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Lunar Sample Return via Tether
I believe there is more money to make on hands-on space experience than
on the Moon rocks. It would be fun for the overweight Internet generation to control a low Earth orbit satellite and take pictures of a home town. It would be even more fun to do some real work. For example, the lunavator can deposit toy size, rock hunting excavators on the visible half of the Moon so that relatively cheap terrestrial microwave dishes can communicate directly with the excavators. The Internet users would control the excavators with a mouse. They would hunt for rocks and scratch graffiti on the Moon dust. A few years ago a businessman considered launching a remotely controlled lunar buggy and renting it for "virtual" joy riders. Whatever you do, keep in mind that novelty of such space hardware will wear off quickly unless the hardware can do new things that have not been done before. I would start with finding a massive piece of junk in low Earth orbit and attaching a 100 kg Zylon bolo to the junk. The bolo has internal wires which can be used as electrodynamic tethers and power supply for a remote manipulator riding on the bolo. The wires can make lots of electric power at night, and they can control the orbit of the junk/bolo satellite. Add a 200 kg sounding rocket, a few Hall thrusters, and you can use the bolo to launch your lunavator in 20 kg pieces assembled in space with another remote manipulator. When the lunavator is assembled, you have your own, dirt cheap, lunavator bolo relay, which is Earth-to-orbit, Earth-to-Moon, and Moon-to-Earth space transportation system. |
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Lunar Sample Return via Tether
I am not sure how far you could scale this project down. I don't think
it would be too hard to get by on the 1,300 lbs to LEO of Space-X. I expect you could even get down to 500 lbs. At some smallness it gets hard to make fault tolerant tethers, but I am not sure where that is exactly. I don't think space junk is nearly the issue around Luna as around Earth. There has not been the human stuff smashing into each other and making lots of orbiting junk. You can get fault tolerance by having spare tethers, as the tethers you need for the moon are not really too heavy. You can make your tether shorter than 100 km, say 5 km, since the non-human payload can tolerate high Gs. This also reduces the chance of collision. Very small diameter Spectra lines are available. And if your last tether did happen to break, you just head back to Earth with whatever regolith you have so far. So a very small tether is probably doable. Scaling down solar power is easy. You can get small Hall Thrusters. At busek.com they have one that is just 900 grams. It might really be possible to do this project in under 100 lbs, though that would be impressive. -- Vince |
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