Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/311723008
YouTube: https://youtu.be/628eqhhpV5s
Welcome to Kerbalism! I’m your host, Aubrey Goodman. In this episode, we harvest resources from an asteroid and use them to capture the asteroid in orbit.
In our last episode, we intercepted an asteroid and grabbed onto it. We still need to slow it down in order to capture it into planetary orbit. If we don’t slow down, our harvester will be swept out of the planet’s sphere of influence to solar orbit along with the asteroid. Since the whole point is to use the resources within the asteroid, we need a retrograde burn with the asteroid in tow.
We’ve used most of the fuel to position our harvester. If we’re lucky, we might have some fuel to slow down, but there’s a good chance we’ll need to do a little harvesting before we can perform the maneuver.
This is where we begin to encounter the boundaries of what KSP can do. As sophisticated as it is, the unmodified game supports only one form of resource processing – fuel. We can convert ore into various fuels, but we can’t make metal or rocket parts to build directly in space. There are addons to enable this, and we’ll use them in the next episode.
This is also where we surpass the real world capability. The game allows players to grapple an asteroid and extend drills, all with the click of a button. Clearly, we don’t yet have this level of technology available in the real world.
The reason we use a harvester to capture our asteroid is simple. It would be expensive to bring enough fuel to slow down the asteroid, so we bring harvesting equipment along and use it to make fuel after we arrive. By carrying fuel processing components, we can plan to use most of our fuel to intercept and attach to the asteroid. Then, we can mine resources and process them into fuel to fill our tanks before the return trip.
With adequate fuel in our tanks, we perform a retrograde maneuver to settle into stable planetary orbit. The final altitude of our asteroid’s orbit will affect our orbital fuel harvesting operations, so it’s important to consider the details.
If the asteroid inclination is high, we will need extra fuel to ferry ore between the harvester and the processing facility. However, the asteroid itself is massive, so we would need a lot of fuel to move it to a different orbit. In our example, we settle into a circular orbit around the planet, between our two moons, but in a highly inclined orbit.
With an asteroid in stable orbit around the planet, we can begin to use its resources. In our next episode, we refine these resources into metal and rocket parts to build spacecraft directly in orbit. Don’t miss it!
And thanks for watching Kerbalism!
Kerbalism 