(Charles F. Radley) wrote in message . com...
The Hoyt/Forward proposals do not need infrastructure on the Moon.
A bit of infrastructure might be nice to collect the specimens ahead
of time and make them ready for pick-up, but that is not essential.

It could be nice to have some tinny rovers collect some rocks and put
them in a basket for pickup. I really suspect customers would pay more for
lunar rocks than for lunar dust. But to pickup the basket you need
to be accurate about where the end of your tether goes, and there is
no GPS system on the moon so far. So there is added complexity and cost.

OK. Whether that is better than zero momentum exchange depends on
whether you are interested in putting payloads on the lunar surface.
Since soft landing on the Moon using rockets is extremely expensive,
the tether method of depositing payloads is much cheaper. It would
open up new markets for lunar development.

If there were people willing to pay big bucks to land small payloads
on the moon then it would be something to do. But if you give up
60 Kg of regolith that you can sell for $250+/gram in order to lower
1 Kg onto the moon you would have to charge at least 60*250*1000 or
$15 mil/Kg. But if their are customers, sure.

In the short term we can soft land lots of infrastructure on to the
Moon basically for free (except for the cost of launch from Earth),
and build hotels ready for the tourists when they come.

Also the cost of what we give up by having that payload. We only have
a limited total mass to work with. If we put on 1 Kg of something
going to the moon and we have to give up 1 Kg of xenon, it would costs us
a lot of valuable regolith.

-- Vince