Another new lander concept | Lunar lander design | Forum

Post edited 11:09 am – January 18, 2010 by Luke Maurits

Here's a slightly evolved, slightly less extreme version of my other lander proposal.  It's still designed to dock to the nose of the CM via a ring shaped structure at its top:

It's another circular, three legged design, but:

• The infeasible, equally sized spherical tanks have been replaced with "bullet shaped" tanks (cylinders with hemispheres at the ends) which hold fuel and oxidiser with a separating bulkhead.  The motivation between having several small tanks like this is that we can use a symmetric configuration of them for descent and then drop those empty tanks before ascent to reduce mass.
• The chair has been brought back and the pyramidal "cage" structure has been made a lot shorter because of it, which should eliminate concerns about poor balance due to a higher centre of gravity.
• The tanks, engine and avionics are now all confined to a short cylindrical frame which can have covering panels around it to protect these parts of the lander from micrometeoroids – this is not a concern if the lander can ride in a hanger which can be covered until just before decsent, but if the lander is stuck on the CM nose in the open the entire trip, it's vital.  I don't know what the "lids" and side panels (not pictured) could be made of – something as light as possible, obviously.

Thoughts?

EDIT: If  we wanted, we could have a transparent plastic shield covering one third of the cage area to help protect against dust thrown up during landing.