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It would take about 1,200,000 kg of fuel to move the iss from LEO to mars transfer assuming the fuel had an isp of 342. Reboost only requires about 4000 kg of propellant per year, going to mars would take 300 years worth of reboost fuel.
If you're changing it's orbit, why not use a lower thrust, higher Isp effort that the structure can actually handle? You might be able to get away with only a single Falcon Heavy launch for propellent.
I calculated the mass of propellant to move the ISS to an equatorial orbit using an isp of 342 (merlin vacuum). You certainly wont be able to change your orbit to equatorial with one falcon heavy using ANY chemical propulsion And there is no feasible way to generate enough power for electric thrusters to do the trick.
It was simply placed in a bad orbit and it will take a ton of fuel to correct that. Well I wish it would take just a ton, its more like 200 tons.
The iss swims in the sky at an inclination of 51.6° that's pretty useless as a way station. It would be useful if we could assemble multi launch missions in orbit or have non direct entries from luna or countless other things we all want to do. Only problem is that dam orbit. Why don't we just change it.
Take a falcon heavy cargo and turn it into a big extended fuel tank for its second stage, dock with the station and just boost. Falcon heavy has a capacity of 53,000 kg, you don't need a faring so the extra tank weight will probably cancel out giving you 53,000 kg of spare fuel. With a specific impulse of 342 you will only need 388,197 kg of fuel to boost a fully loaded ISS to an equatorial orbit. That's about 7 falcon heavies, probably get by with five if you ditch a few modules and do a deep clean first. At $100m a pop that's just $500m-$700m for the whole move, well within the NASA budget.
Hey GW, I come around every once in a while but between work and projects life has gotten busy; I would rather be doing things then talking about doing them. Yeah these ones aren't full MCP, I think the gloves are but that's it. They are trying to develop a product to be used inside a vehicle during assent and reentry. There will probably be a market for these suits when SpaceX starts hauling people regularly. With this type of application you want to be able to comfortably use the suit in a depressurized state for a long period of time. These will probably only be pressurized above the cabin pressure in the event of an emergency. I would suspect that wearing a MCP inside a vehicle with the helmet not pressurized would be unconformable and could cause difficulty breathing because your body would always be pressurized higher than the environment around you. I suppose you could use automated constricting devices but that adds complexity and cost.
When they and the market get around to EVA suits I'm sure MCP will be high on the list of options.
You have to upload it to an image hosting service and post links. I don't know if its bandwidth or legal reasons but newmars has never let users upload pictures larger than a few pixels and that is for the avatars. I would recommend www.sites.google.com its easy and you already have an account there if you use gmail or any other google service.
These are the guys working on mcp suits, they won the nasa glove challenge with a mcp design.
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Gas tanks can and do explode on occasion, I have only heard of it happening after the car was on fire for a while.
I'm fine with military nuclear plains, I believe the assertions that the reactors can be made crash proof.
The trend in commercial aviation is small planes with frequent flights to more destinations. And I don't like the idea of thousands of passenger planes flying around the world with enriched uranium. It's a potent substance in a bomb dirty or otherwise and I would consider it too big of a security risk. Perhaps it would be acceptable for a hand full of very large trans ocean services with limited destinations.
I think the future is electric for short flights liquid natural gas for medium ones and the same old jp1 for distance flights.
On the other hand you come up with a cute little thorium reactor and we'll be in business.
There was a time when industry benefited from advancements in computers, production methods and materials developed for space; today space lags far behind the industry as a whole and clings to 40 year old technology. Nasa still has a ban on lithium based batteries over concerns addressed a decade ago. They refused to allow ATK to develop carbon fiber boosters that would have cut the dry mass by 1/3 or develop mechanical counter pressure suits what would be cheaper, more agile and have lower mass. Contractors are rewarded to overrun budgets and penalized for being under budget. I could offer them a $130,000 vacuum pump new in box for $20,000 and they still would buy it at full price plus some from the manufacturer because no one at NASA has the authority to buy from a non authorized source and you cant become an authorized source unless your the manufacturer or distributor. Rocket design is based on appeasing space states with each state vying to have the maximum amount of money wasted in its boarders as possible. Political infighting kills all long term
Dear presidents of the future, these problems are a systemic cancer that has grown deep into the culture. NASA needs to be reformed as a government owned non profit.
Under construction is a brilliantly conceived overhead crane that manipulates large objects within a 26,896 sq ft area like a three dimensional tram. On the moon with less gravity you can probably get it to cover much larger distances, perhaps a whole crater. The crane could be used to run the whole mine from construction to gathering ore to loading and unloading resources from a smelter or other processing equipment.
You can safely drink it in like 3% concentration. And I don't even know how safe that is my brother drank some on a dare and it gave him a rather nasty upset stomach I'm willing to bet if you drank it too often it could do some real damage.
Vulcanized or cured silicone cannot be melted, it will decompose before that happens.
Kinetic launch from the moon to a remote shallow lake in Canada would have a rather small marginal costs. It may even be cheaper than transporting it from one side of the earth to another.
Its a couple years old, I think we spend around 30k on it.
3d printing is one of the slowest forms of manufacture and produces inferior parts to injected or machined parts. We have a very nice 3d printer and we use it all the time for prototyping and mold making. A good well programmed five axis cnc with a tool changer can can machine out just about anything faster than the printer can print it. The reason we still use the printer is because skilled man power to program the milling machine is at a premium and the cnc is often occupied with production work. On mars or the moon I would prefer to see multi-axis cnc lathes and mills programmed from earth doing most of the work. The one big exception would be for very small parts, a small wax printer used in investment vacuum centrifugal casting can produce some of the highest quality small intricate parts even from high performance alloys that are normal difficult to cast.
A constellations would also allow you to get precise location information. On earth GPS is often off by tens of feet, that's great for navigation but not so good for controlling robots. It would be good to get LPS accurate to a few inches so you can automate as much as possible.
Carbon fiber certainly can be used in harsh temperature environments the carbon itself can be used to 4000k. A pure carbon rod is kinda brittle so you use a carbon fiber composite and there are resins that will work much higher than 100°c
And I was actually arguing against a line of repeaters because of the installation cost.
Also maintaining the relay is going to be a beast. Traveling long distances across the lunar surface to reestablish communications with earth is not a fun prospect. My vote is for satellite at first and fiber optic later on.
Louis your tiny light weight phones only work because there are cryogenically cooled receivers with big antennas and cpus doing signal processing on the other end. But I do agree with you in principle. Here is a break down of what I think it may take.
On the moon especially the dark side there is very little interference or need for you to restrict the bandwidth (RF) you use. On earth a consumer grade 0.4kg radio uses 15 watts and delivers 24mbps. If you broaden the band and use more expensive energy efficient technology you can probably get a few hundred mbps with about the same energy demand but lets say the heat resistant design takes two kg.
Lets assume the solar panels face straight up and there is no active tracking so we need to wait for the sun to poke up a bit more before we generate power so 17 days of dark and 12 of lite. Modest Li-ion batteries get about 150 Wh/kg with a decent reserve we end up at about 4kg. One kg for solar panels should be plenty.
A 0.5" x 35ft extruded carbon fiber rod would be another 2kg, with the lower gravity and no weather it should suffice. I think 10kg or less for each repeater site is entirely feasible.
I can think of two methods for instalation, you drive a rover across the surface or you hop along on a sub orbital rocket hopper. But none of this matters at all, the cost of installation will inevitably tip the scale to other methods of communication. Why not just unspool some fiber along the way with the rover or suborbital rocket and get a 300 gbps connection instead.
I wonder how hard it would be to drape a light fiber optic cable across the surface of the moon as your land or take off. The from the deepest dark side base it would still take less than 2000 miles of fiber to reach the near side and setup a direct surface station.
Nope I'm looking for platinum and the like.
The abundance of Pt groups in normal regolith means little. What interests me are foreign objects like chunks of asteroid. Even if only one in a million large impacts leave big enough chunks behind to mine there is still that one in a million.
Before you could mine you'd have to locate your resources. Knowing the 3d structure of craters should help you determine the size speed and angle of the impactor. Ground penetrating radar may be able to identify the location depth and size of any remnants as well as its dielectric constant which will give clues to its composition. When a promising site is located you send a small lander (perhaps a dragon) to preform a test drill and more accurately analyse its composition.
Jon I would like to thank you for providing a strong critical viewpoint. If someone where to say 'we should do this' and everyone just said 'yup, tha'd be cool' we would quickly go back to scratching our rears stop thinking about it.
Secondly, as I said before, UV spectoscopy is not a reliable tool for measuring heavy elements. To draw far reaching conclusions, as is happening here, based on one quite possibly spurious reading from an unreliable instrument, completely unwarranted.
There are only a few things that could cause bad results from an experiment like LCROSS. There could have been interment malfunction in which case the data from those interments should be discarded. It could be noise in the instrumentation and a margin of error should be determined and hopefully published. Or the analysis of the data was flawed, in which case the error should be found and corrected. You assert that Ultraviolet Spectroscopy cant accurately classify heavy elements that there was only one set of data collected and the interment itself is unreliable; I have a hard time beliving all of your assertions. You may have forgotten that LCROSS took spectra data from infrared trough ultraviolet and spectra data at various wavelengths including infrared was collected from many different observatories around the world and good corroborating results where collected. I think we can at least rule out interment failure and I believe the LCROSS team is as competent as anyone to analyse and interpret the data.
Sorry I was unable to locate my source on the static gold concentration. Its something I read a few months back probably on nasaspaceflight.com It was just something I was throwing out as a possible explanation for the concentration.
As for the mercury the rate of decomposition and sublimation from compounds can be extremely slow and still have a profound effect simply due to the time scale we are dealing with.
I completely agree with you about governance, the best thing we could do for the commercial development of space would be to create strong property laws. Businesses need to be assured there investments in an area will be protected and should be granted exclusive access to areas they are actively developing and mining.
...For the cost of a single large lunar orbiter like LRO you can find, prove up and bring to production a world class orebody in just about any commodity you like. It does not matter if Musk is a miracle worker and can reduce costs to a 10th of what they are at present, it will take a lot more than an orbiter to prove up an orebody. Hundreds of drill holes, ground geophysics, thousands of assays, months of test work, getechnical surveys. It will always be easier to do this on Earth.
The cost of space hardware will decrease like everything. They build this stuff extremely inefficiently, each spacecraft is designed from the ground up and manufactured one at a time. Imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars there is in designing your cell phone and necessary components, how much would it cost if they just built one. I hope access to LEO get down to $100/kg and have reusable solar powered ion tugs pull you to lunar orbit for $15/kg
so the transportation cost of freight on the lunar surface might be around $300/kg. It wont take too many billions to start a mine.
Flame wars never do much for anything but cause people to fade away from posting....
Would you sugest the use of spam bots instead, those count as posts right?
Surly you can detect the sarcasm.
And I wouldn't be surprised if search bots are smart enough to detect spam infested boards and downgrade there status for search results.
Any respectable cloud is far more reliable than a single server most have offsite redundant capabilities if any server or drive crashes it is automatically shifted to a different location and the end users rarely even know something happens.