| Construction Shack |
| Ares rockets with about 70 to 80 tons payload capacity will orbit finished hard modules and their ETs. Might need advanced SRBs to get the ETs in orbit, about 250 miles up, and a stretched ET with more propellant and a main engine module with four RS-68s or SSMEs. |
| Ares ETs and hard modules will be assembled in orbit at a manned space station by space walking humans and robots. An nuclear electric ion drive module will propell the finished station to L5. It will take months to spiral out to L5. Humans will travel to the shack in CEV based rocket systems like those envisoned for our return to the Moon. Inflatable modules will expand the living and work volume of the construction shack. Mass drivers on the Moon will launch ten ton modules with silane/LUNOX thrusters for precise navigation and deceleration into mass catchers stationed at L5 that were propelled there by NEP. The modules will contain metals refined on the Moon, finished parts for robots and machine tools to be assembled at the construction shack, raw regolith ( for radiation shielding and more) and glass-glass composites all produced on the Moon. The modules will be cannibalized. The construction shack will be expanded with these lunar materials and products until large scale building of habitat, robots, SPS, asteroid mining ships and fleets of ships to Mars is possible. At the construction shack, solar energy is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. There will be no need to shut down during the long lunar night, although lunar industry could eventually build rings of solar power plants around the Moon for constant power. Large rotating trussworks of steel, titanium, aluminum and glass-glass composites will be built, similar to giant reflector telescopes with foil or sheet metal parabolic reflectors aimed at the Sun to heat solar furnaces that materials are smelted in. Rotation for "artificial G" will be necessary to keep molten materials from floating away; however, there will also be weightless platforms where containerless manufacturing is applied. Robots will be teleoperated by crews in the shack and by Earthside control centers around the world linked by internet for 24 hour a day production. |
| David A. Dietzler, 2007 |
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| Completed construction shack with "artifical gravity" and rotating trusswork with work platorms and solar furnace. Robots will be stationed on work platforms while crew teleoperates from safety of the pressurized ET and inflateable habitat. The station will be maintained in a Sun facing attitude for solar thermal power at all times. Power will come from a nuclear reactor to avoid solar panel orientation, though solar panels could be installed around the rim of the rotating trusswork. Completed parts will be moved to hub of station behind primary parabolic reflector and then towed into space by orbital maneuvering vehicles with small rocket thrusters. Robots will construct power relay satellites and SPS in space then they will be towed to GEO with solar electric mass drivers. In GEO a small space station will exist for maintenance of power satellites. Partial gravity on work platforms will allow ladling of metals into molds, "gravity" operated drop forges, and ease of handling plates of metal and silicon panels. Extruders will form bars, rods, tubes, pipes and wires that will be spun into cables. Sealed chambers will allow vacuum deposition of metals and carbonyls. The chambers must be sealed so that precious CO gas can be recovered before moving parts into space. The trusswork will be made of steel from the Moon transported by silane and LUNOX burning rockets and/or shot to L2 by lunar massdriver then hauled over to L5 by mass catchers. The steel frame members and bolts will be finished on the Moon, launced to L5 and assembled there. Assembly will involve bolting up the truss then welding it together with CO2 lasers. The regolith bag will be made of woven glass fibers from the Moon. The reactor will come from Earth. Crews will have partial Gee for health, sleeping normally, cooking normally and using bathrooms normally. An ET is about 27.5 feet wide and 154 feet long, though Ares ETs might be stretched a bit. This allows about 15 decks ten feet high each with 594 square feet per deack and 12 ETs will have a total of 106, 858 square feet. If we dedicate 1000 square feet per person the c-shack could house 100 workers in spacious comfort. About 300 square feet per person could be devoted to living quarters and the rest to work stations, exercise rooms, recreation rooms, a cinema, a bar and restraunt, and sick bay as well as solar flare shelters and storage rooms. Hard modules atop the ETs and inflateables will add even more space. Most food will be grown on the Moon and propelled to L5 by rockets and/or mass drivers. There could be some hydroponic farms in the c-shack for fresh salad greens and berry bushes. Perhaps some flowers too for their beauty and fragarance. The decks would access each other with simple rope ladders. Some inflateable modules will have windows for observation chambers. The decks would not be welded up. Inflateables stored in modules atop the Ares rockets would be depolyed in the ETs for quick erection of the station's interior. Plumibng woudl consist of plastic hoses preinstalled in the interior inflateables. A mechanical air purification system would be used and drinking water will be condensed from the air and purified while waste water would go to a SCWO-Super Critical Water Oxidizer to break all the wastes down into CO2, and a water solution of fixed nitrates and other salts. This sterile solution would be used as hydroponic solution and be distilled into clean water for laundries, showering and real flush toilets. All the comforts of home. See: LIfe Support Systems |
| To Space Colonies |
| To Lunar Manfuacturing Index |
| Trussworks surrounding initial shack can be used as fixtures for assembling large wheel trusswork. Dish must be moved. ROMVs and robots on shack trusses will do assembly of the big wheel with some human EVAs |