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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."

1 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. 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.