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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."
$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.
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.
Boring in the extreme. Super boring and not funny. Also assumes every reader is a US citizen, insensitive clod.
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
FYI:
h ighway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Super
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.
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.
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
"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.
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.
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