Re: question about hitching a ride on an NEO

Frogwatch wrote:
Joe Strout wrote:
I'm currently reading "Mining the Sky" by John Lewis. He makes much of
the idea of "hitching a ride" on an asteroid whose orbit ranges from
Earth's orbit to the asteroid belt. He even suggests hollowing several
such out, and using them as interplanetary cruise ships (really more
like space colonies, as each trip takes several years) to allow
thousands of people to economically travel from Earth to Mars or the
belt.

But I don't see how this helps. In order to dock with such an asteroid,
you have to match orbits with it. And having matched that orbit, it
really doesn't matter whether the asteroid is there or not -- you're
headed out to the belt (or wherever the asteroid would've been headed)
regardless. Indeed, it seems that rather than trying to find an
asteroid with exactly the orbit you want, it'd be easier to just make
one up, match orbits with this imaginary rock, and head on out. :)

The only advantage I can think of is that the asteroid provides a large
cache of resources which such a long-trip ship might need anyway. I
suppose there is something to that, but it seems like a fairly small
benefit, given how much equipment you'd need to move into that orbit
anyway to outfit it as a space colony on the fly. It'd probably be
easier to build a space colony in some comfortable, standard location,
and then accelerate it into the desired orbit (even if this takes years
to do).

Am I missing something?

Thanks,
- Joe

Radiation shielding?

That's about it, right off the top. For small asteroids, it makes more sense to build a large rotating space structure out of discarded tankage and engines, and then migrate that into orbit around the desired object. Then you could have automated regolith recovery craft deliver shielding to the structure. It's a short hop from the surface in the microgravity.

If further fuel could be extracted from the regolith, the entire structure could be migrated fairly easily to yet another asteroid.

I think Ceres is going to be a major source of water, but that is a much deeper gravity well (if you can call 1/30 Earth gravity very deep).

Carbon and stainless steel asteroids appear to be rather common, though.

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