Modest Proposal - Common Interplanetary Booster

On Sep 11, 11:06 am, Williamknowsbest wrote:
On Sep 10, 3:27 pm, Ian Parker wrote:



On 10 Sep, 20:13, BradGuth wrote:

On Sep 10, 10:55 am, Ian Parker wrote:

On 10 Sep, 18:01, (Rand Simberg) wrote:

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:50:02 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Derek Lyons wrote:
I feel that we should concentrate on low cost to LEO for the following
reason. Once you are in space you can use the highly efficient ion
propusion motor.

So long as you don't intend to actually go anywhere or do anything, an
ion motor suffices.

Assuming you have the time to wait while it accelerates you, you can get
out of LEO with a ion engine.
You'd have to weigh (literally) the savings in conventional propellants
versus the food and water you'd have to add for the crew as they take
several weeks or months to get on their way to their destination.
Certainly this is something that favors a very small crew, or a unmanned
spacecraft.

Or sending the vast bulk of the mission with an ion engine, and
sending the crew to catch up with it and rendezvous in an Orion or
similar after it's reached escape.- Hide quoted text -

This is (in effect) the quadrature idea. The ion motor would in fact
have to set up a quadruture between Mars and Earth. The first trip to
Mars would be supplies and be unmanned, while the second would be
manned. If you were just sending people off with supplies to last just
a few days you would not need that large a rocket. It would be a lot
smaller than Apollo. Your reentry spacecraft would make the initial
(unmanned) quadrature trip.

I believe that would be the cheapest way to get a manned expedition to
Mars. There is someone who has advocated using Martian CO2 + sunlight
to produce rocket fuel. Beauty of quadrature. This could be done and
tested BEFORE the manned expedition starts. They would know whether
the refueling would work or not.

- Ian Parker

Mars is simply a faith-based kind of inert failsafe planet, and that's
the only reason its getting our hard earned loot invested.

There's 260,000 ppb more h2o within the crust of our Selene/moon than
Mars has to offer. Go figure why there's not multiple underground
lunar habitats as of decades ago.

I am not sauying that a manned expedition to Mars is a good idea, far
from it. I am saying though that if you do, the way NASA is going
about it is completely wrong.

- Ian Parker- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

You want to do it as cheaply as possible, and as quickly as possible.
This means leveraging it off of another program that actually makes
money for the launch provider and vehicle developer, and leverages
common mode design, which is what my original post was all about - and
spreading it around to other folks who are already spending money on
space launch, is a good idea too. Kennedy had that idea, but died
before he could implement it.

JFK did not just go and die on us, but instead was systematically
whacked because he was getting ready to pull those ARPA(DARPA) and
NASA plugs before it was too late. We're talking about 10,000 plus
high level and/or cushy civil service jobs and nearly countless others
with nifty benefits that were put at risk as long as JFK was alive and
intending to pull their plugs.

~ BG