Sorry for reviving an old thread but today I was also thinking of the cheapest way to land an object on the moon, take a few pictures and somehow transmit them back.
I was just wondering, why are the savings of fuel so small? I though that the main need for thrust was to get out of Earth's gravity?. Which also brings me to the next question: At what speed does an object need to be traveling after it has escaped Earth's atmosphere, to not get pulled back into Earth? I'm guessing it would either need to be high enough speed to escape Earth's gravity before the velocity becomes negative or to have a thrust that counters mg.
Also realisticly, is it possible to have a motor that is light and powerful enough to pull a 1kg "rocket" into low earth orbit? Or to phrase it differently: (How much thrust power would you need to lift 1kg into LEO?)
I'm not very knowledgeable on these things but have recently been very curious so excuse the newb questions.
Now I know that such a project is pretty much impossible anyway but I do not understand why even consider engines using fuel to send a small object in LEO and maybe even to the moon as surely an engine capable of using fuel will add a lot of extra weight and thus require even more fuel which would increase the weight to a point where the rocket is too big but not big enough to have the capabilities of achieving anything? Is it possible to use a battery/solar powered motor instead?
Finally, lets say that somehow the rocket managed to get to the moon, the cameras managed to take some pictures, how easy would it be to transmit the pictures and detect the radio signals from so far away?
