if saturn really is a gas planet why dont we just go there to collect fuel. or use it was a space fuel station

Question

as* not was

Answer 1

You gotta be joking, right? Really, you're joking....right?

It's gas, as in the gaseous state of matter (not solid, not liquid).

Our atmosphere is gas, but you're not going to run a car on it. Oxygen is a gas, CO2 is a gas, helium is a gas. None of which are going to work as fuel.

Answer 2

When they say "gas" they mean mainly Hydrogen, which is very valuable. However, we have no way of going there & bringing it back cheaply. It would cost more than it's worth.

Why not use it as space fuel station for an unmanned probe (it's too far for people to go at this point)? Well, any unmanned probe doesn't really need any fuel-- it could just keep going by its momentum. It would be more complicated and costly to stop a probe, somehow bring into contact with the Hydrogen without getting sucked into the planet, and then go takeoff again. We already sent probes past Saturn without needing any additional fuel.

Answer 3

Because first you have to get to Saturn. And second, because you can't just skim gas off the top of the atmosphere without encountering so much drag that you would decelerate out of orbit and fall into Saturn's deep, deep gaseous body.

But if you could get to Saturn, or even Jupiter, there are some moons that would be good sources for fuel. Some of Saturn's moons are almost pure water, and a nuclear powered processing plant could be landed on such a moon and use electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is a great rocket fuel. But the problem remains, how to get to Saturn in the first place. It took the Cassini space craft 7 years to get there.

Answer 4

Saturn (and Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune) is a "gas giant", but gas in the state-of-matter sense, not gasoline, if that's what you're thinking. On the other hand, Saturn is largely comprised of hydrogen, which could be siphoned off and used as a fuel. The main problem would be the enormous amount of energy required to transport enough hydrogen to make it worthwhile. If it costs a trillion dollars to go to Saturn to get a billion dollars of hydrogen, you're not exactly making a profit.

Answer 5

Before we can do that, we have to be able to find a way to go to Saturn and built a space station.
With current technology, it takes a number of years for an unmanned vehicle such as Voyager and Pioneer to arrive to Saturn.
At this moment we are trying to figure out how to send manned vehicles to Mars, which is much much closer than Saturn.

So, at present, we do not have the necessary technology to do that.

Answer 6

Even if some helpful aliens built us a pipeline from Saturn, it would not be worthwhile to pump fuel from there. The reason is Saturn's gravity. It would take many times more energy to remove the fuel from Saturn's gravitational field than you could possibly get from burning it.

Answer 7

gas as in not liquid or solid. The gasses that make up Saturn aren't exactly flammable. That, and it takes 3 years to make a round trip to MARS, Saturn is much further out. It would take decades to run out there for fuel, even if harvesting and using the gases were feasible, which its not.

Answer 8

Satrun is composed of gas, mainly of hydrogen and helium. Not gas as gasoline, petrolium or oil. However, hydrogen and heluim can be used as a source of energy.

Since Saturn is of gas, it has no surface. So you can't build a space station there.

Answer 9

Do you even know what KIND of gas that the planet Saturn is made up of? If we used its gas, life would cease to exist as we know it!

Besides, Saturn is REALLY far away. It would be immposible to get there.

Answer 10

saturn's composition is: >93% hydrogen >5% helium 0.2% methane 0.1% water vapor 0.01% ammonia 0.0005% ethane 0.0001% phosphine. That's a great idea, the only problem is that there's a big distance between the earth and saturn.

Answer 11

Theoretically you could collect hydrogen from the outer atmosphere of Jupiter (that is nearer) but at the moment this would require too long time, too much money, and too much fuel :-)