$5M Moon Rock Stolen From Malta Museum

In article ,
Vincent Cate wrote:
If you use an ion-drive to get to lunar orbit and back and a tether to
collect samples, you don't need to be so mass-limited in your design
and you could bring back much more lunar mass. The difficulty of having
the end of the tether pickup some samples seems much less than having
a couple more rocket stages...

However, the tether deployment, spin-up, and control are basically research
projects, whereas rocket stages are fairly well understood. You're right,
the results probably would be better, but it's a longer-term project with
higher risk.

And ion from LEO to lunar orbit has bad problems with the Van Allen belts.
Rad-hard electronics and solar arrays are very hard on the budget (and on
the schedule, because of availability problems).

An easy mass margin design should be much easier on R&D money.

Only if it doesn't incur major new R&D problems of its own. Much the best
way to provide generous mass margins is just to buy a bigger launch. (One
possible way of doing that without moving out of the Molniya class -- it's
a big step up to Zenit 3SL or Proton -- would be to launch Molniya from
Kourou. I don't know if the Soyuz pad there will be fitted for this, but
it might well be.)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |