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by cpgxiii
843 days ago
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The Apollo LEM, only craft that has ever taken humans to the moon's surface, weighted somewhere around 20,000 kg after landing. Since it only ever operated in space and lunar gravity, it could be built with a much higher mass fraction than a rocket launched from earth requires - greater than 30%, where a Falcon 9 in comparison has a mass fraction below 5%. Even then, the LEM structure had to be built incredibly lightly. While the LEM structure could obviously be lifted by crane and survive launch and docking stresses, those were are at designed points in the structure. Without the presence of a crane capable of lifting the whole LEM, righting an LEM that had landed on its side would have been effectively impossible. Basically all of the modern proposed manned lunar landers are considerably larger than the LEM, and thus considerably heavier. For comparison, a craft built for earth launch mass fractions probably wouldn't survive falling over in the first place - when that happened to a Falcon 9, the whole rocket simply exploded. |
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