This is John Batchler. On Hotel Mars, a conversation with engineer and designer for space

infrastructure, Phil Swat, about the challenges of the Earth Moon system, manned Earth Moon system.

It has to do with the cost of boosting into low Earth orbit and then onto the moon. The rocket cost.

And Phil here examines other possibilities. One called a mass driver. The other one I'm called

a sky hook. And then the possibility of putting a launch system on a space station. So you get

to lower Earth orbit and then you launch from there.

More ideas.

The challenge you had.

Cheaper, the better for the Earth Moon system and Earth, Moon, and Mars.

Hotel Mars with David Livingston.

More of this tonight. Yeah yeah so i believe that

the right approach

is to reduce the cost

of transportation between

the earth and the moon the earth earth and mars

and the key of that

is to understand the nature of the rocket equation

and chemical rocket propulsion obeys the rocket equation,

and it makes for an extremely expensive cost.

This is why the Mars sample return mission, for example,

is going to cost about $10 billion to move one kilogram from Mars back to Earth.

It's the rocket equation causing this to happen.

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