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Space Tug to the Moon and Beyond

Posted by Zonk on from the toot-toot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Andrews Space and SpaceDev, a contributor to SpaceShipOne, are building a cargo transport called SmallTug to travel to the Lunar L1 point using a Hall Thruster and running off of solar power. The final craft will be capable of attaching to and transporting satellites 85 percent of the way to the Moon for use in interplanetary missions. The launch date is scheduled for 2008 and it is being designed to be quite inexpensive. The Inquirer has more details."

4 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Radiation envrionment by lorelorn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The first phase of the mission will be to measure the radiation environment between the Earth and the Moon.

    Part of me wonders why this is not known in detail already, plus wouldn't it be related to solar activity anyway? Solar wind and so forth.

    They need to know though, since the trip to L1 will take 1 year.

    I remember reading in New Scientist about a decade ago now that you can get to the moon using very little energy- an orbital transfer basically. Catch is, it takes 2 years to get there.

  2. Hall Thruster by Planetes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It should be noted that hall thrusters are extremely low thrust but high ISP. This is effectively an ion drive. This means that it's a relatively slow method of doing orbital transfers. In other words, don't expect this thing to drag the satellite L1 in half an hour.

    Our nanosat-4 project is using a PPT although we considered an MET for a while. We have to maintain formation flight between three satellites which requires high thrust/quick burn types of thrusters. That burn time ruled out the MET.

    --
    Planetes
    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
    "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
  3. Interplanetary Superhighway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FYI:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Superh ighway

    Once you are on the IPS, it's pretty easy to get where you want with very little fuel expenditures. What I'd like to know is how they plan to get there, since in order to get to the nearest IPS orbit, you probably still need amount of energy, comparable to what it takes to get into LEO. SpaceShipOne lacked the capability to get into LEO by a long shot.

  4. Re:Cheap by helioquake · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The company's objective is to research, design and develop this "smalltug" spacecraft, not (guessing based on the articles) about putting it into the orbit. Marshall would most probably pick up the bill for that.

    Nontheless, $20mil is a good price tag. I hope Andrews Space does succeed in this (and if it doesn't, well, then it won't get any more than the first phase of the 1.25mil budget...I wish we can slap this kind of thing onto NGST, Boeing or TRW).