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Shuttle program extension?



 
 
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  #151  
Old September 20th 08, 08:04 PM posted to sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.station
Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)
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Posts: 2,865
Default Shuttle program extension?

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:57:27 GMT, in a place far, far away, Brian
Thorn made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:26:00 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:


It has to be, because he doesn't have billions to pay for it. Using
Genesis as a baseline, it will be.

Right. So failure isn't a possibility then. Good to know.

I didn't say that. I just said that if it's built, it will be cheap,
and that there is good reason to think that it will be built, since
his prototypes have been successful.


I don't know... its a long way from a prototype to a real, operational
spacecraft. They've built Echo 1, but we need Telstar.


Prototype or not, Genesis II is a real, operational spacecraft, and
it's been operating for many months now.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/genesis_II/

All it lacks, AFAIK, is ECLSS. Add that, scale it up, and you have a
space habitat. Add propulsion, and it can co-orbit with ISS. Bigelow
has already issued a $23M contract for that to Aerojet.



Wow. And this morning I had a great breakfast of toast, ham and eggs, if I
had only had some ham and eggs.

Glad to know it'll so simple and trivial.



--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.


  #152  
Old September 20th 08, 09:30 PM posted to sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.station
Rand Simberg[_1_]
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Posts: 8,311
Default Shuttle program extension?

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:50:29 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Jorge
R. Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:

Prototype or not, Genesis II is a real, operational spacecraft, and
it's been operating for many months now.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/genesis_II/

All it lacks, AFAIK, is ECLSS. Add that, scale it up, and you have a
space habitat. Add propulsion, and it can co-orbit with ISS. Bigelow
has already issued a $23M contract for that to Aerojet.


Is that all? ECLSS and propulsion? Whew, I was beginning to think they
still had difficult work ahead. "If we had some eggs, we could have ham
and eggs, if we had some ham."


It doesn't need main propulsion, just RCS. You might even be able to
do the job with cold gas. Or hire someone else for an occasional
reboost.

Who are they contracting for the ECLSS? I'm assuming that since they
were smart enough to contract the propulsion, they wouldn't be fool
enough to try to do the ECLSS themselves. But I could be wrong.


I don't know, but I would think that Paragon could whomp something up
for them at a reasonable cost.
  #153  
Old September 20th 08, 09:31 PM posted to sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.station
Rand Simberg[_1_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,311
Default Shuttle program extension?

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:04:27 -0400, in a place far, far away, "Greg D.
Moore \(Strider\)" made the phosphor
on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:57:27 GMT, in a place far, far away, Brian
Thorn made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:26:00 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:


It has to be, because he doesn't have billions to pay for it. Using
Genesis as a baseline, it will be.

Right. So failure isn't a possibility then. Good to know.

I didn't say that. I just said that if it's built, it will be cheap,
and that there is good reason to think that it will be built, since
his prototypes have been successful.

I don't know... its a long way from a prototype to a real, operational
spacecraft. They've built Echo 1, but we need Telstar.


Prototype or not, Genesis II is a real, operational spacecraft, and
it's been operating for many months now.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/genesis_II/

All it lacks, AFAIK, is ECLSS. Add that, scale it up, and you have a
space habitat. Add propulsion, and it can co-orbit with ISS. Bigelow
has already issued a $23M contract for that to Aerojet.



Wow. And this morning I had a great breakfast of toast, ham and eggs, if I
had only had some ham and eggs.

Glad to know it'll so simple and trivial.


I didn't say it was "simple and trivial." My only point is that it is
a lot simpler than an entry vehicle, and it doesn't have to cost
billions.
  #156  
Old September 22nd 08, 04:18 PM posted to sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.station
Jeff Findley
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Posts: 5,012
Default Shuttle program extension?


"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...


Jeff Findley wrote:

So what? A pound of water is a hell of a lot cheaper than a pound of
extruded aluminum, a pound of machined titanium, or a pound of TPS
material. You're falling into the aerospace engineering trap that lighter
is always cheaper.

Why don't you check up on the total amount of water used by weight per
crew member per day on the ISS?
For a crew of four it's 40,000 pounds per year:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J01121...ce_station.htm
starting with that, extrapolating it to a full six-person crew, and it's
60,000 pounds of water per year.
Divide that by four for the intended three month lifespan of your
lifeboat, and you have to drag along 15,000 pounds of water alone to give
the crew something to drink, cook, and wash with while they are orbiting
up there awaiting rescue.


It's time for a reality check. That would be about 28 pound of water per
day! That's absolutely absurd! Take a look at Skylab's actual water
consumption:

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/...ylab-stats.htm

The *three* skylab crews used 4,290 lbs of water and that *included*
showers! The total duration of the three missions was about 170 days times
three crew is about 500 man-days. So, they were using about 8.6 lbs of
water per day, which included an occasional shower! You're not going to be
showering in a safe haven or lifeboat, so that number is obviously HIGH.

Actually, if you doubled the crew size of Skylab to six, that would have
been about 85 days of consumables, which is right in the ballpark for what
I'm proposing for an ISS safe haven.

Water 4,290 lbs
Oxygen 3,336 lbs
Nitrogen 933 lbs
Total 8,559 lbs

This included consumables for all the EVA's as well (there were quite a few
to repair Skylab and to service the Apollo Telescope Mount, which used film
canisters which had to be replaced via EVA). You'd have to add food and
LiOH canisters to that.

Then stick all the food aboard, the oxygen supplies, the CO2 scrubbers,
and the solar arrays, and your lifeboat is around the weight of two or
three Salyut space stations.


This is another silly argument. You don't need all the Salyut systems for a
lifeboat/safe haven. Consumables aren't as big a deal as you're making them
out to be. Again, consumables are cheap since there is zero development to
be done on them. A free flying safe haven which would last for three months
is more like the size of an ATV or two.

This "lifeboat" is medium-sized space station unto itself as far as mass
goes.


So what? You're still confusing mass with cost. Consumables are dirt
cheap. Additional copies of life support equipment already in use on ISS is
also relatively cheap compared to developing Orion.

It's like your plan for the orbiting refueling stations; you get so
enraptured by a concept that the actual costs of doing it are ignored, and
what you end up with is doing something fairly simple in a much more
complex and expensive way...due to some sort of preconceived philosophical
conceit in regards to how it _should_ be done in your own mind, rather
than the cheapest way of doing it in reality.


Every system we need for a safe haven was around since Gemini, Apollo,
Salyut, Skylab, Mir, shuttle, and ISS. No one knows exactly how much
orbital refueling stations will cost because they have not been developed
yet.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein


 




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