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How much would it cost to transport 1 billion dollars in gold from Uranus to Earth?
What about the reverse?
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Interesting: beefymexican M$0.05, psionandy M$0.05, brian san M$0.25, jeffhoard M$0.05
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| August 27, 2009 04:39 AM |
1.6 million miles is the app. distance between the two.
66,667 pounds of gold give or take.
"The Space Shuttle weighs 165,000 pounds empty. Its external tank weighs 78,100 pounds empty and its two solid rocket boosters weigh 185,000 pounds empty each. Each solid rocket booster holds 1.1 million pounds of fuel. The external tank holds 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen (1,359,000 pounds) and 383,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (226,000 pounds). The fuel weighs almost 20 times more than the Shuttle. At launch, the Shuttle, external tank, solid rocket boosters and all the fuel combined has a total weight of 4.4 million pounds. The Shuttle can also carry a 65,000 payload"
"Because NASA has costs for the Shuttle program that are not reflected in the shuttle line item, it is appropriate to add 10% to these totals (see Pielke, 1994 for discussion) and also to adjust to 2003 dollars (to make consistent with the data table). If the program is terminated after 2010, then it will have a total lifetime costs of $173,423 million or about $173 billion. If the program averages 4 flights per year upon a return to flight, then the shuttle will fly an additional 22 times, for a total of 134 flights over its lifetime. This will result in a total program cost per flight of $1.3 billion. Interestingly, the average cost per flight from 2004-2010 is also $1.3 billion. The average cost per flight from the middle of 2005 through 2010, assuming 22 flights, is about $1.0 billion."
Source and further information:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/.../...huttle_costs.html
It cost about 450 to 700 million every time the shuttle launches.
it cost 100000 to put a pound of anything near the moon
The distance between the moon and earth is about give or take 250,000 miles
so about seven times the cost per pound to get it to Uranus
700000 dollars X 66667 pounds = 46666900000
so i'm thinking i can do it for about 47billion dollars one way
So it is possible but its very expensive maybe even more depending on the distance it is away from earth at that time. The shortest distance between the the earth and Uranus is 1.6million to 1.7 million miles depending on the source i use.
100Billion ROUND TRIP
i know there might be holes and the numbers are not 100 solid, but there the best i could do.
Source(s):
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/16/apollo-moon-landing-anniversary-opinions-c...
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question4327.html
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/.../...huttle_costs.html
http://library.thinkquest.org/29033/solarsystem/uranus.htm
www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/.../shuttle_faq.html
| Asker's Rating: |
• Even though this answer is drastically wrong in some respects, you were the first to try some rational calculations. And no one can really estimate it well. I rather think your errors canceled out and about 40 billion is quite reasonable.
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Other Answers (4)
August 27, 2009 04:10 PM
Let's start by assuming that we don't have to send people out to get it. Launching a kilogram of person into orbit is from 10 to 100 times as expensive as launching a satellite. We have launched probes out that far, via Saturn V. Unfortunately, it cost $400 million to launch a Saturn V in 1967. That's about $2.2 billion today. So we've already spent more to get it out there than it's worth, before we've spent anything on the actual return journey.
A naive solution for the return journey, however, is even more expensive. In theory, to get from Uranus orbital velocity (6.81 km/s) to Earth orbital velocity (29.78 km/s) you need to impart a delta-v of around 23 km/s. You'd need to impart that to 33,000 kilos of gold, which means about 10^13 joules.
A gallon of gasoline carries 10^8 joules, so you'd need 10,000 gallons of gasoline to do the job. (Actually, you'd also need liquid oxygen, because gasoline doesn't burn without it, but let's assume that we don't have to.) The cost of that gasoline is negligible, compared to the mission, but lifting those 75,000 pounds of gasoline into space is even more expensive that we said before.
HOWEVER, you could take a different tack on it. Assuming you don't mind that it takes a while to get back, you can use an ion thruster, which weighs only 300 kilos or so and costs around $150 million. It would take literally years to get back (perhaps decades; don't make me do the math).
If you don't mind waiting another 10 years to get it there, you could save the money on the Saturn V and do it via a cheaper rocket such as Ares or Ariane, for around $100 million.
So... if you were willing to wait 20 years, you could do it for perhaps $250 million. But if you'd invested it in the stock market at 7% it would be worth about the same, with much lower risk.
Source(s):
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs/saturnv.htm
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/uranusfact.html
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August 27, 2009 04:35 PM
Oh no! A gas-guzzling space ship! Fortunately no one else has suggested such a thing. The last probe to Uranus took about 10 years to get there, so that's about the right timeline. The big problem is having a vehicle that could actually launch successfully from Uranus, given the high gravity.
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August 27, 2009 04:55 PM
I assumed that it was merely "In Uranus' orbit", and preferably a distant one, since there isn't any real surface to Uranus. (There may be one, buried tens of thousands of km below the clouds, but we can't even get a few measly miles below Earth's oceans most of the time.) Having to get off of the planet adds a whole layer of difficulty.
You might even be able to get it there a bit faster if you were able to sling-shot off Saturn and Jupiter, though that depends on getting the right orbital configurations.
I was a bit surprised that if you use the latest technology and are willing to wait, the costs aren't completely impossible. I did neglect mission failures, R&D, landing it on the Earth, etc, so the practical cost is at least 4x what I calculated. But when I began I estimated it would be more like 100x.
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You might even be able to get it there a bit faster if you were able to sling-shot off Saturn and Jupiter, though that depends on getting the right orbital configurations.
I was a bit surprised that if you use the latest technology and are willing to wait, the costs aren't completely impossible. I did neglect mission failures, R&D, landing it on the Earth, etc, so the practical cost is at least 4x what I calculated. But when I began I estimated it would be more like 100x.
August 27, 2009 05:05 PM
Nobody has built in the cost of developing the technology to travel to Uranus. I myself want to make a pitstop at the asteroid belt for reaction mass. Nuclear submarines have nuclear plants the size of automobiles. Bring along a few of them, use ice asteroids for reaction mass which gets squirted out as steam.
So I only need to launch seed equipment into orbit from Earth, with enough fuel to get to the asteroid belt.
On the other hand, getting all that gold out of Uranus's gravity well is going to be much harder than getting it from the asteroid belt would be - although it may be a trace element there. I think we're going to be ferrying a lot of fuel and equipment to Uranus to get the stuff out of that gravity well.
How much do we get for the movie rights?
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But I'll just make a few observations...
1) I've heard it said (in reputable science programmes) that it the Moon was piled high with gold bricks, it still wouldn't be economic to go get them
2) Costs of anything depend on the tech involved. That is pretty hard to know, esp if you are assuming someone is in the position to actually be on Uranus to begin with. Who are they and how did they get there?
3) Most of the costs in a space mission are the costs of escaping the gravity from a planet's surface and then slowing down enough for the re-entry. The costs don't go up in proportion to the distance travelled. Though they do go up in proportion to how fast you want to get there.
Better option to get the "space treasure" would be to capture an asteroid rich in "precious metals" and bring it to a stable near earth orbit and then slowly get what we want!