Author Topic: Lockheed Martin proposes a mega-lunar lander: 62 tons and an elevator  (Read 44719 times)

Offline envy887

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/lockheed-martin-unveils-a-super-sized-lunar-lander-for-four-humans/

This seems like a great idea, until they actually show how much it's going to cost to launch 40 tonnes of hydrolox to the Gateway for every surface sortie. Blowing a whole SLS cargo launch just to get the mostly empty lander to the Gateway is, well, rather ambitious.

Offline speedevil

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/lockheed-martin-unveils-a-super-sized-lunar-lander-for-four-humans/

This seems like a great idea, until they actually show how much it's going to cost to launch 40 tonnes of hydrolox to the Gateway for every surface sortie. Blowing a whole SLS cargo launch just to get the mostly empty lander to the Gateway is, well, rather ambitious.

That is ... quite ambitious.

It would make some sense if they are aiming more at post-SLS, on the idea that they can get some money for development from SLS boosters in congress, and then ~2023 or so, with commercial costs to the moon crashing, they just happen to have a lander in some state of readiness.
As part of LOP-G, launched with SLS - well ...

Offline MattMason

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Hm. It seems that someone is adapting their Kerbal spacecraft designs for actual spaceflight, if you ask me.

Can someone remind them that mass still makes a difference?
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Offline speedevil

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Hm. It seems that someone is adapting their Kerbal spacecraft designs for actual spaceflight, if you ask me.

Can someone remind them that mass still makes a difference?
Until it doesn't.
If they are predicating cost of launch going down, the cost of typical one-off LM space hardware is so utterly dominant that you may end up with a cheaper vehicle by trying to do it otherwise.
This is way too heavy to be a sensible part of the solution, if business as usual is the plan.

So, either it is a ridiculously expensive fish thrown into the water on the off-chance, or something disruptive.

As to transit - you can in principle fuel this thing in nearly LEO, and it will get to LOP-G on its own, if in fact it's got ~4000m/s delta-v.
 

Offline redliox

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/lockheed-martin-unveils-a-super-sized-lunar-lander-for-four-humans/

This seems like a great idea, until they actually show how much it's going to cost to launch 40 tonnes of hydrolox to the Gateway for every surface sortie. Blowing a whole SLS cargo launch just to get the mostly empty lander to the Gateway is, well, rather ambitious.

That is ... quite ambitious.

Agreed.  Hard to make an exact judgement call.  Slightly more sane than either Gateway or the Mars Orbiting Laboratory.  I'd like more details on this lander for sure.

I kind of wish Altair had been pursued instead of Orion now from the perspective that developing a lander is trickier than an orbiter but yields a more unique and usable spacecraft...as opposed to something no different than the ISS, space shuttle, or Soyuz.
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Offline envy887

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/lockheed-martin-unveils-a-super-sized-lunar-lander-for-four-humans/

This seems like a great idea, until they actually show how much it's going to cost to launch 40 tonnes of hydrolox to the Gateway for every surface sortie. Blowing a whole SLS cargo launch just to get the mostly empty lander to the Gateway is, well, rather ambitious.

That is ... quite ambitious.

Agreed.  Hard to make an exact judgement call.  Slightly more sane than either Gateway or the Mars Orbiting Laboratory.  I'd like more details on this lander for sure.

I kind of wish Altair had been pursued instead of Orion now from the perspective that developing a lander is trickier than an orbiter but yields a more unique and usable spacecraft...as opposed to something no different than the ISS, space shuttle, or Soyuz.

A high delta-v, extended duration, refuelable crew lander that is not capable of reentry would arguable be much more useful than Orion. Especially if it had a cargo/tanker version built on the same platform. Lunar surface sorties could be conducted by refueling in LEO and returning propulsively to LEO for crew return to Earth in a commercial capsule (or even Soyuz). The tanker would effectively permit staging while still allowing full reuse of all components.

This LM lander is too heavy to have enough delta-v, but slim it down and build a tanker version also, and it could be useful even without Orion.

Offline LewisS

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My first question on reading this story was whether or not the RL-10 had that much ability to throttle and be used over and over. So happy I googled before posting. It was originally designed for a lunar lander and was used in the DC-X. Lots of restarts. It uses spark ignition so so need for tanks of TEA-TEB. I guess there's no problem there.

My next questions are about the mission duration and all that liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. They want up to 14 days on the moon before restarting those engines again. The Apollo LEM used hypergolics and relatively simple engines to reduce the probability of failure. How much risk is added by storing those cryogenic fuels for so long? Is the complexity of dealing with boil-off significant? Has anybody every had a hydrolox rocket in space for over 14 days and fired it multiple times?

I certainly see the appeal of using hydrolox. It's efficient. The path to ISRU seems less complicated than making methane on Mars. Only one chemical step - electrolyze the water and get an 8:1 (by mass) ratio of hydrogen to Oxygen. The mixture ratio for the RL-10 is 5.5 or 5.88:1, so you have extra oxygen you can use for breathing. Is that close to correct?

I absolutely love the idea of a space-ship that stays leaves earth and gets refueled and used over and over without coming back to earth. We've never really done that before. It seems like a huge advantage since it takes so much energy to get down and back up.
« Last Edit: 10/03/2018 03:55 pm by LewisS »

Online TrevorMonty

If they could loss some of that dry mass and get DV upto  6km/s, would be capable of LEO -moon leg direct. Return with ISRU surface  refuelling.



Offline envy887

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If they could loss some of that dry mass and get DV upto  6km/s, would be capable of LEO -moon leg direct. Return with ISRU surface  refuelling.

Or bring along a refuelable, reusable tanker (built on the same platform) and top off in LLO going both ways, and it can do the whole LEO-surface-LEO round trip propulsively. At least, until ISRU is up and running.

Offline gosnold

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It's kind of a lego rocket attempt: use as much off-the-shelf components as possible and stick them together. However the dry mass of the thing is unreasonable. At 22t of dry mass and 40t of propellant for only 1t of payload, it will be a long time before we have a moon village...

Offline Tulse

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Two bits in the Ars story caught my eye.  First off, they are saying the vehicle will be reusable for "five to 10 flights".  I am by no means an engineer, but I would be a bit concerned about the actual durability of something that has such low predicted reuse (and presumably has extremely limited ability to be refurbished).  I'd be dubious of doing the fourth flight of an aircraft that had "5 to 10 flights" in it.  (Contrast this with SpaceX's claims for Falcon 9 Block 5 that it can potentially be flown 5 to 10 times without refurbishment, and perhaps 100 with occasional overhauls.)

Second, LockMart also says that "A similar vehicle, of a similar scale, with similar engines could perform a powered landing on the Red Planet."  I would really like to see more detail on that, since I would think re-entry in atmosphere would require a radically different design.

Offline envy887

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Two bits in the Ars story caught my eye.  First off, they are saying the vehicle will be reusable for "five to 10 flights".  I am by no means an engineer, but I would be a bit concerned about the actual durability of something that has such low predicted reuse (and presumably has extremely limited ability to be refurbished).  I'd be dubious of doing the fourth flight of an aircraft that had "5 to 10 flights" in it.  (Contrast this with SpaceX's claims for Falcon 9 Block 5 that it can potentially be flown 5 to 10 times without refurbishment, and perhaps 100 with occasional overhauls.)

Second, LockMart also says that "A similar vehicle, of a similar scale, with similar engines could perform a powered landing on the Red Planet."  I would really like to see more detail on that, since I would think re-entry in atmosphere would require a radically different design.

Lockheed has floated a Mars lander proposal that does use RL-10s IIRC, but otherwise is rather different.



Offline Tulse

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Lockheed has floated a Mars lander proposal that does use RL-10s IIRC, but otherwise is rather different.
Yeah, in my view a vehicle that just uses the same engines doesn't get them very far, and it is a huge stretch to say their lunar design has much relevance to Mars.

Offline Prettz

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A reusable lunar lander is a great idea, but how does it get refueled? (That's always been the pain point, hasn't it?) Obviously the gateway station can play no role in that. I only see some vague gestures at an SEP tug that doesn't exist. Those take too long to reach the moon; you'd need a pipeline of them cycling between earth and lunar orbit.


Online butters

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Is there anything other than ACES anywhere near the drawing board which can be used as a cislunar hydrolox tanker?

Depending on the cryo conditioning endurance of the lander, refueling the lander in cislunar orbit (gateway or not) should be doable with ACES. The question is whether we use ACES as an expendable tanker or as a reusable tanker which returns to LEO.

In the reusable mode, ACES would probably require 4 deliveries to fill up the lander, and LEO tankers would have to deliver something like 272mT of propellant to ACES per lunar landing. If we dispose of the ACES tanker after each delivery, we'd probably cut the LEO propellant requirement in half but we'd need to build two ACES tankers per lunar landing.

Delivering propellant to cislunar orbit from Earth kinda sucks, but if we want a reusable exoatmospheric lunar lander, then there's really no better alternative. Bringing the lander back to LEO for refueling would be worse.

Offline GWH

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The white paper goes into depth on the use of a propellant depot.

This depot is totally independent of the Gateway, the Gateway being totally dependent on Orion's limitations.
Orion's mass, partially being driven by medium duration requirements drives the placement of a station in LRHO. Depots are out of the Gateway plan because SLS would be irrelevant. LEO assembly is also out for these reasons, requiring a medium duration crew capsule to operate in deep space. Enter this lander, able to support medium duration crewed missions on the surface, because no capability of landing long duration habitats is in development. These medium duration requirements drive up mass, and once more, just like Orion we have another inflexible and costly transportation system that doesn't contribute to long run capabilities and sustainable infrastructure.

Oh and yes it still needs propellant depots, which if developed initially would have made so much of the current plans irrelevant.
The tail wags the dog.

Offline speedevil

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Neglecting politics for the moment, Falcon Heavy could launch the fueled vehicle into LEO, and it can get to L1 with 1.8km/s left - it can't get to the surface.

It would be more sensible to launch at some 40 tons all-up weight, into a GTO-like orbit, and then
FH can (in partially reusable mode) throw about 20 tons to that same orbit.

It then tanks (or returns propulsively to LEO if it can't), and now can do 5km/s from 2.5km/s.
0.8 of that 5 gets you to lunar swingby, another 0.8 to LLO, and 1.8 and we're on the moon, with just about enough energy to get into LLO.

Three reusable FH launches, ($300M or so)  with one throwing fuel at L1 in a long duration tank, gets you lunar surface and back to NHRO.

This would more sensibly combine nicely with a H2/O2 tanker.
.
Due to the really heavy dry mass, it can only move half of propellant and burn back to its original velocity over 1100m/s.
BFS can do ~1800m/s - despite having much worse ISP, simply as its dry mass is 1/14th or so, not 1/3.

If a companion tanker was comparable to that mass ratio, with H2, it would be able to do more like 2500m/s, making propellant in LLO ~4* the cost of that in LEO.
It doesn't even need to be capable of reentry or landing, or handling crew. (no, propellant transfer is not well demonstrated)


Offline Lar

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Why am I left thinking this is just slideware searching for funding?

If Lockheed says they are going to build it with or without funding I'd be a lot more impressed.
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Offline MATTBLAK

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I think the design is good, though the 22 ton dry mass and cargo down ability is disappointing. And does it remind anyone else of the Bonestell/Von Braun era Lander? ;)
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