Thursday, September 05, 2013

Terra-Mining

Space travel is of course restricted to the amount of water you can carry on a ship. Its heavy and a great deal is required for survival. Even with reclamation methods (drinking cleaned urine) the ship has to carry a good supply of it. The weight of course affects the amount of fuel required to move the ship which in turn adds more weight.

The idea that we can get water elsewhere is critical to our long term colonization of the Solar System, something we should all be pondering.

The discovery of water on the moon is an immense help, as is the discovery of water on Mars. In the case of the Red Planet it seems that a great deal is held in the soil of the surface, so it can be mined. This means we'll be building way stations on our trek across the System.

And now we have good proof that Saturn has water on it too, though it may be hard to get at. The massive super storm, 190,000 miles long, that has been battering Saturn's northern hemisphere for the past 3  years has churned up a great deal of water ice, pushing it into the upper atmosphere.

All we have to do is mine it.


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