[extropy-chat] Drexler laying down a hand...

spike spike66 at comcast.net
Sat Mar 3 20:38:46 UTC 2007


bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury
...

>  Spike didn't ever say they could not set a lander down on Pluto.  He did
say it would be very very hard.  And I proposed ways out of the box...Robert


Ja and even that is an overstatement sorta.  A Pluto lander can be done with
fairly straightforward traditional technology so long as we don't start
piling on a bunch of incompatible requirements.  For instance, if we are
patient enough to wait 50 to 60 years for the one way trip, or if we are
content with a lander that has the mass of a baseball and cannot do much
when it arrives (such as phoning home) or if we have many billions of
dollars to buy multiple launchers, or we can distract the no-nukes people
while we launch a bunch of nuclear fuel.  

The real issue with this kind of mission is that we want to do it faster,
better, cheaper.  To land on Pluto you only get to pick one of those three.

spike









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