Thanks — this shit is definitely hard mode. But we're 3 weeks away from sending the first private spaceship to deep space, and we're doing it for orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else before us.
I wish you every success. You're doing what 10 year old me in the 1980s dreamed of.
I still daydream about bootstrapping in solar orbit. My amateur idea was to focus the sun onto rocks with huge mirrors at first, lasers later. Then using a handwaving/centrifugal force to separate out the elements lol. Though I wasn't smart enough to figure out what was needed to build a factory via a bunch of robots.
We refine it (or better yet, enrich it) in space and bring it back to Earth. I wish someone would buy it in space, but currently, that market is worth... 0.
So, we ship that shit back to Earth and sell it into the commodities market.
Size estimates are really really hard to be clear. But we do have additional data that says this should be a little bit larger. That all being said, were gonna find out this year!
I get asked this all the time. And in short — no way in hell we can change the orbit of an asteroid that is large enough to make a massive impact. Cool (I guess) to think about, but physics make this impossible for our size craft.
