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In reply to the discussion: Space mining startup set for launch in US [View all]sofa king
(10,857 posts)Pretty much anything we want in space costs ten to a thousand times what it costs on earth because it costs so much to lift it out of the Earth's gravity well.
But if you park refined materials in, say, lunar orbit (if you ask me, it is absolutely insane to park asteroids in Earth orbit; lunar orbit would be a lot better, I think), all of a sudden the material costs of space construction drops precipitously.
But, if you were insane and parked two house-sized asteroids of roughly similar mass in LEO, I think you could de-orbit one of them with comparatively little loss by using tethers, both for orbit transfer and for electrodynamic propulsion of the "upstairs" chunk.
http://www.tethers.com/
I suppose if you had time and a lot of semi-autonomous robots, you could carve the whole rock into a lifting body and glide it to a landing in a large shallow lake. But my guess is that most of the rocks you want are not homogeneous and would be likely to break up on reentry no matter what you do.