Comments on: One-kilometer-long ‘electric sail’ tether constructed

By: GAUSS

GAUSS — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:54:28 +0000

I love this idea of space weather stations. Seems like a good idea to know more about our environment.

Also, great that they’ve actually built the tether!

By: Bri

Bri — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:46:54 +0000

Now this is how we should bring back asteroids. The overall costs should be relatively low. It would be lightweight and reusable.. Although the moon has plenty of aluminum, I’m sure that there must be tons in the asteroid belts. If we could figure out how to manufacture this in space, we could make thousands of them and send them off to ferry back all the materials that we need for space, without having to send it up from earth.

By: Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:05:00 +0000

Why should we want more water and carbon on the Earth?! We already have quite enough, we just need to manage them better.

But it would be perfect for terraforming Mars ….

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:29:03 +0000

So cool that they can get this to work…. so many cool applications that might use this in the future. Love the creative thinking and hope they can test this out on a bigger scale soon.

By: egore

egore — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:35:25 +0000

If it could be used to deflect one asteroid from hitting Earth, I would think it would be worth the expenditure.

By: Knot

Knot — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:01:44 +0000

Not sure whether I care for the competitive element. ‘Beat us at’, and such. It is nice to see several countries working together (Finnish invention, Estonian satelite), and to see funding from the EU for worthy projects such as this.
I’m sure this tech is already being shared internationally, or soon will be, and co-developed with the US and Asia. Maybe we can get some global funding up, in time, as we did with the fusion reactor in France.

PS: Your ice cream soda is a heart attack in a can. I don’t think we’ll be drinking it in any sizeable quantities here in Europe any time soon. It’s an interesting experience though (and hard to find!).

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:35:01 +0000

Now the Estonians are going to beat us at chasing down asteroids? Estonians are going to eat our lunch? Estonians are going to drink our ice cream soda?

1.7 million Euros? That’s big science on a small budget.

This could be cheap enough to start sending packages out to chase after all the Aten and Apollo asteroids. Given enough time, it only takes a small bit of thrust to change the course of a large mass. This could be the thing to bring back the water of carbonaceous asteroids and the platinum group metals of the nickel-iron asteroids.