(Henry Spencer) wrote:

:In article ,
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
::Maybe, but the simplest solution would be to launch the lander without
::any fuel tanks first, and then attach fuel tanks...
:
:And you're back to talking about assembly of pressure fittings in
:space. This is almost always a bad idea, particularly for relatively
:high pressure fittings like fuel feed lines.
:
:The Russians made it work quite routinely -- untouched by human hands --
:for refueling Mir (and, I believe, ISS) from Progress tankers. There's
:nothing that hard about it.

Depends on what your fuels are and how you get them to the engines.
So what you're proposing are gas-pressurized hypergolic fuel engines
with (relatively) low thrust?

ISS main engines, for example, only develop around 100 lbs of thrust
apiece. Mir engines are significantly larger, getting all the way up
around 650 lbs of thrust each.

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw