Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Star Raker! - The Giant Insane Mach 7.2 Space Plane" video.

@smokejaguarsix7757 You do understand that re-entry involves dissipating enormous amounts of kinetic energy via HEAT. Jeff Bezos wants to take iron production off planet. Way back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he told me to look at Helium-3. I did and then went to learn about remote mining by working in Australia's mining industry and that was an eye opener. These days Australia ships over 800,000,000 tons of iron ore *PER YEAR*. At about 70% iron concentration that's about 560,000,000 tons of raw iron. The space shuttle is the ONLY vehicle ever built that can transport any tonnage at all and it could only do 14t per flight. At 14t per flight it would take about 40,000,000 space shuttle flights to bring back what Australia digs up each year. What do you think the heat dissipation from 40million space shuttle flights would do to the atmosphere? Even if you don't use a vehicle and simply de-orbit it. 560million tons of iron being dumped down on the - NOT GONNA HAPPEN. That's before we add in the iron ore production from China, Brazil, Africa,.... Sorry but most people simply don't grasp how much raw material we (the human race) consume each year. I didn't until I went out and saw the extent of it.
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@smokejaguarsix7757 Dude maybe I didn't make it that clear. When I said I went into Australia's mining industry for experience in remote mine site construction and operation I should have said that included multiple projects in the iron ore sector. I have actually spent time on site and several mines. I usually use the example of Tom Price because its a well known mine and the math is very easy. Their trains (when I was there) were 200 carriages at 100t/carriage. At 70% that's 70t of iron in each carriage. That's 5 space shuttle flights PER CARRIAGE if you want to fly it up convert it to iron metal and bring it back down. 200 carriages = 1,000 space shuttle flights. When I was at Tom Price they did 5-7 trains per day. We have enough iron ore just in Australia to supply the entire world for a couple of centuries.
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There's a great part to this discussion I wished you taken further and that is the ridiculous number of flights required. Its also part of the reason why we are never going to mine asteroids for Earthside consumption. Its also why we are never going to take mineral processing off world as Jeff Bezos and others have publicly discussed. Just consider the energy burn-off in the atmosphere and you quite quickly get to the conclusion we'd be burning the atmosphere literally off the planet. Until we find some magic Star Trek stuff nobody is going to be taking that much mass up or down.
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@jdsd744 Have you even been listening? The entire mission to 16-Psyche (at $400M US) is all because its Iron and Nickel. They keep going on how its worth $4 Quadrillion and maybe as much as $10 Quadrillion and will cure the worlds debt. You might get that fact that its totally impractical, but there are promoters with gigantic mouths and people without the background to realise how much shite they're being fed. And when it comes to space and space exploration their is an awful lot of shite being fed to a very gullible audience who have zero perspective. Other than asteroids there's the utter garbage that going to Mars will be just a few years away. We haven't been away from LEO for nearly 50 years. The last guys who did have an above average rate of heart disease. Nobody knows if it was from cosmic radiation or something else. The spent only a few days outside the Van Allen Belts and got permanent damage for it and NOBODY knows why. Even some of the stuff being said about going back to the moon is complete garbage. There are NASA people claiming all the maintenance will be done by robots. Total bullshit from boff heads who've never been on a mine site and have ZERO understanding of what happens to mining equipment in the field. I can tell you as an aerospace engineer who specifically went to work in mining to LEARN how to build and operate mines so that I might get a chance to go to the moon one day, that most of these people are totally clueless. I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) back in 2002 and he told me to look into Helium-3 lunar mining. That was what sent me off into mining. Its wasn't just a wishful thought it was from one of the 12 guys who actually went to the moon. After a career in robotics and automation I got an education in remote mining. I'd be lucky if I know a fraction of 1% of what there is to know about mining and yet I know I am years ahead of NASA. At best they have visited mines I WORKED THERE.
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@X85283 DO PEOPLE LIKE YOU ACTUALLY LISTEN? I don't know your education level so I wont blast of at you yet, but you better start listening. Do you have any idea how much iron ore we dig up EVERY YEAR and convert into iron and what that would take to fly into orbit and then fly back? Which is what Jeff Bezos proposed a few years back. He put forward the idea of taking all the mineral processing into orbit without any idea what it takes. Its not just that we could do it its how much stuff has to be moved up and down. I actually worked at the Tom Price Mine (iron ore) and it does 20mta (million tons per annum). Its a very convenient number because the math is very simple. The Space Shuttle could fly 30tons into orbit but only bring 14 tons back. The typical iron content in the ore is about 70%. yes it can be as low as 50% but also in the mid 90s fro high grade fines. But most grades are around the 70% mark. So every 20 tons produces about 14 tons of iron which is the same as the Space Shuttles. So if they wanted to process the output of a mine like Tom Price using the space shuttle it would take about 1 million space shuttle flights per year. AND THAT'S JUST 1 MINE Total Australia production of iron ore is now over 900 million tons and that would require about 45 million Space Shuttle Flights. FYI - China does over 1,000 million tons of iron ore production. EVEN IF you said don't bother with Space Shuttles and just build a glider our of the iron. 2.1 Billion tons of iron at 8kms (kilometers per second) is a lot of kinetic energy that has to be dissipated. Go look at the film for the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor that was about 9,100 tons. The worlds production of iron would be about 230,000 of those and it wouldn't be a one off it would be every year. If you feed 2.1 billion tons at 28,000kmh into a kinetic energy calculator you get 6.35E+19J which is 6.35 with 19 zeros after it. The Hiroshima bomb was about 63TJ (tera joules = trillion joules) or 63 with 12 zeros after it. YES that much iron coming down has the same energy as about 1 million Hiroshimas and you thing we could do that every year. Shifting iron ore production off world is logistically absurd and thermodynamically a planet killing exercise.
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