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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."

2 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. 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.