A reusable, electrically propelled spacecraft would open up vast realms of deep space to human exploration. The interactive below provides a walkthrough of the proposal laid out by Damon Landau and Nathan J. Strange in "This Way to Mars", an article in the December 2011 issue of Scientific American.
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6 Comments
Add CommentIs there a reason (other than cost) not to deploy a fleet of the ion tugs shown in step 6 and push more of the chemical rocket boosters to the ship? The addition of more rocketry to shorten the time of the trip to/from the asteroid would be offset by lessening the consumables needed for the longer trip.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBoskyO: Once you get past earth orbit escape velocity of around 11.25 km/sec, higher thrust doesn't reduce your travel time by nearly as much as being able to thrust constantly at a ISp.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn incomplete analogy, but a somewhat useful simplification, isn't to see the planets as gravity wells, but as places where you need to pole vault over an obstacle, before being able to do a leisurely stroll for the rest of the trip.
If people really want the formulas for how this works, I can point them out to you, and you can run the math yourself. Unless you really need thrust in the hundred milligee range to minimize transit times in the Van Allen Belts, the sweet spot for interplanetary travel are around 5 milligees applied for hours and days on end, or being able to do about 500 milligees for hours and days on end. Intermediate thrust ranges give you a wider selection of possible transit windows, but don't start reducing your transit time until you can apply them for more than 90% of the trip.
The thing I would recommend for modifying this mission would be a rotator station in a high high eccentricity orbit around the earth that had a perigee that's roughly at ISS height, and an apogee that's past the Van Allen belts, and gradually add habitat modules (and an electrical field generator to deflect particles) and rendezvous with that for transporting personnel and consumables to the actual mission module to the Moon and asteroid.
The use of electromagnetic thrust allows this sort of thing to be done; doing it with chemical rockets is much more expensive.
KWBurnside: I apologize for how inexperienced I am with this topic - it is truly fascinating to me - and I wish to know more - but how realistic/unrealistic would it be to outfit the moon with a pulley system that simply pulls a spaceship in to a higher orbit?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI could visualize small rockets ferrying a tether from the surface of the moon out to meet a spacecraft, hook up to the spacecraft's hitch, and pull it closer to the moon and by doing so achieve a higher orbit.
well at least its a start. my fantasy is somewhat rather close to this but one of my concern is that this will cost like hell. and also i believe one ship is not enough, maybe they will need a stand in or a back up for lets say a disaster? an apollo 13 kind of disaster will not be lucky when it involves a 6 month trip out and in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand any news about the electric propulsion anyone? watched about it on a documentary few months back. looks rather promising
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe rockets could be used serially if longer, lower thrust is the most efficient. Whatever the propulsion be it electric, chemical, my point is put the necessaries on the vehicle to thrust for that 90% of the trip time and minimize the transit time. The cost of consumables will be huge, so make the transit as short as possible.
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