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Shockless Orion Spaceship
Hello,
Reading a thread in RSFW I had to wonder how lot-tech an Orion spaceship could be made. It seems that the biggest problem are the huge shock absorbers needed on smaller designs. Assuming you are building a design that does not do more than .1g how large would it need to be so there is not need for shocks. |
#2
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Shockless Orion Spaceship
wrote in message ... Hello, Reading a thread in RSFW I had to wonder how lot-tech an Orion spaceship could be made. It seems that the biggest problem are the huge shock absorbers needed on smaller designs. Assuming you are building a design that does not do more than .1g how large would it need to be so there is not need for shocks. I haven't been following the topic, but I've an impression the Orion technology has evolved greatly over the past several years. I *really like* the idea of 10,000 tons of space ship out there with people aboard looking at Jupiter (from outside Jupiter's intense radiation belts) or better yet going out toward Pluto and sending back pictures of what's it like out there. (Well, big and dark but in sight of the Oort belt.) I thought the space elevator was the nicest idea for getting out there, but they had some problems and I haven't heard anything from them for a few months. Can they restructure their program, find more money, and restart? I sure hope so. The idea that you stand on a big floating ocean platform, a big diesel starts up and you see a bus rising from the deck and going up into the sky, isn't nearly as impressive as a Saturn 5 lifting off but it's a lot more practical. And I'm thinking about alternatives to the Orion, because I don't think we'll see one lifting off from here. There'd be the problem of making all those little nukes, with a large eye to quality control and to cranks of all varieties including terrorists. So I'm not really interested in a shockless Orion: my interest is how do we build economically viable settlements off-Terra? Cheers -- Martha Adams [sci.space.policy 2008 Feb 5] |
#3
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Shockless Orion Spaceship
On Feb 5, 2:12 pm, "Martha Adams" wrote:
So I'm not really interested in a shockless Orion: my interest is how do we build economically viable settlements off-Terra? Orion should not be considered for getting up there unless you have an emergency like say "Deep Impact" (and they still got it wrong. Orion is useful for moving large numbers of people and heavy equipment around once you are out there. I don't see really space settlement taking place with just a few people at a time going somewhere. Settlements that are going to be capable of meeting 90%+ of their long term needs (trade hopefully to cover the rest) are going to need lots of people with different skills and the equipment those skills need. Starting a successful space settlement with 10 people coming in at a time will take forever. Delivering the first 1,000-10,000 with all the needed equipment stands a far better chance. PS. I am not talking Earth orbit settlements, different rules come into play there. |
#4
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Shockless Orion Spaceship
On Feb 4, 8:30 pm, wrote:
Hello, Reading a thread in RSFW I had to wonder how lot-tech anOrion spaceship could be made. It seems that the biggest problem are the hugeshockabsorbers needed on smaller designs. Assuming you are building a design that does not do more than .1g how large would it need to be so there is not need for shocks. Ulam's original design was shockless and unmanned , here's a copy of the patent... http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com...-inventor.html The later designs used a multi-stage pneumatic shock system with a 30x time-buffering factor followed by a 10x factor from the large piston system. The pulse duty cycle is about 3 ms per second, of 1 in 333. So if you had a mission that required low acceleration or tough astronauts you might be able to get by with a small shock system. For instance at .1 g you could use just the first, pneumatic shock section. The other idea raised in the orginal design group was to build a small shock absorber system inside to protect each vulnerable section. |
#5
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Shockless Orion Spaceship
wrote in message ... On Feb 5, 2:12 pm, "Martha Adams" wrote: So I'm not really interested in a shockless Orion: my interest is how do we build economically viable settlements off-Terra? Orion should not be considered for getting up there unless you have an emergency like say "Deep Impact" (and they still got it wrong. Orion is useful for moving large numbers of people and heavy equipment around once you are out there. I don't see really space settlement taking place with just a few people at a time going somewhere. Settlements that are going to be capable of meeting 90%+ of their long term needs (trade hopefully to cover the rest) are going to need lots of people with different skills and the equipment those skills need. Starting a successful space settlement with 10 people coming in at a time will take forever. Delivering the first 1,000-10,000 with all the needed equipment stands a far better chance. PS. I am not talking Earth orbit settlements, different rules come into play there. I can certainly see Orion as a heavy-mover from one orbital location to another in space. There's an idea around -- the VASIMR electric rocket -- that I see as an early developmental stage of a thermo nuclear rocket. But the thing would be quite large, and technically, we're much farther from developing the experimental setups in labs today into a thing that can actually push a ship. The Orion, by contrast, is a fairly simple idea, except for details around making and firing a lot of little nukes. There is something about living in space I think isn't getting the attention here that it needs. It is, if you live in space, you cannot carry up all your supplies over the long run: you have to build an industrial base to generate your air, your food, your new habs, and etc, *all that stuff*. This fact creates a problem: *how big is the best size*? How many people? At what life quality level? ?? Related to this is the problem of social psychology. I don't see much, i.e., hardly at all, about social psychology. But space is going to be special: you can't just go take a walk to cool off if you're upset; the serious risk is the sealed hab with people inside becomes a pressure cooker with people inside: a bad end to this is almost certain. So how do you deal with these social psychology issues -- before they arise? I think the best person with answers has to be Robert Zubrin and his analog base projects. The more I see of this, the more I see that this isn't a Boy Scout camporee kind of thing. It is rather a critical-path, must-do thing except we must do a whole lot more of it. We can solve the oxygen problem, the water problem, the sealed-hab problem, the power problem, the overall space economy problem, but if we don't solve the *social psychology* problem, then we see the end of space settlement before it even starts. Which would leave the best-engineered Orion tug or ship with no reason to exist. Cheers, sort of -- Martha Adams [sci.space.policy 2008 Feb 6] |
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