> Considering there are two Boeing Starliner astronauts who may be stuck on the space station for several more months
This is a bad measure of our spacefaring capabilities. It’s like ruling out the Berlin airlift because Boeing’s door plugs fall out.
The paper estimates construction using a lunar TBM. The time scale it provides, around the 2070s to 2080s, is well within our projections for what could be accomplished with even Starship, a platform that should be operational by the 2030s. (At $100mm per launch, a $5bn launch budget gives you 340 tons on the surface.)
The most speculative element, as it identifies, is not transport but remote drilling and power. That said, the author appears unaware of the degree to which we’re automating (and offsiting) mining on Earth. The idea that we won’t have remote TBMs within 50 years seems, to me, low.
Why do you need a tunnel? Proton beam is happy in a vacuum and magnets can be shaded a la James Webb for superconducting temperatures. Might need to put the collision area underground to minimize solar and cosmic noise.
This is a bad measure of our spacefaring capabilities. It’s like ruling out the Berlin airlift because Boeing’s door plugs fall out.
The paper estimates construction using a lunar TBM. The time scale it provides, around the 2070s to 2080s, is well within our projections for what could be accomplished with even Starship, a platform that should be operational by the 2030s. (At $100mm per launch, a $5bn launch budget gives you 340 tons on the surface.)
The most speculative element, as it identifies, is not transport but remote drilling and power. That said, the author appears unaware of the degree to which we’re automating (and offsiting) mining on Earth. The idea that we won’t have remote TBMs within 50 years seems, to me, low.