Extracting Materials from Titan

Titan is (im)practically inaccessible. High delta V to get there and come back. Long round travel times.

Humans and their machines may someday occupy the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Titan's nitrogen atmosphere is a candidate source of reaction mass for thermal rockets, but Titan is a long way from Earth, and longer way (in travel time and Hohmann semimajor axis) from the asteroid belts.

Some numbers:

Earth year

3.1557e7 seconds

Solar Gravitational Constant

1.3271e20 m³/s²

Astronomical Unit
average earth orbit radius

1.496e11 meters


Planets &

Orbit

Period

Velocity

Escape

outer

Asteroids

SemiM AU

Years

km/s

km/s

surface

circular approximation

Earth

1.0

1.0

29.79

11.2

N₂ O₂

Mars

1.524

1.881

24.13

5.03

CO₂

4 Vesta

2.362

3.630

19.34

0.36

dust

1 Ceres

2.769

4.608

17.91

0.51

dust

10 Hygiea

3.142

5.568

16.76

0.21

dust

Jupiter

5.204

11.86

13.07

59.5

H₂ He

Saturn

9.583

29.46

9.68

35.5

H₂ He

Satellites

SemiM km

24h d

km/s

km/s

Moon

384400

27.322

1.02

2.376

dust

Deimos

23463

1.263

1.35

0.006

dust

Titan

1221870

15.945

5.57

2.639

N₂

Iapetus

3560820

79.322

3.26

0.571

H₂O ice