NASA Determined To Move Ahead with CEV Acquisition Plan

Yahoo (Space.com) ^ | Sat Jul 29, 10:15 AM ET | Brian Berger

[The_Victor]

It looks like those images are from a June 2005 Popular Mechanics article. Although they claim to be CEV, it clearly doesn't meet NASA's CEV specs. I'm wondering if someone at PM isn't recycling incorrectly labels images.

[Young Werther]

Maybe with a change in persepective there would be no need for military equipment manufactured on Earth or in Space. Meanwhile, the major endeavour on Earth would be farming and meeting mankind's needs in a scientific and logical means. I'm not the first to say that a bird doesn't poop in its nest and neither should we!

The present economic theory says that their are infinite wants and limited means. If we mine the asteroids, settle the planets and move out to the stars we will have the whole universe at our feet. Infinite wants and infite means! Its a win win.

Its not an environmental wacko idea to want a better living place. We can do better.

[nuke rocketeer]

Again, this is wishful thinking. Moving all industrial operations to LEO will not be viable, even if you could cheaply move nickle-iron asteroids into orbit around our planet. Unless the planetary population shrinks by a factor of 100 or more, the continual sonic booms of massive re-entry cargo pods will quickly replace airports as a major source of noise complaints. This idea completely ignores the reality of modern civilization. All the high tech toys we have are built aroound the foundation of heavy industrial development. We will never get around the need for very large machines. How do you propose that a 50 ft long, 100 ton turbine rotor that spins at 3600 rpm with clearances of less than 2 mils gets from LEO to ground without serious warpage? I used to think this was a neat idea too, until I started thinking about the practicalities, which as a practicing engineer, is completely unavoidable. The best that could happen is minig the asteroids for the metals, doing the initial purification processes in LEO and then shipping down the refined metals for further processing on the ground. This assumes that we could move a small asteroid safely into LEO safely. A small asteroid will still weigh hundreds of millions of tons.