When the Artemis Project fulfills its potential, you will be able to
travel in space yourself! Within the next two decades, you will be able to
take a
two-week trip to the moon, at a price you would expect to pay for the
luxury-class European capital tour.
Read on to see how you can go to the moon, and beyond.
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You and your spouse fly to the launch site at Groote Eylandt,
Australia, where you board the shiny new Single Stage To Orbit
rocket, the Melva Gay. There are fifty
passengers aboard, with a crew of five to take care of them.
For launch, your seat gives you as much room as a first-class airline seat.
After you
reach orbit, you'll find that all the open space above the passenger
deck makes a wonderful place to play in zero g.
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The SSTO flies to orbit, where within two hours she makes rendezvous
with the fuel depot. You spend your first day in zero g at the fuel
depot
while the ship is serviced and retanked for the flight to the moon.
This
gives you some time for sightseeing as the ship orbits the Earth.
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The next morning (ship's time) the Melva Gay is "Go" for translunar
injection.
After the initial boost from LEO, you're in zero-g for the next two days
on
the way to the moon. You have plenty of time for sight-seeing and
playing around in the weightless environment. The crew breaks out a
big telescope so you can do some astronomical gawking if you want.
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For insertion into lunar orbit, the crew chases you and the
other passengers back
to
your seats and makes sure everyone is buckled up. We orbit the moon for
another sight-seeing tour and then fly the descent track.
The Melva Gay
lands
a few hundred yards from the main airlock of theLuna City Hotel.
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From the ship, you can see the lighted windows of the Luna City Hotel
set back in the southwestern
wall of a huge crater. A pressurized bus comes out to take you to
there.
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You find your hotel room to be surprisingly large, especially
the height of the ceiling. Your hotel room window provides you
a magnificent view of Mother Earth wandering in the black, starry
sky just above the dusty plains and hills at the northeastern rim of
Mare Crisium.
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Next morning it's time for suit drill. You should have passed your
suit
certification before you left Earth, but these guys are careful; they
sincerely hope not to have any of their guests killed on the tour. (They
could use the organic elements, but it's bad for business.) That
afternoon
you go on a walking tour to visit the local sights. Once you're
confident
with moving around on the moon, you take one of the bus tours.
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Later, the bus tours go out for several days at a time. You'll live
in more spartan conditions, camped out in bunks on the bus, but you'll
see a lot more of the moon close up. If you've booked for the long
trip, you might ride the cable car system out to all the Apollo museums,
strung out across the face of the moon.
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After ten days on the moon, you again board the Melva Gay.
You've traded off ten pounds of your baggage allowance for rocks you
lifted from the surface of the moon with your own hand.
The Melva Gay, her tanks again filled with
liquid oxygen from the moon, blasts off for Earth.
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Most of the oxygen
your ship carries on this leg of the trip is destined for the next
passenger rocket to the moon.
After another day and a half of zero-g, the Melva Gay brakes to
re-enter Earth Orbit, where she deposits her external tanks.
From there she
re-enters the atmosphere for a landing back at the Groote Eylandt
space port.
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That's what we're offering, folks. We have the technological
capability
to make it happen with the next two decades. We only need to get past the
financial and political hurdles.
If you would like to help make
it happen, you might be interested in Artemis Society International's
Future Earth-Moon Transportation Systems Committee.
You'll find a
task list for the committee in section 6.8.7 of the
Artemis Data Book. The beginning of a Business Plan for
the commercial moon rocket is in section 2.7.1.2.