Gateway

Sorry I missed this when Doug Plata posted it; hence the lack of content last month's last day. Thanks Zimmerman for finding it for us.

As of July it's related to HALO so, this blog needs to deal with it.

Over the past week the Z has further noted that Firefly and Virgin Galactic are lagging SpaceX, with Dawn Aerospace far behind them all. Rocket Lab are okay for individual microsats. Forget the Senate Laundry System, that ain't happenin'. I do wonder about Gateway, though.

Looking up Gateway's dynamics, the period is such as to go around our Moon every six days. Kepler imposes a semimajor; NASA are thinking elliptic halo. 70000 km at the height, 1500 km at the lowest. Polar: so it's never occulted from Earth. I am sure NASA employs better dynamicists than Plata and I shall ever be, and I concede the NASA trajectory as clever but... Plata has to ask. Why?

Plata proposes that instead of a space-station, SpaceX can have two Starships transferring propellant to one another. Which they don't need to do in any Lunar orbit; they can do that at, to point out the obvious, Terra-Luna Libration 1. Which Point the two craft then abandon because of its metastability.

I do wonder if we can have Gatewaylikes in, say, the TLL4 and L5 pools. The Moon and the Earth can both supply such a station, and - on from that station - China's kilometer-long spaceship. That however might be a problem for when Luna has colonies of her own.