Sunday, August 14, 2022

Space dirt

Nyrath's twitter is lately discussing Gundam's farms in space. A colony in middle-to-high Earth orbit might import raw material and export the crop, down to Earth's well or out to other systems.

Any crop as can be grown in space can, more easily, be grown on Earth - somewhere. This will hold true until our Sun makes another Venus of this place. So I don't care for this tech for feeding us Earthlings.

One exception: arthropod protein, from space. Never mind the chitin. We might consider space-grown bugs as isolated so less parasite-ridden than the bugs down here. We might (more so) consider space-grown mussels and oysters, against what we pull from the wharf in Kemah.

As far as that raw material, organics from space-sources should be assumed toxic - to the farms, even before the crop is seeded. The Mars boosters are always being confronted with the hydrogen-chlorine poisons on that planet (and the shortage of phosphor). Out in space we won't be pulling stuff up from Mars; we'll be lassoing comets. One possibility - to fix cometary material - might be enlisting fungi. Although, ctrl-F "chlor" doesn't come up with anything...

Also not coming up is Kalium, alias Potassium. This might have to be KREEP raised from our own Moon.

Another point made on these threads - or claim, anyway - is that the foodstuffs shipped from spaceport to spaceport will be dehydrated as far as possible. Inyalowda consider hydrogen as valuable. For that I'll replyguy that this depends on the exporter. Ceres, and points outward, can export. If Mercury and Venus can trap the solar-wind then they can export too.

M-O-O-N 8/15: ToughSF looks at the economics of hydrogen and carbon. This was for propellant although, I'd prefer these for live-support. Lunar propulsion should be railguns and aluminium-oxygen.

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