January 2018
Creating a viable cislunar economy
... ACES stage equipped with a landing kit. The transportation architecture will be enabling for all other activities in cislunar space. However, the costs to emplace such an infrastructure are daunting. The easy answer is to assume that governments...
October 2018
Mining the Moon for fun and profit
... future in space is developing and utilising space resources. Space resources will anchor a robust economy in cislunar space (‘Creating the cislunar economy’, ROOM, Winter 2017). The closest and most accessible source of resources beyond Earth is the...
October 2017
Back to the future - heeding the lessons of history
... hand’ of competition and self-interest, and set in a true meritocracy, can enable Piketty’s forces of convergence. Building a cislunar infrastructure will not only generate enormous wealth; it will also create dozens of new markets and thousands...
January 2018
Maximising the economic opportunities of deep space
... capability, which should in turn make space settlement both desirable and practical. Concept image of Orbital ATK’s cislunar habitat, based on its Cygnus spacecraft. Orbital is one of six US companies developing full-sized ground prototypes and...
December 2014
Asteroid Redirect Mission: preparing for Mars in deep space
... near-Earth asteroid (NEA) in the area around the Moon. As cislunar space is similar to what a spacecraft would experience on the trip to ... SLS will launch the astronauts in the Orion into cislunar space, allowing Orion to rendezvous and dock with the...
November 2017
Reusable air-launch and the space access paradigm
... assembly and propellant transfer to enable a subsonic air-launched RLV to form the first leg of a fully reusable cislunar transportation system. Details of one such in-space transportation architecture are shown in Figure 7, [4]. Air-launch offers...
