Mining that 20 trillion dollar rock in space ( mining an asteroid part XXVIII)

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One of the ideas I had was along the line indicated by the title of this post.

When I left off with that series, I came up with an idea of using an Iron Man suit for life support.  This suit would reduce the weight requirements, as the shielding would only cover the human body, which is much smaller than an entire spacecraft.  You could get pretty good shielding for relatively little weight.

Now, another idea popped up.  Instead of using a space sail, use a VASIMIR concept.  This would require a large solar array, which could be built like the solar sail mentioned in the series.  This would be much, much smaller in scope, however, and therefore, much easier to build.  You could build one that would capture up to 90% of the heat energy being lost, and then recycle it again and again in order to give a multiplier effect.

Let's say you can recycle 90% of the energy lost through heat.

After one pass through, you've got 90% left.  The second would have 90% of the 90%.  The third would have 90% of the 81%, and so on and so on.

So, and equation could be derived from this relation:

x+ .9x + .81x + .729x +  0.6561x + 0.59049x + 0.531441x +  0.4782969x + 0.43046721x+0.387420489x+0.3486784401x+0.31381059609x+0.282429536481x+0.2541865828329x+0.2287679245496x+0.205891132094649x+0.1853020188851841x+0.16677181699666569x+0.150094635296999121x+0.1350851717672992089x+0.12157665459056928801x+0.109418989131512359209x, which equal to approx 9 times.

Thats about 10 times x minus 1.  If y is the percentage amount remaining after one pass through, then, we obtain the generalized equation 1/y, where y is less than 1.  Thus, 1/.9 equals 9.

You would layer some thermoelectric devices around it and pass the coolant through enough layers to obtain the amount that would be recycled.  If the coolant is a gas, it would have to pass through several layers, grabbing off a piece at each layer.  If it were a molten-salt, it would grab off a piece, then shunt the liquid to the next layer to be utilized with the layered thermoelectric devices until the cooling down is complete.  You could have many, many layers.  In space, this may present difficulties as there is no gravity.  You could spin the device, and that would shunt the materials through each layer.

Therefore, with a solar electric array that generated 1 megawatt of power, you could multiply that by 9 in order to get 9 megawatts of power.  This could get a vehicle to Mars in a relatively short time.

But you could also get to that asteroid you are trying to mine.  Maybe you could start with Deimos.

Update:

A possible better idea for a thruster?  It is a continuation of this discussion on to the next post.  I wanted to link these together.