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by ChuckMcM
4713 days ago
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Well it depends of course. One of the dependencies is that space is a pretty harsh environment and building systems with high redundancy and checking (especially man rated systems) is pretty important. That said, all of the computation and more that was available in the lunar excursion module can be implemented in triple redundancy within the size and power budget of a mac book air, including 9 degree of freedom IMU. Dr. Brooks at MIT built a lander system with "modern" (at the time, Pentium-3 level) chips for DARPA and it was pretty straightforward, at a talk I attended he suggested that by this time (actually by 2006) he expected the whole package would be less than $100 worth of parts. The only 'big' thing left between Earth and a regular visit to the Moon is some sort of on-orbit refuelling capability. Once you knock down that particular challenge lifting the parts into LEO which can then be refuelled and sent to L1, and then refuelled again and sent to the moon and back to L1 to top up, and back to LEO. There are existing systems for all the other pieces [1]. [1] So there are liquid fuelled engines, that can be refuelled under gravity, but none have been tested which can be refuelled in zero G. A proponent at ULA proposed a gas pump that would spin creating the necessary force to move propellant from tank to tank without the need for an additional non-dilutive pressurizing agent. But it is a fair criticism that we don't have zero g refillable engines yet. |
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Its sad how the steam of space exploration and development got dispersed after Apollo. If it had continued at that rate who knows where we would be now. Perhaps even a small station at L1 with small crew... Thankfully I feel we might be in the beginning of a new renaissance thanks to lower costs and open source tech. Somehow the $/lb needs to drastically get reduced. There was a space cannon called project harp that could launch 180kg up to 110 mi. Its a shame they stopped it because the costs per kg are insanely cheap. Perhaps with todays robotics components could be accumulated in orbit.
Long story short, we need zero G refueling and zero G assembly. Next gen space vehicles need to be assembled in orbit.