credit: Battelle /caption: Is this an insight into the Altair lunar lander LDAC-3 design?

New Altair project office manager Kathy Laurini revealed to Flight and this blog NASA’s thoughts on how to use landers more efficiently and now it seems Kriss kennedy, Lunar Surface Systems (LSS) Project Office Altair integration lead and habitation manager, has helped Battelle reveal a little bit more about the state of play with the son-of-LEM (Gary Spexarth works at JSC but I couldn’t find an online document that confirmed which project office he worked with, Altair or LSS)Taken from the Battelle thermal energy reservoir system presentation given at the recent US Chamber of Commerce programmatic workshop on NASA lunar surface systems concepts it begins to flesh out what Laurini said about taking a blow-torch to the descent stages (when their not being refuelled for launching regolith samples) for the lunar outpost’s needs

It also adds detail to this “thermal wadi” idea which I am beginning to think indicates a shift away from the “we need to be at the poles for the permanent sunlight” argument and a move to justifying having an outpost where there are 15-day nights because Altair can actually get there with the cargo mass required

The number of presentations posted from the workshop is still very limited so hopefully this week will see more put on the website. But with average page numbers of 99 on the presentations posted so far I am beginning to think that was one real long workshop…