RECENT WORK ON USE OF LUNAR MATERIALS FOR SPS CONSTRUCTION Gerard K. O'Neill (presented by David Criswell) Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 During 1978 and 1979 several workshops were held under the sponsorship of the Space Studies Institute. Experts in spacecraft design, rocket mission optimization, mass-driver design, chemical processing and industrial automation took part in these workshops. An earlier version of the results will appear, in part, in Astronautics and Aeronautics. The purpose of the workshops was to extend in a logical way the concepts of scaling and bootstrapping(T) studied earlier in 1976 and 1978 NASA studies on the use of nonterrestrial materials.,3) in the latest work, the group examined first the question of how small an operation could be mounted that would make a productive use of the lunar materials. In that operation, as far as possible only equipment being developed by NASA for other purposes would be used (the Shuttle itself, without augmentation, small crew workstations, spacesuits, a conventional chemically-powered orbital transfer vehicle, and whatever minimal tele-operators are developed in the course of the next few years). The interim conclusion of the workshops was that the most cost-effective scenario would be one in which a very small installation would be put on the Moon: a mass-driver plus a small chemical process plant plus a small "machine- shop'' would be located in orbit, probably about 2/3 of the way from the Earth to the Moon. By "machine-shop" is meant a partially-automated, general purpose production facility akin to a small job-shop, capable of making most (but not all) of the components of additional, identical mass-drivers, processing plants and machine-shops. On the basis of present-day commercial experience in industrial automation, the group concluded that it would be practical for the machineshop to be about 90% automated. Many of the machines could be directed by human operators on Earth through radio and TV links, with local microprocessors to handle decisions only on a 3-second time scale, that being the round-trip time lag for signals between Earth and Moon. The machine-shop would produce only relatively simple, repetitive, heavy components. All electronics and all high- precision machine components would be brought from the Earth. It was calculated that the system would have the capability of replicating about 90% (by weight) of its own components. Its human crew would be mainly for maintenance, especially for those unusual or unforeseeable failures that could now be repaired by remotely-directed equipment. The lunar facility would be installed by humans originally, but might only be revisited occasionally thereafter. Its purpose would be to export (via mass-driver) material to the space facility, and also to replicate locally additional mass-drivers, process plants and machine-shops. To establish a baseline for the "leverage" gained through the use of lunar materials, an optimized electrical design was completed (3/80) for a small lunar mass-driver. The design took advantage of the six years of design development that have now gone into mass-drivers>3) Copyright 1980 by Gerard K. O'Neill, for the Space Studies Institute
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