Actually - it's probably more feasible to use its materials to make habitats for humans.
If you used the whole of Ceres for radiation shielding - then there is enough there to create Stanford Toruses with over 400 times the total land area of the Earth - that's the ground floor of your habitats - you build your houses on top - and quite possibly other inner layers as well.
I'm not suggesting we use Ceres in that way. But - even extracting enough shielding for the entire land area of the Earth, as Stanford Torus type space habs - would make hardly a dent on the volume of Ceres. Just 1/400 th of its total volume would be needed for that project.
It's possible that Ceres is so interesting and valuable in other ways that we don't want to do this. There are plenty of NEOs, nearer at hand that we can use more easily also.
But - if you do want to colonize using the asteroids - that's the way to do it - mine them, and use the materials to build habitats - which with multiple slingshot type flybys - you can send to anywhere in the inner solar ssytem.
I don't know myself if it's worth colonizing anywhere in space - but Ceres and other asteroids - viewed as resources for mining - are amongst the easiest, though clouds of Venus I think are arguably easier than either - and of course Earth easiest of all - already is colonized :). And still with many "blank places on the map" that are tough to colonize by Earth standards - but absurdly easy to colonize by space colonization standards.
Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths
If you used the whole of Ceres for radiation shielding - then there is enough there to create Stanford Toruses with over 400 times the total land area of the Earth - that's the ground floor of your habitats - you build your houses on top - and quite possibly other inner layers as well.
I'm not suggesting we use Ceres in that way. But - even extracting enough shielding for the entire land area of the Earth, as Stanford Torus type space habs - would make hardly a dent on the volume of Ceres. Just 1/400 th of its total volume would be needed for that project.
It's possible that Ceres is so interesting and valuable in other ways that we don't want to do this. There are plenty of NEOs, nearer at hand that we can use more easily also.
But - if you do want to colonize using the asteroids - that's the way to do it - mine them, and use the materials to build habitats - which with multiple slingshot type flybys - you can send to anywhere in the inner solar ssytem.
I don't know myself if it's worth colonizing anywhere in space - but Ceres and other asteroids - viewed as resources for mining - are amongst the easiest, though clouds of Venus I think are arguably easier than either - and of course Earth easiest of all - already is colonized :). And still with many "blank places on the map" that are tough to colonize by Earth standards - but absurdly easy to colonize by space colonization standards.
Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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