From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 11:37:38 MDT
On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Technotranscendence wrote:
> I bet the Shuttle Orbiters could be retrofitted with gear to land. I
> tend to think this would be risking an orbiter though.
Its silly to send an orbiter down to the surface. The main
emphasis would be to use the SSME to send the craft from
Earth into lunar orbit and get the crew back (unless we
were setting up a lunar shuttle service). From the looks
of the figures I cited earlier, the LEM mass was about 60%
of the payload capacity of the Shuttle. Don't know whether
it would fit in terms of linear dimensions, but since the
Shuttle is providing some of the modules in the ISS which
people live within I would presume something could be
designed that would fit within the shuttle bay.
> It's not like there're an endless supply of them. There are
> only four currently and no others in the works...
No, but we have built a copy before. The expertise for doing
that is a lot fresher than the expertise for building a
Saturn V or an Apollo command module.
I don't know what the Shuttle's maximum service duty is
(its sometimes weather constrained), but I would bet
you could launch one a month if you wanted to use them
to ferry up enough material to rapidly build a lunar
colony in the next decade. So you could probably put
~100,000 kg of support material on the moon in a year
if you had the funding.
But you might be able to double that if you had a good
strategy for semi-automated fuel harvesting at the ISS.
Robert
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