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from the hard-to-swing-a-pick-in-zero-G dept.
So, you want to be an asteroid miner?
So [Williams] started talking to Christopher Dreyer, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines' Center for Space Resources, a research and technology development center that's existed within the school for more than a decade.
It was good timing. Because this summer, Mines announced its intention to found the world's first graduate program in Space Resources—the science, technology, policy, and politics of prospecting, mining, and using those resources. The multidisciplinary program would offer Post-Baccalaureate certificates and Masters of Science degrees. Although it's still pending approval for a 2018 start date, the school is running its pilot course, taught by Dreyer, this semester.
The focus seems to be on space colonies mining what they need in place, more than bringing material back to Earth.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:35PM
The first few times, sure. But if you needed to build 1,000 spaceships or 1,000,000 spaceships, the cost of building the infrastructure in space starts to be less than the cost of lifting all of those spaceships out of Earth gravity. Unless you think a space elevator is realistic within our lifetimes. But you wouldn't, because you don't watch that much TV.
Also, my main exposure to the idea of gravity wells is XKCD [xkcd.com]. Which I read exclusively from inside my Faraday Cage after my Beowulf cluster calculates and executes opening and closing holes in real time to securely control the CLI [xkcd.com]. It's how real programmers [xkcd.com] do it. There's an emacs command for it [github.com].
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?