1

Would it be possible to drill a bore hole into an asteroid, fill it with water tanks and use sunlight to blow a hole large enough to fit a rotating space station inside, seal it off and fill it with air. Without having to spin the asteroid itself? Would any explosive work?

billy
  • 175
  • 4
  • 2
    How do you "use sunlight to blow a hole"? What are the water tanks for apart from supplying the space station? I'm confused. – gerrit Jan 16 '20 at 09:08
  • The idea is to heat the tanks with a giant concave mirror so that the water inside turns to steam wherein the pressure causes them to explode thus making a hole . If that wouldn't work I was wondering if normal explosive would do the job. – billy Jan 16 '20 at 09:15
  • 2
    I don't know, but it sounds massively impractical. – gerrit Jan 16 '20 at 09:17
  • Have a read of this blurb on gravity balloons, which has a similar basic idea only with your weird water and sunlight stuff and considers a whole bunch of problems. – Starfish Prime Jan 16 '20 at 11:30
  • 4
    Larry Niven fan, eh? I think you've misunderstood the concept. It always sounded hokey to me. The idea was to melt the whole metallic asteroid with solar heat, then the expanding steam from the water tanks blows the molten mass into a nice bubble. Good luck with that one. – Organic Marble Jan 16 '20 at 13:19
  • @OrganicMarble ahh, that makes more sense than trying to use steam expansion in place of a mining explosive. Still seems needlessly complicated... – Starfish Prime Jan 16 '20 at 13:43
  • @StarfishPrime I could never make out how the whole process was supposed to be controlled / coordinated. – Organic Marble Jan 16 '20 at 13:47
  • 1
    Why do you want to go inside an asteroid? If for protection against radiation and space dust, much faster and cheaper to grind the asteroid up & create "space-concrete" to slather over your living space exterior walls. So unless you are trying to travel incognito, forget about it. – Carl Witthoft Jan 16 '20 at 14:04
  • Also related https://space.stackexchange.com/q/775/109 – James Jenkins Jun 05 '20 at 14:02

0 Answers0