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Inflatable Toys in Space
Alexey Goldin writes "An inflatable heatshield --- a new technology with a potential to make space access cheaper will be tested on Feb. 9 by Lavochkin Association (Russia) and DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (Germany). A new word in inflatable toys business :-). " This ranks up there with the Mars Pathfinder, where they just surrounded the lander in airbags and let it drop - elegant engineering at its finest.
Hehe, that was funny to watch. Three excellent mpeg movies. I loved the ending of the last one:)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Inflatable heat shield for aerobraking.
Science Fiction -> Science Fact.
(Or it could be totally different, but I can't read the referenced site; either it's slashdotted or it requires JavaScript.)
I hope Michael's comment about Mars Pathfinder was sarcasm. One of the largest problems is that engineers often forget to use their common sense in cases when it COULD be used to solve a problem. Allowing yourself to listen to your common sense and evaluating even the wackiest solutions will often lead to INNOVATION. Being able to do the above is one of the biggest steps you can take to thinking of creative and new solutions to a problem.
I personally am of the opinion that the solution to landing Mars Pathfinder was a brilliant one.
There are several designs described on Mark Wade's site:
e scue.htm
http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/craftfam/r
If I'm not mistaken, this is part of the Cluster Satellite project, investigating "the Earth?s magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind."
I think you mean Cluster II. The first one ended up in a swamp when the French Ariane 5 rocket blew up on its maiden flight due to a software bug. Parts of the instrument were actually recovered and are being used in the new mission under the name "Phoenix", a particularly apt use of the name. I say this only because I was working as a sysadmin at the UNH Space Science Center at the time. The SCC was building one of the instruments for Cluster. I remember a lot of people's dreams went down with that rocket.
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This might be interesting, but I don't really think that it is insightful, inflatable protection was used on the Mars Pathfinder mission. It is not a question if it is practicle, it worked last year.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
At first I thought someone was testing rubber duckies in zero-gravity water puddles.
Actually, the TV show Voyager showed the extreme sport version of this: re-entry wearing only an armored space suit. None of this namby-pamby parachute-like heat shield. Just friction against your suit, varied based on how you choose to fly.
Not if you log out. It's the loophole that can't really be fixed.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I believe the word is "ballute", a mix between a balloon and a parachute.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Some time ago, I ran into a fellow who was designing a pressure-fed upper stage. He was investigating an inflatable nozzle for the engine. According to him, the conditions well downstream from the nozzle throat are cool enough for current materials to handle, and the huge increase in expansion ratio possible with an inflatable nozzle could give a substantial boost in engine thrust with the same fuel burn. This translates to more payload. On top of this, the inflatable nozzle is very compact compared to a rigid nozzle bell. I wonder what became of this?
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
San Antonio, TX, uses inflatable emergency dams under several downtown buildings, in case of a flood problem along their narrow river-front.
Some ice-breaking ships use inflatable bladders to nudge themselves up onto the ice, if I recall correctly.
My last Dell computer (boo hiss blah blah) came in packaging materials that were bags of air, instead of foam, peanuts, or folded cardboard. Not a dynamic use, but still a continuing trend.
Airbags in cars use inflation for dynamic cushioning, of course.
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But then I noticed the contest with it's 'first 200 successful internet pilots' win, and the pointer to the VRML, and I began to wonder if this wasn't all a bit gimicky... and THEN when I tried to skip the VRML, they crashed my NN4.7 browser and I lost my partially composed post.
So you're getting diddly. I'm not paying them much more mind until I see it in a mainstream article, preferrably NewScientist or something similar.
(*) I don't know whether turning off Javascript in NN4.7 is similar enough to what IE 3 will do for you, but there were still a few URLs stuck in my OS copy and paste. Try these.
http://www.return-home.com/English/ mission.html
http://www.return-home.com/Englis h/mission_2.html
http://www.return-home.com/Englis h/mission_3.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/inf o.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/i nfo_2.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/s terne.html
Read The Fxxxxxx Article! This IS privately funded (as much as Russia can privately fund).
This looks like an interesting experiment. I hope they don't get beat up to bad if it doesn't work flawlessly on the first pass. The ability to return/reuse spent first stages, instead of burning them up in the atmosphere, seems like one of the most interesting aspects. Might also remove any future excuses for adding to our pile of orbiting 'space junk'.
I know NASA didn't have anything to do with this, but I have to believe the successfull use of airbags on Mars Lander 'inspired' this crew to go ahead with their experiment. THANK GOD NOBODY PATENTED THE CONCEPT (I hope).
The most interesting part of the project, IMHO, is that they are allowing on-line 'pilots' to attempt to pilot a simulator in real-time with the flight test, and the first 100 to successfully land get a free 'wing commander' souvenir that was in space on the actual test vehicle! Count me in! Talk about the ultimate in Space Geek collectibles!
I have a painting on my wall, done in 1982, depicting a space station in the shape of a Benzine ring - six truncated icosahedrons (soccer balls) connected by tubes. It's double walled inflated Kevlar, foam-in-place sandwich construction with aluminized coatings inside and out. Total usable volue is about 95,000 cubic feet.
It was designed so that the entire structure could be transported to orbit as a single Space Shuttle payload. A second Space Shuttle mission would be needed to bring up the 'internal furnishings'.
The prooof-of-concept was supposed to be a Get-Away-Special (Payload #271). But the software firm I was using to fund the project became a money sink. In addition, officials at NASA asked that the project be delayed because it involved too many technologies that were new to them.
Yes, inflatables hold great promise for use in space where all you want to do is maintain a comfortable shirtsleeve environment. There are significant challenges to be overcome, but that's what makes things interesting.
Now for a prediction. Serious space endevours will be Open Source projects. Some might call it life under a microscope, but imagine the specification and design of a space project as open documents. Then the construction and testing being a streaming video feed. And of course the software would all be Open Source. You wouldn't want to vacation in an orbital hotel where a failure in closed source software could deprive you of oxygen.
Yes, but on that mission it was used as a cushion to make it bounce on impact, not to slow the impact. Part of what a heat shield does (abeit collaterally) is slow impact (usually greatly added by drag chutes, etc at a certain point).
If it can be used for both, great. And in a thick atmosphere, hey... it would be easy to engineer it to get more bang for your buck. I was just saying that Mars wasn't a good candidate for this, and Mars is our next probably target.
Using a gas to expand a solid such that surface area and pressurization meet certain criteria isn't a particularly ridiculous or childish notion. Those car tires you're driving on ain't exactly solid material!
The great thing about inflating something is that, until it's necessary, it can be almost invisible. Many materials can be inflated to many times their compressed size, and still maintain properties that a given situation requires. The fact that their expansion involves temporary forces that would be impossible to deliver under any predeployed material can be quite a blessing as well.
I always thought it'd be fascinating to have shipping material that operated is miniature airbags...whenever an excess shock was registered, the peanuts would pop and grow, absorbing the shockwave.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Overheard near Area 51:
"Whadda mean there's an inflatable doll in orbit?"
"Well, sir, atleast the aliens have a sense of humor."
"Indeed, shoot another one down - we can't store these nukes forever."
"Yes sir!"
Check out BOSS an inlatible satillite. BOSS stands for Big Occulting Steerable Satillite. It will let you do things like directly view earth-like planets in orbit around stars from 5 Parsecs (18 lightyears) away.
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I remember these inflatable cones were proposed decades ago for space station lifeboats. An astronaut in a suit would be able to do an emergency re-entry with this technology. I think NASA was not considering full lifeboats due to mass and complexity -- they already have human-qualified life support spacesuits.
next - one with fully articulatable joints and 3 orifaces! :)
Can't wait!!!
(resisting the urge to shout first post...)
Observe, reason, and experiment.
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
The atmosphere of Mars is about 6 millibars (about 150x less than Earth). An inflatable heat shield might save space and reduce mass, but it would have to inflate out into something really large to slow down descent through increased drag.
Inflatable tech would work well as cushions to soften impact, and could save a lot of cash by reducing the weight of the probe, but this won't work well to slow impact, will it?
Sure, Mars only has 1/3 the gravity of earth, but that still makes (with the cheesy math of 1/3 of 150x thinner) a 50x hit in efficiency in drag vs tests on earth. Plus, the probe will probably still have some of its momentum left from the trip to get there.
Still, at a fraction of the cost, and super-compact, storage, it certainly couldn't hurt to pack along a few dozen cool inflatable extras on a probe. Go-Go-Gadget-Hand-Glider!
The stuff they use to make these things is flexible, yet extremely durable. Think about it. We already have spacesuits designed to protect astronauts from micrometeorites, balloons that can protect a spacecraft from impact without being punctured by hitting rocks after a fall from at least 400 feet, and if a stray supply module hits one of these things, it's most likely going to bounce off, rather than puncturing it. The result is going to be much better than if it hits a solid container, which will probably buckle under the stress and cause joints and connections to come apart.
Think about how much it takes to puncture and completely deflate a steel-belted radial tire, and then realize that tires are like paper balloons compared to the inflatable tools being designed for space.
NASA's been looking at inflatable technology for quite some time and I'm sure that this is just another application of new materials and ideas (the article must be Slashdotted).
If you think about it, inflation makes complete sense. Given the cargo limitations of today's launch vehicles, inflatable cargo takes up a lot less space. I saw NASA's 'architect', Constance Adams, speak at my school once and they've been designing an inflatable habitat for the space station for quite some time now. The great thing about an inflatable habitat is that it takes very little air in the vacuum of space for it to be structurally stable enough for construction habitation. Furthermore, inhabitable systems use an endoskeletal design for their interiors, rather than the exoskeletal designs of current tin cans, leading to a more flexible design. In addition, materials used for the skin are much lighter than their metallic counterparts, saving launch costs.
If you think about it, in space, most things are in tension because of the outward pressure of the required internal atmosphere. Why not use this force to your benefit, right?