Introducing: The Dragon Flyer
The Dragon Flyer will be the first privately-financed deep-space mission. It will capture an entire asteroid and return it to Earth, intact, for analysis. My first set of posts will describe how this...
View ArticleWhy capture an asteroid?
Returning an intact asteroid to Earth will provide benefits to both the space development community as well as to the greater scientific community. Astronomers in particular attach great value to the...
View ArticleQuality AND quantity
Dragon Flyer will not only return asteroidal material of a higher quality than all other previous space probes, but it will also return more of it. A lot more. Between 1999 and 2014, national...
View ArticleThe Dragon Flyer is cost-effective.
By 2014 various national governments will have launched six sample return missions to asteroids or comets. This marathon of sample return missions began in 1999 with the American Genesis mission which...
View ArticleIt’s back of the envelope fun time!
Many space enthusiasts propose extracting precious metals* from asteroids as way to pay for space development. Other space enthusiasts argue that water should be the target of asteroid miners. Mark...
View ArticleA billion asteroids?!
NASA and JPL, two obviously reputable space exploration organizations, have claimed that there a billion meter-sized asteroids in near-Earth space! The exact quote: Because of their small size,...
View ArticleA Swiss Army knife for tiny asteroid retrieval: CleanSpace One
Leave it to the Swiss to design a clever way to retrieve tiny asteroids. CleanSpace One is being built to clean up space junk and will use biologically-inspired technology that could be transferred to...
View ArticleAn Expanding Menu: Rockets, Mass Drivers, Asteroid Capture and Space Elevators
Since the halcyon days of Gerard K. O’Neill and his grand visions of massive solar power satellites and palatial space colonies, space cadets the world over have pondered the best way to collect the...
View ArticlePart 2 of 4: The pros & cons of using Mass Drivers to deliver raw materials...
In a previous post I described the pros and cons of using rockets to deliver raw materials to orbit. And, in the post before that, I explained that this part of a series of posts discussing the best...
View ArticlePart 3 of 4: The pros & cons of Capturing an Asteroid to deliver raw...
The first two posts in this series have focused on the pros and cons of using rockets and mass drivers to collect raw materials in orbit. This post will discuss the merits of capturing an asteroid...
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