From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 09:27:37 MDT
It turns out Spike is pretty much correct.
The great god Google turns up this link:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/v2app2.htm
which is part of "The Apollo Spacecraft -- A Chronology".
NASA SP-4009.
The total mass of the spacecraft is ~40,000 kg, nearly 42%
of which is fuel.
The lift capacity of the Saturn V into NEO was ~118,000 kg.
I'm guessing the difference is in the requirements getting
into a lunar injection orbit. Either that or the Saturn V
was way overengineered for its job since at the time they
started designing it I think they hadn't developed the
lander concept which saves you a lot of fuel not having
to take the command module down to the lunar surface and
lift it off again.
Given a Shuttle/Delta V lift capacity of 20-23,000 kg, you
could do it in 2 missions. If you could harvest the fuel
in space you could probably do it in 1 mission.
If done with Shuttle missions, 2-3 would run you $800M-$1200M at
the going price of $400M/mission. I don't know if Boeing
has released prices for fully configured Delta IVs yet.
You ought to be able to come close to doing it with a single
Energia mission, whose price in 1993$ was ~$110M.
So I'd tend to agree that we could go to the moon if we
wanted to, especially if one used the ISS as an assembly
station.
But you have to get the costs down. That means either space
based harvesting of fuel, preferably from NEOs, as has been
suggested or you have to get the Earth-based launch costs
way down.
I tend to disagree with spike in that I don't think small
people will buy you that much. And we certainly aren't
going to have the ability to engineer them anytime soon.
My bets would be on real AIs before munchkins.
Robert
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