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#151
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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
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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
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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. |
#154
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Shuttle program extension?
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#155
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Shuttle program extension?
On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:43:45 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 20:30:30 GMT, h (Rand Simberg) wrote: 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. Then how does it get to the Space Station where it will serve as the Storm Shelter? Ride up on the Shuttle? If not a Russian vehicle (which is what they've been doing to date, though politics may make that problematic) then Atlas. |
#156
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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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