I get the email update from New Scientist daily, but irritatingly, some articles, like this one, require you to pay for premium content. Sigh. Until I make as much from the books as subscribing for premium content costs, I’ll just stick with the snippets. Like this one…
A new analysis suggests we could place a space station inside a rotating asteroid to provide artificial gravity for mining equipment, digging from the inside out. If you want to remove chunks of precious rock from an asteroid, you can’t just land and jackhammer it: most of them have such weak gravity that a hammer or digger is likely to just bounce off into space. But if the asteroid is spinning, that would create artificial gravity, a force that acts from the inside of the rock outwards. Working in a cavity below ground would also protect the mining rig from dangers on the asteroid’s surface, particularly radiation.
I recently wrote somewhere that I do write what I know, and I know as much about life on the other side of a wormhole as anyone. I think that still stands. But as this article indicates, some people know more than me about mining asteroids.
I like the ideas in this snippet. That may indeed be what I imagine for Excelsior, without having actually specified a space-station in the middle, and I think the tunnels there have a breathable atmosphere.
Fortunately, I have always had Lars and Pete hammering away inside tunnels in the VS asteroids. I’ve blipped how they make the tunnels, though. The colour in that graphic would fit the Viridian System, although the surface suggest the asteroid might be an iron one.
I eventually cut a mining accident from Curved Space to Corsair. I must let you have it as a short story some time.