Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Orbital Solid Booster Swapping vs Orbital Refueling

Building a Lunar Base is more economical with orbital cargo ships. A fully fueled spaceship orbiting the Earth would maneuver for lunar orbit insertion. Once the spaceship arrives the Lunar orbit, it would release its load to descent on the Moon. Then the spaceship maneuvers for earth orbit insertion. Therefore, the spaceship continuous orbiting the Earth and the Moon without landing any one of them. The idea is that you don't lose the momentum you gain by landing and the fuel is conserved. This approach requires in orbit fueling and cargo transfer. 

I had proposed the use of solid boosters. How would they be refueled? By swapping the solid boosters. Like an electric car swapping its battery instead of charging it. Each solid booster pack has several solid boosters to be fired in succession to achieve longer specific impulse and a small liquid propulsion rocket for maneuvering. A rocket launched from Earth would carry the fully loaded solid boosters as the payload. The second stage of the rocket would release the payload once it reaches the orbital speed. Because the payload solid booster has a small liquid propulsion rocket, it can maneuver and attach itself to the lunar cargo ship. The empty solid boosters that also has the liquid propulsion rocket on them would maneuver and attach themselves to the second stage of the rocket which would return to the Earth. Second stage would have unused solid boosters that would be used to slow down the rocket for safe landing. 

Carrying back the empty boosters would be the inefficient part of this idea. However, due to packing and stacking nature of the solid boosters in space, a space ship with huge thrust can be assembled in orbit easily. In vacuum there is no aerodynamic therefore placing tens of thrusters side by side wouldn't affect the final speed of the spaceship that much. On the other hand, a liquid propulsion rocket would be limited by its tank capacity. Stacking such rockets side by side, maybe???

Solid booster packing has the advantage of easy assembly in space. Therefore, planetary traveling rockets can be assembled in orbit with a mediocre size Earth launch rockets.

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