Bigelow launch vehicle mistake

Henry Spencer wrote:
The hard part about "filament type materials" is that you need to
glue the "filaments" together somehow. The usual resins used for
that are not particularly heat-resistant.

What if the heat-resistant carbon fibers weren't glued, but were
simply *woven*?
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

In article ,
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
The hard part about "filament type materials" is that you need to
glue the "filaments" together somehow. The usual resins used for
that are not particularly heat-resistant.

What if the heat-resistant carbon fibers weren't glued, but were
simply *woven*?

My understanding is that (a) it doesn't lock them together nearly as well,
and (b) it weakens the fibers by putting a lot of little bends in them.
More fundamentally for thermal protection, it means that hot air will leak
right through your nice heat-resistant outer surface.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In sci.space.policy H2-PV NOW wrote:

500 spaceplanes fleet, with spares and parts to keep that many in
service, with 40 ton payloads, can put 200,000 tons in low earth orbit
every ten days. That's an average of 50 takeoffs and 50 landings per
day, from maybe 10 spaceports that's five launches and arrivals per
day.

Precicely who on this planet do you see as having the finds of buying
500 ordinary planes to augument their fleets, never mind 500 spaceplanes?
And then operate them?


A very substantial amount of the total payloads would be water ice and
ammonia ice, both required for making atmosphere and rocket fuels in
space. The solid density would make them compact to lift, and the cold
of space will keep them frozen until needed with only modest
containerization.

Water ice is substancially less dense than liquid water.


Water is a luxury item in space. Earth is the water planet. Any
intelligent race that visited this solar system looking for water would
know they hit the jackpot when they fix their eyestalks on Earth. Of

Any intelligent species would not ever bother to get this deep into
the gravity well of teh central star if it wanted water. Water is
plentiful in the solar system.

course there is no actual evidence that there are any intelligent
spacefaring races. In fact there may be no high intelligence lifeforms
anywhere in the universe. Any species which could develop space lift
capability and ignored the Earth as an asset and went to the moon and
asteroids looking to wrestle oxygen and water from them could not be
classified as an intelligent species.

hahahahaha... Look up the composition and required delta-v for harvesting
KBO-s and the compare that to gettng into the inner solar system and
out again ladden with water.


There will be cities of 100,000 people living in LEO and GEO, and
10,000 living at L-5 before the first useful cargo comes back from the
moon, and before the first outward bound human-carrying spaceship
leaves for Mars or transMars journeys.


And what would those 100k people do there?

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++