Inflatable Space Stations
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Inflatable Space Stations
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Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#2Anything that can be inflated can usually be deflated.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#3I suspect without ISRU production of bulk orbit sheet metal, the most feasible solution is to repurpose rockets in their whole.
Building a station this large is gonna be costly even within the cargo hold of starship. But six of them, gutted of insides as welded end to end could provide the vast majority of the bulk mass.
This assume rather sophisticated orbital welding and object manipulation; but its feasible we could do it with robots.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#4Anything that can be inflated can usually be deflated.
so what? it's only one bar of pressure. Bring some gum.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#5I never understand why the rotating station concepts seem to all have rigid tethers, either in the form of a central boom or a rigid circular structure. It would seem like you could get a much larger diameter, so less rotational velocity and more comfort, by attaching rigid, or inflatable in this case, structures with a tether. Compressive loads are non existent, you just need to resist tensile loads.
Maybe I'll go ask the AI.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#6I suspect without ISRU production of bulk orbit sheet metal, the most feasible solution is to repurpose rockets in their whole. Building a station this large is gonna be costly even within the cargo hold of starship. But six of them, gutted of insides as welded end to end could provide the vast majority of the bulk mass. This assume rather sophisticated orbital welding and object manipulation; but its feasible we cou…
This was considered with the orange Space Shuttle fuel tanks; they went almost all the way to orbit anyways.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#7I never understand why the rotating station concepts seem to all have rigid tethers, either in the form of a central boom or a rigid circular structure. It would seem like you could get a much larger diameter, so less rotational velocity and more comfort, by attaching rigid, or inflatable in this case, structures with a tether. Compressive loads are non existent, you just need to resist tensile loads. Maybe I'll go a…
Stationkeeping would be a problem. And difficult to stop it precessing away from the rotation axis you want.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#8This is a really nice article that covers the history of space habitats, but it also made me realize that the future of habitable structures has questionable value outside of space tourism.
We have entered an age where humanoid robots are beginning to do many tasks that we thought were exclusively in our domain. At our current pace, I expect they will be able to outperform us in most work settings within a decade or two.
As those robots scale up in their capabilities and numbers, we will send up a fleet of them to space to do the work there. They are far more suited for the environment than humans, and the cost savings would be huge.
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#9The Bigelow stuff was very promising and showed that it could work. The larger units on extruded spokes was a viable path to a .5G space station. This would be doable with three (possibly 4) Starship launches[1].
[1] Caveat Starship has to reach its goal of transporting 100 tonnes to LEO
Re: Inflatable Space Stations
#10This is a really nice article that covers the history of space habitats, but it also made me realize that the future of habitable structures has questionable value outside of space tourism. We have entered an age where humanoid robots are beginning to do many tasks that we thought were exclusively in our domain. At our current pace, I expect they will be able to outperform us in most work settings within a decade or…
The vast majority of work done in space is already done by machines.
Humanoid robots are potentially useful when operating in human environments, but that doesn’t really apply if we’re never sending humans to these locations.