Giant water trucks could be used to transport water from the pole to these tube cities. The real technical challenge would be how to provide artificial Earth gravity. The only obvious solution being the circular “sleeper train” and that would require a very large tube indeed.

Considering the lack of a few million in funding kept Mr. Brown from making Skylab a true wet workshop by utilizing the second stage of the Saturn V fixed to the converted third stage dry workshop, it must be appreciated Apollo certainly had the potential for reuse. Replacing the first stage with a pair of ocean recovered monolithic solid boosters or better yet pressure fed boosters would have made the Shuttle a poor investment in comparison. The boosters would have been reused and the second and third stage used as a workshop with more interior space than the ISS (in one launch).

Six launches per year from 1973 to the present could have sent around 240 ISS size platforms up and with a station useful life of ten years perhaps 60 stations at a time in orbit with a capacity of 600 astronauts at any given time. A purely hypothetical number because so many thousands of people cycling through tours decade after decade would serve no useful purpose. Actually the same holds true for the one station now going around and around.

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Not the one that NASA is planning — it’s in the wrong orbit (too high) and is not configured to accept multiple vehicles. Like the ARM before it, it’s merely another “make work” project.

But NASA could easily accelerate the development of this technology by commissioning the ULA to modify NASA’s EUS into reusable orbital transfer vehicles and water storing and propellant producing orbiting depots.

Commissioning the developed of extraterrestrial crew landing vehicles with IVF technology would allow crewed spacecraft to be used on the Moon, Mars, and as a crew transfer vehicle between LEO and the rest of cis-lunar space.

The ULA and SpaceWorks have already proposed much larger LOX/LH2 orbital transfer vehicles using IVF technology that could transport humans to the orbits of Mars and Venus.

A Study of CPS Stages for Missions beyond LEO

http://www.sei.aero/eng/papers/uploads/archive/SpaceWorks%20CPS%20Study%20Final%20Distribution.pdf

Marcel

No. It is more than that and the cost will continue to climb as the space station to nowhere nears the end of it’s life. This is really what “we all know” and the fact presents NewSpace with a huge problem: where will the money come from to build a new station? Answer: It will not come because no billionaire tourist industry is possible when a station costs billions per year. LEO space stations are an incredible waste of money. The Chinese are following us but whether they will figure out what a losing proposition they are remains to be seen.

The NewSpace fans think a blow-up tent like Bigelow is proposing will be cheap and easy and they are dead wrong. The missions the SLS can perform are the missions the falcon and falcon heavy will never be able to so those missions of course do not exist for SpaceX fandom. But SLS missions to create a cislunar infrastructure do exist and will be funded. As soon as the Mars fantasy and the soon-to-die-of-old-age ISS are retired.

Regarding landing on a PGM asteroid impact on the Moon, as Dennis Wingo wrote just think having large amounts of PGMs would do for your portfolio. Or lower the cost of platinum so we can produce fuelcells for cars in large quantities and the internal combustion engine goes bye-bye. Anyone working on identifying such sites?

FYI, other day an 11 year old asked me what she can do to become one of the people working on Mars. I said there are no real programs to send people to Mars, and forget about Mars (always 20 years into the future). I suggested consider the Moon, and for starters read the books by Spudis “Value of the Moon” and Wingo “Moon Rush” as these give overall aspect of the Moon along with concepts how to do it.

The problem with that approach is it requires bringing all propellant up from earth for a substantial period of time and the earth has a much deeper gravity well than the moon.