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Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl
Oh, I think it will take more probes than that to find somewhere worth possibly maybe considering going any time in the forseeable future....
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Well we don't need to send one to each planet or moon. The list of places to send probes is quite small, Mars, Europa (this should be the next major target for exploration IMHO), the other Galilean moons, Titian, and maybe Triton, Titania, and Iapetus.
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What makes you think so? Anything worth learning about any planet(oid) we can get to with a manned mission can be discerned via probe flybys for a fraction of the cost required to build a manned spacecraft.
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Flybys are one thing but landing on a planet or moon is another thing, especially if we are talking about the outer planets. The light speed lag is just too great to allow for ground (or in the case of Europa perhaps undersea) exploration by remote; an hour delay in 1 way signals and occasionally no signal at all when Jupiter is between Earth and the Moon with the probe.
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Sadly, even Eros is very far away (it will be around 70 times as far away as the moon at it's closest approach) and it is travelling very quickly. How, exactly, are we going to get to it and extract enough resources to recoup the cost of getting the damn ship into space in the first place, and then get the damn thing back on the ground with its payload? Methinks we are better off just waiting for a resource-rich asteroid to actually hit the planet for the time being if we want to extract resources.
I'm not saying that it can't or shouldn't be done, just that we're not even close to ready yet.
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Good things come to ye who waits...
Once we get there we can detonate a few H bombs on the surface and blast her in to a better orbit...
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Unfortunately, even with ion stabilization thrusters, there's still the small matter of getting the damn thing into orbit in the first place and maintaining/upgrading/replacing it, at the cost of millions of dollars per pound, so whatever it's doing up there had damn well better be worth it. Looming above our enemies with a payload of death does not fit that criteria, especially given the ease with which a satelite can be brought down by a developed nation.
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A bird in low orbit is easy to down but one in a high orbit is much harder; the time on target for any ASAT is sufficiently great that any space based platform in a high orbit could out maneuver its attacker or shoot it down... unless of course the attacking platform was its self capable of large maneuvers and defending its self... at which point we start talking about space going warships.
Now I doubt that Ion thrusters would be used for SCM, any of the more conventional drives would be better served for that.
And of course upgrading becomes cheaper if those new parts don't need to be built on Earth. Its a lot cheaper to ship from Luna to Earth orbit than from Earth sea level to Earth orbit.