There seems to be increased interest in them, perhaps as a result of the Augustine activities. One point the article doesn’t make about the earth-moon points is that they provide continuous windows for access to and from the lunar surface.
5 thoughts on “Lagrange Points”
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I think the significance of the ‘superhighway’ is overplayed for human travel. Sure, it doesn’t take much of a kick to move from L1 to L2, but the travel times are a bear. Am I missing something?
I hope I’m not being overly pedantic, but this statement from the article
Lagrange, or Lagrangian, points are great swathes of space where the gravitational acceleration from the Earth and the sun are exactly equal is not true, and neither is the claim that the L points are gravitational lowlands.the acceleration at Lagrange points is not zero, but rather it has the value required to establish a circular orbit about the barycenter of the two-body system. The collinear points L1,2,3 are “saddle” points and are unstable. Spacecraft that “live” at L2 are actually in Lyapunov or halo orbits about L2.
The article seems to be focused on the Sun-Earth Lagrange Points, not the ones in the Earth-Moon system so it makes sense as there are no advantages in the Sun-Earth Lagrange points for lunar operations.
I think the significance of the ’superhighway’ is overplayed for human travel. Sure, it doesn’t take much of a kick to move from L1 to L2, but the travel times are a bear. Am I missing something?
I doubt you are. Still humans aren’t the only payload and for bulk, radiation-immune materials, the “superhighway” is probably going to be the cheapest way to move them around the Solar System.
The “superhighway” is actually quite important for humans if you’re shipping cargo from one Lagrange point to another, where humans are living, or are going to live. With proper operations planning, speed is not an issue in this case.
The relevance of Earth-Moon Lagrange points to this is that while there are huge scientific advantages to Earth-Sun L1 and L2, you really don’t want to send people there if you don’t have to. Since the delta V to go back and forth between Earth-Sun L1/L2 to Earth-Moon L1/L2 is miniscule, you bring those science facilities back from the former to the latter, and do human servicing of them there.