From: vince@offshore.ai (Vincent Cate) Newsgroups: sci.space.history,sci.space.policy Subject: Re: $5M Moon Rock Stolen From Malta Museum References: <373a0bc9.0405211458.bde154a@posting.google.com> <1ywsc.624$ZM1.488@bignews6.bellsouth.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.88.68.230 Message-ID: <9186edb5.0405250856.eeee6b9@posting.google.com> henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer) wrote in message news:... > The old Luna sample-return missions maxed out the Proton -- in fact, they > needed Proton performance enhancements and reduction of safety margins -- > to return a few hundred grams of sample. Yeah, the hardware was pretty > crude stuff and we could do better, but it's a demanding mission, and > trying to squeeze maximum payload out of a mass-limited system will get > expensive fast. If you use an ion-drive to get to lunar orbit and back and a tether to collect samples, you don't need to be so mass-limited in your design and you could bring back much more lunar mass. The difficulty of having the end of the tether pickup some samples seems much less than having a couple more rocket stages. An easy mass margin design should be much easier on R&D money. A Falcon-V would be plenty of LEO launch capacity. Yes, you would still need to plan on some failures. Having a few backup winch/tether/scoop modules seems easy. Even loosing all your tether lift ability after lifting only 1/10th of your expected 10,000 Kg would still have you well ahead of the non-tether design. So if your goal is to make a profit returning lunar samples, using a tether to pickup samples from orbit seems a less demanding mission that will return far more product. -- Vince PS For future keyword searches: "Lunar Sample Return via Tether"