Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

tahanson43206 · 2023-09-27 12:01:04

This topic is a spin-off from the Large Colonization Ship topic created and managed by RobertDyck.

The Baton style was shown in the movie Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.

This topic is offered to provide a focus for development of a baton shaped rotating habitat for Earth Orbit.

Title revised 2025/01/18 to reflect flow into the Baton design of GW Johnson

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2023-09-27 12:03:12

Here is a link that Bing found, showing the Discovery One spacecraft in the movie Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/pUmYB … 200-80.jpg

The spherical shaped habitat module is one of many possibilities for this topic to consider.

(th)

kbd512 · 2023-09-27 12:53:13

tahanson43206,

I propose that we christen this ship, "Baton Rouge".

tahanson43206 · 2023-09-27 17:59:02

For kbd512 re #3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o … _Louisiana

The history of the region goes back at least 8000 years.

I think a sponsorship might be possible.

I know nothing at all about Baton Rouge, so this Wikipedia article is my first introduction to the city.

History of Baton Rouge, Louisiana
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville provided Baton Rouge as well as Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas with their current names.
The foundation of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dates to 1721, at the site of a bâton rouge or "red stick" Muscogee boundary marker. It became the state capital of Louisiana in 1849.
Prehistory
History of Louisiana
By year
Pre-statehood
U.S. Civil War
Post-Civil War
Topics: African-Americans - Cities - Politics
Human habitation in the Baton Rouge area has been dated to about 8000 BC based on evidence found along the Mississippi, Comite, and Amite rivers.[1]
Earthwork mounds were built by hunter-gatherer societies in the Middle Archaic period, from roughly the 4th millennium BC.[2] Proto-Muskogean divided into its daughter languages by about 1000 BC; a cultural boundary between either side of Mobile Bay and the Black Warrior River begins to appear between about 1200 BC and 500 BC, the Middle "Gulf Formational Stage". Eastern Muskogean began to diversify internally in the first half of the 1st millennium AD.[3] The early Muskogean nations were the bearers of the Mississippian culture which formed around AD 800. By the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico in the early 16th century, many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned, the region at the time presenting as a collection of moderately-sized native chiefdoms interspersed with autonomous villages and tribal groups.[4]
Colonial period

If there is a member of the forum who can comment, please do.

If there is someone not already a member who would like to comment, see Recruiting topic.

(th)

Void · 2023-09-27 20:07:27

The activities of https://www.vastspace.com/

I normally stay out of your large ship topics, but for me this is an exception. I am very interested in Vast Space.

I will say also that what I have read about spin gravity is that it is thought that multiple sessions in a short arm centrifuge can do much good for people tested with continuing bedrest. So, the point is you may not need that much spin gravity for the whole ship. I am not saying that you should not have strong spin gravity, just that it seems that with the possible option of a short arm centrifuge, you might have less. The point about that is it may liberate some of the constraints, that otherwise would apply to how you fashion your ship.

I'm not telling you what to do, rather I am pointing out that options may be possible if they help release other difficult requirement that must go with a higher spin gravity for the ship itself.

If you don't care to care then fine, I have no dog in this fight the saying goes.

This article has some materials that might be of interest, some about the Moon as well: https://www.science20.com/robert_invent … how-176169

If you had a low base gravity from the spin of the ship, perhaps you could get people to Mars in reasonable health with the additional use of a centrifuge.

If would like me to bug out, I can, no hard feelings about it either.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-09-27 20:33:10)

tahanson43206 · 2024-11-22 09:52:06

This topic has been idle for a while...

I thought that the NASA history that RobertDyck brought back into view is relevant to development of GW Johnson's Baton style system.

RobertDyck wrote:

NASA started studies in 1965 of how to use Apollo hardware to send humans to Mars. They got more serious in 1968. Principles of life support in documents from 1968 use the same principles that the US side of ISS use today. After Apollo 11, NASA said their next goal was Mars. The first human mission to Mars would be in 1981. Then they said 1983 (next launch opportunity). Then they said they'll get back to us. Problem was Nixon didn't believe in space; he slashed NASA's budget, used the money for a surge in Vietnam. That worked real well, didn't it?
In 1989 President George H. W. Bush said "we will go to Mars", and tried to set out a long-term vision for NASA. So NASA came up with details how to achieve that, and 90-days later came back with a report called the 90-Day Report on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars. Rather than listing cost per year, it gave total cost: $450 billion. Annual budget of NASA would only increase with inflation, no giant jump, but when you present it as total over many years, it sounds huge. Congress balked. So one NASA contractor, Martin-Marietta, had their engineers come up with a plan that would have a price tag Congress would accept. Dr. Robert Zubrin and his partner David Baker came up with Mars Direct. They presented it to NASA in June 1990. If that plan was followed, they would have had a human on Mars by 1999.
Here are some images of the 1965 designs.

I double checked and the coding that worked for RobertDyck to show the images does not work when copied and pasted here.

However, what ** does ** come up if you click on the links is the original article, and that may be of interest to our readers.

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tahanson43206 · 2025-01-15 19:41:43

This topic seems well suited for GW Johnson's concept of a baton style space craft configuration.

GW included images of the design in recent papers published here in the forum.

I'll try to find an image that we can post separately from the paper.

And here it is:

Baton style artificial Gravity

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GW Johnson · 2025-01-17 10:15:24

For any given level of spin gravity, there is a fixed spin radius matching that gee, at some rpm. It's usually quite large, leading to "battlestar galactica" designs if you approach it with classical rifle-bullet spin mode. This would be appropriate if you needed to transport many hundreds to several thousand people at a time. But until you actually do have that need, nobody is going to want to pay for building such a giant ship.

Using a centrifuge wheel (or multiple wheels) inside an otherwise smaller ship allows you to reduce the size and mass of the ship, at the "price" of a very odd shape that can never penetrate an atmosphere. Wheel thickness has to exceed a min dimension on the order of 2-3 meters, in order for the spaces inside the wheel not to feel too claustrophobic. But if you do an even number of wheels, rotating in opposite directions, you can avoid all the gyroscopic force effects that make ship pointing difficult. This might be appropriate for transporting a few hundred to several hundred at a time.

There is an intermediate between the rifle bullet spin and internal centrifuge wheel approaches just described: "frisbee"-type spin. If your ship is shaped like a frisbee instead of a long cylinder, you can do rifle-bullet whole-ship spin , but with a reduced contained volume, and consequently less mass. It would still be appropriate to housing a few hundred people at a time.

Both of those approaches (and the intermediate) would be appropriate for transporting large amounts of settlers, once you have a real colony planted: multiple hundreds at a time. But there is no need for that many people at a time during the exploration and experimental base phases, on Mars or anywhere else. Those crews are just smaller: a handful, to at most a few dozen.

Baton spin allows you to build a much smaller-mass ship capable of carrying only a few people at a time, with only one large dimension in order to provide the right-sized spin radius. This is most likely a string of modules docked together in a long "stick", that performs as a rigid object, able to resist the bending forces that occur during spin up and spin down. This approach produces designs that you can afford to build which carry the right-size smaller crews appropriate to the exploration and experimental base phases. And if you need more space for a slightly-larger crew, make your long baton stick out of two (or more) sticks of these docked modules mounted side-by-side. There is also the option of a "cross", generalized as 3 or more arms extending radially (but equally spaced around), from a common spin center.

All of these are spin gravity designs that could be built. Each is appropriate to a greatly-different carried-population size range. You just pick the appropriate approach for the size of populations that you need to transport. Uniquely, the baton spin approach also offers the fastest and cheapest way to build a spinning space station in LEO, where the min partial-gee level can be determined experimentally, and where max tolerable spin rate can also be determined experimentally.

Don't confuse rigid baton spin with the long-proposed cable-connected spin concepts. We already know how to spin up rigid objects. The cable-connected approach presents vast unaddressed development difficulties during the spin up and spin down transients, precisely because the cables cannot resist bending moments. You cannot push on a string! Of the two, rigid baton spin thus presents far less needed development effort, in order to become a reliable approach.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2025-01-17 10:31:29)

RobertDyck · 2025-01-17 15:24:13

I edited post #6 to put [ img ] tags back. Those tags are necessary for an image to display. As a courtesy to the website where I got the images, there's also a [ url= ] tag to direct you to that website if you click the image.

Terraformer · 2025-01-17 15:57:46

Hmm. A cross shaped spaceship is an interesting design. Spinning on its long axis but with the living quarters extended outwards. Reminiscent of designs with wheels but a lot smaller. Doesn't have to be all that large.

The gym would go in the centre, where it can spin in it's own centrifuge. A downside of the baton design is that a gym centrifuge would be tricky to install, there's not much space at the axis of rotation for it. A major downside, really. I don't think we should use it.

GW Johnson · 2025-01-18 14:13:51

If one does a baton spin design, you put your workstations and your gym gear in the modules at the ends of the stick, where gee is near 1 by the design of the vehicle. You put your sleeping quarters near the center where gee is near zero, because you get no benefit resisting gravity while sleeping prone (prone is first cousin to zero gee, according to the experiments). Put your other recreational and support stations in the intermediate modules where you have intermediate gee. That would be for a 6-module stick in a one or two-stick straight baton design.

You end up spending a full work shift and part of an off-duty shift at 1 gee, working, or working out. The rest of the waking hours are spent at partial gee (near 0.5), so you average 0.75 to 0.80 gee for your waking hours. Sleeping at low-to-no-gee doesn't hurt, so it doesn't count against that average.

Why is this so difficult for so many to understand?

GW

Terraformer · 2025-01-18 14:39:33

Why is it so difficult for you to understand that making the entire thing 1g is massively overengineering it beyond what is needed for astronaut health? Why are you so wedded to full 1g designs at an RPM of 2 or less?

The baton design locks you into providing full 1g for the entire ship and stops you providing a dedicated gym centrifuge at higher g than the rest of the ship. It is a bad design.

tahanson43206 · 2025-01-18 14:44:13

For GW Johnson re #11

Your request for understanding of your vision is understandable but understanding of your vision by ** other ** human beings may be difficult to achieve.

When some element of your vision enters the consciousness of another human, all sorts of associations occur that you have no control over, and some of these may be injurious to the effect you would like to have.

It may take a bit of effort to work through the challenges of communicating your idea(s) to a wider audience.

At the moment, you are working in a small venue with a group which has self-selected to stick together over a number of years, and dealing with far out ideas such as yours is part of the glue that binds us together.

Why is this so difficult for so many to understand?

It's better for you to discover the answer to your question here, than to publish or present something that is not ready for a wider audience.

More images would probably help.

Animation would probably help.

Terraformer just did your project a tremendous favor, by finding and posting a link to real honest-to-goodness scientific research funded by NASA and carried out in a respected university setting by serious people. That research shows that humans can be trained to accept rotation, at the average rate of 1.7 rpm increase per day. If your target is 17 rpm then you need to plan a training schedule of 10 days.

What this means is that your concept of a rotating pole with 1 G at the tips should be tolerated by a broad part of the human population, if and ** only ** if they are given the appropriate training. Please note that it appears not every human is capable of accepting this training. The aspect I find most encouraging is that apparently the subjects were able to return to non-rotating 1 G without suffering long term negative effects.

You are going to need to up your game to include animation. As it happens, I am interested in how we might be able to so this, and would be willing to work with you to see if we can create a short animation that shows how your proposal would work.

I suspect that part of what is going on is the change of thinking that is going to be required for anyone to "understand" your idea.

You are talking about an object about the size and shape of a submarine, which you intend to rotate end over end and expect the crew to deal with the consequences.

Anyone thinking about your idea is going to mentally place themselves in that crew and try to imagine the experience. I doubt you yourself are prepared to attempt something so radically different from the (relatively stable) lives most of us enjoy on Earth. The Earth rotates at the rate of one revolution per day, and most of us seem to have become accustomed to that. Your proposal is to rotate at whatever rate delivers 1 G at the tips of the pole, and your readers intuitively "understand" they aren't going to be able to deal with that without the training that the NASA funded study shows is possible.

I have revised the title of the topic to reflect the new direction toward fulfillment of your design.

(th)

Terraformer · 2025-01-18 15:03:56

TH,

Its not an issue of understanding. I understand GW perfectly well, I just reject his vibes based design in favour of solid evidence that it's massively overkill.

GW Johnson · Yesterday 20:37:49

I had proposed 1 full gee of spin gravity, using a 56 m spin radius, at 4 rpm.

There is data to support presuming that people exposed to weightlessness, but with exercise and drugs, can withstand up to 4 gees for rocket burns, and for entry, descent, and landing.

There is data to support presuming that people fully Earth fit (1 gee) can withstand 11+ gees worth of entry, descent, and landing.

There is NO data to support presuming that people exposed to fractional gee are any more resistant to imposed high gees than people exposed to weightlessness.

If your mission design excludes any gee exposures higher than about 4 gees, you can do the mission at any fractional gee you want, or even weightless.

If your mission design CANNOT EXCLUDE higher gee exposures than about 4, then you cannot count on fractional gee fitness to provide the fitness to withstand that. You MUST provide full 1 gee, because 0 or 1 gee data is the only data we have.

As to whether 4 rpm is the upper spin rate limit, well, there is either no data, or else very recent data that may or may not have been replicated yet. We will see.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (Yesterday 20:38:15)

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#1 2023-09-27 12:01:04

Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#2 2023-09-27 12:03:12

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#3 2023-09-27 12:53:13

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#4 2023-09-27 17:59:02

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#5 2023-09-27 20:07:27

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#6 2024-11-22 09:52:06

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#7 2025-01-15 19:41:43

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#8 2025-01-17 10:15:24

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#9 2025-01-17 15:24:13

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#10 2025-01-17 15:57:46

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#11 2025-01-18 14:13:51

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#12 2025-01-18 14:39:33

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#13 2025-01-18 14:44:13

Re: Baton Style Rotating Space Habitat inspired by RobertDyck Large Ship

#14 2025-01-18 15:03:56

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#15 Yesterday 20:37:49

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