Nautilus-X: the Space Station With Rockets 121
astroengine writes "So we have a space station, now what? We've heard some rather outlandish ideas, but this is one concept a research group in NASA is taking seriously. By retrofitting the ISS with rockets, Nautilus-X will act as an interplanetary space station of sorts, including room for 6 astronauts, an artificial gravity ring, inflatable habitats and docking for exploration spaceships. When can we take a luxury cruise to Mars? 2020 by the project's estimate. It all sounds very 2001, but the projected costs of retrofitting the space station seem a little on the low side."
Neat (Score:3)
It's a damned cool idea. Probably won't happen, but still, an awesome second life for the ISS, and one that has an actual point to it.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Informative)
It's a damned cool idea. Probably won't happen, but still, an awesome second life for the ISS, and one that has an actual point to it.
Yes, a very cool idea. The only catch? Increased costs for resupplying the thing. Even at Earth-Moon L1, it's out much further than GEOsats, which are orders of magnitude further out than the ISS is currently at LEO. Funding the retrofit is one thing, funding resupply and ferrying in/out inhabitants is quite another. Besides, that thing would have to live outside the earth's magnetic field. Water shield or not, I'd hate to be out there during a CME or X-class flare.
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Rare earth magnets... Why would you spend electrical power to generate a DC magnetic field?
Permanent magnets are always on and draw no power.
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Point. But an electric generator is useful for powering things besides shields, like a spinal railgun for world domination.
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"Point. But an electric generator is useful for powering things besides shields, like a spinal railgun for world domination."
But I already own head-mounted lasers on sharks for that!
Re:Neat (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that despite the resemblance, this thing is not actually a Space Station. It's a space vehicle designed for interplanetary travel.
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You do realize that despite the resemblance, this thing is not actually a Space Station.
Is it a moon?
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I suppose given some windows and some pantless astronauts it could be. :-)
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Two words: Space elevator.
Indeed. Focusing our effort on the last part of creating a space elevator, the long strand carbon nanotubes, would be a key part of a presence in space because it will also allow us to build larger and more massive structures in space. I'm sure there are plenty of innovative ways to build in space with our existing materials but as there is no magical shield technology, ice or regolith is more likely.
Having a building material with strength in the gigapascal range would certainly be a great starting point.
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We have materials with tensile strength in the GPa range. Some very high strength steels even have that (~2GPa) and glass fiber does as well. Some carbon fiber is up in the 3-5GPa region. However a space elevator needs strength to weight *ratio* (steel is poor while carbon fiber is the best so far). Almost the whole structure is supporting itself.
I should have been more specific. According to Bradley C. Edwards, Ph.D the author of "The Space Elevator, NIAC Phase II Final Report" a S.E needs material with 100 GPa strength. He also reports that early testing of CNT have tensile strengths of 63 GPa and a theoretical strength of 300 GPa in the 10s of grams range.
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Thank you for such a thoughtful post.
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As for disruptive technology. Not really. Not nearly as disruptive as CNT bulk materials with +60GPa strength with a density at ~3000 kg/m3. This is so much better than what we have today that is like jumping from the copper age to the post industrial age in one go, with respect to materials anyway. Let
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The problem with predictions on costs, its that you have no idea how much the cable will cost, and hence estimated costs are literally just made up. There is simple no way to know what the cable will cost.
Well I think that you have to start somewhere and an estimate that is a ballpark figure is as good a place to start as anywhere. Hey by the time a S.E is implemented it may even be cheaper.
As for disruptive technology. Not really.Not nearly as disruptive as CNT... It would/will be a big deal.
Absolutely, CNT will certainly enable many things like multi kilometre high sky scrapers, super sonic railways under the ocean, lightweight passenger vehicles, breeder reactors that work, the list goes on and are not limited to just an S.E.
However such a material is so useful in so many different ways, that we don't need a space elevator as a reason to research it. This is how i see it happening. First we finally get bulk CNT with +60GPa strength, but they are expensive(try buying 1kg of SWCNT today). ...Note that there was little disruption in this case due to the high initial cost of the fibers.
Agree, I just wonder what the first industry to use it will be and how we can force
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And even if we do eventually make a material with that kind of strength to weight ratio (ie more that 10x current best). It will be easy to make uber performance rockets.
A space elevator is like a bridge across the ocean. Even if you could build it. Its still cheaper to have a runway at each end and fly, than to build the bridge.
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As far as I am aware there are two main types of radiation. An electromagentic shield wouldn't be really needed, since whatever it stops could be stopped by your skin anyway. The other type you'd need a foot of lead or lots of water. I'm open to correction here but that's my understanding.
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How long you are in space depends what you need to worry about. Long duration, cosmic rays becomes the lions share of the dose. Shorter missions the solar wind is more of a issue (IIRC). In both cases CME are a real problem--without a "bunker" shelter, your dead. The shielding requirements means that you just can't do small w
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Was I the only one that read "GEOsats" as "Goatsex"?
Seems just as likely to catch politicians banging a goat than exploring the universe I guess.
- Dan.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrm. Took me aback as well, that might just work with some serious modifications. Of course I don't see much point in going to Mars right away, we'd be better off concentrating on the mineral wealth floating around near to earth and using that to build orbital manufactories and further survey ships. Once we have a significant orbital infrastructure we can populate that level and look at going much further out, in style.
I mean I get the whole wonder of the mission and so on, but there's a reason man didn't go back to the moon. We need real economic incentives to build onwards and upwards, realistically. Once we're up there in force it's a whole lot easier to go anywhere else.
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Taking a cue from Greenland, they obviously should've referred to the moon as Cheeseland.
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And of course Iceland had no pasture back then, just ice due to how cold it was back then before the multi-century warm spell most of the world (excepting the far north Atlantic) experienced.
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I agree. It could work and it might be nice to do. But what is the objective? To do it just because we can?
Effectively and efficiently harnessing and utilizing energy and raw materials in space and on other planets is key to further space exploration. Focusing on robotic exploration and automated mining and manufacturing would give us the type of infrastructure we need in space to build the ships and space stations that people might actually be able to live in self sustainably. And by the time that infr
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I don't disagree, you're right. However, I think point behind it is that if we're going to do manned exploration (regardless of whether it is smart to choose it), this would be the least expensive first step.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Hahah, alright so. You construct an 11km high tower/launch ramp, a compressive tower the same as cell towers as a truss of smaller elements. A reasonable height-to-base ratiomight be 20:1. So a 10 km tower would have 3 base points 0.5 km apart, assuming you have a triangular cross section for the tower as a whole.
Each principal column would in turn be a truss with 3 sub-columns spaced 25 meters apart, which in turn are made of tertiary columns 1.2 meters apart and 0.06 meters in diameter each. The tertiary columns have a wall thickness of 0.03 meters. This puts you above the denser elements of the atmosphere. Its not nearly as hard as it seems, Frank Lloyd Wright designed mile-high skyscrapers back in the 30's.
Then you run maglev/railgun type vacuum tubes up the length of it, therefore using extremely cheap electrical energy to power the vessel through the first stage, which I think should put the ship into LEO at 7g, althoughyou'd probably still need a booster stage.
If you could launch at 10000 ft above sea level, you could reduce your velocity change to get into orbit by approx. 250 m/s. However, you need about 8000 m/s to get into orbit. A 3% improvement, which would actually be a serious improvement. A RL-10A has an Isp of about 450 seconds; thus, exhaust velocity Ve is about 4400 km/sec. Structure and payload mass fraction is exp[deltaV/Ve]; a RL-10A powered vehicle could achieve a maxium amount of structure plus payload to 8km/sec of 16.3%. Typically about 5% of this is actually payload. A 3% decrease in delta-V to orbit increases this to 17.3%. This increases the *payload* to 6% of the gross lift-off mass -- a 20% increase in payload.
Imagine the benefits of launching higher and a lot faster.
This has the effect of vastly reducing the cost to get to LEO and from there to proper orbit and eventually escape; if it was as cheap to get to orbit as it is to cross oceans, we'd already be on Mars.
So lets talk mineral wealth. The most detailed study of an asteroid, Eros, collected by NEAR shows that it contains precious metals worth at least $20 trillion. If Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance's of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.
That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.
So once you make it economical to get up there, you need to build out an infrastructure. There are lots of theories on how to do this by aseroid resource extraction, I'm wavering towards the "rubble pile" asteroids which come pre-demolished, I can go into more detail if you like.
Let's be clear though, unless a launch tower would drastically lower costs to space, the initial buildout has to be for space and by space. Then once orbital manufacture has reached a sufficiently advanced level, you can send manufactured goods, worth many times their wieght in gold, straight back to earth markets.
/borrowed from many sources, I haven't the time to do the maths right now.
Pikes Peak (Score:2)
Back in the 1960s (maybe earlier) there was some talk about building such a ramp up the side of Pike's Peak. For transporting goods, I think it might work pretty well. The container vehicle might be based on a pure SCRAMjet, since the speed off the top of the peak could be Mach 5 - or, if possible, maybe the railgun could accelerate it to orbital velocity directly, so no fuel or motors required other than steering. To accomplish this in perhaps 10-15 km of track, the G forces might be too much for anythi
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What "mineral wealth"? You mean dust spread out over the entire Solar System?
Some of those "dust particles" are almost 3500 km [wikipedia.org] wide.
Describe even in vaguest terms how you are going to get there, what are you going to do once there, and after that, profit??
Launch a self-replicating factory to the Moon. Geometric growth on the Moon for a period of time. Then program it to start a gold/platinum group metals mine and launch infrastructure for sending that stuff to LEO. Deorbit the stuff that you want on Earth. The total cost up to atmospheric entry is development of the factory and deployment/launch plus modest Earth-side crew that you have running operations and designing the infrastructure expansions.
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It's a damned cool idea.
It's about the stupidest thing I've heard on slashdot in hours.
It's a research station. Using it as an docking station would ruin one or the other task.
And a docking station is probably better run as a business. A combined government project would be more expensive, because they'd assume the business side would be a cash cow that could subsidize the research and reduce expenditures. Then it would be too expensive to use, and it would lose the maximum possible amount of money when it sits manned and idle.
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Well, the "attach rockets to the space station" part has been around for a long time. I worked on a proposal for a boost module that, sufficiently extended, would have served the purpose here. That was even one of the parts of the study.
That a long-duration space station would make an ideal platform for a long-duration trip to mars, etc, is also hardly new - it goes back to at least the 50's. All the same problems have to be solved for low earth orbit (for a long time) and and years-long plan
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One thing that is not the same is resupply, and that (not surprisingly) is the sticking point with all these sorts of schemes.
Also massive thermal problems. Everything on the station was designed with one hemisphere experiencing vaguely constant room temperature radiation from the surface and the other half oscillates from deep space to direct solar every 90 minutes or so.
Deep space operations will have some pretty weird thermal effects. I suppose if you spin it fast enough...
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It's not much of a problem, and it's certainly a well-understood problem.
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One thing that is not the same is resupply, and that (not surprisingly) is the sticking point with all these sorts of schemes.
Couldn't you just fire a continuous stream of supply pods after it? You could even use them to help build up velocity if you wanted. It doesn't matter how long your supply chain is, once it is unbroken. You could even fire a cluster of them intended to end up around Mars in orbit.
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I'm sure that'd be doable if we had infinite resources with which to do it. Of course, this is kind of the same issue with basic resupply: COST.
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Energy is basically free, you have the sun right there. The main cost after building it is getting the stuff from the earth to the launcher, I'm envisioning some sort of two stage railgun apparatus here.
Wonderful idea (Score:1)
Fuel Costs (Score:1)
I wonder what the fuel budget for moving from Earth orbit to Mars orbit is, compared to moving from the surface of Earth to the Surface of Mars is? I'd imagine it's a small fraction.
Re:Fuel Costs (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Delta-vs_between_Earth.2C_Moon_and_Mars [wikipedia.org]
It's about 1/3rd.
When the quote fits the article (Score:2)
Money (Score:2)
We can definitely afford it (Score:1)
All you need to do is raise taxes.
Problem: Solved.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt we can afford this
NASA's budget for 2010 was ~18 billion dollars of a 3.55 trillion dollar budget. Making up a mighty half a percent of our budget. We can certainly afford it, even in these rough times. Whether it's a priority or not is up for debate.
I doubt if anyone will consider it seriously.
You are probably correct.
Inaccurate title. Read the @!#$&*$ article. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Nautilus -X plan doesn't propose fitting "the" space station rockets and sending it to other planets (which would require making a goddamn huge rocket!), it proposes building "a" space station with rockets and sending it to other planets. The idea is to use a modular system that's actually built in space like the ISS to go to other worlds. Pay attention.
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Indeed, the ISS could not take the acceleration required to move it anywhere significant. A rotating section for artificial gravity was looked into but rejected because of the vibration it would cause on the rest of the structure. The ISS is fairly fragile by space standards, after all it was assembled in zero G and only ever gets a little bit of thrust to make up for the altitude it loses day to day.
The only possible way (Score:4, Insightful)
for long distance human travel is if we already had massive space stations at destination orbits.
You would only need to move human transport shuttles between stations, instead of transporting entire launch-shuttle-landing systems.
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http://www.worldrowing.com/display/modules/news/dspNews.php?newid=324795 [worldrowing.com]
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in other news: airships are making a come back! (Score:2)
seriously, it would be great, but it's not going to happen at that cost, in that time frame.
at best, Ad Astra will be allowed to put a VASIMR on it and boost it to a geosync orbit.
not reusing the ISS (Score:4, Informative)
they aren't going to actually reuse the ISS, btw. They just put that in the article for people with no imagination, for which every modular spacecraft looks like the ISS.
A truss, with a VASIMR and a bunch of Bigalow inflatable modules attached is what they are proposing, as a lunar transfer ferry.
That might (probably will) happen SOME day, but i doubt by 2020.
Back-ronym (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Back-ronym (Score:4, Informative)
That's just a standard acronym, not a backronym. Backronyms use the acronym as a word in the full phrase. For example: WINE: WINE Is Not an Emulator.
No. Backronyms are acronyms where the phrase was created such that it fits whatever the acronym they desired happened to be, instead of actually appropriately naming something and then figuring out what the acronym is.
What you're thinking of is a recursive acronym. You can also have recursive backronyms.
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Backronyms are acronyms where the phrase was created such that it fits whatever the acronym they desired happened to be, instead of actually appropriately naming something and then figuring out what the acronym is.
What you're thinking of is a recursive acronym. You can also have recursive backronyms.
But can you have precursive backronyms?
Cow? (Score:2)
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Depends. Did you just put Wirt's leg with a book of town portal inside a cube?
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Yep, that's a cow alright.
bad article & summary (Score:4, Informative)
Bad summary of what Nautilus-X is about, but the article itself fails in the opening paragraphs as well.
A better summary of the idea from physorg of the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle [physorg.com].
The idea is NOT about taking the existing ISS and strapping rockets to it. Nautilus-X IS about building something that would ride permanently in space out of technologies similar to what was used in ISS, along with inflatable modules such as Bigelow Aerospace's expandable space habitats. Separate crew modules would provide the ability to land and lift off from planets.
About the only part ISS itself would play is hosting a demonstration version of the ring centrifuge.
Pretty much the "real" interplanetary spacecraft as it has been discussed for decades, but Nautilus-X would be built with mostly known technologies.
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the catch with the bad summary is that the bad summary is a lot more interesting since it involves a platform already lifted quite high.
because otherwise it's just "hey let's build a modular space ship with 200 million!" which is a neat idea.. but an idea that gets thrown pretty often and lacks the key question of how to get the stuff to space for that cheap.
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Excellent point about the lifting stuff out of this rock's gravity well. It's unfortunate that for the past couple of decades NASA heavy lift capabilities seem to have become more and more constrained and dictated by political concerns involved in maintaining certain contractors' business models than actually getting anything into space cheaply. I don't really mourn the passing of Orion & Ares, for that reason.
I related news, the Air Force has encouraged Space X to focus on the Falcon 9 heavy and the co
About time (Score:4, Insightful)
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I keep waiting for us to do something halfway exciting in space. Instead we blow our money on being world police. Screw all that. Cut the military budget in half and we could have a colony on mars.
How would a mars base support using fear to control the populace? The ole Australia gambit, be good or we ship you far away?
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Well, it would make mutually assured destruction slightly harder to maintain, if one side had a colony that was out of ICBM range.
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And the arms race can move on to IPBMs.
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How about using the money saved to do other things than create a cool colony that will not significantly impact life on earth. How about we use it to do other things like solve the energy crisis, solve the food problem, solve the growing water problem.
The comments for a Mars colony are very slim.
Life boat;
Tiny population + radiation and other harsh conditions = inbreeding and mutation = non-human life if they survived at all. A tiny colony will not save the human race.
Minerals.
Considering the billions of do
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Yes! Use the resources of the empire to establish colonies. No more war--wait... ummm... we might have a problem here...
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A manned mission to Mars in 1989 was estimated to cost 500 billion dollars. An inflation calculator brings that up to 854.14 billion in 2009.
The cost estimates of ISS range between 35 billion to 160 billion dollars in 2005 dollars.
The total DoD budget for 2011 is 721.3 billion dollars
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Once you are off the oil you'll save yourselves $600 billion a year in imported oil. I
Space Station (Score:2)
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A more reasonable approach (Score:1)
We go to the airport in a car, then get on the plane. This sort of craft should be dedicated to the bulk travel, and not stop at either end. A smaller resupply shuttle to transit on & off would save all sorts of energy, rather than stopping & starting this huge system twice for every round trip.
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Comments on TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
He says:
The Nautilus has a huge deep-space antenna where laser transmission may make more sense. It also has a shuttle-derived remote manipulator arm which also seems like excess weight.
As for the manipulator arm, yes, it is excess weight. Excess weight isn't necessarily a bad thing if you are already going to be lifting a lot of mass to orbit. If, say, one launch for constructing this vehicle required a Dragon, HTV, Progress, or some other supply vehicle to be lifted (for the purposes of a lifeboat, or some such thing), one could piggy back the manipulator arm on as an extra payload and outfit it to the new spacecraft. If the arm would require an extra launch then, yes, it is an expensive addition. However, in the event that this spacecraft would be landing a crew and then picking them back up again, the manipulator arm would not be unnecessary mass, but, in that case, a critical system for redocking surface-to-orbit ferries.
The oddest thing about that assessment by the author is when he says this previously in the article:
To significantly lower mass and therefore reduce transit time, why not simply send unmanned landers ahead and put them into a parking orbit to wait until the crew arrives.
If the spacecraft is supposed to be linking up with landers in a parking orbit at the destination, you can bet your sweet ass that a manipulator arm will be necessary to capture the landers. Of course, alternatively, the crew could also take a ferry to the on-orbit lander modules instead, but then you'd be carrying around the crew ferries rather than the landers and/or the arm, which means, again, a trade study should be conducted and the folks at NASA have probably already done so.
One other thing to consider is that while a higher mass requires a higher delta-v to hop from orbit to orbit, if the excess mass is a small enough fraction, it may not make a practical difference. Rocket engines that are in production produce a certain amount of thrust. If that thrust can boost "up to X many kg of mass to this delta-v" then reducing your mass below X is somewhat unnecessary, unless you need or want a higher delta-v margin.
It's important to remember that the first European colonists to North America didn't land on the East Coast and then drag race to the Pacific. Rather, they established a colonial foothold in the East first (like we should in LEO) and then, after developing their on-continent infrastructure some, they set off to explore further. Baby-steps lead towards progress. One off, epic publicity stunts lead to debt.
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Here's the physorg article. Much better imo.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-nasa-nautilus-x-reusable-deep-spacecraft.html [physorg.com]
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Umm, no.
While a higher mass might require more fuel to hop from orbit to orbit, the deltaV requirements are pretty much defined by the starting orbit and ending orbit, without consideration of the mass involved.
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Send the shuttle instead (Score:2)
One word... (Score:1)
Not really (Score:2)
The cost of adding rockets wont be that much, seeing as it is not really that expensive, they do not need to be huge like those to get out into orbit, they can be as small as canisters of hairpsray, the many of them there could be, would all add propulsion and also would need some stabilizers in opposite directions...a full 360 is the most advantageous, but also almost impossible, unless you use dyson vacuum principles