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ISS Space

SpaceX Says It Will Launch First Commercial Space Station By Mid-2025 (upi.com) 88

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: SpaceX confirmed Wednesday it signed a contract to launch the world's first commercial space station. The company also will perform manned space flights shortly after launching the station into orbit "no later than August 2025," SpaceX said in a statement. The Haven-1 space station is being built by Vast, a private aerospace company based in Long Beach, Calif. Its "mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space -- a future in which the human population and our resources expand far beyond our current imagination." Vast is solely funded by its billionaire founder and CEO Jed McCaleb.

SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 rocket to carry the Haven-1 station into orbit. Manned crews will then use the company's Dragon reusable spacecraft to get to the space station, docking for up to 30 days while in orbit. Vast plans for the initial module to become part of a larger 100-meter-long multi-module spinning space station with artificial gravity. SpaceX confirmed it also will provide crew training, as well as spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises. SpaceX also will conduct mission simulations, as part of the agreement with Vast. Crew selection is underway, the company said Wednesday, and will be announced at a future date.
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SpaceX Says It Will Launch First Commercial Space Station By Mid-2025 More

SpaceX Says It Will Launch First Commercial Space Station By Mid-2025

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  • The headline is literally true (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @03:41AM (#63515823) Homepage Journal

    The headline is literally true, but really all SpaceX is doing is contracting to launch someone else's space station. I guess nobody has heard of Vast so it becomes a SpaceX story.

    Vast are being very optimistic here. Some of it is pure sci-fi too, like spinning for "artificial gravity". Spinning causes a lot of mechanical problems, which is why nobody has done it yet. Also the "gravity" isn't gravity at all, and unless the station is absolutely huge and people only live on the tips of it, it doesn't work well for humans. It's been tested on Earth and found to be lacking.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Agreed, there will absolutely be no artificial gravity - we don't have the engineering capability yet.

      First, if I recall correctly you need something like a 200m radius of rotation to get an acceleration gradient at a reasonable rotation rate that doesn't make a standing average-height human feel ill (that's pretty big). Second, every little movement from then on is going to change the centre of rotation and stress the entire structure. Third, it's a bitch to dock with.

      If SpaceX wanted to claim they were

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Forth, the direction that the "gravity" is pulling is constantly changing as you rotate around the axis. If you throw an object it won't travel along the same trajectory that it would on Earth, it will become disconnected from the rotating force as soon as you let go of it.

        Scott Manley did a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        At around 10:30 you can see some video of Soviet experiments where people struggle with simple tasks, and demonstrate the way that objects behave when thrown.

        • The coriolis effect inside a small rotating space station is definitely counter-intuitive to someone raised on a large mass like a rocky planet.

          The good news is, though, that your brain can rewire itself for the task of predicting the path of thrown objects if you switch environments. It might take some time, but you can do it.

          Astronauts already do this when switching from normal terrestrial gravity effects to a microgravity environment while in orbit.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Ksevio ( 865461 )

        I liked the design in the movie Stowaway where the crew portion of the ship was tethered to a center point (with communications and stuff that doesn't want to be spinning as much) and countered by a booster tethered across from it to keep it balanced. They reeled in the tethers for the docking portion.

        Not sure how practical that is in reality, if we have materials strong enough, but it seems like something that would give the appropriate circumference without building as large a structure

        • The tether-and-counterweight is one of the more serious proposals for providing some 'normal gravity' for astronauts on long trips - say, to Mars. It's a simple setup to have two objects and a tether, and shifting mass in one won't really be that much of an issue. And a 400m tether is a LOT less mass than rotating ring that would just shake the rest of your ship apart starting at the bearings.

          Even better, you're usually not planning to use such an arrangement permanently. The usual scenario involves stopp

          • And a 400m tether is a LOT less mass than rotating ring that would just shake the rest of your ship apart starting at the bearings.

            Things are a bit different in the microgravity of an orbit. The vibrations you get on Earth in a very high mass structure supported on bearings are aggravated by gravity. Without gravity pulling the mass down when it bumps up, there are no vibrations. Instead the whole structure wobbles a little. The vibrations you're talking about are essentially pendulum behavior, but that doesn't happen in orbit.

            • "Wobbles a little" is not trivial in a space station. That wobble translates into stresses at every joint / seal / weld / whatever.

              If you jump (or push off) the interior of a non-rotating structure in free fall, it's a fairly simply thing. When you do that in a rotating structure, the dynamics get a bit more complicated and can be more energetic - after all, you can apply a lot more force with your feet staying firmly planted than you can if you start floating away the moment you apply any effort.

              It's the

      • Agreed, there will absolutely be no artificial gravity - we don't have the engineering capability yet.

        Don't we? If you mean there's no off-the-shelf design waiting to go, sure, but there are no unsolved engineering problems.

        First, if I recall correctly you need something like a 200m radius of rotation to get an acceleration gradient at a reasonable rotation rate that doesn't make a standing average-height human feel ill (that's pretty big).

        Sure. So build a big thing. That's not just a known engineering capability, there's an example in orbit right now. The ISS main truss is 94 meters long. It wasn't lifted into orbit in one chunk that long. It was built.

        Second, every little movement from then on is going to change the centre of rotation and stress the entire structure.

        Microscopic changes to the center of rotation aren't going to stress a rotating space station. You said yourself it's going to be at least 400 meters across. If it'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      You might be able to do it comfortably without a huge station by using a tethered system with a counterweight and a very long tether between the main module and the counterweight allowing you to rotate a good distance from a common center of gravity. Also, you can do simulated gravity without simulating 1 G. It might be sufficient to simulate Mars-level gravity or moon-level, or even lower.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The problem with a tether is that the forces on it can get quite extreme. It's difficult to build a robust system where the risk of it ripping itself apart is low enough for crewed missions.

        Given that people can live in zero g for longer than the trip to Mars takes, there just isn't much reason to try to develop such complex technology.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          The problem with a tether is that the forces on it can get quite extreme. It's difficult to build a robust system where the risk of it ripping itself apart is low enough for crewed missions.

          I keep hearing people talking about the "extreme" forces involved in simulated gravity and I am constantly left scratching my head. The maximum we would go up to simulating gravity would be 1G. That's a really standard force that engineers here on Earth always need to deal with. This is no more "extreme" than hanging the module from something. Suppose, for example, that it was a gondola hanging from a balloon. If the forces for a module spinning on a tether are "extreme" then the forces acting on the cables

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The magnitude of the force is only half the equation. The other half is mass.

            You can lift a pencil, but not a bus. Both subject to 1G that you need to overcome.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tragedy ( 27079 )

              The magnitude of the force is only half the equation. The other half is mass.

              You can lift a pencil, but not a bus. Both subject to 1G that you need to overcome.

              Yes, but that was covered by "This is no more "extreme" than hanging the module from something." If you can take whatever module you're going to attempt the artificial gravity experiment on and, for example, hang it off a bridge over a deep canyon, and the tether doesn't snap, then you're handling the forces _and_ the mass just fine. You'll want to add extra mass to the module, say 2X its normal fully loaded mass so that you have a 3X safety factor.

              Also, if we're still operating under the realm of engineeri

    • Vast are being very optimistic here.

      So you're saying they are being half-vast? 8^)

  • SpaceX says a lot of things... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @03:45AM (#63515831)

    Doesn't often happen that way.

    • In general, SpaceX is really bad at making deadlines. But they still end up doing things faster than anyone expected and far more than what many think they can do.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Faster than anyone except Elon Musk expected, perhaps.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by indytx ( 825419 )

          Faster than anyone except Elon Musk expected, perhaps.

          Is that what you think? He's like a carnival barker. A rich, rich carnival barker, but he's still like a carnival barker.

      • In general, SpaceX is really bad at making deadlines. But they still end up doing things faster than anyone expected and far more than what many think they can do.

        Right. NASA took 9 years to research, built and get to thee moon. Spacex could have done that in 9 months.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Ksevio ( 865461 )

          That was when NASA had a large budget and huge support from the government. They're currently trying to get to the moon again with the Artemis project using existing technologies, but it's looking like SpaceX might be there around the same time

          • That was when NASA had a large budget and huge support from the government. They're currently trying to get to the moon again with the Artemis project using existing technologies, but it's looking like SpaceX might be there around the same time

            Bloody hell, man Spacex will be on Mars, and sending manned missions to Europa in a few years...

          • Don't let yourself get hoodwinked by people who love huge government spending for spending's sake. People who complain that NASA is underfunded usually play a particularly dishonest game: They compare NASA budgets year-by-year as a percentage of government spending (which, because it has risen at an insane rate as government started and grew huge social spending programs, and had growth in debt payments, made NASA a smaller portion of the budget). The fact that the US Government upped child school lunch pro

    • Why does this Slashdot item say 'no later than' yet when I visit the website for the company doing the thing it says no earlier than?
    • SpaceX role in this doesn't sound any different than what it already does for the International Space Station.

      • SpaceX role in this doesn't sound any different than what it already does for the International Space Station.

        Right, which indicate that they are qualified to do the job.

  • The company under American law because it's registered there (I guess) but the station itself?

    • The company under American law because it's registered there (I guess) but the station itself?

      This has been hammered out for ISS already. The nation which launches the individual modules retains ownership, and what happens in their modules is under their jurisdiction. For this station with a single owner, it will be wholly under American jurisdiction, unless Vast abruptly registers themselves in Panama.

      It's quite similar to maritime law, though lawyers claim it isn't, for reasons that involve getting paid more money.

  • I'll drive to the launch site using my Cyber Truck.

  • Bigelow Aerospace has been developing the B330 for decades. Unfortunately, the pandemic put a damper on things. From my understanding, it's built and ready to fly, it just needs a ride!

    • I think Bigelow is done at this point, and while the pandemic may have helped their demise I doubt it was the primary thing that brought them down. They seemed to be having trouble before it and while they managed to launch some interesting hardware (two partial test articles and a small demonstrator for the ISS) they weren't getting much actual traction (contracts). Even with all of the testing/hardware they've had other companies are developing their own inflatable modules instead of buying them off of

  • T&C (Score:1)

    by dubidub ( 23742 )
    I hope they don't change their Terms & Conditions mid stay.

  • For a Wheel space station.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I thought it was odd that the emissions and pollutants from rocket launches are not talked about or given measure in general articles to the public. It really seems to undermine the efforts to curb environmental pollution.

      It's because they're so small as to be unmeasurable. There are lots of good targets for regulations to reduce CO2 output (and other pollutants), but space travel isn't one of them. Someday that might change, but, for now, the focus needs to be on electricity production, ground transportation, manufacturing, and farming. When those are squared away, then we can talk about things like air and space travel.

    • Because they don't even show as a rounding error on emissions statistics. Even picking the largest rocket in existence (starship) and assuming a worst case scenario (failure on the pad) it's methane emissions would only be 0.005% of the global emissions per year. Nineteen of them would have to FAIL on the pad every year to even reach 0.1% of global emissions. If successful their direct emissions are water, oxygen, CO2 and negligible amounts of Nitrous oxide. Other rockets produce nastier stuff to be sur

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