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Over the next 30 years we will need accommodation space for LEO about 100-150 people , servicing several zero-gravity space platforms in earth orbit and the moonbase will accommodate 50-125 people. We are working towards one or more space vessels enroute to Mars with a crew of 5-20 people.
We are not talking about large numbers but we need to rotate the crews ( like in the Military Operations ) from the several space platforms and also the lunar surface. For the health of the crews we need the spinning space station. It will take about 4-8 years to design , map the schedule for construction and create a scale model of the rotating space station, then building a full scale mock version of the station for training and internal design mechanisms.
The Next 4-8 years are about the methodology on the construction of the space station and the manufacturing of the necessary components for the space station to function. Then we move into the assembly phase that might take another 4-8 years, So this means a minimum of 12 years (2019) to a max. of 24 years (2031) would be required to design, test, create, assembly and bring into operation for this rotating space station.
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Well Houston we have a problem, If we use the ISS and its status of cost and personel count as a base to solve the if we can do it some time in the future. We will fail to even set up shop with anything even the size of the station.
The current figures are crew size 2 with only the option of more if we can solve how to get them back to Earth in a life boat. The cost is well over 100 billion and it will never do what we want it to do, which is to create... not just take up resources for doing science.
One any station in LEO must be simple and low cost to construct or before the first flight has happened it would be cancelled due to past history of building such places.
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Hate to be a downer, but what would such a station really be good for? How is it any more useful than the current space station? So what if people can stay up there longer - what will they accomplish that will be worth the cost?
We don't need it as a way station - we aren't currently going anywhere, and when we do, it looks like the plan is to send people into orbit, rendezvous with another ship launched from Earth, and go on. It'll be a long time before there's enough traffic to need a lay-over spot for people to catch the next lunar shuttle (as in the movie 2001, BTW).
I don't think it's any easier to get to a station than it is to get to orbit in the first place, as someone seemed to be arguing.
If we were going to build stuff in space, it might make sense as housing for construction workers - but given the cost of getting and keeping workers up there, and the fact that we'll have to ship up all the raw materials anyhow for some time to come, the economics seem to favor building stuff on earth.
Repair work might make sense, if there were sufficient volume of demand. I figure a rotating station is going to cost around $150B at least (current station is now aiming for $95B,I think?). You can build and launch a lot of replacement satellites for that much money, or even fly repair missions from Earth. Note that it looks like building and launching a replacement for Hubble will be cheaper than going up to fix it.
The sooner we get some real productive infrastructure in space - mining raw materials so we don't have to ship as much mass up from Earth - the sooner we'll have a use for something like this. So why not focus on the former first?
I'm in agreement with then that we need a spinning space station in space. It the order in which we should go after building those space station that we should be discussing. If we go directly after building these spinning space station we will still be stuck in orbit and most of those resources will have to come from the Earth, which is not a good plan.
That the reason that I think we should go Moon Direct and setup a manufacturing facilities there of maybe several hundred to a thousand people there. At least on the Moon we have something to work with in regards to resources, but in space we have nothing to work with. After all it is only a two or three day trip to the moon. We also may mine those asteroids and/or comets too to get resource. Then we will have the resources to build spinning space station and I think we really need too, because it will act as a gate way to Mars and other places, but as a gate way to the Moon it not absolutely necessary, but would be helpful to have in place. Also having a major spinning space station that might have a city in it in space beside being holding area for people going to Mars and other places, you would also have a major space ship building yard there too for building new space ship. You would be able to deal with the nuclear powered ships there of either building them, maintaining them or decommissioning them without endangering Earth, Mars or the Moon population at that time.
So in that regard, your partially right, in that no matter what we build, it not going to be big enough and we will always will have to send up more stuff from the Earth to get to be what we want or upgrade that spinning space station and that not going happen.
So I’m figuring that we should be looking at building it in a thirty to fifty year time frame instead and figuring that the Lunar Base and our asteroid minning colonies will be the ones supplying most of the resources for our spinning space station. But we might build a smaller one as a temporary weigh station, but it won’t be anything major, becuase it would both cost too much and use too much resources from the Earth to make them practical.
But, once we have done this, a Mars Colonization program would be right behind it as a natural follow through and a continuation of what we had already done on the Moon, spinning space station and the asteroid minning colonies.
Larry,
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Well Houston we have a problem, If we use the ISS and its status of cost and personel count as a base to solve the if we can do it some time in the future. We will fail to even set up shop with anything even the size of the station.
The current figures are crew size 2 with only the option of more if we can solve how to get them back to Earth in a life boat. The cost is well over 100 billion and it will never do what we want it to do, which is to create... not just take up resources for doing science.
One any station in LEO must be simple and low cost to construct or before the first flight has happened it would be cancelled due to past history of building such places.
For the most part, I agree with you. "HOUSTON WE DO HAVE A PROBLEM"!
That the reason that I believe that we should go Moon Direct and build up an industry on the Moon and/or local asteroids that may come past the earth to get those resources. Then we might revisit this idea of building a rotating space station or even build a rotating city in that space station. As you have knotted, it going to cost too much and it also going to be too resource intensive for us to supply those resources from the Earth.
Larry,
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The biggest problem that we have to solve now is to reduce the cost of launching payloads to LEO.
If a space station directly supports this goal it might be worth building it early, but otherwise developing a Lunar colony for raw materials mining (if we can find a spot that has enough of the elements required) is higher priority.
Anyway cost reduction is a typical task for the commercial sector while NASA can already begin the exploration and early settlement of Moon and Mars parallel to it.
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The developing of a rotating space station and lunar manufacturing and mining facilities work together. It depends on the long term approach that is needed to manage the expansion goals for humanity in space.
The moon could be the most important space asset and investment for humanity in the future from building spacecraft components providing raw materials and provide off-earth training for space crews. With low gravitywe could move larger objects with the same energy output and with no atomsphere the components can be designed and launched with no drag or have structural issues with atomsphere developed designs. Final assembly could be in Lunar orbit or ferried back to earth and assemblied here before crewing the vessels.
I think that a well designed plan will include both the rotating space station, zero gravity space platforms and lunar manufacturing and mining facilities.
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Still Fledi is right we do need a much cheaper and routine access for space. When we have that we will get the space station.
And why should any country design a cheaper access to space especially with the high likehood of the incredible costs of designing such a system.
The answer is National self interest
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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The biggest problem that we have to solve now is to reduce the cost of launching payloads to LEO.
If a space station directly supports this goal it might be worth building it early, but otherwise developing a Lunar colony for raw materials mining (if we can find a spot that has enough of the elements required) is higher priority.
Anyway cost reduction is a typical task for the commercial sector while NASA can already begin the exploration and early settlement of Moon and Mars parallel to it.
Having a majors spinning space station and/or spinning city in space does support those other things.
But, the problem is:
What supporting that spinning space station in resources they need have?
All those resources can't be coming from the Earth or our plan will fall apart because it will consume too much of our resources here on Earth. So even reducing the launch would only have a limited effect too if we don't have access to other resources in space. Now we need to reduce that launch cost, but it not the only thing that we need to be doing.
We need a second generation space shuttle to get the people to our spinning space station, because the current shuttle is insufficient to do what we need or want done.
We don't absolutely need it if we are going Moon, although it would be nice to have one. The Moon also act as a base from which to work from too.
So if we are going to have a major spinning space station, we almost have to bundle Lunar mining along with possibly mining asteroids too and development program for the Moon to get a large enough spinning space station to do us any good at all.
At that point we would have the infrastructure in place to do a major Mars colonization program on large scale, but lacking this kind of infrastructure: Anybody for a Glorified Apollo Program for Mars?
Larry,
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Considering the staggering costs involved, you want to focus on The development of a passenger service from Earth to the Moon. Once you can send a hundred people to the moon on a Daily basis, build a small lunar city for ten thousand (you can open the moon for investment in underground city construction- this population will escalate to a million pretty quickly. This allows large scale materials processing on the Moon.
This will provide materials for a construction platform and a small space station of fifty to two hundred and fifty people. It serves as a 'space dock/ship yard'-construction and testing of a big unmanned nuclear drive capable of pushing a million tonnes has taken place using it- the first fell through the earth atmosphere and took out Hawaii, the second failed to go any where and is being pushed out to a safe solar orbit away from earth. The third is under construction.
The moon is now heavily crowded by rich tourists, corporate executives and their families who have fled a failing earth civilization. It is just as easy to be a corporate executive if the HQ is on the Moon. Religious groups have fought against off world colonization by this corporate ruling class- the only religion on the Moon is the Church of the Sheppard, these followers of Alan have risen in popularity. They support space civilization leaving behind the weak, decayed philosophies of the past. On earth Terrorists have laid seige to launch facilities arround the world-they know that they and their children will never leave the earth. Entire nations are little more than prisons to keep the terrorists and fanatics caged. Poverty and injustice is on the rise and Despotism is in favour in every democratic nation.
It is at this point that you want to be ready for the colonization of Mars. You have been forward deploying systems for the last thirty years. There are generators sitting in craters filled with heavy terraform gasses that sit there like smog and a dam of dirt is being pushed across the mouth of Vallis Marineris to trap over five hundred cubic kilometres of this smog. Over a thousand people live there as part of the forward survey teams. They have been busily assembling as many of the FD systems as possible. There is even an airlocked village tunneled into the side of a mountain-ready to become the greatest mining city in the Solar system.
Over that thirty years of Lunar colonization and space propulsion development, you have seen a concerted effort to build a reserve of resources necessary for this. The construction of space habitats capable of traversing the great distance of space freely as agricultural city-states and ocean liners.
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bump
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Maybe China would do something or
2024?
SpaceX's Mars program is a development program initiated by Elon Musk and SpaceX in order to facilitate the eventual colonization of Mars.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201018070 … r-BB1a72Tq
Space Station Freedom was a NASA project to construct a permanently manned Earth-orbiting space station in the 1980s. Although approved by then-president Ronald Reagan and announced in the 1984 State of the Union Address, Freedom was never constructed or completed as originally designed, and after several cutbacks, the project evolved into the International Space Station program.
https://nasa.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom
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