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A comment on SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to asteroid belt. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to astero... by rtkwe on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:09AM (#16324854)
I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
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Re:SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to astero... by Retric on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:15AM (#16325414)
As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume.

Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home.

PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.

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Re:SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to astero... by rtkwe on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @12:36PM (#16326288)
Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes.

I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.

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Re:SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to astero... by Retric on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @01:51PM (#16326973)
But what's the point of having large structures in space without people?

We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.

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