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Advanced Concepts / Re: Spinlaunch on the Moon
« Last post by lamontagne on Today at 11:39 am »-Spacing was more or less based on wind turbines. They probably wouldn't be all aligned in the way I showed them.A small array of spinlaunchers close to a lunar factory. Would need to have more for the full output of the factory..
The towers are 25 m tall, 1.5m in diameter, about 1 cm thick aluminum. The rotors have a radius of 25m.
These ones have 150 hp motors and launch 50 kg every two hours, 500 kg per hour for the array, ot about 2000 tonnes per year.
Spinlaunch without the box, basically.
Awesome! I like the detail of the factory. And I also appreciate the brown tones in the regolith. Too many space artists just assume that moondirt is just pure grey.
Two things come to mind:
First, though this is likely artistic licence, the spacing of the launchers so close to each other and the rest of the plant. A failure on these things is likely to be catastrophic. Close to release, a broken tip is going to hit the ground at ~2000m/s and then kick up a spray of regolith at similarly high velocities, not to mention a LOX payload rupturing. So you want a good deal of space between them. Or use fewer, beefier ones with higher mass at lower rates?
Second, aluminium might not be the best choice since it has quite a coefficient of expansion and has lifetime fatigue issues (the arms will be rotating quite fast, with a wobble when the payload has departed). On that note, I expect you'll have some really DEEP anchoring. How are tensegrity towers for this kind of application? You could make the tower a tripod, pentapod shape or whatever because you just need to clear the arm (failure modes notwithstanding).
For the last mile problem catching, you could probably use some kind of electrostatically charged net. Payload has a positive charge, and so does the net except near the middle.
-Perhaps just stronger arms. The arms mass is a kinetic energy storage and the energy is not lost. so they can be more massive with little energy cost.
-The tower will probably have problems with whiplash. Need to redesign I think. I used wind turbine towers, but I think I'm wrong on this. There's probably a reason why the large Spinlaunch is on the side of a mountain!