Yet another lander concept | Lunar lander design | Forum

I have thought the same way and agree wholeheartedly.  It should definitely be possible to have the descent be almost completely automated, and we should strive for that.  Where manual intervention is absolutely necessary, it should be very user friendly fly-by-wire stuff that is, like you said, essentially impossible to crash.  Radar altimeter(s) combined with inertial navigation should be enough for this to be possible.

brmj said:Another thought: We might want to allocate some extra mass, if we can spare it, to mission specific equipment or aditional breathing gasses. It might be nice to make the design expandable as well. If our design had reasonable spots a dirivative could add one or more additional engines and the fuel tanks could be enlarged, a dirivative of our stack could do amazing things given the extra lifitng capacity of a Falcon 9 Heavy. It would be a shame to build this whole infurstructure and be unable to do anything with it other than quick flag planting missions.

This is really something we should think about.  Lately I have been feeling a little unhappy about how single purpose the CLLARE core hardware is.  I discovered a concept for a manned capsule that the Japanese floated back around 2001, called "Fuji", which never received funding and remained purely a concept.  There's a Wikipedia article, but it's clearly been written by a Japanese person with imperfect English, although you can certainly get the gist of it.  The strongest impression, though, comes from this apparent fanpage, which has a lot of wallpapers of concept art showing just how flexible a system it was.  They had separate propulsion modules, living space modules, robotic manipulator arm modules – even an inflatable viewing balloon attachment for space tourism.  Some of the pictures show what appear to be entire space stations built by docking together huge numbers of simple modular units.  I was quite impressed and disappointed it was never actually made.  In stark contrast there's not too much you can do with a CLLARE CM except send one person somewhere.  We don't have a generic docking ability with an airlock/transit tunnel to allow using the CM for transfer to spacestations, etc. (of course, EVA transfer would be possible).  Still, CLLARE was originally conceived as a bare-bones, simple and cheap as possible moon mission, so maybe this isn't surprising.  If CLLARE actually happens, then I'm sure CSTART's next manned project will be a much more flexible system.

The best approach that I can think of, for extended CLLARE applications, would be to go back to the idea of having a "hanger" module inbetween the CM and the PM.  These could be made fairly large, to store more complex landers, or multiple simple landers, etc.

I've also thought before that it may be appealing, the first time we test an automated descent of our lander on the actual moon (obvioulsy we shouldn't have an astronaut on there the first time we try it), to make use of the spare mass (which will probably be at least 100 kg if we end up using a very light weight elastic space suit and possible more if we dont) by putting a robotic rover on a modified version of the lander.  We could replace the astronaut's seat with a shielded holding bay for the rover, and replace the stairs/ladder with a ramp, and just have the rover roll down the ramp once the lander has landed.