Re: Venusian orbital carbon industry?

"IsaacKuo" <mechdan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1131480619.491892.37020@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> The idea of using an elliptical orbit "airscoop" vehicle to
> scrape water from Earth's atmosphere has gotten me thinking
> about using the same concept on other planets. Basically,
> you get raw materials using a solar powered satellite with
> a scoop in the front. This satellite flies in an elliptical
> orbit that dips into thin atmosphere to scoop up some
> gas. Some of the gas is condensed into a storage tank.
> The rest is accelerated with an electric rocket to make up for
> the lost orbital speed.

This problem looks suspiciously like the ones involved in "making Jupiter
useful" or starlifting.
A ramscoop would almost certainly work, but I can't help wondering if it
might be better in terms of the amount of material lifted out in a given
time and the amount of maintenance that needs to be done on the equipment to
make use of something like a thermal fountain- set up a satellite using
either a big laser or focused sunlight to superheat a small section of the
upper atmosphere, causing a plume of hot plasma underneath the satellite
which can be gathered electromagnetically.

> So, let's say you have Venusian airscoop satellites which
> harvest carbon dioxide. How difficult is it to refine this
> into useful materials for construction and/or consumption?
> Is there a relatively easy way to use CO2 and solar energy
> to make structures out of graphite? What about more exotic
> materials, like diamond or buckytubes?

Graphite and buckytubes can be manufactured by vapor deposition. Buckytubes
probably require some sort of catalyst or other special conditions, though;
I'm not very familiar with the specific methods of manufacture. Diamond can
also be manufactured by vapor deposition, but (at least with current
technology) it requires a seed crystal and methane rather than pure carbon
vapor.
Refining CO2 into carbon and oxygen I expect could be done by mass
spectrometry. And if you use thermal fountain harvesting or something
similar (or even if your ramscoop just goes into the ionosphere), the gasses
are alreay conveniently pre-ionized, although one would probably have to
heat them up further before you got elemental carbon and oxygen. And even
more conveniently, after coming out of the mass spectrometer, the carbon is
already vaporized for use in vapor deposition.
One might also do mining by having floating platforms in the atmosphere that
refine blocks of carbon and possibly launch them into space via
electromagnetic catapult. Or maybe they just build more stuff floating in
the atmosphere.

> Is it possible to make crude hybrid chemical rockets almost
> entirely out of graphite and oxygen? The main body could
> be a graphite tube, with a graphite oxygen tank feeding
> oxidizer to a powdered carbon combustion chamber.

Sounds plausible, but I see problems with making sure that you don't oxidize
the graphite body of the rocket.
Is it possible to make solid polymers entirely out of carbonyl groups
(-CO-CO-CO-)? If so, I'd go with that as the interior lining of the body and
combustion chamber. Otherwise, that's probably where the 'almost' comes in.
There's a lot of nitrogen in the Venerean atmosphere atmosphere, as well.
Perhaps that could be put to use. Trace amounts of sulphur could be quite
handy, too.

> For example, suppose you want to build a massive partial
> sunshade for Earth. Could this be formed by mass
> production of rockets made out of Venusian carbon
> dioxide?
>
> Could you reasonably build electronics out of diamond or
> buckytube semiconductors/wiring? What about solar
> panels? Could the venusian airscoop satellites be

Buckytubes can be used for wiring, transistors, and memory. But I believe
all of those require dopants.
Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I do know that current buckytube memory
technology requires them to be placed on a standard silicon substrate.
As far as solar cells, I'm not entirely sure as I can't seem to find a
reference to it at the moment, but I think I read an article in the last few
months about how nanotubes had been used to construct visual-spectrum
rectennas.

> turned into Von Neumann machines whose only raw resources
> are solar energy and carbon dioxide? If so, then you
> could not only create a massive industry in Venus orbit,
> you could conceivably terraform Venus into a reasonable
> place to operate.

You could terraform venus lots of other ways, too, but that is a pretty cool
one.

-l.
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