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It seems to me it would be easier to build a space elevator on the moon if only to make it more reasonable to transport manufactured fuel / other items. I wonder if anyone has considered this ? (anyone at NASA that is)
That astronomy magazine article was interesting. Particularly that it only takes 30 seconds at 250 watts to harden the lunar soil. I would love to see teams of special-purpose robots built to enable astronauts/ground-based controllers to carry out substantial base-construction efforts with minimal direct supervision. Perhaps a bunch of small highly mobile machines to collect soil and bring it to a mobil but more bulky machine to bake it into bricks, with other robots available to use the bricks for the actual construction.
I wonder if it would be possible to use a similar scheme on mars (likely with much higher power requirements due to the different composition of the soil). It would certainly give NASA a chance to build and test the concept on the moon and then send a small team of robots to mars to prove the concept there before sending a more complete team of robots to construct facilities on mars before manned mars missions.
Perhaps it would require a 'Crater' of fuel :-)
the architecture docs at nasa's exploration site indicate a plan for 21 MT of cargo to the moon, but don't indicate how they plan to do that. Seems like it would be reasonable to have a simpler stage for a cargo drop than manned. We shall see.
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