Excavation of artificial caverns inside asteroids by leveraging rotational self-energy

Future space ventures will likely require exploitation of near-Earth asteroid resources. Moreover, it can be envisaged that asteroids may host habitats in their interiors. In fact, a cavern inside an would natural radiation shield against cosmic and also serve as confined environment for storage mined material such water ice or other processed volatiles propellants. To this end, paper proposes to leverage the rotational self-energy remove from interiors create spherical cavern, by means orbital siphon concept. The is chain tether-connected payload masses (the material), which exploits rotation delivery mass escape. Under certain conditions initiated ensure self-sustained flow A net effect generated connecting new payloads at bottom while releasing upper payloads. Key parameters are discussed, required dimension maximum size internal cavity excavated, function period. assuming elastic behaviour, closed-form expression stress tensor found failure criterion used identify regions subjected larger stresses. It shown relaxed radius void increases.