NanoRacks Plans To Turn Used Rocket Fuel Tanks Into Space Habitats (ieee.org) 130
An anonymous reader writes from a report via IEEE Spectrum: A couple of weeks ago NASA announced it has committed $65 million to six companies over the course of two years for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars. One of the six companies, called NanoRacks, is attempting to take empty fuel tanks from the upper stages of rockets and turn them into space habitats on-orbit. IEEE Spectrum reports: "A rocket like the the Atlas V, which can deliver payloads of nearly 19,000 kg to low Earth orbit, consists of three primary pieces: on the bottom, you've got the first stage booster, which consists of a huge engine and some big tanks holding kerosene fuel and oxidizer. Above that, there's the second stage, which consists of one or two smaller engines, a big tank for storing liquid hydrogen fuel, and a smaller tank for oxidizer. The payload, which is what all of the fuss is about, sits on top. The first stage launches the rocket off of the pad and continues firing for about four minutes. Meanwhile, the second stage fires up its own engine (or engines) to boost the payload the rest of the way into orbit. On the Atlas V, the second stage is called Centaur. Once Centaur gets its payload where it needs to go, it separates, and then suicides down into Earth's atmosphere. Getting a payload into space is so expensive because you have to build up this huge and complicated rocket, with engines and guidance systems and fuel tanks and stuff, and then you basically use it for like 15 minutes and throw it all away. But what about the second stage? You've got a whole bunch of hardware that made it to orbit, and when getting stuff to orbit costs something like $2,500 per kilogram, you then tell it to go it burn itself up in the atmosphere, because otherwise it's just useless space junk." NanoRacks thinks this is wasteful, so they want to turn these tanks into deep space habitats. IEEE notes that the hydrogen fuel tank on a Centaur upper stage has a diameter of over 4 meters, and an interior volume of 54 cubic meters, while the inflatable BEAM module that arrived at the ISS earlier this year has an interior volume of 16 cubic meters. For more details, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Jeff Manber, CEO of NanoRacks, and Mike Johnson, NanoRacks' Chief Designer. You can read their responses here.
My only concern (Score:1, Offtopic)
I just want to be sure this isn't an advertorial for yet another Kickstarter.
Undatable! (Score:1)
In my day, the girls with nano racks were undatable.
I don't get it (Score:3)
I don't understand how this can possibly be cost effective. Can anyone explain?
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
So an empty metal container made for storing fuel is also a great place to live? It has precisely the right properties in terms of structural integrity, heat and radiation shielding, etc.? Putting all the required machinery to sustain life inside is cost-free?
Or, if it is none of those things, changing all that stuff in orbit is actually cheaper and easier than launching a complete habitat from earth?
(hint: the answer to all these questions is "no")
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The article intro above actually explains this, if you read it. The fuel in this tank is BURNED, getting the payload into orbit. In the Apollo mission days, the payload was e.g. a third stage that went to the moon and back, as these are BIG rockets. In the past, the second stage tanks would be "thrown away" and allowed to reenter and burn up, but that's slightly insane given the roughly 32 MJ/kg direct energy cost (multiplied by a few orders of magnitude) of lifting anything at all into orbit.
The reasoning is then as follows: We've gotten this great big cylindrical chunk of pressure-tested metal -- remember, it held liquid hydrogen at HIGH pressure securely through a launch exerting many g's of acceleration -- into orbit. It already cost us millions of dollars to build, and tens of millions to get it into orbit as a SIDE EFFECT of lifting this other, really big payload. Let's not waste it!
So, what can we do with it? Well, given that it is roughly the size and even the shape of a good sized mobile home or the living volume of early submarines, making it into pressurized living space is an obvious choice. It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space. It is made of high quality, carefully x-rayed, stress-tested metal (because NASA would be insane to fire a rocket into space with humans on board with anything less holding in the fuel of the rocket). The metal has been carefully crafted and annealed to be able to handle liquid hydrogen temperatures without becoming brittle, so it is also proofed against your concerns with heat -- humans cannot tolerate any temperatures this metal is unlikely to be perfectly capable of withstanding, and besides, shielding it from sunlight is a matter of wrapping it in a reflective mylar blanket that weighs almost nothing and can easily be shipped up as part of the conversion kit.
As for radiation shielding -- that I don't know about, but I very much doubt that it is an issue. If the Earth gets hit dead on with a solar flare, I don't think there is anything we could reasonably put humans inside in orbit that would be "safe". It's not clear that being on the Earth's surface inside the atmosphere would be "safe". If the metal that the container was made of wasn't adequate as shielding during such an event -- I'm pretty sure it would be perfectly good most of the time -- and we had something better (but smaller and more expensive) then humans could retreat into the latter as a "shelter" to wait out the storm.
Life support machinery and furniture for the interior of the tank turned into habitat is a small fraction of the weight of the whole thing, and weight into orbit costs like gold.
Now let's compare costs. Suppose you used the Atlas to launch an Earth-built space habitat directly into space as to you suggest, and just wasted the second stage tank as usual. It costs you one launch to get the habitat into space, and the interior volume is almost certainly going to be smaller than the second stage tank volume. Now suppose that you take the empty tank and just hook it onto the habitat you just launched (which already has all of the life support machinery, radiation tolerance etc that you are worried about. Voila! You've more than doubled your available habitat volume in space at (almost) zero additional marginal cost! EVEN if it isn't AS safe as the primary habitat in the event of a solar storm, well, astronauts can always retreat into the primary habitat during such a storm and still use the tank as room for experiments, hydroponics, their ping pong table, room to spread out in to avoid going nuts.
The last question is: What do you have to do to the tank to FACILITATE this so that it isn't being done on an ad hoc basis? As you say, certain pieces of work are way cheaper on Earth than they will be in orbit. Should we build the tank out of slightly different metals so it IS a better radiation shield? Should we pre-install ductwork for ventilation and wiring and liquid
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Summarizing your point: the good news is that the engineers aren't just going to yell "YEEEEE HAWWWW" and start welding chairs and shit into a fuel tank, and then light the fuse. They do the math. They'll know what the added mass is, and what the reduced fuel volume will be. They'll add systems for venting the remaining pressurized fuel into the hard vacuum of space.
NASA looked at doing this 50 years ago in Apollo, but never got funding. They also looked at doing it with the Shuttle ET. There's even a
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a damn shame they didn't do it with the shuttle external fuel tanks. Those things were huge. How many would we have in use now if that was part of the design?
A lot of people lobbied hard for that. My understanding is that the biggest barrier standing in the way was that the spray-on foam insulation on the external tanks would likely "popcorn" in vacuum, filling LEO with more little bits of debris. (I'm not sure where I read that; it was ages ago.) Junk in LEO is already a big enough problem.
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They didn't do it because the ET would have become the cargo - the Orbiter itself couldn't carry much beyond it's crew. On top of that, the altitude they would have been delivered to would have required regular reboosts. (Any tank launched before the turn of the century and not reboosted would be gone by now.) On top of *that* it required a n
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I'd think that evacuating the remaining fuel would be the least difficult problem imaginable to solve. As you say, hard vacuum. It's only tricky if you want to recover it (as both O2 and H2 might have some value of their own in space). Beyond that, pretty much any simple valve will work as long as you bleed it off slowly and watch out for Unintended Consequences (like thrust or vacuum refrigeration of the interior from adiabatic expansion).
As you say, not a new concept. But it is a far cry from try to r
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Bleeding off the excess H2 and O2 seems as wasteful as throwing away the tank itself. I would suspect that having an extra ton or two of oxygen and hydrogen wouldn't be all that hard to turn into an extra ton of H2O, which the crew might appreciate. Or if they send up multiple partially empty tanks, they could designate one tank as the recovery tank.
The tank purging process would probably be time consuming, but there should no reason to be in a hurry to convert the tank into a different usable space. Con
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It's like this. A dedicated construction robot eats sunlight, and breathes vacuum, or air, or H2 gas, or N2 or O2 gas as you ask. It, like honey badger, just don't care, as long as its batteries have time enough to recharge before its work shift. It can stay up in space for months or years without its bones deteriorating. Properly engineered, it is likely to survive all but the worst solar storms by just powering down and waking up again afterwards. It might even be able to repair itself, or if there w
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Grieved though I am when one of my colleagues is killed at work (only a couple dead this year), I've yet to see a case in which any flags went to half mast. Besides, whose flag would you lower? The worker's nationality? Their country of origin? Their cultural identity? Their employer's nationality? The ISS's (or other vessel) "flag of convenience" for insurance purposes (I assume that like
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This is an exothermic reaction. You want to be careful starting those on Earth, where "run away" is an option. You're even more careful about starting them at sea (I work on offshore oil rigs ; trust me on this, or I'll start to talk about the Hot Work Permit system!), where "run away" has a good chance of being followed by "die of hypothermia or shark attack". You're even more
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space.
It is pressure tested on earth before being subjected to the intense rigors of launch. All bets are off as to whether it retains long-term integrity, as it has not been designed to do that. It's easy to find situations where a vessel will will not leak at high pressure differentials, but will leak at low pressure differentials. That we don't know the answer as to what will happen to the current designs is a good reason to test, but it should not be put forth as incontrovertible evidence of future success.
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Sure, pressure tested with HYDROGEN. Believe me, anything that holds hydrogen at 68 atmospheres should hold O2 at less than 1 (given the huge difference in molecular size), but yes, this is absolutely one of the design issues as the SV tank was designed to be loaded and then vent to hold the design pressure until launch, not hold H2 inside for weeks. Another one is that the tank itself only is structurally rigid enough to survive launch BECAUSE it is loaded with an enormous internal pressure, which makes
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I think you've hit the nail on the head. Nevertheless, I do want to point out that there is a simple case where a pressurized tank will hold just fine, but will leak like a sieve if the pressure is lowered: an internal flap that is being held in place against a hole by the high pressure, that is no longer being held sufficiently tightly when the pressure is lowered. The flap, in this case, might well be unintentional, like from an overlapped seam of two panels. It turns out that the flapper valve in most
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See "Doctor" joke upthread. Don't do that.
[Searches toolbox] "Nobody sent us a hammer!" [Radio to mission control] "Can you send up a hammer in the next tool shipment." [Mission control] "No. Next question?"
Seriously, [Myself on an oil rig 3km above the Atlantic mud, off the African coast] : "Your equipment is giving suspicious results. Pass me your multimeter so I can check if it's working properly."
[Service company rep.] "Our office will only send out a multi
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, my job is doing thermal testing on spacecraft. I can tell you thermal design involves just slightly more than "wrapping a mylar blanket around it".
Also, the fact that rocket stages and habitats are both in some sense metal boxes does not in any way imply they are therefore interchangeable. Both are highly specialized parts that have very different goals. Rocket stages simply cannot afford all the extra weight necessary for them to function as a habitat (life support equipment, solar cells, meteorite shielding, access hatches, equipment for the astronauts to do useful work with, etc.). Besides, the biggest (lower) stages never make it into orbit anyway (only the top stage does, and why do you think that is?). The top stage is typically quite small. It's also not just a hollow shell; inside are multiple tanks (for fuel and oxidiser), the engine itself, pumps, electronics, etc. You'd have to remove all that.
So let's say you want to add all the necessary equipment later. How is it going to get into orbit? For that you need _another_ launch! And then you need to do a hell of a lot of precision engineering in one of the most hostile environments known to mankind, just to remove the old contents of the stage, and replace it by new contents which you might as well have launched ready to use from Earth (the weight is going to be the same, whether you pack it up tightly or not, after all).
You also have to come up with a plan to get rid of any remaining fuel. If it's hydrazine (not uncommon on upper stages), that's pretty toxic, and no, you cannot just open the hatch and hope it disappears into space.
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"So an empty metal container made for storing fuel is also a great place to live? It has precisely the right properties in terms of structural integrity, heat and radiation shielding, etc.?"
Gee, if only H. sapiens were an adaptable species, capable of making do in extreme environments with available materials.
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There's this concept called engineering. Its very different from armchair engineering and political ranting, the core of this site. When applied correctly, engineering can solve many problems posed by a hypercritical, speculative and un-invested audience (/.), often in unique and unexpected ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The funny thing being, of course, that I actually do thermal testing on spacecraft and therefore have a good idea of what's involved in their construction, whereas you are presumably a pale basement dweller who has zero real-world experience of any kind but believes he knows everything because he has read about it on the internet once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thermal tester eh? Based on that last comment I was sure you were a demographic pigeon-holer forced into early retirement. Basement dweller you say? I wish! My basement has a drumset, wet bar, and a nintendo wii! Unfortunately I'm too busy with my day job*, that of an evangelical lobbyist with a primary focus on shifting federal policy to fewer rockets and more creationisim in school text books. As such I don't even need any real world experience because nobody fucks with the Jesus, fool! http://thebiglebow [wikia.com]
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
And the US did launch a converted stage in the 70s with Skylab (albeit, Skylab was built on Earth and didn't contribute propellant / thrust... a rather different beast ;) ). That is, a dry workshop rather than a wet one.
To a rocket scientist, it's "obvious"; to a habitat designer, it's a nightmare. They're designed for dramatically different needs, and in-space construction is very difficult (and thus expensive). Orbital habitats are not just big shells, they're complex structures that take a lot of work to make. The original proponent of the wet workshop concept, George Mueller (who had worked with Von Braun on the idea), himself had switched to arguing for a dry workshop over a wet one by 1969 (this eventually became Skylab), telling congress that the wet concept had become just an inferior stopgap based on necessity rather that desirability.
There's this concept that launch costs are everything. They're not. A lot of times, it really is just cheaper to spend more in launch costs than to do more engineering, assembly, and/or in-orbit work.
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Yes, it's totally that simple! The ISS has hundreds of thousands of parts, but only because congress insisted on adding thousands of Machines That Go Ping for no good reason. And random objects totally love being submerged in liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. And empty tanks are totally easy to haul all the way to orbit when pre-loaded with fittings and jackets and extra tanks. And building things in space (including bloody
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Now only if there was some way to test some of the stuff you're griping about without sending it to orbit. Oh wait, all of it can be tested with facilities that already exist.
And why would any welding need to be done in space? We've already built a huge space station without it. Just make sure there are fittings already there before you launch it.
Can you do this with a bone-stock Atlas-V tomorrow? No, there would need to be some retrofit. But that retrofit will likely cost far less than multiple launch
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You may be right. But I don't see it as automatically being the case that welding would automatically be stronger, quicker, cheaper or more effective than, say, gluing. We do have some pretty effective glues, for example, and in space, you don't have an oxide or moisture film forming after you abrade the surfaces to join.
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I like this bit:
Water can double as radiation shield. Put on a "slip on" jacket around the cylinder, assembled in 3-4 pieces, fill with water.
Now you have both radiation shield AND water supply.
'cos getting water into LEO is going to be so easy.
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A fair enough point. Of course, getting water from the asteroid belt isn't likely to be free either. But if only there were some other reason for learning how to move overgrown dirty snowballs around in space ... like the dinosaurs didn't.
(No, it's not certain that the Chicxulub impactor did for the non-avian dinosaurs - see signature ; I've been following Gerta Keller's work for over a decade - but it sure as hell wasn't a good day for anyone on the plane
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If you can move comets the last place you'd move them to is LEO!
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There isn't much leftover H2 or O2 -- no point im wasting the energy putting it into orbit.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think anyone would argue that it costs nothing to do this. Nor would they argue that it's easy. The argument would simply be whether or not it's cost effective. Can it be done for less than the costs of launching a fully developed habitat from the ground.
That's the job of the company providing the work. If they can make it work, more power to them. If they can't, failed business model. If they can't and it gets funded through tax dollars as a huge boondoggle, then it becomes a problem for the masses.
Prove that it can't be done cost effectively. Not random "Oh sure!! That'll work great!!! No costs at all!"
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You could conceivably have a module that inflates and expands inside the shell of the tank; it is much more viable than I thought just looking at the headline, although it isn't a slam-dunk proposition.
The real question is how much mass do you save for launching compared to a purpose-built device, and does that mass and velocity have a higher value than the complexity of re-assembling in space.
It will be interesting to see if it goes anywhere.
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But at the same time, it would help a whole lot if tanks were designed with on-orbit adaptation in mind.
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Building big stuff in space doesn't make all that much sense yet. Building big on the Moon, makes a lot more sense and a lot of the raw materials are already there. Just need a binder and some earth moving equipment, nuclear powered earth moving equipment, the binder, well those tanks can be reused. The moon has a couple of big advantages, much lower gravity and no atmosphere to deal with, definitely a better place to build the components of a space station. The smart research is in how to use the raw mate
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Building big stuff in space doesn't make all that much sense yet. Building big on the Moon, makes a lot more sense and a lot of the raw materials are already there.
EXACTLY! We have built and launched metric shit-tons of equipment Earth orbit. Building on the Moon should be the next step. As mentioned, plenty of raw materials on the moon. There would be a one-time huge cost of delivering equipment up there for the first time. Eventually, a permanent infrastructure could be created and the equipment could be built there as well.
My .02 cents...
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It's the concept of the wet workshop [wikipedia.org] that goes back to the Apollo days. The thought was that if funding continued, they could either retrofit the tanks of a spent S-II stage after you already spent the energy to get it into orbit into a workshop / living area, and then push it deeper into space to use; or you have the equipment already mounted in there and sealed up, and when you reach orbit you vent the remaining fuel to space and then go in and deploy your gear.
A 'dry workshop' version of this was actual
NanoRacks (Score:5, Funny)
I guess tinytits.com must have already been taken. ;)
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Oh, ATLAS V... (Score:2)
For some reason, when I was reading the summary, I kept reading it as "Saturn V" and I was like "since when is anyone building those anymore?"
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Well, maybe because NASA considered this with Saturn V for Skylab.
Finally if was deemed more effective to build to station on the ground entirely rather than to recycle the used fuel tank.
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Actually Skylab was built in a fuel tank. The the idea was to launch it using a Saturn Ib but a Saturn V was used because one was available. BTW that s why the the floors of Skylab where an open grid. There was even a plan to put a Skylab in orbit around the Moon.
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I doubt that. Cite please.
SSTO is a big deal.
Protection (Score:1)
As I recall the inflatable module has a multilayer lining to protect from radiation and micro meteors and other stuff. I don't recall fuel tanks having the same concerns. Also the inflatable module used for comparison is a prototype and full size inflatable modules will be substantially larger.
All in all I don't see how a second stage tank will compete.
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Or you could make it a habitat first, add all the shielding for radiation and micro meteors even add some live support systems.
Then just fill the habitat with fuel.
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Because all of the hardware that goes in a habitat is just totally compatible with being submerged in liquid oxygen and/or liquid hydrogen?
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Right, so they're going to reengineer every last subcomponent of every last part to withstand cryogenic temperatures, specifically for production in the tiny volumes needed in the space industry? Just for the inconvenience of reusing an upper stage?
Again: contrary to would-be-rocketeer imaginations, launch costs are not the be-all end-all of expenses when it comes to space. Engineering and low-volume production is killer. Mission designers always heavily stress TRL (Technology Readiness Level) of all com
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I mean, you could use duct tape but where's the fun in that? Not every engineer at NASA is qualified to use it.
Too bad they can't use the SS ext. tanks (Score:3)
Too bad it's too late for them to be able to use the Space Shuttle external tanks.
There were around 135 launches (so I guess the number of tanks that made it almost to orbit would be 134). Of course many (most?) of these missions were not in the correct orbital plane for use as space habitats (I guess they would not be easily reachable by subsequent manned flights). Still when one considers the sheer volume (about 2 million liters!) you'd think they'd be very useful. Also because they didn't have much heavy external hardware (like engines) they'd be easier to move around and keep in orbit.
What could they have been used for? I'm not sure but a whole bunch of interesting applications come to mind. If they could hold a full atmosphere's worth of pressure they'd make huge living spaces. If only a low pressure environment could be maintained, perhaps plants could survive in a mostly CO2 atmosphere; with a slow rotation about the long axis and a central light column running down the length of it, it could be a huge hydroponic garden for waste recycling and food. If they turned out to be pretty durable then perhaps propellent storage or even reuse as fuel tanks for interplanetary expeditions could be envisioned. Since they are light, perhaps they could be sent, empty, to a passing comet to refill with water and then sent back to earth orbit using some of the collected mass as fuel. If nothing else, they could have been cut up and used as raw materials for use in providing shielding against micrometeorites.
Anyway, there were well over a hundred of these giant things that, with just a little more delta-V (and admittedly, long term boosting to counteract atmospheric drag) could have been a valuable orbital resource. I guess it wasn't done because some infrastructure wasn't available (cheap orbital "tugs" perhaps using ion drives for low fuel consumption) and the vision and political will wasn't there. Too bad because this could've been like Skylab but hundredfold.
Re:Too bad they can't use the SS ext. tanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Shuttle ETs never got up to a stable orbit. It would have been possible to use the OMS to take them up there, but then the Shuttle would have had basically no payload capacity on that mission.
Of course, that's one of the lesser problems with the concept. Often proposed, often investigated, but never considered worth throwing serious money into.
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Shuttle ETs never got up to a stable orbit. It would have been possible to use the OMS to take them up there, but then the Shuttle would have had basically no payload capacity on that mission.
On that issue, the shuttle actually used the OMS engines to steer the ET into a quick re-entry, then dropped it and used the OMS engines to get into the orbit they wanted. They used extra fuel to do this. (This doesn't address the other issues with the concept, of course.)
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And even then, the tanks would be low enough to require regular reboosts. Without reboosts, any tanks launched before around the turn of the century would already have re-entered.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
There's lots of research demonstrating that long periods of time spent near campfires cause serious health issues. Absent cleaning the air, such as with a complete air-conditioning and filtering setup, it is unhealthy for humans to be near a campfire for any significant length of time. ... so this isn't viable.
It's about risk. The risk of you cooking your food (thus exposing you to carcinogenics) compared to the risk of eating uncooked food (which we did for MILLIONS OF YEARS) is a trade-off.
Do you sacrifice those temporary, mostly reversible health issues (comparatively vanishingly small compared to the general risk of take-off and space travel in general, to be honest) for the opportunity to live and work in an entirely new environment?
To be honest, mining is an incredibly dangerous profession. Scouting the bottom of the oceans too. Diving near oil rigs. All of these things are MUCH HIGHER RISK than the health effects of prolonged space travel. And people do them every single day.
Even simulated gravity doesn't solve the problems of space travel, so even your solution is completely useless in terms of combating all - or even the significant - health risks. Radiation would be the killer, long-term.
To be honest, there are thousands of people, most of them sane, educated and intelligent, willing to sign up to a one-way mission to Mars.
In the same way that for centuries, people fought to get to the top of Everest or to the middle of the arctic poles. Of course it wasn't without risk. It can't be. But that's how you discover the risk, reduce them and compensate for what you can't reduce.
So re-using a fuel tank as a habitat in space is just one sensible method of reducing risk - of having to send up more junk to live in, so you don't have to live in cramped conditions, or needlessly spend money on more accommodation when you could spend it on safety gear or fire tests or whatever.
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Idea from the 1960s (Score:1)
The concept of a Wet workshop [wikipedia.org] (reuse an upper stage as a habitat) was first proposed by Wernher von Braun in the early 1960s.
Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
From the interview: "The reason that Skylab wasn't build like this is kind of a strange story: [NASA] had fewer Saturn IBs than they had Saturn Vs, so von Braun just decided to use a Saturn V and fly up a "dry" lab, with all of the equipment aboard it already."
Um, not quite. When a 'spare' Saturn V became available (because a lunar mission was cancelled), they swapped from a IB 'wet' lab to a V 'dry' lab because the 'wet' labs were very expensive for their very low capability. The expense came from needing to have considerable amounts of structure and infrastructure designed to survive inside the cryogenic conditions inside the tank, from redesigning the tanks to serve a dual role, and then re-certifying the whole deal for flight. The low capability came from the requirement that everything that couldn't survive a bath in deep cryogens having to be manhandled into place via the very narrow docking hatch. While a dry lab was more expensive than a wet one - the leap in capability was far greater than the leap in cost.
That's also why NASA built their ISS modules with the large CBM [wikipedia.org] hatches - manhandling large amount of stuff through tiny hatches (like those the Ixion will use) simply isn't very efficient. (And that's without considering the headaches that splitting all your equipment down into tiny chunks brings. Not just handling - but installation and integration too.) All of the ISS cargo craft that NASA is responsible for uses CBM, as does the Japanese HTV.
"In the commercial sector, it's getting interesting, because people are taking more risks. Not unnecessary risks, but acceptable risks to reduce costs."
Moving your man hours (outfitting the module) from expensive ones on the ground to hellishly expensive ones on orbit is not a recipe for cutting costs. Especially since you still have to pay for the launch of the module (Centaur) *and* the launch of the stuff to go inside it. (You can't piggyback because no Centaurs are headed anywhere near the ISS.) Even in lower inclination orbits, the mission module, the rendezvous systems, and outfitting the Centaur to survive years on orbit are all going to cost money and cut into it's payload - which will make piggybacking unattractive to Centaur's usual customers.
"We want to keep hardware costs as low as possible: it's not about building something on the ground that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Why do that when you have perfectly good hardware going to space, paid for already?"
You don't have perfectly good hardware going to space already. You have a vehicle designed for a completely different purpose and completely lacking the "stuff" customers will pay you for going to orbit.
Or, in short, nothing in the article or interview leaves me with a warm fuzzy that they've solved any of the well known problems with 'wet' systems.
easy peasy (Score:1)
This must be easy.
1) Construct the habitat/fuelcontainer here on earth.
2) Put a big plastic bag inside and fill the plastic bag with rocket fuel.
3) When in space, attach the habitat to ISS and rip out the plastic bag.
4) Open all windows for a while to remove any remaining smell of rocket fuel.
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What plastic are you thinking of and at what thickness, that is compatible with liquid oxygen, retains flexibility at LOX (or worse, LH) temperatures, and withstands the pressure, all without adding a massive mass penalty? How is the plastic supposed to deform around every little structure in the habitat (aka, not face multiple atmospheres of asymmetric pressure)? What sort of hardware are you thinking of where every last element is just fine with being frozen down to LOX (or worse, LH) temperatures? How
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Well, for the actual system they're considering, it's the larger (volumetrically) part of a single tank, the LH2 and LOX being separated by a "fibreglass honeycomb", which I guess is glued in place after welding together the bottom end of the tank and the main length of the tank body, but before welding on the top end. I'm
Didn't Proxmire keep this from happening ? (Score:2)
. . I've heard the story, on and off over the years, that Sen. William Proxmire stopped funding for NASA studies on taking the External Tank into orbit, and using it for the basis of a Station.
But I can't seem to find an actual reference, anybody seen one, or is this an Urban Legend of the Space Program ?
This is the exact opposite of new (Score:2)
"Tank Farm Dyname" (Score:5, Informative)
Story by David Brin, using Shuttle external tanks. Whaddya know, the whole story is on the web: http://www.davidbrin.com/tankf... [davidbrin.com]
"Firestar" (Score:2)
And in response to all the people saying that the cost of either modifying the tanks to server dual purposes or performing additional construction in space makes it infeasible you're probably right. If we were talking about a one time deal
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Thanks for the post. I really enjoyed reading that. I was wondering why all the yeast until they got to the ale/beer part.
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Don't forget Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. The Ares was essentially built from Shuttle ETs.
Toxicity (Score:2)
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You're probably thinking of things like hydrazine, or some of the hypergolic mixtures. (A and B are "hypergolic" if mixing A and B results in explosion in milliseconds without needing any initiator, detonator etc. Very good if you want your motor to re-start reliably. The explosion delay is an important characteristic. Milliseconds matter.)
The main fuel in the Centaur stages under discussion are liquid hydrogen ("LH2") and liquid oxygen ("LOX"), but the reliabl
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Even in low orbit (i.e., where the drag is sufficient to de-orbit the tank within a couple of years), you're still in what on Earth would be considered a really hard vacuum.
Book (Score:2)
Better than junk (Score:2)
Which they are now, orbiting junk, and a hazard as long as they drift along.
But recycling them offers an opportunity to raft a few together, build a new, viable habitat, and reduce the clutter.
Oh, and when do we send up the garbage scows to harvest the real junk and delitter the low orbits?
Why not make server farms? (Score:2)
Why not use these as server farms? Solar power would be easy. Microwave comm link. No need to waste energy cooling it.
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Condensed version of the Laws of Thermodynamics : you can't win ; you can't break even ; you can't stop playing ; absolutely everything is subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics, including specifically anyone who objects to the tyranny of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
storage, not habitat (Score:2)
Surely they could be used as storage tanks, instead of living spaces. I doubt they'd be rated, after the stresses of launch, for long-term habitation, but there's going to be ample need for the bulk storage of mass. One of the sad things that is done, is the jettison and burning of trash; perfectly good organics and mass that might be someday useful in orbit, when the technology is developed to make use of them. Then the containers themselves could be used as raw material for some hypothetical future proces
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Is anything at all "rated" for long term habitation in space. You'd never get the physical ailments consequent on a 6-month spaceflight past any industrial safety laws. Seriously, not.
You've gone from step 1 to step 100 without showing any of your intermediate working. This blank assertion does not convince me. Would you fill in a few of the steps by which you arriv
This is ... (Score:2)
Old idea (Score:2)
Parts for a Big Wheel (Score:2)
What I'd like to see is
Send up a hub.
Slot the used Centaurs into the hub as spokes
Connect the spokes on the outside rim
Spin 'er up as a rotating wheel space station.
You've always known you want one of these [wikipedia.org]!
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Just imagine how much we could accomplish with all that welfare money? (3 trillion a year).
Where are your priorities, man!?
Don't you realize that $3T is what keeps the status quo the status quo and contributes heavily to a 90%+ incumbent reelection rate?
Why, I just heard about the new program being proposed by the administration to help quell the recent riots. It's sort of a spin-off from the 'Cash For Clunkers' program.
They believe that access to safe and stylish transportation will both assist in their financial mobility but also in bolstering self esteem.
They've floated a few possible names fo
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Poor people in India harvesting feces from the sewers have a better habitat than living in a fuel tank in free fall.
Just give them time, Space Nutter Troll. The feces will come, the feces will come.
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In LEO thicker walls are worse from a radiation perspective.
They aren't going to stop high energy cosmic rays, but will throw off tons of more dangerous secondary particles. You want the cosmic rays to just go through, not scatter a bunch of secondaries.