Far Away, Yet So Close

He who controls the [Earth-Moon Lagrange points/Phobos/Deimos/Lunar North Pole], controls the solar system.

Why?

Because in space, it is not the tyranny of distance that sets the rules – it’s delta vee instead.

Since there’s no resistance, traveling large distances just takes longer, but doesn’t necessarily require more propellant. Unmanned craft can take this long trip time just fine. This is completely different from the implicit mental models of everyday life or historical exploration, travels and colonization. Even places that are far away in distance can be close in delta vee, and vice versa.

The Earth-Moon Lagrange (EML) points have really low energy trajectories to all the other places, including low Earth orbit (or Earth re-entry). They’re the crossroads. They’re probably not controllable though, like you can’t control low Earth orbit either, it’s just a figure of speech* to stress their significance.

For example, Phobos and Deimos have really low delta vee needs from EML2. And they have really low gravity. This means that it’s cheap to send stuff to them, but perhaps more importantly, it’s cheap to bring stuff from them. Since a lot of space faring is limited by mass that can be brought to locations, a low energy source of material is a real paradigm changer.

The Lunar north pole’s peaks of eternal light are much closer to Earth, but the Moon is so heavy that it takes quite a lot of propellant to descend to and ascend from the surface. The good constant sunlight is an asset though. The area is limited so this is the best incentive so far for a “race”, though I’m skeptical of that.

This post was written partly inspired by Paul Spudis’ and Clark Lindsey’s talking about the importance of the Moon as an enabler for other stuff – I am somewhat less certain. (On VASIMR and JIMO I can refer to Kirk Sorensen who has good reasons for skepticality – the power to mass ratio needed is huge and that’s the really hard part, yet it’s rarely talked about. Space reactors are much harder than Earth ones because of the cooling problem.)

We must dismiss analogies that do not work, since space is a different medium. We must use completely different planning than for exploration on land or the seas, because of the completely different role distance plays. And we must also plan on advancing from exploration ultimately to infrastructure, colonization and self sufficiency.

*: From Frank Herbert’s Dune of course.

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2 Responses to Far Away, Yet So Close

  1. Joe Cassady says:

    I agree with your premise (as do many).

    But you don’t need multi-megawatts (or VASIMR) to do this. We have studied SEP cargo tugs and they do very well at 500 – 600 kW.

    It’s all a matter of time and power. Those two trade off against one another.

  2. gravityloss says:

    Yes, VASIMR is a bit of a distraction.
    Long time, high ISP, low power. Short time, low isp, high power.

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