From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 00:03:15 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>At 10:06 PM 7/13/02 -0700, Spike wrote:
>
>>There is no point in hauling wings and wheels all the way out to the moon,
>>where they are useless. A much lighter payload released from the
>>shuttle might be taken to the moon.
>>
>
>Hang on, is this true? All the work of designing and building and
>road-testing the Orbiters has been done. If the only additional costs
>involved in hauling wings and wheel to lunar orbit are some extra fuel
>tanks and robot refuelers fired up to LEO, maybe that's cheaper than
>starting all over? I assume a LEMish thing would do the dropoff to lunar
>surface. Any way to estimate these numbers fairly easily?
>
>Damien Broderick
>
Yes, it would be absurd to take a shuttle to the moon to save the
cost of engineering a lunar lander. Back of the envelope calc: it
would take almost 3 shuttle loads of fuel to take a shuttle to the
moon. Each launch is 4E8 USD, so around a billion dollars of
fuel to do that. We can design and build the right vehicle cheaper
than that.
Ill sharpen these calcs later, right now I gotta get ready for a
breakfast with a local extropian then a motorcycle ride. spike
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