Potential economic reason for missions to Titan?

[Stormrage]

I'm not an expert on this. But I'm assuming that there will be a mining operation there soon. It will probably start out slowly being cumbersome until productivity and competiton increases. By then the it would have already paid for its self.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

All we need is to build a freighter style ship capable of the long distance travel to Titan, once a mining base is set up the ship can refuel there and ship the resources back to Earth, on the return journey to Titan the Freighter could take supplies back for the small colony, as time progresses the colony will get larger, the mining operations will get larger and we'll build more freighter ships for the increased shipments.

 

[Meredith]

The God Thing said:

Christopher said:
...or Freeman Dyson's laser launch system (which uses a laser to heat the atmosphere beneath a craft into plasma, causing a series of explosions that propel the craft upward, so that the craft needs no onboard fuel for launch).

The laser launch system was originally proposed by Arthur Kantrowitz, not Freeman Dyson.

Stormrage said:
I heard about the Astriod belts have trillions of dollars worth of resources...

True, but as Krafft Ehricke (RIP) pointed out to Dandridge Cole (RIP) - after reading the latter's 1963 Space World article, $50,000,000,000,000 from the Asteroids: Most Startling Report of the Space Age Answers Critics of Our Space Budget - the act of placing potentially astronomical quantities of formerly precious metals and organics onto the world market would crash their prices to such an extent that any attempt to actually mine them would be economically self-defeating.

TGT

Cool, but can a company really profit from this with current "internation laws" concerning outer space?

 

[Christopher]

Fire said:
All we need is to build a freighter style ship capable of the long distance travel to Titan, once a mining base is set up the ship can refuel there and ship the resources back to Earth...

You're thinking in Earthbound terms. For delivering cargo from one planet to another, you don't need a ship. After all, there's no weather in space to protect cargo from, and no friction to slow or divert the trajectory of any moving body. Remember, we've been able to launch space probes on unpowered courses that got them to precisely calculated targets hundreds of millions of kilometers away and years after their launch.

So all you need to deliver cargo from planet to planet is a launcher (mass driver) at one end and a catcher at the other. The laws of physics take care of the rest -- as long as you launch it on the right course at the right speed, it'll get exactly where you want it to go, because there's nothing in between but a whole lot of empty.

And there's no way anyone could effectively hijack your cargo en route, because there are no horizons in space -- it's impossible to hide from observation. As long as you kept a telescopic eye on your cargo, then any hijacking ship would be seen coming and could be tracked all the way to its destination.

 

[Blueicus]

As with most of these projects the big cost is in terms of people: At our level of technology you're going to have to send people along to Titan and it's going to be a 10 year round trip. The costs of training and supplying these people (let alone finding them) will be high.