In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
: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?

Not necessarily.

Making the pipe bigger, to feed higher-thrust engines, poses no
fundamental problems, especially since (unlike ISS/Mir) there is no
particular need to be able to break the connection again once it's made.

As others have noted, essentially all rockets are gas-pressurized for the
feed from the tank to the engine, and not at high pressures either. The
Saturn V first stage, with engines devouring over 13 tons of fuel per
second, ran its fuel tank at about 25psi and its LOX tank at about 20psi.
All the high-pressure stuff is on the engine.

And there's no particular reason why hypergolics are magic in this
connection -- if anything, it's easier with non-hypergolics, because
they aren't as corrosive.
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