Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  The Griffin 3.0 heads to the lunar space station. Then transfer fuel over from the depot to the reusable landers. Get in the new lander, take her down to the surface, stay for a few days. Now, if the lander fails to take off, engine dies, whatever, you have a second lander standing by in lunar orbit that can come down and rescue the crew. This means we must always have a spare lander on hand and the fuel to use it.

  So that's eleven launches, nine Heavys, two Eagle 9s. Two landers, three Griffin 3.0s, nine Aquila upper stages, one BA-330, and a special fuel depot and that gets us to our first manned landing, and with the benefit of a backup return ship, a backup lander, and a lunar orbit station. At this point, each additional landing mission requires an Eagle 9 launching a Griffin 3.0, a heavy launching an Aquila takes the crew to lunar orbit. A second heavy sends just an Aquila to the station, delivers 15 tonnes of fuel.

  So each additional landing has the incremental cost of two heavys, two Aquilas, one Eagle 9 and one Griffin 3.0.

  So let's price this out with expendable launches, nothing reused. Eagle 9s are 55 million, call each Heavy 150 million, Griffin 3.0 at 40 million, Pegasus at 50 million, Aquila's are 40 million. In our first eleven launches that comes out to 1.945 billion dollars, so we'll call it 2 billion. Then each additional mission costs two heavys, two Aquilas, a 9, and a Griffin 3.0, or a total of 420 million. Let's say we do ten manned landings beyond these first eleven launches to set up the infrastructure. That's 4.2 billion in addition to the 2 billion. 6.2 billion divided over 10 missions puts each lunar landing at a cost of 620 million dollars.

  Now let's look at this with Eagle 9s, Heavys, and Aquilas being reusable and reducing their costs by 50%. Heavy launch is now 75 million, an Eagle 9 is 28 million, an Aquila is 20 million. That puts start-up cost at just over one billion, and recurring landing mission cost at about 240 million per landing. Divide that over a 10 mission program and we're at 345 million dollars per landing.

  Figure we do four or five landings, scout out a few possible base locations. Then it's time to start building a base.

  If we launch two heavys, one with a lunar cargo lander and a partially fueled Aquila, the other with just an Aquila, meet them up, first Aquila does about half of TLI. Second Aquila does rest of TLI and LOI. At this point you've got about a 30 tonne vehicle in lunar orbit. It needs about 14 tonnes of fuel to slow itself down to land on the Moon and you're left with a 16 tonne vehicle on the surface, some of that mass is empty tanks and engine, so we'll call it about 12 tonnes worth of usable structure and cargo. Figure we get Bigelow to make a 10 tonne inflatable, call it a BA-180. Land it horizontally, lands on some wheels, that way you can move it around after it lands. So we have a habitat, then we need an oxygen extraction plant. A 10 tonne pressurized rover that can drive up to the habitat and dock directly with it, then it can traverse long distances and house astronauts for weeks at a time. No need to walk four kilometers away from your ship. Instead, you drive the big rover around, you take samples as you go, if you see something of interest, you go out for a few hours for an EVA, then get back in. You can spend months like that scouring a huge area. We'd need a big solar array setup, give that another 10 tonne lander. So figure a base would require five landings: habitat, power, lunox, rover, greenhouse. These would be cylindrical modules, would have small propulsion modules at each end that can land them horizontally and be a standard landing propulsion module. Once the land, they can deploy wheels and maneuver to be docked with the other base modules, and if needed, we can take the whole base and drive it somewhere else.

  Five landings makes a base, that requires ten Eagle Heavy launches, or about 2 billion if expendable and counting the Aquila, 1 billion at 50% cost with some reusability. Once we can start producing lunar oxygen, we can then use it for oxidizer and then we only need to bring methane to do lunar missions. oxygen is two-thirds of the propellant mass, so that means each lunar landing requires us to bring just six tonnes of methane. So basically we can do three lunar landings for each fuel truck we send to the depot. Thus with lunox online, it takes an Eagle 9 and one-and-a-third heavys to do another lunar landing, or about 200 million per additional lunar landing.

  So in total, if we go all expendable, setting up the lunar station, two landers, four landings to scout locations, followed by five cargo landings to create a base, followed by twelve landings to cycle crews, our cost would be...2 billion to setup space station, 2 billion to setup lunar base, not including the cost of any of the cargo modules, then 420 million per landing, with sixteen landings total. That comes to 10.7 billion dollars. Not including R&D or cost of those cargo modules. If we factor in 50% savings from reusable components, then it costs about 6 billion. We're talking about 50-plus Heavys, quite a lot of launches, probably going to be spread out over a period of about 10 years. Say two years to setup orbital infrastructure, two years to scout locations, two years to construct the base, and then four years of crew rotation. Ten years, 10.7 billion dollars. Or, a billion dollars a year to run this program on our side of it, not including the lunox plant, R&D and all that. Figure that actual operational costs are about 50% of total cost, and that R&D and start-up costs are the other half, that gets us to a total of 20 billion dollars.

  So I think we can tell NASA that if they give us 20 billion dollars and a decade, we can give them a permanent mobile Moon base including lunox plant, greenhouse, habitat, rover, etc., and a total of sixteen manned landings. And that's without factoring in any reusability of our rockets or upper stages, and not factoring in any savings we might get from producing lunar oxygen.”

  “You whipped this up in ten minutes?” Brittany asks.

  “I was making that up as I went along,” K replies.

  “Freak,” Brittany replies.

  “So, everyone start thinking about everything I just said. Griffin people start thinking about Griffin 3.0 and the lunar lander version, called Pegasus, and having as much commonality between the two as possible. Also keep in mind Mars when designing the Griffin. I'd like it to be able to be refilled on the Martian surface and fly itself unmanned back to Mars orbit. So make sure you've got tanks big enough to have the delta-v for that, and make sure it has enough thrust to take off when loaded that full and under Mars gravity. For Pegasus, think about how we would bring cargo to the lunar surface. Think about a place in it to store a rover or experiments, etc.,

  Weller, look at the Aquila, make it light, see if we can make it reusable or if that will be too costly to delta-v. Rask, work with him on that.

  Bowe, I want you to coordinate with the Pegasus design on creating the pilot's station. In Apollo they stood up with their faces pressed against the glass so they didn't need big heavy windows, and in one-sixth gravity you don't need seats anyway. Figure that as a starting point. Get the window placement, instrument layout, controls, work with them on that. We can use external cameras, so figure out where to put external cameras for the best visualization. Where do we put lights to help with landing, alright, think about all of it.

  Schwinghammer, where's she at, I don't see her face.”

  “I'm here,” Missie, head of customer relations says.

  “Start asking around for lunar payloads. What science needs to be done on the Moon, how can we do it, who wants to do it, who might have a payload for us, etc. I know one thing you can do is make a massive liquid mirror telescope on the Moon. We'd have to build it there, but then you put a kind of molten salt liquid in it and spin it and by varying the spin you can create a perfect mirror out of liquid. It would only point straight up, but if we put it in a crater of eternal darkness, it can have pretty much perfect conditions. So look into stuff like that.”

  “What's the competition going to do?” Hammersmith asks.

  “ULA will probably up-scale Delta, not the Atlas with engines built by Energomash. A two engine version of the Delta-IV, call it Delta-V at 25 tonnes, a Heavy configuration at 70 tonnes. Then maybe GenCorp might keep going with an SLS-like launcher, s
ay Aerojet solids, SSMEs, maybe they'll even try to re-use the core, and they can put together a heavy lift vehicle.”

  “What if NASA splits up responsibilities, say one company handling the launch vehicle, one handling the lunar lander, one handling the in-space-stage, then why are we building a complete lunar architecture instead of figuring out which section we should do?” Brittany asks.

  “Because whatever happens, we're going to be able to make a Moon base ourselves and sell tickets to it to tourists and other nations,” K replies.

  “So you want us to pay for R&D on five different things, only one or two of which will actually be covered by NASA,” Brittany says.

  “We've got to develop all these technologies at some point. He did say fair competition, not porky splitting up of responsibilities. If we can get a big piece of this, we'll have so many launches that we'll be able to develop any of a number of things. We don't know exactly what the program will end up looking like. We get in on this and we'll have the money to sustain us while we develop Mars architecture and reusability. We do this right, and I will be retiring on Mars.”

  Chapter 21

  Four Years Later

  January, 2020

  Eight rocket engines roar to life and a structure one hundred meters tall and weighing nine million pounds races into the sky. Four strap-on boosters surround the core rocket which features four of its own engines. Each of these engines converts kerosene and oxygen into a concentrated plume of exhaust and 6.37 megaNewtons of usable thrust at rate of 2.7 metric tonnes per second. Altogether the rocket produces 51 megaNewtons of thrust, enough force to keep five million kilograms or eleven million pounds in the sky. The Saturn V produced around 34 megaNewtons, or the equivalent of more than seven-and-a-half million pounds. This rocket is 50% more powerful than the historic Saturn V.

  These engines produce about 8% less thrust than the F-1 engine from the Saturn V's first stage. But the Saturn V had five F-1s, while this rocket has eight engines. These aren't Rocketdyne F-1s, these are YF-660s.

  Forty seconds into the flight, the four YF-660s in the core are throttled down, while the four boosters, each with a single YF-660, remain at 98%. Each booster uses up 320 metric tonnes of propellant in just under two minutes, remaining nearly at full power for that entire duration. With the four sleek boosters empty, they are jettisoned and peel away from the central core which throttles up its four YF-660s back to 99%. The core's first stage contained 1800 metric tonnes of propellant at launch, but contains less than 1200 metric tonnes at booster separation.

  The core continues to burn for another minute and forty-five seconds after the boosters were discarded. Some three million kilograms of propellant have been burned, but this rocket is not yet in orbit. The first stage and its four massive YF-660 engines is decoupled and the second stage lights. The hundred meter structure is broken in half. The top continues accelerating, powered by a pair of YF-220 engines that burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Each YF-220 produces about 2 megaNewtons of thrust, or the equivalent of 440,000 pounds of force. These two engines have 500 metric tonnes of hydrogen and oxygen to convert into kinetic energy.

  On the side of this white rocket, in red, are the characters “CZ-9.” This is the abbreviated English transliteration of the Chinese name “Long March 9.” The Long March 9 is the latest in the Long March series of Chinese Rockets. The name Long March refers to a military retreat, a literal march of great length made by communist forces. It might seem odd to celebrate a retreat, but the Long March is seen as the event that kicked off Mao's rise to power. Long March in Chinese is “Changzheng,” hence CZ.

  The Long March 1 rocket lofted the first Chinese satellite in 1970, making China the fifth nation capable of reaching Earth orbit (after USSR, USA, France, and Japan). The Long March 1 rocket family was developed from an intermediate range ballistic missile, and much of the Chinese space program was based on Soviet technology. The Long March 1 would eventually be capable of putting nearly a single tonne payload into orbit. The Long March family from CZ-1 to CZ-4 all used storable but highly toxic unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as a fuel in their first stages, a reminder that these rockets were developed from nuclear missiles. The military likes to have rockets that can be kept ready to fly at a moments notice, hence their affectation for storable propellants, even though these propellants are highly carcinogenic and they are outperformed by safer fuels likes liquid hydrogen or kerosene. But you can't leave a rocket full of liquid hydrogen for very long, and so that makes it not a very good fuel for a missile. The Long March 1 used storable propellants in its first two stages, and a spin-stabilized solid rocket for a third stage.

  The Long March 2A was developed, launching only once, in 1974, and resulting in failure. The Long March 2C launched in 1975 and was still in use in 2015. The 2C featured a first stage with four YF-20 engines burning UDMH and NTO, but a liquid hydrogen powered second stage. The 2C was successful on its first 34 launches prior to its first failure in 2011, and is capable of lofting 2,400 kilograms (2.4 tonnes) into orbit. The Long March 3 was developed in the 1980s, and was essentially a Long March 2 with a small third stage that could place a smaller payload into a higher Geostationary Transfer Orbit. The Long March 2D was introduced in 1992, featuring many incremental improvements, the payload was raised to 3.5 tonnes. That same year, China embarked on a manned space program, called Project 921 (the “92” comes from the year in which the project was announced). This was the second time they had decided to start a manned space program, the first being a false start that was canceled in the early '70s.

  In order to launch people, China would need a more powerful rocket. They took their Long March 2D with a core of four YF-20 engines and mounted four boosters, each with a single YF-20 engine, and the result was the Long March 2E, a rocket capable of putting nearly 6 tonnes into low-Earth-orbit. The 2E was then refined into the man-rated 2F.

  The Long March 2F was the rocket that put the first Chinese spaceship, the Shenzhou, into orbit, making China the third country to put humans into space in 2003. In 2007, China began development of the Long March 5, a modular family of rockets. The most capable version of the CZ-5 could put 25 tonnes into LEO, and the family is comparable to the Delta IV family. With the Long March 5, China finally cast aside the missile origins of their rockets and developed kerosene powered engines to replace their toxic fuels. The YF-120 kerosene burning engine represented China's first major step in developing their own native rocket engines, having previously relied on Russian and Soviet technology as at least a starting point for their own refinement. The YF-120 was their first truly indigenous major engine program. They also developed a more powerful liquid-hydrogen engine, the YF-50.

  But after the Long March 5, Chinese eyes aimed higher, much higher. They developed two new engines, the YF-660, a much more powerful kerosene burning engine, only slightly less powerful than the mighty F-1 from Apollo fame, as well as a larger hydrogen burning engine, the YF-220, for upper stages.

  The CZ-9's first four minutes of flight rely solely on high-thrust kerosene-burning engines. Since the boosters and the core both ignite at the same time, this is called a two-and-a-half stage rocket. The core is called the first stage, while the boosters are either just called boosters or are counted as stage-zero. The Saturn V was a three-stage rocket, with three successive stages piled on top of each other. This design however is not the most efficient. The Saturn V's second stage with five J-2 engines is simply dead weight while the first stage is burning. But in a stage-and-a-half design, like the Long March 9 or the Eagle Heavy, or the Space Shuttle, more than one stage is burning at the same time, and so those engines that will be used later in flight, aren't simply dead weight needing to be hefted at liftoff. If you were to design the Saturn V today, you would probably opt for a two-and-a-half stage rocket, with the five J-2s serving as the first stage and the powerful F-1 engines being mounted radially as boosters to be discarded while the core continues to burn. Not
only is this approach more efficient by eliminating dead weight, it also makes the rocket configurable (and is also essentially what the SLS rocket was going to be before cancellation).

  The Long March 9 core of four YF-660 engines can be launched without any boosters, and a smaller second stage with only a single YF-220, and the result is a rocket with a payload to LEO of about 75 metric tonnes. With two YF-660 boosters added, the result is a rocket with a payload of about 95 metric tonnes. But with the full complement of four boosters, and the larger upper stage, that payload jumps to 130 metric tonnes, more than the Saturn V's payload of 120 metric tonnes. This rocket is capable of sending 50 metric tonnes to a Lunar Transfer Orbit, five tonnes more than the Saturn V.

  The CZ-9 is the most powerful rocket ever launched. The first CZ-9 was launched in the CZ-9A configuration, with no boosters. The second, a CZ-9B, had two boosters. It lofted an 80 tonne space station module named Ziyou, which means “freedom,” that was then docked to the expanding Tiangong (heavenly palace) space station. This, the third Long March 9, is a CZ-9C, featuring the full complement of four boosters, and has its sights set on a higher target.

  Atop this rocket is a modified Shenzhou space capsule. Shenzhou 5 began the Chinese manned space program in 2003, with a single astronaut, Wang Liwei. This flight was followed up by Shenzhou 6 in 2005, carrying two astronauts for nearly five days. Shenzhou 7 in 2008 featured the first three-person crew and the first Chinese space walk. Shenzhou 8 was an unmanned mission to dock with the new Tiangong space station, then just a single module. Shenzhou 9 in 2012 carried a crew of three to the new station. By 2019, Shenzhou 10 through Shenzhou 17 had spent more and more time at the growing space station.