Evaluation of the resulting trade-off between the time and cost of capital development first requires that the effect of Ko and M on the length of the capital production period be determined. For any given launch fleet, the time required to achieve a certain capital mass is minimized by delaying lunar soil processing until capital can be increased at a faster rate by producing it in space than by transporting it from Earth. Mathematically, Ku must be chosen so that Thus, the time can be minimized for every fleet size by starting with a seed facility of tons. Indeed, this fact is displayed by the isotime curves of Fig. 4. The rapid increase in time near the ^0-axis can be explained in a similar manner. As noted above, it takes KJM years to transport the initial capital into space. The effect of an incremental change in the transport fleet on the length of this period is
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