Moon & Mars Orbiting Spinning Tether Transport - Tethers Unlimited

Tethers Unlimited, Inc.MMOSTT Final Reportdeployed in a modular, incremental fashion, in which each component can generate revenue tofund the development of the rest of the system, much as the first railroads were developed.Because the largest current commercial market for in-space transportation is the delivery ofcommunications satellites to GEO, the initial Tether Boost Facility will be designed primarily toservice traffic of satellites from LEO to GTO. This LEO⇒GTO Tether Boost Facility, however,will also be capable of transporting different payloads to other destinations, including LunarTransfer Orbit (LTO). Once the initial facility has been deployed and proven in operation, thesystem capacity could then be built up incrementally by adding more modules. Then,additional tether facilities deployed to handle Earth-to-Orbit Assist, LEOLunar Surfaceround-trip travel, and deployment of manned Mars bases.Figure 5. MXER Tether Technology Development Roadmap.Figure 5 illustrates the proposed incremental development path for the Tether TransportSystem. The development will begin with several low-cost technology development anddemonstration experiments. The first experiment is the ProSEDS mission, a NASA/MSFCexperiment currently scheduled to fly in mid-2002 to demonstrate electrodynamic dragpropulsion using a bare-wire tether. The proposed RETRIEVE experiment will demonstrate avery small (~3.5 kg) electrodynamic tether system that uses current feedback to control thetether dynamics while it deorbits a microsatellite. These two experiments will develop theelectrodynamic propulsion technologies needed to first bring to the commercial market smalloperational electrodynamic tether systems for spacecraft propulsion and deorbit, and then tofield larger tether propulsion systems such as for satellite orbital transfer and reboost of theInternational Space Station. These electrodynamic tether technologies will also provide the7