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Space Tourist Trips To the Moon May Fly On Recycled Spaceships
thomst writes "Rob Coppinger of Space.com reports that UK-based private company Excalibur Almaz plans to offer commercial lunar-orbital tourist missions based on recycled Soviet-era Soyuz vehicle and Salyut space stations, using Hall Effect thrusters to power the ensemble from Earth orbit to the Moon and back. The company estimates ticket prices at $150 million per seat (with a 50% profit margin), and expects to sell about 30 of them. Excalibur Almaz has other big plans, too, including ISS crew transport, Lagrange Point scientific missions, and Lunar surface payload deliveries. It expects to launch its first tourist trip to the Moon in 2014."
Trips around the moon for paying tourists in 2 years time? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not that it makes any real difference to me, I guess... It's not like I have a spare $150 mill.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Several articles on /. along these lines recently. Humble beginnings from actual private space enterprise closely followed by science fiction from space charletons.
No? Okay. I'm easy going. I take no for an answer. I understand.
Soooo, I have this great bridge I want to sell you.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
When you're 60+ years old and have tons of money, but not that much time left on the Earth, you don't really worry so much about the risk of such ventures. Just being able to go to the Moon is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and only a very tiny number of people have even done it so far. Just like it wouldn't be that hard to find people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars despite the extreme risk there, I don't think they'll have much trouble finding people willing to take the risk of traveling to the Moon in a recycled Soviet capsule (esp. if they can do it once successfully to prove they can do it). The question is if they'll find enough people with the required funds willing to do it; however, the Russians didn't have that much trouble finding rich people willing to spend $20M on a ticket to LEO, so it's possible.
It would be interesting to recast the entire "space tourism" options in terms of energy costs.
I wonder just how much of the "costs" are associated with each element of a trip (not specifically the trip in TFA, which I haven't read). I would guess that energetically, getting out of the earth's gravity well is going to cost by far the most - beyond that (and presuming infrastructure is in place - a big presumption I know), energetically things become easier. I guess what I am musing on is whether space tourism might become something slightly feasible if there is a destination.
Beyond weightlessness and seeing the earth's curvature, super rich paying to go to the ISS has always seemed like a bit of a dead-end. The ISS isn't for tourists, and so you are left with a mental image of them floating about on a science base just throwing money about the place and everyone else going "who is the dick with the cash on-board?". Now if the destination was specifically a tourist moon base and you went there for a month then it might seem like it had some sort of point. Fixed costs to get that running would be crazy - but ongoing costs might be affordable (energy from PV, moon H2O providing water & oxygen - with full reclamation).
Wishful thinking that it would ever happen or that I would have enough money to do it if it did exist! But better to do that than what has been allowed to happen in society over the last 30 years of sitting about becoming a reductive species, more interested in silly gewgaws than true hope and progress.
Hall effect thrusters are NOT high thrust devices. He's not talking three days to Luna, more like three MONTHS.
Each way.
Somehow, I'm not seeing this as terribly practical.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
For those unfamiliar with the tradeoffs: Hall effect thrusters make fairly efficient use of the reaction mass - about 2000s, compared to ~250 for solid rockets or ~300-400 for liquid rockets. That means a considerable increase in your delta-v - since you only need 10-20% as much reaction mass for the same impulse, you get 5-10x more delta-v. Great, right?
The trouble is that you need a power source. Liquid fuel rockets just burn the propellant. Hall effect thrusters (and other ion thrusters) need a power source in addition to the propellant.
This is a great tradeoff for stationkeeping on satellites - you only need tiny amounts of thrust, so you can easily generate enough power using solar cells or a RTG. Thus the very efficient use of reaction mass means a much longer useful life, or more useful payload in your satellite for a given launch mass, etc. It's just plain more efficient.
But this isn't like that. They seem to want to use them to perform the Hohmann tranfer. That means having a very high thrust for a short duration - not just because you want to get there more quickly, but because it's much more efficient than a long continuous burn.
They're talking about 100KW. That seems low. Ballpark 5000 newtons of thrust... Compare to the Apollo command/service module at ~90,000 newtons. Thus they'll need a fairly long burn at that power. How the heck are they generate that kind of power for a long duration?