Crisewell's LPS

1.) Both excavate lunar resources, but Criswell needs to refine and
fabrciate on the Moon. O'Neill needs to have mass driver launch,
mass catcher and orbital refining and fabricating. What are the cost
differences between the two schemes? To me, the only price delta would be the cost of the mass-driver and catcher. And I don't think that would overwhelm the other advantages of the O'Neill approach. Something pushing this in the other direction would be that it would take less delta-V to just get your ore refineries and manufacturing facilities into HEO than to soft-land them on the lunar surface.
The only slack I can see that could POSSIBLY pull in Criswell's
favor is on point 1. MAYBE it could be cheaper to manufacture solely
on the moon, although I doubt it. But maybe. I think one good reason to doubt it is the difference in energy costs likely from continuous availability of sunlight in HEO vs sunlight unavailable 50% of the time for 2 weeks at a time. There may be some advantages to 0-G for manufacturing, though that's a bit speculative. Surely there are advantages when it comes to assembly of large structures. For any process where the lunar gravity is a plus, the same thing could be done in orbit inside a rotating structure.
Despite all of the problems of his vision, he persists in advocating
it. I'd really like to hear his defence with respect to the O'Neill
plan, Me too. I find the entire situation strange due to the fact that he worked on the O'Neill plan back during the original High Frontier studies. Why he suddenly started pushing something different is a bit of a mystery to me. To my mind, Crisewell's plan would only make sense if there was some staggeringly great difficulty with getting lunar resources off the surface of the moon. But compared with getting the mining equipment, ore refineries, and manufacturing facilities off the Earth in the first place, it's pretty easy. without the Habitat component (drawing in the need to build a
Habitat would be a red herring.) And one that Zubrin couldn't pass up. ;)
Regards, Mike Combs