Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 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. Re:The moon is a liberal myth. by terrox · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  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:Why stop? by MGDruss · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  5. Re:well..... by barc0001 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.