A troupe of wind-up marionettes drinks the asteroid dry, bottling its breath in orange.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of an asteroid-mining propellant depot as a troupe of wind-up marionette machines — hung on strings from beyond the frame, chewing through scattered carbonaceous rock and bottling its baked-out water, drop by flat orange drop, as fuel. Carbonaceous chondrites really do hold up to about a tenth of their mass as water in clay minerals, and NASA-funded studies have explored baking it out for propellant, but no such depot exists.Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
