"Earl Colby Pottinger" wrote in message
...
"Henk Boonsma" :

Those of you who've seen the BBC's Space Odessey documentary will agree
that
the Pegasus is a pretty good design for an interplanetary tour around
the
solar system. The only thing that we didn't hear too much about was how
they
would sustain themselves for 6 or more years. There's no way you could
carry
that much food for a crew of 8 people.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/prog.../pegasus.shtml

Did you try to do the math before making that statement? Basicly a person
needs about 0.5 metric tons of food per year and about 1.0 tons of water
for
a total of 1.5 tons of supplies per person per year. 6 * 8 * 1.5 = 72
tons
of supplies needed at max.

Take another look at your spaceship, it is already carrying landers that
mass
35, 45, 15, 28 and 29 tons each! What would be the problem adding in the
food? And worse to your claim is water is highly reclaimable and is being
generated the entire trip by the crew. You probably don't need to ship
more
than 1.0 tons of water per person period, and maybe noteven that much.

So you get 6 * 8 * 0.5 = 24 tons of food.
And you get 8 * 1.0 = 8 tons of water.
Total 32 tons of supplies plus equipment to recycle the water, which I
expect
to mass far less than 40 tons!

The ship itself weights in at 400 tons but that's including its own mass and
propellants. That doesn't necessarily leave a lot of room for consumables
and water. The pictures don't seem to show a lot of storage space aboard
either.

The thing I like about the ship is the spinning gondola. I've been
advocating for years that NASA should stop all research on trying to find a
'medicine' that alleviates the bone and muscle loss and instead focus on
artificial gravity using spinning wheels or gondolas. It would also remove
the need for a lot of other research, such as how to operate on someone in a
zero-g environment.