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#141
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Shuttle program extension?
"John Doe" wrote in message ... A escape pod only needs consumables for a few hours. Enough to drop below the station, wait one or 2 orbits and fire de-orbit engine to target some ocean and drop into water somewhere, and from there, just float until rescued. This is an emergency vehicle, not a cruise ship, it need not have fancy stuff inside. Using ATV as a starting point, a free flying safe haven would likely be much less expensive to develop than a reentry vehicle which would use ATV's service module. Consumables (O2, H2O and food) are cheap. Jeff -- A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein |
#142
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Shuttle program extension?
On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:25:02 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote: Still not small or cheap. Cheaper than Destiny and Columbus, but that's damning with faint praise. It will be big job to make an orbital survival shelter. Why? Sundancer will be a lot cheaper than Orion/Ares... I hope so, but I'm not counting unhatched chickens lately. :-) Brian |
#143
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Shuttle program extension?
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. 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 "lifeboat" is medium-sized space station unto itself as far as mass goes. 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. Pat |
#144
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Shuttle program extension?
On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:44:22 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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:25:02 GMT, h (Rand Simberg) wrote: Still not small or cheap. Cheaper than Destiny and Columbus, but that's damning with faint praise. It will be big job to make an orbital survival shelter. Why? Sundancer will be a lot cheaper than Orion/Ares... I hope so, but I'm not counting unhatched chickens lately. :-) It has to be, because he doesn't have billions to pay for it. Using Genesis as a baseline, it will be. |
#145
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Shuttle program extension?
"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
... On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:44:22 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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:25:02 GMT, h (Rand Simberg) wrote: Still not small or cheap. Cheaper than Destiny and Columbus, but that's damning with faint praise. It will be big job to make an orbital survival shelter. Why? Sundancer will be a lot cheaper than Orion/Ares... I hope so, but I'm not counting unhatched chickens lately. :-) 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. Oh wait, sometimes chickens DO fail to hatch. -- Greg Moore Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC. |
#146
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Shuttle program extension?
On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:35:22 -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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:44:22 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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:25:02 GMT, h (Rand Simberg) wrote: Still not small or cheap. Cheaper than Destiny and Columbus, but that's damning with faint praise. It will be big job to make an orbital survival shelter. Why? Sundancer will be a lot cheaper than Orion/Ares... I hope so, but I'm not counting unhatched chickens lately. :-) 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. |
#147
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#148
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Shuttle program extension?
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. |
#149
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Shuttle program extension?
"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
... On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:35:22 -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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:44:22 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 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:25:02 GMT, h (Rand Simberg) wrote: Still not small or cheap. Cheaper than Destiny and Columbus, but that's damning with faint praise. It will be big job to make an orbital survival shelter. Why? Sundancer will be a lot cheaper than Orion/Ares... I hope so, but I'm not counting unhatched chickens lately. :-) 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. Umm, geesh, I'd think after all these years your reading comprehension, especially of stuff YOU wrote would have improved. Sadly I continue to be proven wrong. Let's see... "Sundancer will be..." And "It has to be... it will be." Right. I must have missed the conditionals there. -- Greg Moore Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC. |
#150
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Shuttle program extension?
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." 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. |
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