New Mars Forums

If you notice above, each face of the perpendicular science labs will have to have the center 6m cut in with an 11.25 degree angle on each side.    This to meet up with the individual outer ring modules.   The .6G ring will require two 22.5 degree cuts as there will only be 8 inner ring modules.   Or, more likely, each inner ring module will *also* have an 11.25" angle on each end to allow the same interconnecting module to me used.   All the modules are semi octaganal, with 4 sides being ~3.8m and 4 sides being about 1.55m.   The connection points will have to be electron welded, inside and out and would allow for the passage ways to be 2m x 2m, enough to facilitate walking between modules with no ducking, no waiting for others.  The floor spaces in the first level would vary a little, between about 5m and 6m.   Waste water tanks would be near the ends of each module, underneath the curved floor.  This would be pumped into the agriculture spokes where the water would first filtered through hydroponics, along with water from the aguaponics labs.    De humidifiers would capture evaporated water, while a solar still integrated into the outer skin of the agriculture spokes would boil and condense water in larger quantities through multiple passes.  This would then be used as shower water.  Shower water would be recycled directly through different legs of the solar stills directly to drinking water.   Any additional temporary storage or processing of water would be done in the connecting labs that connection the agriculture and aguaponics spokes in the .6G ring.   Long term storage of fresh water would be in .1G tanks surrounding the 0G lab.   Each tank could store approximately 400 cubic meters of water or about 100,000 gallons if needed.  A minimum of two storage units would be needed for backup water, so the other 6 could be storage units or micro gravity science labs.

Okay, so I've done my mini "SSV" design here.  The difference is, SSV was built from scratch in orbit.  This can be sent by about 73 Falcon Heavies.   It is only about 5000 tons, versus the 140,000 of the SSV, but still could easily fit 200 people, and possibly even fed them all, with 6000+ square meters of hydroponics and 8 aguaponics bays.   There are two levels in the 1G ring, 1 level in the .6G ring.  ~121m in diameter.  Over 6000 square meters of 1G work area.    A 20m x 6m 0G lab in the center.  Around that are 8 water storage units with a central pass through to the spokes.  The spokes appear to have ladders, but there was no open elevator icon.    The lower 1G level is continuous.  The connecting portals are 2m x 2m and each section uses electron beam vacuum welds to connect, along with external bracing.    The octagonals represent sections that are turned sideways, extending about 7m out in each direction.  This allows future clones of the station to be brought together in stacks and doubling, tripllng or more, the amount of space.   Eventually, the sections between could be enclosed using materials mined in space and robots.     The spokes contain all the hydroponics systems, the .6G ring all of the aguaponics systems for raising fish. 

The SEC doesn't want to destroy Musk, but they will fine him after a settlement.  They just want to show their power.

If we can find or build a microbe that can liberate oxygen from the Martian dust we'd be on to something, even if it had to take place in temperature controlled domes for a few hundred years.

One of the hundred things that bothered me about The 100 is that they had no possible chance of survival, even aside from their suicidal population explosion, but it's hard to believe they even had the ability to make any clothing on space stations that were assumed to have non-stop supplies from Earth.  Or at least, they never explained how they survived.   A far better show would have been about the first 100 years and how they managed.

The idea is partially for strength and also redundancy.   Mainly tubes, storage, ducts, etc, so they can be part of the entire structure rather than added in.   Things that can last the length of the module itself.  Not so much electronics.  It's possible that a water distillation or water cooling channel could be irreparably damaged by a meteoroid, but there would be so much redundancy that it wouldn't matter, except maybe over hundreds or thousands of year.

"But nothing is certain, and space stations and human spaceflight in general have long had powerful critics.  One of the most outspoken is Dr. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist. He's called the ISS an “orbital turkey” and said that “human beings don’t serve any useful function in space.”"

This new 3D manufacturing technique using bulk metallic glass may be a good way to create a corrugated highly insulated, high strength, water cooled and meteoroid-resistant spaceship/space station hull that could be easier and cheaper to produce than an aluminum one.

https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-re … -for-metal

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a … 2104001245

My point is mainly that we are in no rush, to be honest.  There is nothing on Mars we need.   Landing people on Mars just to say we did it? Okay, I think that has some merit from a pure back slapping exercise.  However, trying to create a permanent base when we can't even create a 1G station around Earth, when we haven't even created a permanent moonbase seems a bit silly.   Space X needs to land its ships on the moon and then bring them back to Earth safely.    We didn't just go land on the moon.  We did it in baby steps.  We sent four Apollos into space before landing one.    Hail Marys are always fun when they succeed.   But a touchdown is a touchdown.   We don't need to make it a life and death event for marketing sake.   Musk's time table is to aggressive, which is why it will continually slip.   Besides, crashing a spacecraft with 40 people on it would destroy Space X and throw everything into chaos.

In reality, I think creating large Babylon 5 style stations out of NEAs and comets (depending on their orbits) have as much, if not more promise.  For one thing, you don't have to terraform an entire planet to be able to go outside on the lawn.   Just the internal space.  For another, you're closer to the sweet spot of Earth orbit.  For another, the asteroids can be digested and removed as being a threat to Earth.  Finally, there's no energy required for take off and landing, yet you can have full gravity simulated.   

I don't see Venus or Mars as impossible over hundreds or thousands of years of mass robot and biological engineering.    Might as well, they are of no use to humanity otherwise, except as dots of light.   The problem with Venus is that there is plenty of oxygen, but essentially no hydrogen except in the sulphuric acid.  So the sulpher would have to be sequestered, and most of the CO2, which means finding a stable,  but safe and useful large Carbon/oxygen molecule that remains a solid and stable at very high temperatures, so that the atmosphere can be depressurized and neutralized.   The massive amounts of sulphuric acid in the air would still only yield an ocean about 1/5000th the mass of Earth's oceans if my very rough calculations are close.  Even if you did that, you have a huge problem with days that can't be controlled, and the fact that probably only the area around the poles would be habitable after all that effort.   I suppose that you could construct massive carbon shades that blocked the sun and reflected the heat away.  And still no magnetosphere.

A space station could have full gravity and active magnetic shielding and a very low cost to build with replicating robots.  And I don't think we'll see any attempt at terraforming anything in our lifetimes.

If it's a sphere, and it goes around the sun, it's a planet.   That includes Ceres and Pluto.    I will never submit.

Sure, things are not clearly defined, though I would argue that a robot must have all of the following:

1.  Some form of computerized intelligence
2.  The ability to be reprogrammed for different tasks
3.  Some sort of feedback mechanism.
4.  The ability to operate on its own for indefinite periods of time with little or no human assistance.

That is why a plane or its autopilot is not a robot.  It is a single task product.