New Mars Forums

Of course. Be we'll go broke trying to do that launching from earth.

NASA will never keep those engineers and scientists alive long enough unless they learn to live off the land and pay their bills.

They can, should, and must exploit the land enough to get what they need for themselves, and prove methods to the industy to follow.

If they can make something to soften the blow to tax payers and thus support more exploration, they should do that to.

The idea is to put all your pieces together in orbit first, hopefully through an automated process.

That way the "cost per mission" is just the cost of the launch of your fuel and your CEV.

So if we spend $2-3 billion to put together a reuseable "lunar shuttle", and launch 4 missions a year at a cost of $250 million (for launcher, fuel module, and CEV refit) each your already down to $500-750 million total cost per mission, which will continue to go down with each additional mission. Thats already cheaper than Apollo, and with time will be half the cost of the shuttle.

And consider that thats for Spiral 2 missions (4-15 days moonside). I figure well do those for a couple years untill we develope the base modules. At which point we can still use the above system to shuttle crews back and forth for Spiral 3 missions, were we may have the capability to create fuel on the spot, which will reduce our Earth launch costs.

Well hell, if thats all were going to do we might as well call it Apollo 18.

By transit module I mean a larger life support hab so half the crew don't spend 3 days in hell staring at there fellow crewmates rear end like in that 5 man CM you provided. Its will most likely be inflatable.

And by lunar surface equipment I mean mostly hand tools, at most a rover. A rover doesn't need to be anymore advanced than a glorified ATV with a tows trailer.

The more that we have to throw away it the more money we have to spend for every mission, and the bigger rocket we'll need (aka more money).

I'd rather spend a little more money now so theres more less we have spend for every mission and more to spend for toys.

Well thats one team, and I hope the next one does better.

I'm looking at the popular mechanics piece, and the pic is a little better than the Space.com one. If anyone has a place to host it I can post it.

I'll give it two things. Its reusable and it can carry 6 people.

But otherwise I can't find any other redeeming values. A spaceplane is useless in this case. We already spend 6 months in the ISS and land in a Soyuz capsule, why would there be an issue after spending 3 months max in lunar gravity?

The propulsion module, transit module, and Lunar Access Module should all be reusable, a parked in a suitable orbit. That way the only thing we have to launch for each early lunar mission is the CEV capsule, and a disposable fuel module of variable sizes for various missions. That way we can land multiple times in a single go if we choose to. What remains is equipment for use on the Lunar surface. Perhapes it can be stored in compartments on the side of the transit module.

Those who live in glass houses should change their clothes in the basement.

To er is human. To really screw things up, you need a computer. 

Joking aside, it looks impressive. Although I'm not sure how they intend to resupply on on the lunar surface.

Also, I'm a little nervous about anything not water cooled, having heard a lot about early Soviet sub reactors.

If I'm not mistaken, the first one third scale Bigelow module is due to be tested by the end of the year.

While I'd love to see a fire lit under the butt of the development of these modules and give it the publicity it deserves, to do a sort of life boat mission for Hubble, the greater portion of such a mission would be the method to attach the module to the station, massive external gyroscopes to support the now dead weight of the Hubble and that of the station, rockets to maintain the orbit of the station, and of course the various needs of a station itself, like the solar panels, life support, external work areas and air lock, and probably a robotic arm.

A tall order in only a few year, and all of it based on a technology that few with the money to do it are willing to spend it.

And the biggest part of any private effort would be getting to this contraption they created. At best, the winner of Americas Challenge won't be ready to go untill after 2010, and I don't think it could make it to Hubbles current orbit anyway. Granted if we managed to do all the things mentioned above, changing the orbit shouldn't be a big problem.

It would more than likely need NASA funding, and as a result the cost would more than likely top the cost of a Shuttle mission. But would it be worth it? We'd be testing a number of handy technolgies needed for the VSE, ranging from the inflatable, to Zero g grappling, to station sized electric ion engines. The Hubbles life would basically be extended indefinately, opening up as many servicing missions as we care to do. And the science would continue, limited only by the size of the mirror.

The downside is even if we managed to put it together in time, the earliest servicing mission would be after 2010 when either the Americas chanellenge winner is sent up, if it can get there, or the CEV, if the project is funded by NASA. So there will still be a gap. And if NASA were to fund such a project there'd be no  chance the HOP would ever get off the ground. If the hubble itself as a design can withstand the changes needed to stay competeitive with technologies bound to come out, such as the wide angle part on the HOP is an open

If we bake enough oxygen out of the soil, we could use that.

Just not in a confined area, or near sparks.

Yeah, if that pans out a whole herd could be put to "sleep", put on a slow IV drip for norishment, and launched. If the crew gets hungery, they can wake one up and slaugher it.

Of course theres the not so small manner of getting these critters adapted to their new g when they wake up.

They should feature whatever helps our intepid explorers be comfortable and accomplish their mission, in that order.

As for our unmanned probes, we should include apologies for the first radio signals to be transmitted from Earth... Hitler at the 36 Oylmpics.

Instead of looking at random stars, why arn't we studying stars in order of their distance from earth? Just a pet peeve of mine.

In any case, if we can travel 41 light years, we can move the astroids to the most ideal place in the system and build massive space stations out of them. That system will be inhabited someday.