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Dreams of the Moon

Posted by michael on Sunday January 4, 2004 @08:33AM from the green-cheese dept.

Iron Sun writes "The Mars Institute has an interesting overview of past studies into sending people to the Moon, ranging from pre-Apollo plans by Werner von Braun to NASA studies just a few years old. Timely, given the continuing speculation as to whether the US is going to go back."

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Re:Some things to think about... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-04 08:55 · Score: 5, Informative

If you haven't, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (by Robert Heinlein) for a war between a lunar colony and Earth story...
Re:Aerobraking for the moon? by BabyDave · 2004-01-04 08:56 · Score: 4, Informative

Reading through the rest of the article, it seems the aerobrake would be used at the end of the return journey, to get the LOS into a similar orbit to the ISS - i.e. in Earth's atmosphere.

I suppose they could try using aerobraking to adjust the orbit around the Moon, but given the extremely low density of its atmosphere (someone more knowledgable can provide numbers ...), it's unlikely that it would have a noticeable effect.