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| TAXI PORT |
| Moon bound travelers will transfer from VTOLs to Taxis in LEO at taxi ports-non-rotating zero-G space stations where taxis are also fueled up and serviced. At L2 there will be a taxi port where travelers transfer to Moon Shuttles and descend to the lunar surface. |
| Rescue Ship |
| What if taxi rocket motors malfunction and the taxi fails to rendesvouz with the cycling station? What if the taxi is stranded in the Van Allen Belts? We cannot let the travelers die! Rescue ships with nuclear propulsion and zero-boil off water for reaction mass will race to the rescue. These ships will be based in GEO so that nobody on the Earth below feels threataned by nuclear reactors in the sky. |
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| ABOVE) Large taxiport. Gallium Arsenide solar panels generate 12 MWe, but only half the time when the taxiport is on the dayside. Power during passage thru Earth's shadow comes from fuel cells. That's enough to power over 4,000 average homes. Lots of electricity is needed to light and cool the station and run the LSS. Also, power is used to reliquefy boil-off from monopropellant tanks and run ion drives or electrodynamic tethers that overcome the slight atmospheric drag at 600 kilometers altitude. A similar taxiport at L2 uses ion drives,mag and solar sails to stay on station, since L2 is a bit unstable. Large main dish tracks one of three large relay stations in GEO that links with other GEO relays, ground stations, L1 and L2 stations, and space craft in Earth orbit and in Earth-Moon space. Needless to say, the GEO relay stations have some massive antenna farms to keep track of all these other stations and ships in space. |
| Materials from the Moon are launched by reasonably sized mass drivers to 100 km. orbit. Ten ton payload modules fire cold gas thrusters (dV 15 fps) to rendezvouz with collectors at 120 km. When the collectors fill up with a few thousand tons of payload they use NEP with magnesium for reaction mass to haul loads to smelters at L1, L2 and L5 where aluminum, magnesium and LUNOX are produced. Taxiports at L2 fuel up Earthbound taxis and 1000 ton+ payloads assembled at L1 are shot down to LEO every 90 minutes with a small chemical rocket burn. Nothing nuclear approaches the Earth. |
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| BELOW) When lunar industry is advanced enough it will be possible to build huge mass drivers that launch 12m by 15m conical aerobraking containers each carrying 1000 tons of alumina (Al2O3) or magnesia (MgO) directly to LEO from the Moon's surface to fuel taxis and other spacecraft. |
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