Space Tug to the Moon and Beyond

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."

Comments

Cheap

[hoka]

$20 million is pretty darn cheap for the whole thing. I'm a little curious about the methodology for getting the thing into space. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this one of the teams that was competing for the X-Prize, which puts things into "space" but not into an orbital launch? Did the group adapt its developed technologies to a more rugged device that will be able to reach a large distance to the moon, or is the IPS that great at moving things into space?

Man some days I really wish I had would have pursued a degree in rocket science.

Re:Cheap

[helioquake]

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).

Re:Cheap

[tonsofpcs]

L1 is the first Lagrange point of the moon, the point between the Moon and the Earth where the perceived gravitation is negligable

Re:Cheap

[toddbu]

Well, I think that there are three factors here that contribute to the low cost. First, there are no people on board to have to worry about. I don't know exactly how much NASA is spending to have the shuttle sitting on the pad right now, but I hear the term "millions" coming from the news media. One or two delays in manned spaceflight can come pretty close to paying for an unmanned mission.

The second factor at work here is that the private space business doesn't have all the overhead that a government operation does. Look at Spaceship One. No fancy designs, no high priced systems. Just some good old fashioned engineering and the kind of "can do" attitude that made NASA great in its early days. You know how NASA got the first Mercury space capsule to the pad? A sheet of plywood, an old mattress, and a pickup truck. That would never happen any more, and not necessarily because it's a bad way to transport a space capsule. Many of NASA's expenditures are to support its contractor constituency and its public image.

The third and final factor is that NASA's primary mission these days seems to be searching for ET. Don't get me wrong - Missions like Cassini and the Mars Rovers are great, but not because NASA thinks that there's probably life out there somewhere. The commercially funded missions are focused on doing real work that people can understand, stuff like going to the Moon and mining it for its resources. The missions to the outer planets represent a kind of pseudo-science that doesn't have any practical day-to-day benefit. This, of course, is always the problem with science, since the public is less interested in what makes something tick than what it will do for them. But riding the coat tails of ET isn't a good way to approach it. I can tell my friends that Deep Impact will help us understand how comets work and what might need to be done in order steer them away from Earth if they're on a collision course. If we happen to get some great science along the way and better understand the makeup of comets then that's a good thing. It's much harder to make the case that spending billions for Cassini is in the public interest just because there might be life on Titan.

What's ironic is that the ISS was sold to Congress and the public based on its practical merits, yet it can barely support the two occupants currently stationed there. The cost of doing research on board ISS is prohibitive since it is supported primarily with manned flights. When commericial enterprises can start to leverage space at a reasonable expense then that's when we'll see the promise of all the engineering advancements that a weightless environment can provide.

Radiation envrionment

[lorelorn]

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.

Re:Radiation envrionment

[ArbitraryConstant]

Send cargo on the slow boat, then send people in a faster craft when everything they need has arrived.

Re:Radiation envrionment

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

I will take a guess that the answer to your first question is implied by your second question.

Apollo, if it carried radiation instruments, only gave us 3-day samples. We still need to know likely worst-case values over the course of a year. Then there's enough data to correlate with sunspot numbers and whatnot, to make forecasts possible.

Why stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

85% Why stop there? If it can get to 1.5 million km at L1 why can't it go all the way to 0.35 million km for the Moon? It seems to me that almost any spacecraft that can get to the 85% of the Moon in a finite period of time can make it all the way to the Moon.

Re:Why stop?

[MGDruss]

"85% Why stop there? If it can get to 1.5 million km at L1 why can't it go all the way to 0.35 million km for the Moon? It seems to me that almost any spacecraft that can get to the 85% of the Moon in a finite period of time can make it all the way to the Moon" Because the purpose of this mission is to travel using the Interplanetary Superhighway. This is a very slow, but extremely energy efficient (almost energy free) way of travelling round the solar system. There are Lagrange points between any two bodies in the solar system, these are points where the gravitational forces balance out. Some of these are stable, but some are not and drift around. The Interplanetary Superhighway is the map of these drifting ones. Basically, you get to a drifting Lagrange point and you are on a highway which connects to any place in the solar system! It just takes ages to get anywhere though.

First Prime Factorization Post

[2*2*3*75011]

85 = 5*17
2008 = 2*2*2*251

Re:The moon is a liberal myth.

[terrox]

Boring in the extreme. Super boring and not funny. Also assumes every reader is a US citizen, insensitive clod.

SmallTug?

[matt21811]

Ha, could they come up with a more porno sounding name?

Of course it comes as no suprise that "Andrews Space is a privately held company"

Hall Thruster

[Planetes]

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.

Re:Hall Thruster

[Migraineman]

A PPT is a Pulsed Plasma Thruster. Usually a stick of somthing like Teflon is ablated by a big spark (i.e. the plasma part) and ejected out the back. The reaction force moves you in the opposite direction.

An MET is a Microwave Electric Thruster. You use microwaves to ionize a gas like Xenon and accelerate the ions out the back with a high-voltage electric field grid.

Here's a nice table of thruster technologies with specific impulse characteristics.

"off of"

[Anonymous Coward]

If we can't spell correctly here, can we at least make English the primary language.

Interplanetary Superhighway

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Modularity

[James A. D. Joyce]

How well could it interface with existing satellites? It's all well and good having a cheap and convenient space cargo ship, but it's pointless if it only attaches properly to a particular proprietary type of craft.

Naming rights...

[John Seminal]

Someone made a joke about calling it SmallTug. I laughed and thought "well, at least it is not called TugJobs", which got me thinking in my usual demented manner...

Ox might have a copywrite lawsuit. Or maybe they would settle for Ox advertising on the side of the spaceship "Brought to you by BangBro's".

Come to think of it, I am suprised Nasa has not sold naming rights yet. If Comisky Park can get 30 million to change their name to US Cellular Field, how much could NASA get to change the name of their space shuttle from Challanger to the Anhiser Bush Space Shuttle. Maybe they could even get a 30 second advertising clip of the astronauts floating in space drinking a cold refersing budwieser. Nike could be next in line, having an exclusive contract to provide all NASA shoes. It could be like what Nike did 10 years ago in college basketball when they paid 7 or 8 of the best college program universities millions of dollars to force their athletes to wear nikes as part of the uniform. When the final 4 came, all 4 universities were in contracts with Nike, and all the basketball players were wearing Nikes. Every 3 hour basketball game was free advertising for Nike, as every basketball player was wearing their shoes. Well, in space, there is only one team, and it would be lots of free advertising when they are interviewed. Maybe Kennith Cole could pay a couple million to help design the artistic look of the new space suits.

With all the different industries that could contribute money for advertising, I wonder how much NASA could get per year? 100 million dollars? 250 million dollars? If you were IBM and you were smart and wanted to keep OS/2 alive, what better advertising could you have then to have your OS used on the space shuttle, to have advertising?

Just imagine every chemist, biologist, mathematician and physicist in the USA, dressed in Nike Moonwalkers, wearing Kennith Cole Space Pleather jackets, with their IBM laptops running OS/2, and drinking a coca-cola before thier big exam or buisness meeting because it is what the astronauts drink before a critical mission.

Re:well.....

[barc0001]

Seeing as how it's from the Inquirer and all... IF it's real

You DO know that the Inquirer site in question is NOT the American rag that prints things on the Sasquatch's illegitimate chilrden with Elvis and all that, but rather a British IT/Tech news site?

The fake news mag is spelled Enquirer, not Inquirer. And technically it's known as the National Enquirer.

Just tired of explaining this to people when they ask about an article from the Inq.

Re:faster speeds for transport?

[radu124]

that doesn't really work, even when you are in orbit, in order to increase your distance from the Earth you have to spend energy (the gravity still exists and pulls you down).

So getting in orbit is just the first step. Escaping entirely from the earth's gravity is something different. I think this is the distinction between the first and second "cosmic speed". (I am not sure whether the term is correct in English)

I am curious if you could use alternate types of energy to get into orbit. I mean, there are solar powered planes, it's true they only work in the atmosphere, but as you climb, the atmosphere grows thinner and you could increase speed. If the transition between atmosphere and void is really smooth what would stop you from slowly increasing the speed until you switch from gliding to orbiting.

Does anyone care to do the calculations what speed you would need in order to start orbiting at the edge of atmosphere? (My guess is that it probably is too high, but it was just an idea)

Re:The moon is a liberal myth.

[mederjo]

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.

Replying is troll feeding, and frankly I'm surprised you spent the energy to type all that out ( unless you're trying to be funny ), but I was reading this just the other day :

Romeo

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon

by William Shakespeare, 1597

...if such a person even existed, that is...

Re:The moon is a liberal myth.

[mederjo]

Ah, but the great joint-Iluminati/World Zionist Consipracy/Knights Templar/other causers of tinfoil hat wearing group responsible rewrote all the books, obviously.

Ah, of course, how foolish of me.

Also, tides are caused by special machinery installed for the purpose. ;)

Let me get this straight though - could the giant balloon not also be responsible for the tides ? No need for what would have to be some impressive machinery ( and associated maintenance, salt water can be rough on things ) if it were just a side effect of the giant balloon flying about. Those nuclear reactors would probably have a quite a bit of mass after all.

We also have the moon here in New Zealand. We're pretty liberal already, and we don't have the same issues with guns as the US does, so what could the liberal moon pilots be looking for ?

Food for thought...

Another badly titled article.

[hey!]

When somebody says "Space Tug", what comes to mind is a space version of the powerful little boats that haul barges around -- something compact which moves a lot of mass around.

The system, however, is called "Small Tug". It only costs $20 million becuase it's a technology demonstration. It's not meant to be practical, it's meant to show that it's principles of operation are sound and to get experience with the technologies involved. It's still a bargain, but if we could build something that would haul tons of cargo to L1 for 20 million, we'd be half way to Mars.

Larry Niven will sue ;)

[rsynnott]

A worrying number of space systems were invented by science fiction writers...

Re:faster speeds for transport?

[FooAtWFU]

The term in English for "cosmic speed" is, I believe, "escape velocity" - the speed required to escape from the Earth's gravity and go off into the cosmos, I suppose. The alternate term, however, is fascinating - what language is it from?

Re:The moon is a liberal myth.

[arbitraryaardvark]

Short version of parent: "That's no moon!"