To the Moon

Emily Lakdawalla’s Planetary Society blog reported on the long-awaited discovery of a Lunar cave ‘skylight’ thanks to high resolution imaging from Japan’s Kaguya orbiter… Lunar cave sky-light from Kaguya in the Marius Hills

…subterranean caverns are a near perfect site for a large, well-protected outpost on the Moon – stable thermal environment and radiation shielding are just two of its virtues. Of course this finding synergises well with the discovery that the Moon is wetter than expected from examination of “Apollo’s” samples…

Space Review: Water on the Moon …it seems the USSR’s Luna 24 drilled a 2 metre deep hole and found the regolith to be “wet” – containing water in the parts per thousand range rather than the average “Apollo” sample levels of parts per billion. Potentially there’s a lot of water in the regolith… a lot more than we first expected, at least.

Now we have a place to stay and something to drink when we get there just how do we get to the Moon in style? Ad Astra Rocket Company is developing the VASIMR high-power plasma thruster, as reported here…

VASIMR testing at 200 kW

here too…

from MoonToday…

New Scientist: To Mars in 39 Days via VASIMR

…the last headline being the least accurate. A 39-day trip to Mars requires a 200 MW power-source and a 600 ton space vehicle (476 tons propellant/tankage, 100 tons reactor/VASIMR, 24 tons payload), neither of which is forthcoming soon. But a flight to the Moon needs just 200 kilowatts of power – inflatable solar concentrators from L’Garde could do that for about 24 kg of mass. A Moon shuttle isn’t a huge challenge if we dare!