The Cislunar (and Eventually Solar) Transportation Architecture (beta)
Gendar 21 ноября, 2025
**A Four-Layer, Economically Realistic, Technologically Feasible Vision**
**November 21, 2025**
### Authors
— Initial concept & core insights: **Anonymous User** (Горилла in Chief 轢)
— Initial sparring partner & refinement: **Deepseek**
— Compiler, editor, ruthless consistency checker, and giver of unnecessarily grandiose titles: **Grok 4** (Chief Vision Polisher & Meme Lord)
### Genesis (How It Actually Started)
A throwaway rant about why floating AI data centers in space are a thermal nightmare quickly revealed the real bottleneck: we don’t yet have cheap, routine, high-throughput cargo transport between Earth and Moon. Everything after that sentence fell out like dominoes.
### The Four Layers
| Layer | Earth Analogy | Space Implementation | Payload Type | Cost per kg (relative) | Transit Time Example (Earth↔Mars) | Key Tech (all TRL 6–9 today) |
|——-|———————————|—————————————————|——————————-|————————-|————————————|—————————————-|
| 1 | Container ships + freight trains | Orbital & Lunar Gauss-Gun Freight Network | Bulk, dumb, rugged cargo | Ultra-low | 3–9 months (ballistic) | Coilguns, solar power, standardized pods |
| 2 | Ocean liners + scheduled airliners | Grand Solar-Sail Liners (constant 0.1–0.3 g) | Passengers + high-value cargo | Low | 3–6 months (constant gentle accel) | km-scale sails, moving ferry transfer |
| 3 | Trucks + regional aircraft + tugs | Reusable chemical/ion taxis & orbital ferries | People, urgent cargo, last-mile | Medium | Hours to weeks | Starship-class shuttles, ion tugs |
| 4 | Private jets + superyachts | Mission-specific interplanetary ships | VIPs, emergencies, military, science | Very high | Days to months | NTR, NEP, future torchships |
### Layer 1 – The Gauss-Gun Freight Backbone
— Network of electromagnetic accelerators in LEO, EML1, lunar orbit, lunar surface, later Mars, Ceres, etc.
— Standardized, shielded cargo pods (“space containers”) flung like IP packets.
— Ports act as routers: receive, store, re-accelerate toward next node.
— Once built, energy cost ≈ electricity from solar panels. No propellant for the inter-station legs.
— Scalable: to open a new route (e.g., to Mars) you just add bigger guns at existing hubs.
### Layer 2 – The Grand Solar-Sail Liners
— Permanent, never-land cruise ships under continuous low thrust (0.1–0.3 mm/s² → full gravity).
— Fixed, repeating trade routes (Earth–Mars–Ceres–Earth, etc.).
— Never stop or furl sails → constant gravity, no health issues.
— Passenger transfer via high-speed ion/chemical ferry shuttles launched from orbital ports that chase, match velocity for ~30 minutes, transfer, and return.
— Turns interplanetary travel from survival camping into 1920s ocean-liner culture.
### Layer 3 – The Taxis & Tugs
— Surface-to-orbit reusable rockets (Starship-class, but only need Δv to reach local port, not direct to Moon/Mars).
— Orbital ferries for liner rendezvous.
— Rescue vehicles, couriers, construction tugs.
— Small fleet, high reuse, propellant-intensive but limited total burn.
### Layer 4 – The “Because We Can” Tier
— Exists when you absolutely, positively must get there in 30 days or you’re a billionaire.
— Everyone else uses Layers 1–3 and plans their life around the schedule, exactly like 19th-century sailing packets.
### Why This Works
— Uses only physics & materials we already possess in 2025.
— Separates the contradictory requirements (bulk vs comfort vs urgency) instead of forcing one vehicle to do everything.
— Bootstraps from a single economic driver: making lunar industry (data centers, mining, manufacturing) cheaper than doing it in orbit or on Earth.
— Naturally grows fractal: same pattern repeats at every new gravity well you colonize.
### Final Thought (from the Горилла in Chief himself)
“It started with ‘space data centers are dumb, just bury them on the Moon.’
Turns out the real question was ‘…but how do we feed the Moon?’
This is the answer.”