Snidely scribbled something like ...

David Spain scribbled something like ...

Snidely wrote:

SciAm has supplemented the December article with a Skype Interview
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-space-landau-
strange



Any comments?

Their plan involves a capsule ride to a deep-space ion-drive ship,
used in a kind of powered-shuttler scheme, and to support EV tasks
with pods. Test flight would be to an orbit above the lunar south
pole to control a fleet of robotic explorers.


I suppose that's an interesting 'test'. But robotic lunar exploration
is just as easily accomplished from Earth as it is from an "ion-drive
ship". And likely for a whole lot less $$$ and for a lot longer
period of time.

The idea of doing the lunar trip is to do a shakedown cruise near
enough to earth for safety, and the robot control is just a serving of
gravy on top of the rest of the mission objectives.

It is also approximately the starting point for the Oberth maneuver for
the trip to Mars or 2008 EV


The trip to 2008 EV is the centerpiece of the baseline plan, hence my
original subject line.

So nobody here has been reading about the Landau-Strange-et-alia plan?
(Merryl Azriel apparently has, with a brief mention in Space Safety
Magazine at
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2...ics-engineers-
explain-roadmap-crewed-mars-mission/)

Here, by the way, is a set of slides at seti.org providing some
additional data, with Jonathan Battat as an additional author:

http://tinyurl.com/LandauSEPslides


There a short list of potential asteroid destinations at ESA:
http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/MAD/p...-MAD-2010-(DPS)
Humans2Asteroid.pdf

Those two seem to come together at
http://targetneo.jhuapl.edu/pdfs/sessions/TargetNEO-Session3-Landau.pdf




/dps