'All The Mod Cons'
Can i have mine lined with six foot thick lead walls please?
Living in space is about to get a lot more cushty as NASA invests $65m to be shared between six companies chosen to design and develop deep space habitats. The collaboration between NASA and private companies is part of the space agency’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) set up to advance human …
I read this and thought, wow, they are updating their computing hardware to NeXTSTEP, then I realised the capitalisation was different ..
I suppose having somewhere to live when you get there is a next obvious step, but this can't be without a catch ...
I'm just wondering what the call out rates are for the essential maintenance on the housing though, it must be difficult to get a plumber or a painter when you really need one. Now I'm thinking about the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and the Golgafrinchans 3 ships again !
"requirements, including: a pressurized container; a docking capability; environmental control; life support systems; crew health capabilities; fire safety technologies; logistics management; and radiation mitigation and monitoring."
What, no WiFi, tea and coffee making facility, mini-bar, Corby space-suit press, Gideon Bible?
..and no coin-operated Magic Fingers in the bed personal pouch.
I bet Magic Fingers won't work well in free fall anyway. Unless you're strapped in real good...
I'm not sure about magic fingers, but in order to weigh themselves on the space station, astro/cosmonauts strap themselves to what is basically a stick on a spring. How fast they wobble up and down (er, not that there's an up or down in free fall) is determined by their mass.
Surely there's room for a device that gives one a nice massage, while also measuring mass?
>And no requirement for spinning it around to imitate gravity
Yes - that does seem an omission.
Still, we do seem to have missed the point of Space - in that there's a lot of it. We will only ever 'conquer' that volume of space which we can enclose and tailor to our needs.
For any longish-term space occupation, we're going to need quite a lot of space:
1. To deliver said artificial gravity by spinning a fairly-large-diameter torus/cylinder
2. To grow food (which has the additional value of 'growing' oxygen).
3. To house the number of people required to make up and maintain an autonomous society.
Our best bet is likely to be to find an asteroid and hollow it out.
>"1. To deliver said artificial gravity by spinning a fairly-large-diameter torus/cylinder"
They can just join 2 of the habitats together with a long cable, apply a short burst of thrust and start them spinning around each other. That assumes that the habitats could take the stress, but since they have to survive launch stresses maybe they are already strong enough.
It will be tricky to get in and out of the habitats once the are spinning but when you toss out the trash it won't stick around.
We aren’t technologically advanced enough yet, I wish we were but although a lot can be learned from space exploration I think the machines have the upper hand for now.
The ISS is great and cost a big bucket of dough, maybe the extra funding should be spent on the ISS IMO.
BTW Will this one be pod shaped as well cos round just don't work with any of my furniture?
To be fair, this type of habitat testing is a big part of why the ISS was conceived in the first place. If us hairless apes want to cruize thru the starry dome overhead in style, we're gonna need really sophisticated artificial support. Too many things can kack you out there.
This expenditure is clearly very preliminary, but it has to begin sometime.
But seriously - given how long it will take to get to mars and back whoever goes there will need something like a habitat instead of a capsule.
Since we aren't likely to be shipping a large population to Mars, the sex-based average calorie consumption isn't relevant.
We should just pick some suitably qualified people to go, perhaps adding a "consumes less calories" criteria if it seems relevant to the logistics, although it seems to me that "small enough to fit in this tiny tin can" might be more useful, and also keep calorie counts down.
And if you were shipping a population, perhaps one intended to be long-term self-sustaining, is not shipping any men a good idea, even if it did save on calories?
"Since we aren't likely to be shipping a large population to Mars, the sex-based average calorie consumption isn't relevant."
If it takes up to several months for your ship to travel to Mars, you have to have several months of food supply per person, and double if it is a simple flyby/orbit and return mission, as has been proposed before. The average man weighs more than the average woman, and consumes more calories. That's more weight redirected to food that could be instead used for radiation shielding, fuel, etc.
Given that shipping women to Mars will be cheaper to some degree than shipping men, you could consider starting a colony by including some frozen sperm along for the ride.
So far as I'm aware, they have a clear lead in the space hab game - a tested technology with a couple of years time in orbit already, superior shielding to anything on the ISS, and more usable volume per ton launched than 'tin can' -style technology. Can't see Boeing catching Bigelow any time soon. Sierra Nevada have form too, although with shuttle-type space planes.
This is about deep space not LEO. Bigelow have a lead in the game but it is diminished by the much higher radiation further out. It could even be a disadvantage as they will inevitably go down the route of increased layers of the technologies they have already developed. Other players could take a clean sheet approach and come up with something superior.
I'd put money on Bigelow being in the top 3 come the prize giving but that's as far as I'd stick my neck out.
Send em up one at a time and just lego them together into a big sphere and eventually it will be safe to live in the middle. We send enough up the mass of the earth drops and it gets cheaper!
A similar technique can be used to make massive floating pontoons at sea - the outside ones will damp the waves and it would be nice in the centre.
"Send em up one at a time and just lego them together into a big sphere and eventually it will be safe to live in the middle."
On a similar vein, why not re-design the 2nd stage boosters (which normally just burn up in the atmos once they are "used") and collect them together in orbit, join them up and re-use them/recycle them.
It might take a bit of re-imagining how these boosters are designed so they could be "dual use" (ir as boosters and then as storage/habitats/raw materials but they could be re-used post-launch, and it would be a start.