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Why go to the bottom of a gravity well to mine ice?

We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.

Right, but those gravity wells might make that water rather irritating to get to relative to water contained in comets or other Oort Cloud objects.

Oort Cloud objects as in [0]? Getting to asteroids takes way to long already. Yeah, Oort cloud won't happen unless we have a magical breakthrough in propulsion as depicted in The Expanse. And at that point current intuition around gravity wells will probably not apply anymore as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...

Ceres is about 2.5AU from the sun, has more water than Earth and the mass of 0.00015 Earths. The ort cloud is 1,000-100,000 AU away.

I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.

There's a massive practical difference between Ceres size gravity wells that can be escaped with a half-decent cannon and ones that can't. And I've never heard of people suggesting there might be life on/in Ceres.

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