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The goal is to have a vehicle that can land on another planet and return to the surface of Earth in working condition with the only requirement as add fuel. On
by maeon3 14y ago
The goal is to have a vehicle that can land on another planet and return to the surface of Earth in working condition with the only requirement as add fuel.
One hindering factor is the problem of having enough fuel to make the return trip.
There needs to be a better technology to harvest the massive amounts of energy wasted when decelerating from 30k mph to 1 thousand mph during re-entry. Convert the heat to a usable fuel. So we store the fuel needed for re-entry in the velocity of the craft.
A heat to fuel converter. If we could be 100% efficient at this, we would land with just as much fuel as we left to get into orbit.
- homeomorphic 14y ago> There needs to be a better technology to harvest the massive amounts of energy wasted when decelerating from 30k mph to 1 thousand mph during re-entry. Or, in the case of of Mars, we can focus on in-situ resource utilization [1]. Zubrin's Mars Direct [2] is built around this, and there are some immense fuel savings to be had [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_resource_utilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_resource_utilization [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct [3] Zubrin, Robert. The case for Mars. Free Press, 1996.