Day 1, Post 1: Spacecraft Re-design

Last night, just before sleeping, I came across a video on the “Baltic Anomaly” on YouTube. The video was about an hour long; it was already close to midnight on a Sunday night so I decided to read up on it instead. Like all mysteries of this nature, it seems to be taking time to resolve for there are those that believe, those that do not and there is money to be made in the interim while the uncertainty lingers.

Whatever is lying under the Baltic Sea at least on initial inspection does not appear to be metallic and therefore does not appear to be an alien spaceship (though it might be; and may well have “rusted” over). This got me thinking about the assumption that space faring craft have to be made of metal.

If we consider a spacecraft that is manufactured in space and designed exclusively for use in space, we could just as well modify an asteroid for the purpose: hollow out the asteroid to make room for whatever we wanted to fit in and to ensure that the mass is distributed the way we want it. This would save the cost and effort of fabricating everything from scratch on a planet and transporting it to space.

The excavator and other mining apparatus for hollowing out the asteroid may still have to be flown up of course. However, the same equipment would be re-used to hollow out multiple asteroids and make multiple such spaceships. Potentially, spacecraft manufacturing could be an offshoot of the asteroid mining industry — once an asteroid has been mined for useful minerals, the hollow kernel is passed on for spaceship building.

The hollowed out chambers could subsequently be fortified using metal or other artificial materials if necessary for additional safety or to prevent gasses and liquids from seeping through. The living chambers, command module etc. would then all fit into these hollowed out tunnels or caves inside the asteroid. Lastly, put in a propulsion system and you are good to go. Of course, the crew would need to fly into space to board this ship and begin their adventure.

This approach would also have an additional advantage that any civilization watching out for alien artifacts might mistake the spacecraft for a comet and not inspect it too closely.

Not a terrible idea — is it?