Property Rights Proposal]

> I always think the high frontier idea has never really got
> anywhere because of it's extreme ambition - let's face it the
> original idea of island one is on a massive scale requiring
> huge amounts of money.

> I know from readings that smaller incremental ideas were studied.
I was wondering if something like an "orbital garage" might be done?
It could be a low-inclination space station, serving as a way station
for payloads going higher up. It should be combined with a high-ISP
orbital tug, and initially the station could be merely an unmanned
facility where payloads are fitted to the tug, and the tug refuelled
with reaction mass. The tug could have a Hughes-type ion engine though
bigger - perhaps of lower ISP for higher thrust, and sacrificing some of
the relative payload mass; or a Russian plasma engine. It could for
that matter have a mass-driver engine.
We might bypass the unmanned orbital facility altogether at first,
and simply have a reusable tug. The launcher brings both the payload
and the reaction mass. Later, perhaps a facility to receive reaction
mass from the payloads and store it until the tug needs it would make
the operations easier. The facility might also have a robotic arm to
ease the transfer of the payload from the launcher to the tug.
Since for a payload currently going to Clarke, two thirds of the mass
delivered to low orbit is the upper (chemical) stage, it seems that for
a given launcher a significantly larger mass might be delivered to
Clarke with such a tug, though at the price of a slower trip - and more
time spent in the van Allen belts.
If this facility becomes an economic success, it may be expanded with
a habitable module and facilities for astronauts to join parts into a
satellite too large for a single launcher - one launch brings the bus,
another brings the solar panels and the antennae, for instance. The
parts are joined, the satellite is tested in orbit, and is then moved to
Clarke.
If *this* becomes an economic success, the next stage may be to use
the upper stages of the launchers as raw materials for more advanced
production. Or grinding them into dust for the mass-driver tug.
Turning an upper stage into a habitable module (advisable that that
upper stage not be hypergolic, just to be on the safe side), later
machining upper stages into structural members, later again machining
them into much larger pressure vessels than available by simply
mimicking how Skylab was built.
A dry dock might be produced, in which shirt sleeved technicians work
on a satellite part before the dry dock is evacuated and the part
floated out.

This would be a good way to run up experience before the far more
daunting task of mining a chunk of dirt and rock and refining the ore,
and *then* machining and building.
Could the market support such a facility? Taking into account that
such a facility would probably expand the market, if prices were not
forbidding? There is a good reason why we don't already have
hundred-tonne complats in service.
I'm guessing that the main obstacle to such a plan is that the market
isn't big enough. The technology is either available or will become so
if a bit of research is put into it, but the current market may not
justify the development costs plus those of operation.

Jon L. Beck.