Crop Tugs



A mission-critical element of the Bountiful Sky project, the crop tugs were built to de-orbit packages of food (and sometimes other cargoes) from low earth orbit using a tether, allowing them to re-enter Earth's atmosphere by aerobraking. This task did not require the massive momentum transfer of the ore barge launches, and consequently the crop tugs were much smaller than the ore tugs, though the basic principle was the same.

Because the crop tugs de-orbited packages to many different locations on the Earth's surface, they were much more versatile than the ore tugs. They were also sometimes pressed into service to transport heavy loads to the main hab or to low lunar orbit.