9.1 CHAPTER IX TRANSPORTATION, SCHEDULING, AND COST IX.l: TRANSPORT SYSTEMS IX.1.1: Earth Surface-Low Earth Orbit Transportation: All construction equipment for the colony must be supplied from the surface of the Earth. The initial assembly crew is transported into the low earth orbit environment, along with their initial living quarters, in order to assemble the interorbital transport spacecraft and lunar landing cargo vehicles. Materials to be used in the setup of the lunar base and the transport linear accelerator are also carried into earth orbit before their subsequent transfer to the lunar surface. The colony construction site is assembled in the same time period as the lunar base and transporter, so the entire site must be brought up from Earth in prefabricated form. This total mass, shown in the previous chapter to be on the order of several thousand metric tons, must all be initially launched into low earth orbit. Since this design involves the construction of a small colony to be used as an engineering prototype to test the habitat concept, it seems unwise to initiate development of a completely new earth surface-low earth orbit shuttle applicable to later full-scale colony development before the results of the prototype are known. In any discounted systems cost analysis, the importance of the research, design, test and evaluation (RDT&E) costs are emphasized due to the interest charged to these capital costs, carried throughout the construction period. In order to minimize these costs in relation to the earth orbital launch system, it is desirable to use as much current state-of-the-art technology as possible. An inefficiency in the use of only the current space shuttle as a launch system lies in the nature of the shuttle itself. The shuttle has been designed as an efficient, general-purpose launch system for the placement and retrieval of a wide variety of payloads.
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