]]>GW has posted before about a dry dock using aluminium framing and mylar sheeting. It wouldn't be pressurised, but it would be well lit and free of temperature extremes, allowing the workers to use simple mechanical counter-pressure suits rather than the bulky suits they have today.
If you scale-down a full-size module to twice the diameter and same length of the Destiny laboratory module, it would still have 4 times the volume. That would be 8.4m diameter and 8.4m length, or 3.36 times the diameter of Genesis and 1.9 times the length. That would be 3.36*3.36*1.9=21.45 times the mass. So 29,172kg launch mass. Still too big for Falcon 9.
If you make the Bigelow module the same size as Destiny, it would be 1.68*1.68*1.9=5.36256 times the mass, so 7,293kg launch mass. That Falcon 9 could lift.
Of course if you launch Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral AFS instead of Kwajalein, and launch it to ~390km altitude instead of 185km, you could reach ISS. The higher your orbit, the less atmospheric drag. To get completely out of the atmosphere so the orbit just won't decay, you have to get at least 800km which is medium orbit. The Van Allen radiation belts are around there. Higher launch latitude results in higher orbital inclination, which results in lower launch mass. Falcon 9 can lift 9,900kg to 185km circular orbit at 28.5° inclination if launched from the Cape. ISS is at 41.6° inclination, so reduce launch mass. Higher altitude also means lower launch mass. So the question is just how big do you want the hab, and where will it go?
]]>So, in essence, you want to build the shipyard out of Bigelow modules. Okay, I suppose there's nothing in principle preventing that.
]]>No, a shipyard would be better off built as an entirely separate project. It'd need to be 100 times the size of ISS anyway, so it'd be silly to gimp such a large project by the need to be compatible with some piddly little cramped canister.
]]>The most productive time in the history of NASA was the first ten years, after that NASA just coasted to the Moon and gave us "more of the same" and accomplished very little afterwards. Frankly the Mars Direct and Mars Semi-direct both accept that space travel will remain hideously expensive for the forseeable future, I just don't feel we should concede that point and give up on space travel except for the elite with the "Right Stuff" and "gray hairs" that NASA pays for. I'm tired of the future of Space Travel being utterly dependent on how much Congress appropriates for NASA. I think we should work on making space travel cheaper, and I don't mean a token effort of a spinning of the wheels just so we can say we are doing something about it. The Space Shuttle was a failure because NASA and Government in general suffers from "Attention Deficit Disorder" They were unable to keep their focus on Shuttle Economics and got distracted by "What's in it for my District?" or "How many jobs will it produce?" The criterion that government programs should produce jobs goes against the criterion for making they program economical. I think private industry is concerned about profits, not in "creating jobs" which under private sector parlance goes under the heading of "expenses" and "costs". The entrepreuner wants to create as few jobs as possible when making his investments, because each job he creates is another expense that comes out of his pocket, he's always asking, "Is this job really necessary?" "Maybe there is a way to build this so that it saves labor and I don't have to pay for this additional salary." The
Congressman however says, "A thousand new jobs for my community, cool! This really ought to help my constituents out, they will appreciate what I'm doing for them and will then reelect me." Congressmen and Senators love big complexes with thousands of government workers and hired contractors all gainfully employed, and going home, spending money and thereby boosting the local economy at the Federal Government's expense. The private company that lays off workers because their work is no longer needed is not so popular with Congressmen and Senators.
There is pressure on Government Contractors not to be so efficient, don't improve efficiency, throw some money around and we'll make sure your company meets its bottom line, wink wink, nudge nudge. Then what eventually happens is that some other Senator of Congressman who doesn't have NASA installations hin his district gets jealous and says, "What a waste of money this is, buying all this equipment and throwing it all away just to obtain rocks from another planet when all this money can better be spent to help out the poor. That is basically what happened to the Apollo program, and since the Apollo Program had no self-sustaining basis, it was easy for Congress to pull the plug.
]]>All I am saying is that it going to be a whole lot more expensive than the future Moon Mission and base on the base on the Moon. Matter of fact, I am a proponent developing those technologies and then using them to go to Mars and even maybe build a city there too while we are on the subject.
Larry,
Larry,
]]>You realize that your plan would cost 50 to 100 billion dollars to design and build. Other than that, I have no problem with your plan and it probably along the lines that we should be looking and what we should be trying to accomplish in those twenty four years too. But, if we intend to have a scamjet shuttle, we will need a much bigger space station with a quasi ship yard in the right orbit that we need to accomplish our intended goals. We would probably need 10 to 20 Saturn V or cargo shuttle launches to send up the space station and ship yard with all the equipment to make it operational. I was thinking using 10 to 14 Bigelow habitats in a circle when finished, will be able to hold between 100 to 200 people. We will need to be able to put up that many people to support both the lunar base and make our Mars launch manning the space station and running the ship yard. The deep space space ship needs to be a fission or fusion powered rocket. If it a fission powered craft, it will need to flip end over end to generate the effects of artificial gravity. If we are able to build a fusion powered craft by that time, then it will be powered space craft all the way to Mars. In either case, those space craft would have to dock with the space station to get provision to make the next trip to either the moon or Mars. Which means that we should discontinue the chemical rockets of going to the moon or Mars and use re-usable shuttle for moon too.
This is ultimately where your plan would have to go if we were to implement it. It would be a whole lot more expensive than the current moon project, but would also eventually replace the Orion Moon Mission space ship with these new space ship. Although it would cost more in the beginning build it, it would be cheaper to run it and to get more people with the resource into space after it been put into place. But, if this were to be done this, it would still be expensive to do it, but it would bring down going to Mars by 90%, because we have the infrastructure already in place to go all the way to Mars. The only thing that we would need then would the the lander, the Martian habitats, power stations, etc. to complete the job.
It would be nice, but I don't see it happening.
Larry,
The Design Reference Mission is a complete throw-away. In the end yo9u get nothing but a pile of Mars rocks and a used Orion capsule to show for it all. Six Ares V rockets and one Ares I rocket are expensive and you throw all that hardware away to get the astronauts to Mars, keep them alive and bring them back to Earth, and in the process you throw away parts of their space ship that our country has so expensively built and launched into orbit, and after the mission, we have to build another six Ares V rockets and One Ares I rocket if we are to have another mission to Mars, that's the equivalent of launching six Moon missions every two years. Government bean counters are going to look long and hard at this program if all were getting out of it is piles of Mars rocks and lots of space junk in orbit around the Sun. Scramjet Space Shuttles are useful for other things besides assembling space docks and Mars ships in orbit. The Design Reference Mission is useful if we are going to send people to Mars in the next ten years, that would be how we would do it using "off the shelf" technology, but for the year 2031, it makes no sense to use today's "off the shelf" technology. If someone said our goal was to land men on Mars in 24 years, then we should be doing something different than if someone said to do it in 10 years. If it was going to take 24 years to put together the Design Reference Mission, then we would have to be dragging our feet. Such a slow pace in implementing "off the shelf" technology is not reasonable. You wouldn't take 24 years to build an Aircraft carrier, because it would be obsolete by the time it was finished!
I just got the Special Edition 2001 A Space Odyssey, it seems to me that we can actually build stuff like that by 2031. That opening sequence after the Ape-men scene shows a winged orbiter that might be a scramjet, it shows a double-wheel shaped Space Station that is still under construction, it showed Lunar Shuttles, a Moonbase, and the Spaceship Discovery. All the spaceships shown in the film were meant to be reused rather than thrown away. I think we should try to get to the point where our spaceships and space stations resemble somewhat the ones in the movie at least in terms of usability and functionality. We should get beyond the age of throwaway spaceships, the Space Shuttle was one such attempt, it was a miserably failure, but that does not mean that the underlying goal wasn't a worthy one. I think we should try to build a replacement for thatr shuttle, but not the same way we built that shuttle. The methodology we used for building those shuttles was flawed, we should instead provide incentives for private industry to build the next generation Space Shuttle. I think sending people to MArs would be a worthy goal for the next ten years. The way I think about it, life is too short, we should try to operate within human time scales, try to do something within the next ten years with anticipated technology. I think from the Word "Go!" we should try to have people on Mars in ten years. Having a 24-year plan just doesn't make much sense, if such is the case, the first 14 years should be spend doing research to widen our technological options for getting to Mars, things like the Scramjet, and perhaps also research on space elevators as a good alternative hedge, the actual implementation of the mission should be done within the last ten years of the program and we must then be prepared to spend the money to get there or else not go.
]]>The end of Moon build should be around 2026 and if the start of mars launchings are 2031 then there is some fund during those years to make use of but at what delay to starting mars?
NASA plans to start building the moon base in 2024, so no way it´ll be done in just 2 years.
Welcome to newmars naitsabes.
This is where it may be confusing in that the lunar outpost thread has the first landing in 2018 to 2020 time frame with 6 month missions planned for the base construction of completion around 2024.
I would hope that there is no huge delay in building once first landing have happened as that is a huge waste...
]]>