Monday, January 20, 2020

The first space factory

Chet Richards recommends a manned space factory - implicitly, an Earth orbiting factory. (h/t, Sefton.) Richards wants this for assembly of other orbiting satellites.

Two important words missing: "gravit-" (and "mass") and "shield" (and "radiat-").

His case is for building larger Low Earth Orbit satellites. Since he is saying naught special about radiation, he is using the innermost Van Allen Belt for blocking that. So, his range is 340-640 km. This will restrict the factory to making fellow LEO satellites. UPDATE 11/23: The best play is for a scrapyard.

As for gravity, he allows for zero-G assembly. I would propose Spinning The Drum for the crew on those off-hours. Although, crew-friendly living-quarters is one of those components as can be assembled on-site.

I should also like another factory built, and in part assembled, by this factory, and run up to between the VA Belts - 12000-13000 km up. This one would be better shielded. It could reprocess space-junk and asteroids for raw material as doesn't come up from Earth. It could build garbage-scows to start clearing the largest of the space turds off Earth's orbit. It could even make and restore photovoltaics. And this one could assemble even greater vessels, to build stations at EML4 and EML5 ("yeeagh!").

In the meantime: good start.

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