When I read the title I thought it was about Project Habbakuk and that seemed a bit OT.
This was a top secret project to determinine the feasibility of developing ice ships during WW2.
In fact if you want to scuba dive in freezing Patricia Lake in the Canadian Rockies you can still see the sunken wreckage of the abandoned prototype.
The Iceship was mentioned and artist impression shown on a documentary recently on Discovery Channel, but it was very brief. Only about 1 minuts was devoted to the idea.
The link above gives more detail and info than the Doco did. Fascinating idea though.
From the ice ship page:
"Answer: pack parachute-cloth bag in the Shuttle bay, fill it with water, let space freeze it. "
They got a diagram of a 'orbiting water storage' filling up the ice ship with water. That water storage would have to pack alot of energy to heat up that water, otherwise it'd be hard to pump ice into the ice ship!
Doesn't seem to be an issue here jc_7.......
"The energy required to heat, melt and boil the lunar ice to 1 Celsius is about 3 Megajoules of heat per kilogram of ice. This is a purely thermal process at 1 Celsius temperature. The reject heat from a nuclear electric generator such as an SP-100 service reactor can deliver this. For example, a 100 kilowatt electric generator would produce about 1 megawatt of waste thermal heat. This amount of heat would melt about 6,900 tons of water per year (1 Megawatt of thermal power, 5 days a week, 48 weeks per year). The Baseline NSR would deliver about 1123 tons to lunar escape orbit with this much water.
This suggests that the melting of ice is a relatively small issue. "
Wait a minute what if you could catapult the ice into the Lunar orbit and then scoop it up somehow? Save all that fuel.....
just my imagination running away with me now;-)
