Digg
Digg are the pioneers of off-world excavation. Named after their founder Douglas Digg, the company has adapted designs of terrestrial excavation equipment for use in low-g environments.
They have created mining equipment, trench diggers, backhoes, dirt-movers, graders, drills and tunnelers and will create new machines on request. Some types of applications require more than one design solution depending on whether local conditions enable bracing the equipment to compensate for lack of gravity.
Contracts have call out and services costs in order to place equipment at location and to perform the required task. This price is given by the delta-v (in ms-1) from their head-quarters at Freedom to the location multiplied by the gravitational field strength of the location (in ms-2), rounded up to one significant figure, multiplied by the volume of material to be removed (m3) multiplied by ten.
Example calculation: 1000 m3 to be removed on Mars. Delta-v to Mars from LEO is 3,600 ms-1 while the gravitational field strength is 3.711 ms-2. Rounding up the field strength gives 4 ms-2 to yield a final calculation of cost = 10 * 3,600 * 4 * 1,000 = $144,000,000.
This webpage refers to a fictional company which is part of the UK Space Design Competition. No information presented here or implied herefrom should be regarded as factual. Any similarities with real events, places, or persons are purely coincidental.