[ANNOUNCE] "Why Are Space Stations So Hard?"

Jeff Findley wrote:

Actually they aren't- the Soviets found out that the small ones of the
Salyut series worked fairly well, and were pretty economical to build
and operate.



You're kidding right? The complete history of early (pre-Mir) Soviet space
stations contains many complete failures along with many partial failures.
How many Salyut stations failed even before the first crew would have docked
with it?


I probably should have phrased that differently; what the Soviets found
out that a small station has limited enough maintenance needs that it's
pretty easy to keep it running, and still have time for the crew to do
meaningful work in the time not taken up in station maintenance.
Salyut 1 was a rush job to beat Skylab, and had a lot of problems due to
the haste of its design and construction.
The Almaz military Salyuts had a basic design problem in that the were
designed to be docked to the TKS module which would provide the crew's
living quarters, and they were never employed that way, so the crew had
to put up with a very cramped interior.
By the time they had gotten up to Salyut 6 and 7, they had figured out
how to design them fairly well- there were still mechanical problems
(including the major propellant leak on Salyut 7), but the basic concept
was workable.
That wasn't the case in regard to Mir- by the time the station got to
that size and given the lengthy modular assembly technique that they
used to build it, by the time it was finished the first modules were
getting old, and the whole thing became a maintenance nightmare. The
crew spent almost all of their time just keeping the station working,
and didn't have hardly any time left to do the experiments and research
the station was theoretically built for.
In short, all the station did was eat up money while generating no real
return on the investment...much as the ISS does.



It's just the big ones that really are tough to make work on a budget;
they basically stated that Mir was too big...
Considering that the ISS makes Mir look like a midget... :-\



Your conclusion doesn't follow from your failed assertion that the Salyut
stations "worked fairly well and were pretty economical to build and
operate". Pretty much the entire Soviet manned space program's budget was
spent on these things, and Mir was the natural extension of them (based
entirely on technology used in the Salyut program) and we all know how well
Mir worked out, especially once Americans were on board and the failures
couldn't be as easily hidden from view as they were on the Salyuts.



You had a total of six modules on Mir, so you were going to get around
six times the number of breakdowns on it.
Two guys on a small station could do more useful work than three guys on
Mir.
What the Soviets did get out of it was a lot of practical experience in
living in space for long periods of time, and a lot of data on how to
design and not design space stations.
And after it was all over, they came to the conclusion that Mir wasn't
the way to do it.
I've never seen total cost estimates on the Salyut program, but I doubt
it was anywhere near what was spent on Apollo or the Shuttle. In fact,
given the need to use a Saturn V to launch it, Skylab probably cost
significantly more than any of the Salyut stations, despite using a
converted S-IVB stage. It would be interesting to know what the cost of
the overall Mir program was- it certainly wasn't cheap, and may well
have rivaled the cost of the development of the Shuttle.
What I was trying to get at is the concept of a small sized/small crewed
space station is a workable one.

Pat

Scott Hedrick wrote:

The real problem is that the longest-lived components *must* also be the .
How could you replace the core module of Mir? If something happens to the
Unity module, how does *it* get replaced?


Hadn't thought of that little problem. :-\

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:

What I was trying to get at is the concept of a small sized/small crewed
space station is a workable one.

So long as your goals and equipment are modest, yes.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005 01:48:48 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

The Almaz military Salyuts had a basic design problem in that the were
designed to be docked to the TKS module which would provide the crew's
living quarters, and they were never employed that way, so the crew had
to put up with a very cramped interior.

....Actually, the biggest problem with Almaz was getting the damn
things up in the first place. IIRC, while Salyut I was a DOS civilian
version, Salyuts 2-5 were all Almaz designs, and only 3 and 5 made it
into orbit. The subsequent Salyuts were not Almaz designs, again IIRC.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
I probably should have phrased that differently; what the Soviets found
out that a small station has limited enough maintenance needs that it's
pretty easy to keep it running, and still have time for the crew to do
meaningful work in the time not taken up in station maintenance.

I'd really like our resident expert on this subject to comment on this
assertion.

How about it Jim?

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.