Anti-mass-driver

What dol you think of the closed cycle momentum exchange tether system for
delivering payloads to the surface of Luna, and carrying payloads to Earth ?

It would cost a lot less than a mass driver based system. The investment
would pay for itself versus a rocket based system after 17 missions. I think it all depends on what your mission is. If you are exchanging large payloads at infrequent intervals, and there's two-way traffic which is pretty close to being balanced, then a tether system is obviously better. If you instead are trying to get lunar resources out of the moon's gravity well, then I think the mass-driver is better, because instead of launching a several ton payload every few hours, you're launching kilogram payloads every second. The latter can form a kind of "mass-pipeline" streaming up from the moon. In that case one would expect the total mass sent up from the moon to outweigh the equipment we sentdown to the lunar surface by a substantial ratio.

Regards,

Mike Combs