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Space Station Stuff

Absolute Zero said:
In 2021, the nett world population increased by about 9,000 people every hour and a 737 carries 215 passengers at most so that's more than forty flights per hour just to keep the population on Earth constant.
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That will most likely reverse, in time.
 
 
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Yeah, the concepts were proposed in the 1970's already, the Stanford torus, O'Neill cylinder, Bernal sphere to name a few.
 
Dandridge Cole has largely been forgotten. His concepts came even earlier.

Scott Lowther was working on a book of Megaprojects and had made some headway--as seen in the asteroid station here:
https://twitter.com/UnwantedBlog/status/1610076858485194752?cxt=HHwWgICysemXktgsAAAA

I am surprised no one ever did art of Cordwainer Smith's big inflatable design
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Cordwainer-Smith-ebook/dp/B071DRV5PR

It would have been larger even than most fictional ships.
https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2022/06/what-is-biggest-ship-in-science-fiction.html

But here is a sad note: The Enzmann ship---which always looked rather conventional to me---is now in doubt:
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=51362

As for the situation on ISS---and on Earth:

Soyuz get medal for shrapnel
Rogozin get shrapnel for medal
Both leak showy way
Equation is balanced
 
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publiusr said:
Dandridge Cole has largely been forgotten. His concepts came even earlier.

Scott Lowther was working on a book of Megaprojects and had made some headway--as seen in the asteroid station here:
https://twitter.com/UnwantedBlog/status/1610076858485194752?cxt=HHwWgICysemXktgsAAAA

I am surprised no one ever did art of Cordwainer Smith's big inflatable design
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Cordwainer-Smith-ebook/dp/B071DRV5PR

It would have been larger even than most fictional ships.
https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2022/06/what-is-biggest-ship-in-science-fiction.html

But here is a sad note: The Enzmann ship---which always looked rather conventional to me---is now in doubt:
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=51362

As for the situation on ISS---and on Earth:

Soyuz get medal for shrapnel
Rogozin get shrapnel for medal
Both leak showy way
Equation is balanced
Click to expand...
would you please stop killing threads with your link diarrhea?
 
I think you will like this one at least:

Researchers create tractor beam that pulls macroscopic objects
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-optical-tractor-macroscopic.html

I can see a large station beaming not only power---but directing flight of vehicles in thin atmosphere:

"In previous studies, the light pulling force was too small to pull a macroscopical object," said research team member Lei Wang from QingDao University of Science and Technology in China. "With our new approach, the light pulling force has a much larger amplitude. In fact, it is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure used to drive a solar sail, which uses the momentum of photons to exert a small pushing force...."Our technique provides a non-contact and long-distance pulling approach, which may be useful for various scientific experiments," said Wang. "The rarefied gas environment we used to demonstrate the technique is similar to what is found on Mars. Therefore, it might have the potential for one day manipulating vehicles or aircraft on Mars."

ISS Model
https://www.metalearth.com/international-space-station
 
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Space stations over the years
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XCV330 said:
I've seen some interesting designs from single-tank to one rotating wheel-of-tanks for artificial gravity. I recall that NASA looked into it at one point and found that one of the problems was if the tanks had been left in space too long, the foam insulation would have "popcorned" and caused a potential hazard. I don't know about the early tanks but the later lithium-aluminum super lightweight tanks probably lacked adequate micrometeorite protection, so blankets would have had to have been brought up and fitted. Then the interior space would still need to be contstructed.

None of this was non-doable, but I think the main thing was that the shuttle could only put a tank in orbit if it had no other cargo, which never happened, unless STS-1 counts. Columbia could lift less than the rest of the fleet, so it could not have done it, either.

Shuttle-C, the wingless cargo-only variant might have been able to do so even while hauling payload, if it had been built. I am kind of a fan of Shuttle-C. It would have given the US a nearly-saturn-v like capability and allowed all sorts of things we're still waiting on, in the early 90's (including the Shuttle derived launcher we ARE finally going to get, SLS). The First Bush administration was all in on both Space Station Freedom/Alpha as well as moon and mars missions. But the SEI program that came out of all that talk cost over half a trillion dollars. Congress was not amused. Dan Quayle, who was involved, well you couldn't make Quayle more akward than he was. Richard Truly was fired, which was a pity, he was a great astronaut and in many other ways. Mars, moon, heavy lift, etc was all shelved for decades. We would have even lost the space station (keeping this on topic!) if it had not been for Clinton using the idea to bring the Russians on board as a slightly naive swords-into-ploughshares thing (they can make both, actually).

And so we have ISS.


shuttlec.jpg

but no shuttle-c
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IIRC Shuttle C involved cannibalising an existing shuttle (Columbia) for a single expendable launch.
 
XCV330 said:
I agree that I don't agree either.

I browsed and immediately disagreed here: “It wasn’t until the space shuttle came along that it was possible to consider building a space station as a series of building blocks.”

Salyut was already moving in that direction and Mir was built as it was also because Proton was the biggest launch vehicle the Soviets had.

But America didn't have to do that. I think the United State's generous and unwanted gift of Skylab to the people of the Australian outback was one of the stupidest decisions made in space policy. It still bothers me, and I know i am not alone, that people wander through Skylab II at the NASM thinking it's some kind of mockup or display. Nope, that's unflown space hardware. That's America's second large space station, and it could have been launched on one of the Saturn V's people chose to abandon outside Marshall and Johnson instead of flying so they could concentrate politically on STS and Apollo-Soyuz.

Skylab should have been saved. Skylab II should have been flown. By the time we needed a Skylab III, Shuttle-C would have been a heavy-lift option for building the next one from the lessons learned from the previous two. And that's the sad part, those lessons had to wait decades. Skylab needed its orbit boosted, needed an increase in solar power capacity, as well as a docking module, but all those things would have been good lessons to learn anyway, and certainly were in the capacity for NASA once Shuttle was running . Of course Shuttle delays and an unexpectedly strong solar weather surge meant Skylab was coming down early, but I still maintain it could have been saved by sending up one of the remaining Apollo CM's and boosting it's orbit via the Service module, just enough to keep it up there a few more years.

By the time that ISS building began in orbit, with the shelving of the US Propulsion Module, NASA was at least unwilling to hedge those kinds of bets since it was now entirely reliant on the Russians and the occasional Shuttle reboost (not many of the latter, lately) and the ICM remains in mothball status just in case it is needed. So. one lesson learned at least.
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Skylab couldn't be saved, unless the Shuttle stuck to schedule. But Skylab B could and should have been launched for eventual Shuttle use.
 
diankra said:
IIRC Shuttle C involved cannibalising an existing shuttle (Columbia) for a single expendable launch.
Click to expand...
I think so yes.

Another idea was to use Pathfinder test article (OV-098) for a prototype. If Shuttle-C had ever become a recurring vehicle. they would have had to have started a production line, however. After Dick Truly presented his proposed budget for the early 90's Mars missions to the White House, and everyone's eyes popped out of their heads, that kind of ended the idea. OV-098 is now the shuttle mockup outside at the space museum in Huntsville. Few that see it realize it might have become the first heavy-lifter since Energya.

The idea came back up during Constellation.Sidemount SDLV was proposed as an alternative to the Ares V development. It would have been faster (edit: faster in production/development) but would have required two launches plus one Ares I flight or human rated EELV+Orion for lunar. But it would have been ready more quickly.There are some interesting concepts of that one, out there.

Later when the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation Program and we had the vague "Program of Record" it came back up again. But congress mandated SLS exactly as it exists, and we've been stuck with the Senate Launch System as the Northern Alabama Space Administration's flagship booster ever since.

diankra said:
Skylab couldn't be saved, unless the Shuttle stuck to schedule. But Skylab B could and should have been launched for eventual Shuttle use.
Click to expand...

Martin-Marietta and some of the old guard Apollo folks did propose an attempt to save Skylab in the 70s as shuttle development slowed and Skylab's orbit degraded. TRS was kind of a daring idea. There's an article by Oberg about it, here:

http://www.astronautix.com/s/skylabsuntimelyfate.html
 
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XCV330 said:
I think so yes.

Another idea was to use Pathfinder test article (OV-098) for a prototype. If Shuttle-C had ever become a recurring vehicle. they would have had to have started a production line, however. After Dick Truly presented his proposed budget for the early 90's Mars missions to the White House, and everyone's eyes popped out of their heads, that kind of ended the idea. OV-098 is now the shuttle mockup outside at the space museum in Huntsville. Few that see it realize it might have become the first heavy-lifter since Energya.

The idea came back up during Constellation.Sidemount SDLV was proposed as an alternative to the Ares V development. It would have been faster (edit: faster in production/development) but would have required two launches plus one Ares I flight or human rated EELV+Orion for lunar. But it would have been ready more quickly.There are some interesting concepts of that one, out there.

Later when the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation Program and we had the vague "Program of Record" it came back up again. But congress mandated SLS exactly as it exists, and we've been stuck with the Senate Launch System as the Northern Alabama Space Administration's flagship booster ever since.



Martin-Marietta and some of the old guard Apollo folks did propose an attempt to save Skylab in the 70s as shuttle development slowed and Skylab's orbit degraded. TRS was kind of a daring idea. There's an article by Oberg about it, here:

http://www.astronautix.com/s/skylabsuntimelyfate.html
Click to expand...
Vaguely remember this from the early 1990s. Shuttle-c needed a rear mounting for SSMEs.
Baxter's books use Pathfinder.
 
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XCV330 said:
I think so yes.

Another idea was to use Pathfinder test article (OV-098) for a prototype. If Shuttle-C had ever become a recurring vehicle. they would have had to have started a production line, however. After Dick Truly presented his proposed budget for the early 90's Mars missions to the White House, and everyone's eyes popped out of their heads, that kind of ended the idea. OV-098 is now the shuttle mockup outside at the space museum in Huntsville. Few that see it realize it might have become the first heavy-lifter since Energya.

The idea came back up during Constellation.Sidemount SDLV was proposed as an alternative to the Ares V development. It would have been faster (edit: faster in production/development) but would have required two launches plus one Ares I flight or human rated EELV+Orion for lunar. But it would have been ready more quickly.There are some interesting concepts of that one, out there.

Later when the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation Program and we had the vague "Program of Record" it came back up again. But congress mandated SLS exactly as it exists, and we've been stuck with the Senate Launch System as the Northern Alabama Space Administration's flagship booster ever since.



Martin-Marietta and some of the old guard Apollo folks did propose an attempt to save Skylab in the 70s as shuttle development slowed and Skylab's orbit degraded. TRS was kind of a daring idea. There's an article by Oberg about it, here:

http://www.astronautix.com/s/skylabsuntimelyfate.html
Click to expand...
I love Oberg's stuff. Have a copy of Red Star in Orbit. But he is the first to say that he did his best at the time.
 
diankra said:
Vaguely remember this from the early 1990s. Shuttle-c needed a rear mounting for SSMEs.
Baxter's books use Pathfinder.
Click to expand...
that was one of the advantage of side-mount SDLV over Ares V (and SLS). the thrust profile did not change so it could essentially use a boat-tail version of the aft-end of the space shuttle, including the OMS engines as well. I haven't read the Baxter book. what is it called?
 
XCV330 said:
that was one of the advantage of side-mount SDLV over Ares V (and SLS). the thrust profile did not change so it could essentially use a boat-tail version of the aft-end of the space shuttle, including the OMS engines as well. I haven't read the Baxter book. what is it called?
Click to expand...
Titan, I think.
 
Zubrin’s Ares would have had in line payloads, but a recoverable SSME pod…but we have Energia II in SLS. I seem to remember some Burans minus wings to be left as space station cores in orbit.
 
publiusr said:
Zubrin’s Ares would have had in line payloads, but a recoverable SSME pod…but we have Energia II in SLS. I seem to remember some Burans minus wings to be left as space station cores in orbit.
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funny how Zubrin's ideas attracted a young impressionable Elon Musk who then had his own ideas who then tried to buy a launch from the Russians, but was laughed at so formed his own rocket company and here we are today.
 
Starliner delayed..
again..
because..

oh you have to love Boeing..

FLAMMABLE WIRE INSULATION.

at this point NASA just cancel their contract and give it to Sierra like you should have done originally.
 
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