I just ran across the Powerpoint of the talk I gave at Space Access last year, that Jon Goff (who moderated the panel) put on the web. It might be of interest, given current events. Particularly the potential business models.
[Sunday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has links to the other presentations on the panel.
Rand, does anyone have an audio of the talk as well?
Henry Vanderbilt probably does, but I don’t know how he might make it available. I don’t know how good the talk would be — I was running a 101 degree fever when I gave it…
I think depots are one of those things where the people that just don’t get it will claim to have been supporters of it all along once established. Can you imagine arguing if gas stations along the highway are a good idea?
As an easy alternative, instead of developing a fuel depot for Moon missions, how about launching a much larger Lunar payload into LEO first, ( as it would probably be just equipment that can orbit for substantial amount of time without degradation) and then launching a Lunar Lander and much more fuel for such, second; docking them in LEO, and then going to the Moon? You wouldn’t have to launch the infrastructure to deal with long term fuel bleed-off, and would be able to get much more payload to the Moon, with far fewer Landers.
Harmon, it depends on what you want to do in space.
If all you want to do is go once, then your two launch idea makes sense. It was an option considered for Apollo. However, if you want to actually expand humanity into space on a large scale, then you need to use a different approach.
If you have fuel depots. then you only need to launch whatever hardware and people you need as far up as the depot, and then they can refuel or perhaps transfer into another vehicle more suited to the LEO to L1 journey. And then whoever can get up to that fuel depot can go to the moon from there, or to an asteroid, or Mars, or wherever they want.
And by making it that much easier to get to wherever they want to go, more people will go, and the price will come down. Look at what has happened to computers and cell phones over the last 25 years – it could happen for space, too, but not by followin the one-shot single-point-of-failure NASA model.