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Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus
astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
The gas mines.... of Uranus.
Please tell me that this story is a joke.
that title is just begging for jokes...
-- derby
As your Uranus blowing up is not a good thing.
This is not a joke post.
There's some around, well, you know...
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Nope, you're not!
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
this is actually an interesting article. Certainly more thought-provoking than the latest smart-phone malware.
Just sayin'.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Rather than shipping factories to outer planets and extracting helium-3 from a dilute mixture, why not use technology that already exists? Irradiate lithium in a fission reactor, get tritium as a result, and let it decay to helium-3.
"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...
Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
I felt a great disturbance in the 'net... as if a million voices suddenly cried out in bad jokes, and were suddenly posted on Slashdot.
This story should be fun.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I would have thought it would be full of methane.
Why travel a gigameters or even petameters when we can travel less than a megameter to get our fuel?
Sorry, no Hynerians here. Just humans. All we produce is methane.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How many space-based projects have we seen just this year called "Project Icarus"? It's as though there's no other popularly recognisable legend/myth with a reference to flight, let alone one that represents overreach & hubris as a spectacular failure at the point of apparent success.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
It's never ever ever ever ever going to happen. It takes more energy to go to another planet and get the fuel than you would ever get from the fuel. To simply accelerate the mass of the helium itself to a decent speed takes such a huge portion of the energy it contains, possibly more actually, that it would be more expensive than any other energy source ever invented. You could launch coal into space from earth for cheaper and run a steam powered spaceship for cheaper than dragging gas back from a distant planet.
I have a theory about this. Hmmm, energy is a hot topic right now. Getting lots of energy gets attention from the media and government. NASA is getting de-funded. I think this entire thing is an exaggeration to get more space travel funded.
would this be the first time a goatse link would likely be modded informative?
Someone beat me to the fart joke. :(
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
And assuming that we get that fusion power to work, wouldn't the Moon be a good place for the fuel source to get a fusion-powered interplanetary mining expedition to Uranus in the first place?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
Came for this refrence, and was not disappointed.
It seems that someone tries to bring democracy to Uranus -- Flock
Amazingly, it took this long for someone to make it. I wonder if company policy will allow capes?
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
No-one has a working (energy-positive) controlled fusion design. Icarus in theory has an advantage in that it's powered by thermonuclear device detonation, but the technological and engineering challenges are still immense, and AFAIK no-one is anywhere close to solving them. Let alone how you'd solve the political problems inherent in building a 54000 tonne nuclear-engined missile. It strikes me as putting the cart before the horse in a big way to be worrying about fuel at this stage of the project. You might as well have started the article "When considering sources of gold to feed your dragon..."
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
So where is the best place to start? At the pole?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I would have thought such a title more fitting for an operation near Mercury.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It's more likely than you think.
No, this isn't another "youranus" joke. It's obviously a bad investment in time, energy and money to drive all the way to Uranus and back with gas just for the relatively small amount of energy we'd get out of it back here. For a much smaller investment we could get enough to power the Earth back from deuterium mining on the Moon as the summary notes. Or, even better, we could put solar collectors across Lunar surface, then beam the energy back to the Earth through a small network of lunar/solar/Earth orbital satellites to floating sea platforms. The lunar energy projects would pay off within a decade, and replace practically all energy (and emissions, and mining, and their territorial conflicts) here on Earth.
But Uranus' gas "mines" are still an excellent resource. Once Earth's energy needs are satisfied, lunar/solar power would still provide enough to push human exploitation through the other planets. Lunar/solar power is an excellent way to get to Uranus, especially if we set a trail of collectors and transmitters along the way. But once there, solar energy density is so low that even very large collectors left to concentrate solar energy beamed to the Uranus neighborhood will be very low. To get beyond Uranus, and even around in the Jupiter-Saturn neighborhood, pulling energy from Uranus' gas would be a good way to go. Or rather from each gas giant.
By the time we get Earth's energy hooked up to lunar/solar and get out to the outer planets, I expect we'll have gas->radiation fusion tech that works well in the uninhabited vacuum of interplanetary space. Dropping fusion plants into gas giants' atmospheres to pump a network of "solar" transfer stations orbiting planets, moons and the Sun would complete a Solar System power network delivering energy throughout the system along the paths our machines, and perhaps eventually longterm colonizing humans, travel. Power from Uranus, and then Neptune, would be the best way to push our travel outwards from our planets into really distant places, and eventually to other stars.
Let's not turn "Uranus gas mining" into just a joke. We'll get to it. But let's get serious about lunar/solar power systems, and the satellite infrastructure to support it. We've had the tech to do it for over a decade, and the dire need to replace our sugenocidal legacy energy systems with it for even longer. Back to the moon for solar power; Uranus can wait.
--
make install -not war
We don't even have fusion working yet, and He-3 isn't the easiest fuel to fuse, so it won't be burned by first-generation reactors. So stop talking about it as a primary reason to go to the moon, already! Let's get some kind of fusion working first.
That being said, getting some kind of a ship to Uranus that could collect it would be enough of a technological challenge that we would probably have fusion working by then.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That poor planet really needs to be renamed.
Hope is the currency of fools
This would be a great reason to build the cloud city of Bespin - just as long as the appointed administrator doesn't use it as a wager in a card game.
When you can just make the helium-3 on Earth.
http://www.marxist.com/
Don't they know what happened to Icarus?
This is not a question:
"Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
Question marks mark questions.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!