International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

SpaceNut · 2016-04-17 16:56:59

True and it is so but I hope that the next module will have a new can designed to bring it to orbit so as to get a full sized unit.....

RobertDyck · 2016-04-17 22:01:24

Well... you could deliver a big one with Cygnus. Replace the entire pressurized cargo module with a single big Bigelow hab. Keep the Cygnus service module, and rendezvous with ISS the exact same way. In fact, the pressurized cargo module (PCM) has a single CBM hatch at one end. A Bigelow hab has the same hatch. This is Cygnus...

Beam packed up...

And animation of installation of BEAM...
http://bigelowaerospace.com/beam/

The Cygnus service module is the small part on the bottom that looks like shiny aluminum foil. Everything above that is the PCM. You could replace the entire PCM with a Bigelow hab.

"Enhanced" Cygnus, with longer PCM and round solar arrays...

"Enhanced" PCM dry mass 1,995kg, and payload capacity when launched on Atlas V 401 is 2,700kg. That's according to an Orbital Sciences document, not Wikipedia. So it should be able to handle a Bigelow hab with total mass of 4,695kg including stowage and deployment mechanisms. "Sundancer" massed 8,618.4kg, and BA330 masses 20,000kg, so this would require a lighter module.

::Edit:: You would leave the Cygnus service module attached, so solar panels would provide power. BEAM had a "packed" mass of 1,400kg, so this one would be 3.35 times the mass.

Last edited by RobertDyck (2016-04-17 22:14:05)

SpaceNut · 2016-04-18 17:24:56

So basically the can would split in half an be discarded prior to it being inflated....which sounds like a plan....

RobertDyck · 2016-04-18 18:21:38

Nope. Replace the can with a Bigelow hab. Encased in an Atlas V fairing, which splits in half and discarded during launch.

SpaceNut · 2016-04-20 20:00:54

I find these articles interesting if not by topic but what it could mean for the future of space flight and of colonization....
US-Russia Space Projects Set Example of Good Cooperation
Russia, US Discuss Boosting Efficiency of Cooperation at ISS
NASA Interested in Using Russia's Vostochny Spaceport

SpaceNut · 2016-05-08 08:59:55

RobertDyck wrote:

I mentioned using Falcon Heavy with Dream Chaser to deliver the Centrifuge Accommodation Module to ISS. Actually, there's an even simpler method. Since the module would require RCS thrusters to manoeuvre close to ISS, you could just add the service module from Cygnus. It has all the autopilot stuff to rendezvous with ISS. Would still need RCS thrusters, not just those on the service module. An entire station module is a lot bigger than Cygnus. But with additional thrusters under control of the service module, it could. Then the station arm could grab it and berth to a CBM port, just like an oversized Cygnus.
I suggested doing this with a Bigelow inflatable. It could be done with a metal hull module too, just with more thrusters for the additional mass..

Sure would be nice if any centrifugal unit was sent but it seems that Nasa is still trying to deny that its needed to which we have solved for how to get one up to the station is there was a completed unit to send up.

SpaceNut · 2016-05-08 09:05:33

GW Johnson wrote:

I look at actions (money is involved) not words (talk is cheap). I think based on actions for many years that NASA really, really doesn't want to send men anywhere but cis-lunar space on missions of 2 to 4 weeks duration. They only want to reprise Apollo and similar, with men. If that were not true, then we would be building something other than a botched reprise of a Saturn moon rocket with shuttle technology, and something more than Apollo-on-steroids for a cramped capsule to ride in.
And most importantly, they would have been working on artificial gravity, having already found that about a year and half, maybe 2, is the most microgravity exposure that an astronaut might endure successfully and recoverably. There are no missions beyond the moon that short.
We could now (not 20 years ago) build a spinning free-flyer annex to ISS affordably. Modify 4 Bigelow 330's with interior decks, and add a center hard airlock/docking/solar panel module with some spin-up/spin-down flywheels. This cluster as a linear baton is around 25-30 meters long. Spin it at 8 rpm (tolerable with training), and you have one gee at the ends, and every value of partial gee down to zero in the center. You have a space big enough for a crew to live and work in. You could find out in a couple of years exactly how much partial gee is "enough", to support maybe the next century of solar system exploration.
Assume for the sake of argument each of these 5 modules will cost $100M to build as flyable items. Assume for the sake of argument that it costs around $100M to launch each one. Let the ISS crew catch them and dock them. So, you get your partial gravity research facility for human experiments, plus about 1300+ more cubic meters of space station, and you get your answer for how much partial gee is enough, for grossly $1B, under 1% of the original construction cost for the ISS.
If NASA was serious about sending men beyond the moon, they'd already have been working on this issue. Or, they'd be chomping at the bit to try an idea like this. If I can sit down and come up with ideas like this in under half an hour, how come they haven't already done so?
Well, THAT'S why I say they really don't want to send men to Mars.
Musk does.
I hope his people see this.
GW

and with this post I see we have another way of creating the experiment....

SpaceNut · 2016-05-12 20:45:48

Observing how microbes adapt in a spaceflight environment the space station is also ideal for observing Earth microbes - single-cell organisms so tiny that millions can fit into the eye of a needle - in a new environment.

GW Johnson · 2016-05-17 16:49:53

Talk is cheap. Action is not.

GW

GW Johnson · 2016-05-18 10:06:26

I found a news story on-line about an ISS window damaged by what they think might have been a paint flake. But I cannot get the story to open. I get an unrelated story instead. Bad links on the news service.

Anybody know anything about this? Similar things used to happen to the Shuttle windscreens now and then.

GW

RobertDyck · 2016-05-18 10:24:19

A quick Google found a few articles...
An astronaut on the space station just looked out the window and saw this

Of all the things you don't want to see while orbiting Earth in a pressure-sealed habitat like the International Space Station, the view in the image above probably tops the list.
This quarter-inch (7-mm) diameter chip in one of the windows of the Cupola - that little nook where astronauts take all their cool pictures - was photographed by British astronaut Tim Peake this week against an inky backdrop of space. And holy crap, we'd be freaking out right now.

RobertDyck · 2016-05-18 10:31:14

An article from September 2014, with more technical detail...
ISS teams evaluate MMOD strike on Cupola window

The windows are made up of four panes – an inner scratch pane to protect the pressure pane from accidental damage, two pressure panes 25mm thick to maintain cabin pressure, and finally an outer debris pane.
In the event of the damage being more serious, on-orbit replacement of an entire window is a design feature. Such a replacement would require an EVA to fit an external pressure cover to allow for the changeout, with a pressure cover requiring a flight up to the ISS.

2014-09-05-12_56_15-L2-Level-ISS-On-Orbit-Status-Report-Notes-August-2014-350x291.jpg

SpaceNut · 2016-05-19 20:48:24

Just think what a frozen piece of foam would do... we need to beef up the sensing of this space junk and its removal.....

GW Johnson · 2016-05-20 10:03:32

I wonder if we could put a satellite in a slightly-higher orbit above the debris, with a search radar and a laser. There would always be debris coming up faster because it is below the satellite. Find it, hit it with the laser. Not to destroy it, but to slow it down just a tad with the pressure of the intense laser light. That puts the debris on a faster path to reentry destruction.

You do not want to destroy it with the laser because that just creates more, smaller, harder-to-find debris.

GW

SpaceNut · 2016-05-20 21:19:52

Sort of like an anti solar sail repulsion system by flying higher we do see the objects sooner but the power level of the lasers are the issue as you noted its more of a defocussed beam to create force....

SpaceNut · 2016-06-17 19:59:47

I thought that th partners had all but decided that the station would be utilized well past 2024.....
NASA Administrator Bolden Addresses ESA Council

This was an opportunity for him to share with Council Delegates information about NASA's priorities, future direction in particular NASA's expectation that ESA will be able to commit to the extension of the International Space Station until 2024, as all other partner agencies have already done.
Let us not extinguish this beacon, until we have secured our foothold in space and until we are ready together to take the next steps in space exploration for the benefit of our citizens and all humankind.

On a related note to the draw back of micro gravity.... Hearing - Human Spaceflight Ethics and Obligations: Options for Monitoring, Diagnosing, and Treating Former Astronauts - Hearing Charter

Keith's note: It has been interesting to listen to astronauts and medical professionals talk about the various medical aspects of flying in space - especially what Scott Kelly has gone through as he re-adapts to life on Earth after his long flight. There is still so much we do not know.

GW Johnson · 2016-06-18 17:01:53

Well, as near as I can tell, NASA is going on the theory that 8.5 months to Mars weightless is survivable, and it is. They think the 0.38 gee there at Mars will be about as therapeutic as 1 full gee here at home, so that the crew will be in full health, for the 8.5 months weightless coming home.

There are two very serious problems with that theory:

(1) There is not one shred of direct evidence available from partial gee experience to support it. Everything we think we know is inferred from very indirect things like bed rest studies. There is a reason why we spell "assume" the way we do: that word describes what (an ass) assuming things will make out of u (you) and me. In actuality, we know nothing at all about how therapeutic partial gee will be. We only know for sure that our entire evolutionary history was at 1 full gee.

(2) Even if 0.38 gee turns out to be therapeutic enough (which I really doubt, but that's just my opinion), there's 8.5 months of weightlessness to endure before an above-escape speed free-return scenario in most of the mission plans I have seen. Even if the baseline plan is to recover the craft in Earth orbit, the emergency "bailout" if capture fails is that same free-return entry. That entry interface speed is around 50,000 ft/sec = 16 km/s. It'll likely be somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-15 gees peak deceleration (it was 11 gees returning from the moon. From long missions in Earth orbit, all we see is around 3-5 gees. There is no credible evidence of any kind at all, not one shred of any kind, to suggest that a 12-15 gee entry is survivable after accumulating 8.5 months of microgravity damage to the body, no matter what exercise regimen you propose.

It is because of those two flaws that I think we are ethically bound to provide 1 full gee of spin gravity for the outbound and return trips, and not just Mars, but anywhere at all beyond the moon. Anything else is wishful thinking, not science as we know it. Just because spin gravity is inconvenient does not (repeat NOT !!!) trump the ethics.

I'm sorry, but I do insist we try not to kill our crews when we have perfectly good means to save them.

GW

SpaceNut · 2016-06-24 20:36:54

Ah the disease of know it all rather than building to test the theory of what we think we know.

Nasa must be scared of what they will find out.....

So does anyone have a spare billion to launch what we can design as a self contained research location?
Of course one we are done we want to reuse it rather than dump it in the Ocean like Nasa does with everything.....

There has been a crew change onboard the station and Go Army is the image of the day for the crew for the USA.....

GW Johnson · 2016-06-25 08:38:37

Well, I dunno if NASA is scared of anything but risking another lost crew. Although they should be.

But, there is the mental straitjacket of only doing an incremental change upon what you did before (which a lot of people and groups suffer from, not just NASA). They keep wanting to use the Apollo model for travel beyond the moon, and that simply cannot work. There is a very fundamental difference between keeping people healthy for a couple of weeks in space, versus a couple of years in space.

Sometimes, you simply must face up to the fact that you have to do something different. Long-distance manned travel in deep space just requires it.

And that sort of rules out making program decisions based on what gets built in whose district, especially when what got built before was only suitable for the moon or Earth orbit.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2016-06-25 08:40:57)

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-06-25 15:08:09

NASA should have a plan for what happens next if people die in space. Death is a part of live, and if people go in space, then people will die in space, it is inevitable. The fact that someone may die in space due to a mission shouldn't threaten it. There are a lot of reason why people may die in space, they could die of a heart attack. The Pilgrims did not return to England when half their number died that first year due to starvation disease and cold, their colony succeeded and became Massachusetts.

GW Johnson · 2016-06-26 10:07:33

I probably wasn't clear enough. What NASA should (and does) fear is killing another crew because they made some kind of mistake. Dying because of circumstances during a mission is quite different. The difference is that there's fault when you screw up something, like the Apollo 1 wiring insulation and hatch, the Challenger decision to fly too cold, and the Columbia decision to ignore the debris impact. There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew (if you killed them by making some idiotic mistake).

This history is part of what drives the rather extreme risk-aversity on NASA's part, which in turn is why they are preparing for only cis-lunar flights, not true interplanetary voyages with men. The other part is what I already mentioned: congress micromanaging what NASA does, for nothing more than pork-barrel politics.

It seems strange, but it is true nonetheless, that NASA ignores the lethal risks to human health of long-duration interplanetary travel, until you realize these need not be addressed if you stay cis-lunar. They have yet to face up to the spin gravity requirement, or the use of water and wastewater as passive radiation shielding against solar flares. They have yet to address the issues of large living space, laundry, supple spacesuit, landing craft, or space food-that-keeps-more-than-a-year.

What that tells me is that, as an institution, NASA currently has no intent to really send men to Mars. Doesn't matter what they say, what matters is what they are doing now, especially since the preparations require years to accomplish. I don't see them doing very many of the right things to send crews to Mars. Building a moon rocket, and a moon rocket capsule, ain't it. A lot of that is Congress's fault; there are groups within NASA that really do want to go to Mars. But those folks are not in charge, and they would have no congressional support if they were in charge.

GW

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-06-26 10:58:04

Waste water is not a big problem, you simply evaporate it and re-condense it. In space you have access to a vacuum, expose the water to a vacuum and it boils away, leaving the solid contaminants behind. You capture the water vapor and re-condense it to distilled water. What could be simpler?

SpaceNut · 2016-06-26 21:14:42

The trouble with evaporation with loss of air pressure is that it requires power for pumping to lower which means the water is moving towards the pump due to natural direction of change. Opening a valve to space vacuum means we are lossing the internal air pressure that we need to keep....

SpaceNut · 2016-08-21 20:40:45

NASA Wants to Bring Enterprise to the Space Station

“Commercial companies continue to approach NASA to use the ISS in ways we never imagined,”
“to determine private market interest in using unique ISS capabilities that have limited availability.”
NASA received 11 submissions “from a broad range of respondents including individuals, small companies and large companies,” Sam Scimemi, division director for the ISS program, said in an e-mail.
Boeing is the prime contractor on the ISS, with a five-year, $1.2 billion deal through September 2020. Part of that contract calls for it to assess the station’s “primary structural hardware” and determine whether the outpost’s functional life could be extended through December 2028. The ISS will operate until at least 2024 since NASA agreed in 2014 to keep the lab open for an additional decade. The space station was originally scheduled to shut down in 2020.

SpaceNut · 2016-11-17 18:24:12

Soon U.S. Astronaut Becomes the Oldest Woman in Space of which NASA's Peggy Whitson has circled the sun 56 times and now she's the oldest woman in space

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#401 2016-04-17 16:56:59

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#402 2016-04-17 22:01:24

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#403 2016-04-18 17:24:56

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#404 2016-04-18 18:21:38

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#405 2016-04-20 20:00:54

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#406 2016-05-08 08:59:55

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#407 2016-05-08 09:05:33

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#408 2016-05-12 20:45:48

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#409 2016-05-17 16:49:53

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#410 2016-05-18 10:06:26

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#411 2016-05-18 10:24:19

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#412 2016-05-18 10:31:14

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#413 2016-05-19 20:48:24

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#414 2016-05-20 10:03:32

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#415 2016-05-20 21:19:52

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#416 2016-06-17 19:59:47

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#417 2016-06-18 17:01:53

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#418 2016-06-24 20:36:54

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#419 2016-06-25 08:38:37

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#420 2016-06-25 15:08:09

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#421 2016-06-26 10:07:33

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#422 2016-06-26 10:58:04

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#423 2016-06-26 21:14:42

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#424 2016-08-21 20:40:45

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#425 2016-11-17 18:24:12

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

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