9.26 payloads per second, controlling the velocities of several buckets simultaneously, and also calculating and applying the necessary velocity corrections to reach the extremely critical velocity accuracy requirements, all within the 80 millisecond residence time of the payload within the two velocity adjusting sections of the track. However, if these and other engineering problems can be overcome, the transport linear accelerator represents one of the most promising of new space transportation concepts, and is baselined in this report on the strength of that promise. IX.l.S: Interlibration Point Transfer Vehicle: Even with the extreme accuracy requirements placed on the transport linear accelerator in the previous section, it still does not exhibit sufficient accuracy to place the payload masses at libration point LS reliably. It has therefore been proposed to launch the masses of lunar material to the unstable libration point L2, behind the Moon as seen from the Earth. At this point, the masses would be collected and shipped to LS. Regardless of their ultimate destination, the masses from the TLA must be caught and retained during the accelerator duty cycle. For this mission, the use of an interlibration point transfer vehicle (ILTV) has been proposed (9.11). In the current conceptualization, the ILTV looks like a large, conical bag made of Kevlar fabric. The only rigid structure is in the rim of the catching bag; this is a hoop 200 meters in diameter. Steel cables are strung across the face of the opening, formi~g a grid pattern to decelerate and break up the incoming lunar masses before their impact on the Kevlar bag. The entire structure is slowly spun, providing a pseudogravity to prevent the mass particles from floating back out of the mouth of the ILTV in weightlessness. In order to maintain station at L2 in the face of the orbital instability and the added impulse provided by arriving masses, some means of propulsion must be provided. Heppenheimer has proposed the use of a rotary pellet launcher, which uses part of the incoming mass as "propellants", accelerated to exit velocity by passage through the hollow arms of a rapidly
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