Mark Whittington has a largely reasonable assessment of the implications of the Democrat takeover for space activities. I’d just add (though it’s not really associated with the takeover per se) that one other interesting potential change in the new Congress would be the return of Jim Sensenbrenner to the House Science Committee, as ranking member (he would have presumably gone for the chairmanship if the Republicans had retained control). As noted in comments at the link, he will be much more skeptical of NASA, and welcoming of commercial activities, than many of his predecessors.

In this post, Jay Manifold comments:

…my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that LH2 can only be stored for a few hours.

It is incorrect. There’s no intrinsic limit on how long you can store LH2. It’s just a matter of how much weight and power you’re willing to devote to insulation and/or refrigeration systems.

In fact, the concept I have for a cis-lunar infrastructure is a series of combination depots/tankers. You’d have at least four of them (probably five, for backup purposes). One would be sitting in LEO, being filled up. One would be sitting at L1 to provide propellant for returning and lunar-bound vehicles. There would always be (at least) two in transit, one heading toward LEO, and the other heading toward L1. When one arrived, the one already there would depart to the other destination.

I’m envisioning them with plenty of power, both to run high-Isp thrusters, and to keep propellants continuously chilled. You might be able to do it with solar (though the panels would take repeated beatings going through the Van Allen belts). The obvious technical solution would be nuclear, but that’s probably still politically unacceptable, despite its reasonableness.

[One further evening thought]

If they were powered with nukes, there’d be plenty of power to not only keep the hydrogen chilled, but to actually crack it from water. The marginal cost of doing so, given the initial investment of the nuclear tankers, would be pretty low, and it could dramatically affect the cost of delivering the propellants to orbit, since they could be delivered in a more dense form that doesn’t require cryogenic tankage, and is much safer. Of course, the vehicles would either have to operate at a stoichiometric ratio of 8:1 oxygen/hydrogen (which is suboptimal in terms of specific impulse–ideal is 6:1)) or throw away or find other uses for the excess O2.

Here’s an article from the Guardian about space tourism. It’s not too bad, but I found this irritating (as I often do these sorts of things):

…even if space tourism will benefit science done in low Earth orbit, such as launching satellites, it is unlikely to help scientists reach further out into the solar system, says Kevin Fong, a leading UK expert on space medicine at University College London. “It is extremely unlikely that a successful, profitable space tourism operator would find a workable business plan for the exploration of the Moon or Mars,” he said.

Why in the world would anyone expect an “expert on space medicine” to know anything about “workable business plans”? Why is it that journalists think that they should go to scientists and researchers to learn about this stuff? They’re often the least knowledgable.

This is a paper that I wrote a couple years ago, and that I never really found a place to publish. But then, I remembered that I’m a bloggist, and have a place to publish things that no one else wants to publish. It seems like it’s a useful discussion right now, given that NASA has announced their lunar architecture plans, and things seem to be somewhat in ferment.

Continue reading Earth-Moon L1 Considerations →

Jon Goff has some very good suggestions for getting NASA on the right track.

Jeez. I have to find out via Clark Lindsey that my latest take on NewSpace in The New Atlantis is now on line.