✨ Nora Tindall  🪐

oh yeah, a cool thing about staying exclusively in solar orbit rather than going down well is that you can set up transport systems to feed raw material from the asteroid belt down into low solar orbit, where you use high-intensity light from the sun to directly heat and refine

just use large solar concentrators to collect sunlight and melt the ore instead of generating electricity etc. you can do it in the belt too of course but inverse square means theyd have to be enormous. instead just move closer to the sun!

if you're smart, you move the whole asteroid, instead of mining it out there. slow the rock, let it slip into an elliptical orbit so it goes down towards the sun, then use high intensity sunlight to park it at a closer orbit where you can refine it using sunlight

when you need to send the material back out, no problem, you've got high-intensity sunlight and higher solar wind density so you can either use solar sails for that, or concentrate the sunlight to make solar thermal rockets

also, since space is already full of radiation, there's no point in NOT using nuclear thermal rockets. you're not polluting space with more radiation than is already there, unlikely on earth. so if you're really worried about transport, it's fine, you have plenty of thrust

don't NTRs release a bunch of radionuclides, at fairly low velocities? those last a while and probably _will_ end up polluting some areas, especially if you're building at stable points

low velocities in space are still quite fast. but also, the expanding gas cloud will be so low density within minutes that it wont matter really it depends on the kind of rocket design anyway. gas core rockets can be way nastier b/c of the mixing of radionuclides with propellant

this is a place where @BeyondNerva would have a lot to say tho. im only passingly familiar, but from what i know, solid core NTRs are perfectly capable of running fairly cleanly and gas cores spew radiation but not so much as to be a problem