4 ms·
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Sim
by hparadiz 5mo ago
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
- mr_toad 5mo ago> you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
- chainingsolid 5mo agoYou would have to do at least a circulization burn no matter the budget spent on maglev.
- hparadiz 5mo agoYou can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
- shigawire 5mo agoThat is the idea behind "mass drivers" on the moon I believe. Maybe that search term helps.
- taneq 5mo agoThen when the inevitable war for independence takes place, you have the option to throw rocks at Earth. ;)
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot Rough estimates? Mass drivers make sense. I haven’t seen the numbers for just compressing and leveling regolith.