b_a_t_m_4_n t1_jd5hitd wrote
For an asteroid to be useful for interstellar travel it has to be moving really fast. Which means we have to catch up with it. And if we can catch up with it, we don't actually need it. There's no benefit.
Beaver_Sauce t1_jd5qp0r wrote
This is exactly the right answer. If you can catch it you have already done all the work and expended the energy to match it's course. You need nothing else. The asteroid would provide zero benefit. This is pretty easy to explain even in calculous.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5jjyq wrote
Now I kind of disagree with the premise that we don’t need it, it could become a ship of it’s own, though with even more added benefits like : protection from radiation and very small asteroids, they contain much of the materials needed for human survival and manufacturing, meaning you could potentially take less equipment with you on the initial departure and instead manufacture sensory devices later on.
VertigoOne1 t1_jd6gn2r wrote
Yeah your right, their forgetting that you match speed, but not mass, millions of tons versus 10. Take everything you hope you need and build a cozy home. It might even be rotating a bit giving parts of it some gravity.
thatwasacrapname123 t1_jd6mr9h wrote
But the down side is its too big to steer or slow down/speed up effectively. You just got to hold on.
b_a_t_m_4_n t1_jd71pqp wrote
For all that to be true you need to have the power to lift all the heavy machinery required for mining and refining and building sub-surface habitats etc, and then accelerating it to the speed of the interstellar asteroid.
If you have all that sort of delta V available that buys a metric fuck tonne of radiation shielding.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd8t3ku wrote
For sure we are a ways off but perhaps you send smaller rovers that manufacturer these instruments once on board the asteroid, perhaps just deploying enough raw materials to give them a start.
Voyager for example just ran out of gas. As is expected. This is an issue you’d need to solve in such types of travel. Asteroids seem like a possible solution
Some_Canadian_Man t1_jd6hy7z wrote
What if instead of trying to put people on there we put a small device designed for extreme accelerations. It would simply need to be in the path of the moving body. After that, it can hitch a ride and leave the surface when it's ready to wonder space at high speed.
Some_Canadian_Man t1_jd6icjr wrote
P.S. The fastest body in our solar system goes 200,000mph, or about 0.03% the speed of light. At this speed, it will take about 13,400 years to reach the next sun, assuming it ever arcs in that direction (if I got the math right - I ignored relativistic effects since it's so slow).
b_a_t_m_4_n t1_jd71zr0 wrote
For a body to be going fast enough to be useful in any non-generation sense the asteroid would need to be traveling at a non-negligible portion of c. Anything we could build would be vapourised.
Some_Canadian_Man t1_jdbglzp wrote
When I die, me and God are gonna be having some serious conversations about this seemingly restrictive design choice.
b_a_t_m_4_n t1_jdcdcgi wrote
While you're at it ask him why is the blood supply in front of the retina? And why give us so many teeth that we regularly have to take some out? What an idiot.
[deleted] OP t1_jd5z5oz wrote
[removed]
Dreholzer t1_jd6go0f wrote
I disagree, it’s a great idea, we just need to wait for the right one… with a Tv, refrigerators and sh*t…
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5jkla wrote
Now I kind of disagree with the premise that we don’t need it, it could become a ship of it’s own, though with even more added benefits like : protection from radiation and very small asteroids, they contain much of the materials needed for human survival and manufacturing, meaning you could potentially take less equipment with you on the initial departure and instead manufacture sensory devices later on.
FallenShadeslayer t1_jd5onoi wrote
What are you even talking about? Turning an asteroid into a ship? What? You need to chill out with the science fiction.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5osmc wrote
Lmao, haven’t we landed a probe on an asteroid before?
scorpyo72 t1_jd5qt2s wrote
We have, but you're talking about interstellar (as in between the stars, or solar system to solar system) travel. The majority of the asteroids we have access to are locked up in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. We occasionally see comets, but they're not stable enough to sustain is, and then we have the forementioned need to get going at least as far as it is.
Something like ʻOumuamua, the "interstellar" object that moved through our solar system a few years back would be more on track with what you're thinking of. But that doesn't mean we could catch it. ʻOumuamua was 'tumbling' , as in it didn't have a fixed axis we could really locate to even think about trying to run up alongside it.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5r9xl wrote
Bennu was going 67,000km/h
Oum is something like 20,000km/h faster.
We can’t do it yet.
Yet.
scorpyo72 t1_jd5rl4k wrote
Well, I'll just live out the rest of my life over here while you're waiting for another interstellar object to pass by our planet, in our lifetime.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5ou5b wrote
Wait, are you talking to me through your handheld computer? Please, the science fiction.
FallenShadeslayer t1_jd6a1dm wrote
….That’s your reply? I get you’re a kid, but a smartphone and making a spaceship out of a freaking asteroid could not be further apart.
MaekusMikolous t1_jd5ls68 wrote
Dude how is prospecting minerals, processing them, and then manufacturing materials, and then making them into useful products a good idea to be doing on an interstellar mission.
Please just submit.
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5maih wrote
Making the initial payload lighter so that you would be able to send a number of rovers to develop a more sophisticated operation, once actually on the object, rather than trying to land the entire operation there, all in one go. Which would require heavier payloads with = harder to get to such speeds.
Getting off the asteroid is just as much an issue as slowing down an independent spacecraft that has reached similar speeds and makes an interstellar journey. How do we slow down? Wouldn’t we need fuel and propulsion just as we got up to the same speed so to board the asteroid initially, or to slow down an independent spacecraft.
At least on an asteroid you can mine for the fuel and create a rocket.
MaekusMikolous t1_jd5pqa6 wrote
Okay, we can get up to the speed of the asteroid ourselves, we don't even need it!
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5qf12 wrote
I explained it in other comments and I cba reiterating but I think there are more benefits than just matching it’s speed with a single craft
OnlyAstronomyFans t1_jd5xqis wrote
Why wouldn’t you just stay in the ship that you built that already had enough Delta V to escape the system? I see what you’re getting at but why would you want to do it? The thing would be moving so fast you would spend so much energy trying to catch up to it then you’d have the complication of trying to land on it and hope that it fits your needs. All those pictures you saw of those previous interstellar objects were just artists depictions. Nobody could image them well enough to know what they were made of or what their spin rate was, really anything about it, other than its speed and trajectory.
Unless we’re already really good at interstellar travel, what you just described is the suicide of whatever crew was on that ship
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd62vkq wrote
A quick answer would be protection from space debris. More land with which to make the space craft more reinforced and with which to potentially build further technological instruments, or even live on if that was a possibility.
Even so. It could provide avenues for slowing down the payload once reaching the destination. If you could mine for fuel, that’s a win.
OnlyAstronomyFans t1_jd64lq3 wrote
This is going to be my last response to you because I am positive that you’re trolling us, trying to get karma so you can post spam in other subs that have rules about new accounts posting.
That said but the only reason anyone would do this would be because they wanted themselves and all of their descendants to live on that asteroid forever. You would need insane technology just to get to the interstellar object, let alone land and mine it. For sure it is not anything that would happen in either of our lifetimes. Fairs seas, my little troll.
Nopants21 t1_jd64187 wrote
I think you're imagining a much larger asteroid than what is common. Oumuamua was at most a kilometer long and it was considered a large enough object. Most fly-through objects are much too small to be mined productively and also hold together well enough to act as shielding.
On top of that, the amount of stuff you'd need to mine it is also much larger than you might think. You need refining, production, maintenance, energy, and the rovers you're sending need precision tools to create precision installations. Think of the amount of mining that goes into making a single rocket on Earth, it requires several countries working together for every rocket launch, each with a power grid, an industrial base, a workforce, etc.
As a last point, if the object is going fast enough, staggering your operation so that it's not all in one go makes it so that everything needs to occur in a short timeframe, because the object is zipping out of the solar system pretty quick. By the time you see the object, calculate where it's going, get everything organized, you might have missed it.
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