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by Kim_Bruning
2078 days ago
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Yes and no, the problem is the initial infrastructure. Travel to and from the earth's surface are your actual major cost. (And to be honest, as we all know, the downward leg is almost free; so just the travel up the gravity well to low earth orbit is your actual bottleneck) . If there was already a town/colony on the moon, they'd attract the entire current space industry, because it's simply cheaper to launch things into earth orbit from the moon. Specifically from the moon, you can probably upgrade your launch options and get launch costs low enough to compete with earth-surface to earth-surface shipping, in some cases. People somehow mis-estimate delta-v costs. Take a look at the Saturn-V for an intuition. Pretty much the majority of that towering machine was needed to get people to LEO + first leg to the moon (and most of it was fuel), but only the 2 tiny space-ships at the top were needed to get people back. |
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