Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by ryanmercer on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @09:09AM
(#21813534)
> That means that you'll also have to lift whatever type of canister used to contain the gas and the propellant to reach your transport ship.
Or you just push it through a pipe, space-elevator style, exactly how many hard science fiction authors do it for mining gas giants for reaction mass/other fuel.
Should be considerably cheaper from an energy standpoint.
If you're to a point where you can create such a station and manage regular transport between two bodies, you're going to be able to build some sort of pipe that should be able to contain the helium enough to pump it far enough out to considerably reduce the cost of leaving orbit.
I suppose that the good news is that wherever you're getting your helium from you'll probably also have copious quantities of hydrogen available so you won't have to carry that over. Managing to oxidize it however is left as an exercise to the reader (apparently there's a tiny amount of water in Jupiter, but of course then you'd need some other energy source to electrolize it).