sifuyee t1_jd5j8p5 wrote on March 21, 2023 at 11:52 PM

The other issue is that once you've caught up with it, you're now stuck travelling where it's going, which is unlikely to be toward any nearby star, so now you're just hanging on getting yeet'd out of the solar system into the great void between stars.

So even if you did spend all the effort (enormous, many stage rocket, very very tiny delivered payload to match the object's velocity) you're not necessarily going anywhere interesting. The only thing working for you in this scenario is you are sitting on a big pile of potential resources for building something else. But even then you need to build quickly as your access to abundant sunlight to power any construction is going away quickly as you leave the vicinity of the sun.

Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5k0sj wrote on March 21, 2023 at 11:57 PM

Hey, reaching great speeds and then slowing down is just as much a problem as actually getting off the craft.

I mean, you would choose an asteroid with a desirable trajectory.

Yes, the object could be boarded by multiple smaller spacecraft with specific payloads.

In terms of mining before you leave the sun, perhaps only a certain level of mining is essential, like for certain gasses. Even still maybe you send enough payloads that mining isn’t much of a necessity.