling Stations and other such things.


bradley101

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Hi

We have all seen movies or read wikipedia pages on Orbiting construction yards building huge starships and making fuel and goods for surface bases allowing use to travel futher and faster in to the Cosmos. I ask you what do you think about this? Do you think restarting the Ares V project would help such this become a reality?

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We have all seen movies or read wikipedia pages on Orbiting construction yards building huge starships and making fuel and goods for surface bases allowing use to travel futher and faster in to the Cosmos. I ask you what do you think about this? Do you think restarting the Ares V project would help such this become a reality?

There are a lot of things that would have to happen before it could become a reality. We have very limited experience assembling things in space. We have even less experience handling hazardous materials (like fuel) in space. We have almost zero experience smelting, calcining, or refining ores in space -- or building things from any kind of raw material. (There have been some interesting experiments with concrete made from lunar dust, though.) The cost of lifting things from Earth is high enough that developing these technologies is a necessary step.

Planetary Resources is a company you may want to look into (http://planetaryresources.com/). They're working to develop and deploy some of the technologies we'll need to create things we need for space exploration in situ (with a focus on asteroid mining). I'm ardently hoping that they'll be successful.

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