Dantassii
HUMONGOUS IMS shipbuilder
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2012
- Messages
- 508
- Reaction score
- 20
- Points
- 33
I have to say, this is a very cool project. I had been toying around with the idea of a lunar space station for my VSA for a long time now, and I think this would be a fine station to throw at the moon, very impressive stuff, keep up the good work!
I agree that this is a VERY cool project. One of the things I learned while I was working on my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Tennessee Space Institute back in the 1990's was that when it comes to manned vehicles in space, bigger is always more efficient. Small is great if the vehicle is unmanned, but the moment you put a man in the craft, the bigger it is, the easier it is to do a LOT of things with it. Of course, the bigger it is, the harder it is to get it to go anywhere interesting.
Hence the need for heavy lift boosters.
I'm currently building a Lunar Station in a 100km orbit around the Moon using the IMS modular spacecraft system. To date I've flown 233 missions from Brighton Beach using an XR5 and I'm VERY far away from it's final form. I estimate that it will take around 4,500 XR5 missions to build the entire station as I current envision it. Now, if I had a reusable, heavy lift, booster for the Moon.....
Dantassii
HUMONGOUS IMS shipbuilder