HRogge Wrote:Interesting writeup...Yes. I was planning to to a writeup of then soonish, so I'll give a preview:
Rakhasa Wrote:In late 2017 she used her share of the Translunar, gathered some Warsie investors, and began the construction of New Bespin, the biggest of the Jupiter gas stations.Are there more floating Jupiter stations?
Those stations are part of the unspoken (but necessary) infrastructure of fenspace, like yet another future idea for the comet mining stations in the Oort cloud, to answer two questions: Where of the thousands of space habitats, big and small, get the air and the water? Venus, Mars and the Earth-Moon system have pleny, but what od Belters and the people in Jupiter's moon do? In they are the equivalent of the (also undefined, but still there) belter miners that gather all the metals that have been used to build, say, Genaros, the White Tower or the domes of Coruscant.
The air is found in Jupiter. The atmosphere is mainly Hydrogen and Helium, but there are traces of other gases. To quote the wiki:
The atmosphere contains various simple compounds such as water, methane (CH4), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), ammonia (NH3) and phosphine (PH3).[1] Their abundances in the deep (below 10 bar) troposphere imply that the atmosphere of Jupiter is enriched in the elements carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and possibly oxygen by factor of 2–4 relative to the Sun.[c][1] The noble gases argon, krypton and xenon appear to be enriched relative to solar abundances as well (see table), while neon is scarcer.[1] Other chemical compounds such as arsine (AsH3) and germane (GeH4) are present only in trace amounts.[1] The upper atmosphere of Jupiter contains small amounts of simple hydrocarbons such as ethane, acetylene, and diacetylene, which form from methane under the influence of the solar ultraviolet radiation and charged particles coming from Jupiter's magnetosphere.[1] The carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and water present in the upper atmosphere are thought to originate from impacting comets, such as Shoemaker-Levy 9. The water cannot come from the troposphere because the cold tropopause acts like a cold trap, effectively preventing water from rising to the stratosphere (see Vertical structure above)
Of course, "traces" in something a huge as Jupiter is a significant amount in raw terms.
There are many floating gas stations in Jupiter (and Saturn, and, likely, Uranus and Neptune too); the smallest simply vacuum some atmosphere, maybe give a basic distillation, and then either sell the helium (the most valuable basic gas in Jupiter) or carry the product to the bigger ones. The big stations do more than this: They break apart the atmosphere, separate the useful gases, use industrial processes to transform then (mainly carbon in either oil or construction materials like diamond or carbon fiber), and/or build a proper breathable atmosphere to sell to space habitats (this probably will need to use water from some comet to get enough oxygen; we are back to the origin, the unspoken but necessary Oort comet miners)
The very biggest, of course, do all this and more, as they are industrial refineries and full city-states.
P.D. Mylar was, in fact, what I had wanted to say instead of "plastic" but I completely forgot the word... (also, carbon and glass fiber)