Читать книгу Time - Stephen Baxter - Страница 38

Madame Chairman, this is not some wacko stunt. It is a sound business venture.

Here’s the plan from here on in.

Cruithne is a ball of loosely aggregated dirt: probably eighty per cent silicates, sixteen per cent water, two per cent carbon, two per cent metals. This is an extraordinarily rich resource.

Our strategy is to aim for the simplest technologies, fast return, fast payback.

The first thing we’re going to make up on Cruithne is rocket fuel. The fuel will be a methane-oxygen bipropellant.

Then we’ll start bagging up permafrost water from the asteroid, along with a little unprocessed asteroid material. We’ll use the propellant to start firing water back to Earth orbit – specifically, a type of orbit called HEEO, a highly eccentric Earth orbit, which in terms of accessibility is a good compromise place to store extraterrestrial materials.

Thus we will build a pipeline from Cruithne to Earth orbit.

This will not be a complex operation. The methane rockets are based on tried and trusted Pratt and Whitney designs. The cargo carriers will be little more than plastic bags wrapped around big dirty ice cubes.

But in HEEO this water will become unimaginably precious. We can use it for life support and to make rocket fuel. We think Nautilus should be able to return enough water to fuel a further twenty to fifty NEO exploration missions, at minimal incremental cost. This is one measure of the payback we’re intending to achieve. Also we can sell surplus fuel to NASA.

But we are also intending to trial more complex extraction technologies on this first flight. With suitable engineering, we can extract not just water but also carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulphur, ammonia, phosphates – all the requirements of a life support system. We will also be able to use the asteroid dirt to make glass, fibreglass, ceramics, concrete, dirt to grow things in.

We are already preparing a crewed follow-up mission to Cruithne which will leverage this technology to establish a colony, the first colony off the planet. This will be self-sufficient, almost from day one.

And the colonists will pay their way by further processing the Cruithne dirt to extract its metals. The result will be around ninety per cent iron, seven per cent nickel, one per cent cobalt, and traces. The trace, however, includes platinum, which may be the first resource returned to the surface of the Earth; nickel and cobalt will probably follow.

(Incidentally I’m often asked why I’m going to the asteroids first, rather than the Moon. The Moon seems easier to get to, and is much bigger than any asteroid besides. Well, the slag that is left over after we extract the water and volatiles and metals from asteroid ore – the stuff we’d throw away – that slag is about equivalent to the richest Moon rocks. That’s why I ain’t going to the Moon.)

Later we’ll start the construction of a solar power plant in Earth orbit. The high-technology components of the plant, such as guidance, control, communications, power conversion and microwave transmission systems, will be assembled on Earth. The massive low-tech components – wires, cables, girders, bolts, fixtures, station-keeping propellants and solar cells – will all be manufactured in space from asteroid materials. This plan reduces the mass that will have to be lifted into Earth orbit several-fold. This plant will produce energy – safe, clean, pollution-free – we can sell back to Earth.