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Completely new CLLARE design.

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7:22 pm
March 11, 2010


Luke Maurits

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Post edited 7:25 pm – March 11, 2010 by Luke Maurits


DenisG said:

First of all, this new design looks pretty awesome and cool. This simple, round design is very pleasant to the eye! I would love to see that fly; that half a percentage point can tip the complete endeavour from success to failure is the norm in engineering — no reason to dump the whole concept.


I'm glad you like it! I certainly did not mean to suggest dumping any concept because of the high sensitivity to tank mass fraction.  I just wanted to point out that this figure was much more important to the feasibility of the mission than one might intuitively expect.  I don't think we are in serious danger on this ground, though.  The page I linked to suggests that 0.9 is quite achievable, and that certainly gives us enough CM mass.  Even 0.85 should be possible.  I just meant to point out that we should pay close attention to this issue and do our best to push the mass fraction up as high as we can.  It wouldn't make much sense to dump this concept because of the issue because this issue will reappear for any other concept.  Importantly, it absolutely applies to the "old" CLLARE concept, whose empty PM mass figures are probably absurdly low.

DenisG said:

Second, simple errors in calculations are found easily if people can double-check them. They can't, if only the results are available.


Yes, this is very true.  I know I've been a little bit counter to the spirit of openness with this work by just posting results.  It's honestly just because the code that makes these calculations is embarrassingly ugly, since it started as a minor hack of the old CLLARE fuel code and just grew wildly as needed.  I will try to make a clear and tidy version with comments and post the code soon so people can look over it and we can get some more certainty that they are correct.

DenisG said:

Regarding the control panel issue: I imagine that we could make the control panel a device like a computer keyboard, that can be attached to various places in the CM with a snap-in, magnetic or bayonette mechanism, either cable-bound or connected to the main computer via bluetooth. Maybe the wireless solution is even better since it allows us to encapsulate the devices more easily, which is important because of the very dangerous moon dust. Regarding the chair: Maybe something like a g-force matress can be used, which can be put to various locations in the CM. Same thing with belts: add enough lags everywhere and you can not only strap yourself to every wall, but have lots of handles and grips and can even tether yourself, or tools, to every convenient point.


These are all ideas which are well worth looking into as we refine the design of the CM interior!

DenisG said:

I have a problem though: there was barely any talk about manufacturing. Round tanks are very difficult to make and are definitely not cheap. And "new welding techniques" are damn expensive. REALLY expensive. This all means we're far away from giving the construction plans to some random workshop, and light years away from welding your personal CM in your garage.


It's very true that I've neglected manufacturing.  I really know very little about this.  The new welding techniques that the paper I linked to discussed (friction stir welding, which is very popular at SpaceX) were mentioned in the context of increasing cryogenic storage tank mass fraction above 0.9.  I think 0.9 is more than enough for our needs, so certainly there is no need to entertain the concept of expensive new techniques there.  "Normal fusion welding" will be adequate.  Is this expensive?

As for the CM itself, it's hard to say much about manufacturing when we don't yet really know what it will be made from.  Is there much difference in the difficulty of making a sphere out of metal (say, aluminium) and some sort of composite material (like carbon fibre)?  If we can make the CM entirely out of composite material it would probably be worth doing to save mass, although I suppose if we can get it light enough with aluminium we may as well do that to keep things simpler and cheaper.  If we went with aluminium, perhaps we could make the pressure vessel itself something like an icosahedron (but with more than 20 sides)?  This would involve welding together a large number of small, flat plates.  This would be tedious, I guess, but probably straightforward from a welding point of view?  This would still offer a good surface area to mass ratio and I imagine still be a more efficient pressure vessel than a perfect sphere.  We could then coat the outside of it in something to make it perfectly spherical for the sake of getting a sphere's aerodynamics.  I don't know what one might use for this coating, some kind of rubber, perhaps?  It should ideally be something that is a very good thermal insulator.  Anyway, this could all be nonsense, I am not a manufacturing person so I am just making up stuff that sounds good to me.

On a more general note:  I think it would be fantastic if as much of the CLLARE hardware as possible could be manufactured in a well-equipped home garage, I think this should be our ideal, but I also realise that this is probably not going to be completely possible.  Some things are just going to need more sophisticated manufacturing.  We should try to keep things simple wherever we can, but also not be afraid to use more exotic techniques if it is necessary for the sake of the project.  I would rather see us get to the moon using expensive stir friction welding than not be able to get there at all because we insisted on cheap and easy oxyacetylene!

EDIT:  Maybe this is a better example of the kind of shape we could use.  It is made from a combination of "small" triagles and "large" pentagons.  The pentagons could be good places to incorporate portholes and enry/exit hatches.

Starting a new TA job next week, might be busy for a while! Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

9:11 pm
March 11, 2010


Luke Maurits

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Post edited 9:12 pm – March 11, 2010 by Luke Maurits


Some quick mass calculations: the table below shows the mass of an aluminium sphere for a range of diameters and thicknesses.

  Diameter (m) 1.0 1.25 1.50 1.75 2.00 2.25 2.50
Thickness 5 mm 41.99 65.74 94.79 129.14 168.80 213.76 264.01
  10 mm 83.14 130.43 188.32 256.81 335.91 425.61 525.91

As regards diameter, I think 1.75 m is probably closest to the mark, based on the fact that Voshkod capsules fit 3 cosmonatus in 2.3 m and that there was a 1.6 m proposal by Convair for the USAF's MISS program.  As for thickness, I have no idea what this should be, but 10 mm (1 cm) feels to me like it should be more than enough for holding cabin pressure in.  This comes to 256.81 kg.  If we work with 800 kg total CM (which is the lowest result that has seemed likely so far), this leaves about 550 kg free for heat shielding, seating, batteries or fuel cells, electronics, breathing gas cylinders, etc, etc.  Note that the structural mass drops quite steeply to 129.14 kg for a 5 mm thick sphere, so we could potentially have a lot more mass than this if 10 mm is too thick.

Regarding getting a proper value for thickness, two thoughts:

  1. The Wikipedia article on pressure vessels has an equation for the mass of a spherical pressure vessel in terms of the vessel's volume, the pressure difference between the inside and outside (which for us will be about 1 atm), the density of the material and "the maximum working stress that material can tolerate".  I wanted to use this formula but I didn't know what value to use for maximum working stress of aluminium, because it seems there a lots of different kinds of stress out there for different situations and I don't have enough engineering knowledge to choose the correct one.  If someone does know, and they could use this formula, that would be great.
  2. I wonder if rpulkrabek could easily get an answer to this using his sophisticated engineering software?

Of course, there is not just the pressure issue to consider, there is also the degree of radiation shielding the CM structure can provide, and then there is the issue of heat shielding.  On the heat shielding front, one of those lunar return ballute papers referenced above claims:

"because the vehicle using the ballute decelerates at much higher altitude, the peak heating rate for return to Earth from the moon is two orders of magnitude lower than for entry using a traditional lunar return capsule, negating the need for an ablative thermal protection system"/p>

This is extremely relevant to our interests!  Not needing ablative heat shielding could save us a lot of mass.  Of course, we then have to investigate the mass of our ballute system.  Those two papers have lots of information on the proportion of a total spacecraft mass which a ballute system will represent for various reentry conditions.

Starting a new TA job next week, might be busy for a while! Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

11:02 pm
March 11, 2010


brmj

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Sorry I've been conspicuously absent from this. The laptop failure and a new quarter starting have made it difficult, but I should have tried harder. Anyway, on to my assessment of the plan.

I think a lot of really good work has been happening here. I think I like the spherical capsule and ballute combo, though the manufacturing details could be a problem. The problem of lander component positioning and the resulting center of mass difficulties worry me a bit. If you want a really crazy idea on that topic no one has thrown out yet, we could perhaps have the whole legs, tank and engine assembly pivot, with an explosive bolt or similar holding it in front of the capsule for launch and the trip to the moon, and then having it swing into position below the astronaut's feet with a little spring-loaded catch or something once we are ready. Beyond that particular lander orientation concern, another one is how it impacts the plan to use "D Blocks" for the landing. In the position they are currently depicted in, the maneuver needed to make that work could be at the very least a bit disconcerting and provides an additional failure point in the case of RCS difficulties, for example. Yet another idea, this one dealing with both problems: Mount the lander components in line with the D Blocks, mating the capsule to the D Blocks with a frame component distinct from the things that would be jettisoned. Lean the seat a little, so that it is more like sitting in a low recliner or lounge than lieing flat on one's back. Land with the seat still in that configuration, requiring the astronaut to just deal with it. The lower gravity should prevent working in that position from being so very uncomfortable or difficult as to render this infeasible.

The stacked D Blocks worry me a little, and I think your mass fraction estamites are too optimistic. As you split it up into more tanks, you get more tank wall and the mass fraction gets worse? If not, you may want to redo the math taking that into account. Also, I think the numbers you say are for a launch vehicle with considerably larger tanks than ours. Mass fraction improves with tank size, since tank mass scales aproximately with surface area.

Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)

3:00 am
March 12, 2010


Luke Maurits

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brmj said:

Sorry I've been conspicuously absent from this. The laptop failure and a new quarter starting have made it difficult, but I should have tried harder. Anyway, on to my assessment of the plan.


Welcome back!  It's great to have you around again.

brmj said:

I think a lot of really good work has been happening here. I think I like the spherical capsule and ballute combo, though the manufacturing details could be a problem.


Do you refer here to manufacturing the spherical CM or the ballute? Or both?

brmj said: The problem of lander component positioning and the resulting center of mass difficulties worry me a bit. If you want a really crazy idea on that topic no one has thrown out yet, we could perhaps have the whole legs, tank and engine assembly pivot, with an explosive bolt or similar holding it in front of the capsule for launch and the trip to the moon, and then having it swing into position below the astronaut's feet with a little spring-loaded catch or something once we are ready.


I had thought of that general idea, i.e. having the way the landing gear is attached to the outside of the CM facilitate "swivelling" it around, but I was worried about whether or not it would be possible to do this and still make the attachment sturdy enough to survive landing forces. It is something to consider, although I suspect making the internal configuration (seating, etc) either similarly rotatable or just otherwise more orientation-neutral could be simpler overall.

brmj said:

Beyond that particular lander orientation concern, another one is how it impacts the plan to use "D Blocks" for the landing. In the position they are currently depicted in, the maneuver needed to make that work could be at the very least a bit disconcerting and provides an additional failure point in the case of RCS difficulties, for example.


I have been meaning to draw a diagram detailing the entire flight plan, showing the maneuvers involved in using the individual PMs, to facilitate discussion of this. Is it really so awkward currently? After firing the TLI PMs in LEO, we need to rotate the entire stack around 180 so the PM engines are correctly aimed for LOI. This is a large and heavy thing to turn around, especially with just the CM RCS, but we also have 3 days to do it in under normal circumstances, so it can be quite gentle. If we need to turn around very quickly on the way to the moon in some sort of emergency we can just separate the CM from the entire stack and use the landing engine. After LOI, the CM and one PM can separate and are already facing in the correct direction for the PM burn to start dropping the lander's altitude. Admittedly, the PM thrust does not point right through the landing configuration's centre of mass.

brmj said:

Yet another idea, this one dealing with both problems: Mount the lander components in line with the D Blocks, mating the capsule to the D Blocks with a frame component distinct from the things that would be jettisoned. Lean the seat a little, so that it is more like sitting in a low recliner or lounge than lieing flat on one's back. Land with the seat still in that configuration, requiring the astronaut to just deal with it. The lower gravity should prevent working in that position from being so very uncomfortable or difficult as to render this infeasible.


I quite like this approach, in that it represents the optimal position of everything from the point of view of keeping things symmetric and with thrusts pointing through centres of mass.  I am not as worried now as I was at first about the seating orientation.  The idea that the CM needs to have a definite "up" and "down" in its layout is distinctly "Earthly" thinking.  In the microgravity of space and the greatly reduced gravity of the moon, things are more flexible, and we should embrace that as providing an opportunity to think outside the box, and come up with an innovative solution that solves our problems.  If anyone here is a fan of the Ender's Saga series of books, I cannot help but think at this point about "the enemy's gate is down". :)

brmj said:

The stacked D Blocks worry me a little, and I think your mass fraction estamites are too optimistic. As you split it up into more tanks, you get more tank wall and the mass fraction gets worse? If not, you may want to redo the math taking that into account. Also, I think the numbers you say are for a launch vehicle with considerably larger tanks than ours. Mass fraction improves with tank size, since tank mass scales aproximately with surface area.


You have some good points here.  I obviously didn't think about this too much.  Mass fraction depends, as far as I can reason, on two things.  Size, and shape.  By using the same mass fraction to simulate both the stacked blocks and one small lunar descent block plus one big everything-else block approaches, I've ignored the dependence on size.  So this needs to be looked at again.  One thing to keep in mind is that the stacked blocks approach gives us more flexibility with shape.  With the one big tank design, a sphere is awfully impractical, so we use a long cylinder.  With smaller blocks, perhaps spheres could work.  Whether or not the improvement in mass fraction due to the change in shape would cancel out the decrease due to change in size would require more detailed knowledge.

I think perhaps the most sensible thing we can do is try to delay thinking about this too much until such time as we find someone with more knowledge of cryogenic tanks, find some better data more applicable to tanks of our size (perhaps from NASA's Altair lander?), or one of us finds the time and motivation to study this a bit.  Instead, we should focus on getting better estimates of the total CM mass.  Instead of making up values for the tank mass fraction and seeing how large of a CM we can use, let's find a decent figure for the CM mass and then find out what the minimum tank mass fraction has to be to fit on a Falcon 9.  This is the easiest way to tell if this approach is feasible.  If we need a higher fraction than 0.9, we're probably screwed, but if we can get it lower than that then we'll know that at least there is a chance of finding a solution once we get better tank data.

This means we should focus now on solving the engineering problems associated with the CM, it's interior seating solution and it's lunar landing attachments.

Starting a new TA job next week, might be busy for a while! Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

3:57 am
March 12, 2010


DenisG

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Post edited 4:21 am – March 12, 2010 by DenisG


The stress type meant here is calculated from normal yield stress, that is Rp0.2 in MPa or N/mm^2. A quick glance in a table book gives me

S235 (most usual steel): 235
S355 (high yield steel): 355
36CrNiMo16 (pretty much the best stainless): 1050
Al alloys: 275–350

Note that these are values for room temperature. Allowable stresses are dependend on a lot of factors, among others geometry and the use case. Note that most Al alloys are not weldable, neither are some steels. I don't have any data available on fibre composite materials, but it's a lot less fun to do calculations with those as is with steel (and that's already not fun!!).

The max allowable stress for pressurized tanks is calculated as (Tresca shear stress criterion): sigma = 1/2(Di*p/t + p). For quick calculations, assume sigma = Rp0.2. With Di: inner diameter, p: pressure, t: wall thickness. This formula works for spherical and cylindrical tanks.

Source: Roloff/Matek Maschinenelemente (2007)

4:03 am
March 12, 2010


Luke Maurits

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Two things:

Firstly, another huge problem with this plan which hasn't been discussed much (although Denis mentioned it briefly) is lunar dust management.  One advantage of a separate lander is that one can get out of the EVA suit and thoroughly dust oneself off before getting back into the CM.  With this current plan's approach, the astronaut will be climbing directly from the surface into the CM and taking off the suit in the CM.  If we aren't careful, there could end up being dust everywhere inside the CM, which is problematic.  We need to think of ways to tackle this.

Secondly, very relevant to the mass fraction issues above, I found this paper by NASA on LOX/LH2 tank masses.  They take the empty tank mass and total propellant mass for a very large number of rockets of different sizes and from different countries, plot all the data points on a graph and then fit a power law to the data and use that to estimate tank masses for the Earth Departure Stage (EDS) rocket for Constellation.  Actually, they come up with three power laws: a generic one for all LOX/LH2 tanks, one for tanks which utilise a common bulkhead (something we have always talked about doing, and probably should) and one for tanks which utilise fancy new aluminium-lithium alloys (something we should avoid unless we absolutely have to because these alloys are probably hard to find and expensive).  These power laws are still not perfect for our uses, since the small "block D" PMs hold significantly less fuel than any of the rockets in the data NASA used, so we are extrapolating the power law trend somewhat outside of the range of propellant masses it was fit to: but it is still a much more principled approach than anything we have tried so far.

I'm going out to the cinema with my wife tonight so I won't be able to do any more work on this now, but I will try to make time tomorrow to come up with a neat and commented version of the code I have been using to do these analyses, which uses the common bulkhead power law from the NASA paper to get mass fractions.  Once any problems you guys find have been solved this should then put our mass estimates for this proposal on fairly solid ground.

Starting a new TA job next week, might be busy for a while! Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

7:11 am
March 12, 2010


brmj

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About the dust management: I wonder if it would be practical for us to deal with this by sucking the dust into or onto a colector using electrostatic force.

Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)

7:30 am
March 12, 2010


brmj

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Luke Maurits said:

Do you refer here to manufacturing the spherical CM or the ballute? Or both?

The spherical CM.

I had thought of that general idea, i.e. having the way the landing gear is attached to the outside of the CM facilitate "swivelling" it around, but I was worried about whether or not it would be possible to do this and still make the attachment sturdy enough to survive landing forces. It is something to consider, although I suspect making the internal configuration (seating, etc) either similarly rotatable or just otherwise more orientation-neutral could be simpler overall.

You may very well be right.

I have been meaning to draw a diagram detailing the entire flight plan, showing the maneuvers involved in using the individual PMs, to facilitate discussion of this. Is it really so awkward currently? After firing the TLI PMs in LEO, we need to rotate the entire stack around 180 so the PM engines are correctly aimed for LOI. This is a large and heavy thing to turn around, especially with just the CM RCS, but we also have 3 days to do it in under normal circumstances, so it can be quite gentle. If we need to turn around very quickly on the way to the moon in some sort of emergency we can just separate the CM from the entire stack and use the landing engine. After LOI, the CM and one PM can separate and are already facing in the correct direction for the PM burn to start dropping the lander's altitude. Admittedly, the PM thrust does not point right through the landing configuration's centre of mass.

Forgive me if Impression I had gotten of this plan was that the one PM attached to the CM when it is functioning as a a landerwas going to aid in slowing the landing, in addition to deorbiting it. If this is the case, and it is on a different axis than the lander engines, than landing would require shedding the PM once it has run out of fuel, then rotating the CM 90 degrees while freefalling towards the moon, then using the lander engine to finish the landing. Not a terrible problem, but an additional failure point, and depending on which altitude it happened at, this could be a bit scary. If my understanding of this mission plan was flawed, then this is simply not an issue.

I think perhaps the most sensible thing we can do is try to delay thinking about this too much until such time as we find someone with more knowledge of cryogenic tanks, find some better data more applicable to tanks of our size (perhaps from NASA's Altair lander?), or one of us finds the time and motivation to study this a bit.  Instead, we should focus on getting better estimates of the total CM mass.  Instead of making up values for the tank mass fraction and seeing how large of a CM we can use, let's find a decent figure for the CM mass and then find out what the minimum tank mass fraction has to be to fit on a Falcon 9.  This is the easiest way to tell if this approach is feasible.  If we need a higher fraction than 0.9, we're probably screwed, but if we can get it lower than that then we'll know that at least there is a chance of finding a solution once we get better tank data.

This means we should focus now on solving the engineering problems associated with the CM, it's interior seating solution and it's lunar landing attachments.

This seems entirely sensible.


Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)

8:24 pm
March 12, 2010


Luke Maurits

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brmj said:

Forgive me if Impression I had gotten of this plan was that the one PM attached to the CM when it is functioning as a a landerwas going to aid in slowing the landing, in addition to deorbiting it. If this is the case, and it is on a different axis than the lander engines, than landing would require shedding the PM once it has run out of fuel, then rotating the CM 90 degrees while freefalling towards the moon, then using the lander engine to finish the landing. Not a terrible problem, but an additional failure point, and depending on which altitude it happened at, this could be a bit scary. If my understanding of this mission plan was flawed, then this is simply not an issue.


I think I see where the confusion has come from.  I included a diagram in the first post about the Soviet Block D plan, taken from astronautix.com, which made the whole thing very clear, but it's gone now.  Now that I think about it, this has happened before.  Astronautix.com obviously has some sort of anti-hot linking mechanism in place.  If you load this page the diagram is the first one on the left hand side, it has a blue background.

The Block D engine was not used in the landing per se.  It was used to carry the lander out of it's initial elliptical orbit to a point where it was about 4 km above the lunar surface and travelling at about 100 m/s.  Then the Block D was jettisoned and crashed into the lunar surface quite some distance away.  Immediately after jettison, the lander's engines kicked in, the lander rotated through roughly 90 degrees (a little less) and descended under its own power.

In the Soviet arrangement, the Block D engine and the lunar lander engine are aligned along the same axis in the same direction.  In the CLLARE 2.0 configuration pictured above, the two engines are at right angles.  I think this arrangement is still workable, but probably less than ideal.  A different configuration, with the CM connected to the train of PMs via its landing legs, solves a lot of problems about centre of mass placement.  It raises some docking complications, but I think these are probably something we can overcome.

Starting a new TA job next week, might be busy for a while! Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

8:23 pm
March 13, 2010


Shambles

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Post edited 8:31 pm – March 13, 2010 by Shambles


Note: I posted this to the relevant /r/tothemoon submission initially, but I'm reposting here for posterity. I realise that the rear-facing landing structure was already mentioned, but I intend on doing some research and concept sketches for a system I have in mind so I'll leave it in anyway.

I'm not involved at all in CSTART and I'm no engineer, but I just read this thread through and have a few (laymans') thoughts:


I've long thought that multiple small PMs would be more efficient than a single PM for trips like this, but not as efficient as a single motor loaded with a string of disposable (possibly also collapsible for ease of removal) fuel tanks. Fuel would be routed through the tanks in series, and the tank closest behind the module could be mechanically slipped out of the line once empty and discarded using a small mechanical force (perhaps exerted by a small tension-loaded hook), pulling the tank out at a vector as parallel to the stack as possible to reduce the impact on the craft's trajectory). This would reduce the tank mass fraction, but also the rigidity of the vessel.


The landing legs seem to be troublesome. Must they be solid? If retractability/flexibility is permissible, then I'd propose mounting them at the rear of the craft, orthogonal to the strapped-in crew, and allowing them to fold in two so that they are curled out of the way of the PM(s) in flight. A crew lying flat for liftoff but seated nearly upright for lunar descent wouldn't need to reconfigure the internal CM layout at all with this arrangement. Plus, maybe the CM-PM locking mechanism can be made to serve a second purpose as lock for the extended legs? I'll have to show this graphically, as I'm not too sure I can explain properly verbally. I can see that having the landing motor mounted between CM and PM would increase the length a fair bit though. Perhaps the above single-motor/multi-tank system would allow a few tanks to be arranged around the landing motor rather than behind it, saving length overall but increasing width? Symmetry is pretty much unaffected if the tanks grouped around the lander are jettisoned simultaneously just prior to lunar descent, assuming they're small enough and drained concurrently (big problem, I know). Now that I think about it, perhaps a well-coordinated slightly asynchronous jettisoning of these few tanks after detaching from the PM could be used to perform some of the CM's reorientation, saving fuel. Alternatively, how about an inner-tube style tank, circling the landing motor? Oh, the possibilities.


You mentioned using a panel-based construction for the pressure vessel, and then coating it in an insulator to form the spherical outer profile. Composite Carbon Aerogel paper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A…..gel#Carbon) sounds like it would do the trick nicely as an insulating/smoothing coat, being extremely lightweight, quite strong, less shatter-prone than other aerogels (a problem solved by using small minutely separated tiles anyways), possibly cheaper than other aerogels, and an incredibly efficient insulator.


All of these may be completely unfeasible due to concerns that I'm unaware of, but I thought I'd put them out there anyway. Fantastic work so far, man!

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