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NASA Has Plans for 2nd Space Station at L1
Keith Gabryelski writes "New Scientist has an article on NASA's unveiling of a "blueprint for the future" of space exploration. It entails a Space Station 5/6ths of the way to the moon. In other news, radiation sheilding on the space station isn't so good."
With the insane ammounts of cost overruns and mismanagement in the ISS project, who thinks that a jaded congress is going to vote a new space station [no matter how much MORE useful than the ISS it may be] any funds whatsoever?
There is only room for three people for extended stays, due to Congressional budget cuts in the habitation module and escape vehicle. The original intention is seven people. That means the crew of three must spend 75% of their time in maintenance with only a small amount for experiments and other innovation. Unlikely the current administration will increase funding. Many republicans hate NASA because of its environmental monitoring programs. And the previous scientific leader of NASA has been replaced by an accountant (cut and slash).
The new IMAX movie about the first three years of space station construction is fascinating.
space is a harsh place. Radiation, temperature extremes, enormous distances of nothingness. It'll be nice when it isn't almost senselessly prohibitive to go.
If i'm to be modded down for offtopicness, well, I deserve it, but I need to get this off my chest:
.00001% deviation from expected results researching *.*, right after they make clear that most likely it's due to faulty measurement equipment, New Scientist will publish that they found aliens, that they have a draft of the alien invasion plan, that Einstains's GToR is therefore void, and that in fact he himself WAS an alien trying to distract us from the truth. And then they _really_ start speculating and tell you that they infer from the inforamtion that Einstein was a shape shifter and that he was also the first husband of Melinda Gates.
/.er's comments than NS (if you can believe that!)
I simply can't read new scientist anymore. When the site actually loads (regardless of slashdotting), every single article they publish seems to be the scientific equivalent of the paparazzi.
I mean, really, one thing is to have a non-peer-reviewed magazine, and an entirely different thing is to intentionally publish exagerated, ridiculous, absolutely un-proved (and almost always un-provable) "facts". Even the simplest of stories is spinned beyond recognition. If a story comes up of some scientists spotting a
Now, I haven't read this article (not that I could even if I wanted to, NS' site goes DoS when they're linked from my cousin's non-porn website), but I'm sure I'll get more substance out of
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
The time between when Columbus "discovered" the new world and Magellen circumnavigated the globe was 30 years. It has now been 30 years since Apollo 17, the last time man visited the moon, the last time man left low earth orbit. I think it's a great failure of our race that we've dragged our feet such.
To think that technological advance is blazingly fast in this day in age is misleading. We're not doing too well at hitting the important targets. NASA might just now be waking up to this, but it's yet to be seen if their budget wakes up to it. (Nasa funding was 4% of the national budget at the height of the Apollo program, it's less than 1% now)
So I applaud their very recent efforts to finally mention some vague goals away from Low Earth Orbit. L1 is a fine stepping stone, but Mars is where the public eye is. Nasa administrator Daniel Goldin had some brave words about the possibility of sending men to Mars in this decade or the next, but Bush put a bean counter in charge of Nasa pretty quickly to throttle cost overruns from the ISS.
What we really need is a president giving NASA a kick in the pants, and the funding to follow, as Kennedy did. Either that or wait around for private space exploration to become worthwhile, and we're going to be waiting quite a while in that case. Another space race? maybe China? I hope so. Because the current NASA schedule is anything but ambitious.
Apollo was not built around science. It was built as another battlefield of the Cold War. The space program wasn't even important until the Soviet Union beat America into space. When NASA can make routine, scientific trips to the moon, then they can concentrate on building a space station at L1 and worry about getting to Mars.
The Space Shuttle is routine now, and usually stays within budget. NASA should build on this technology, slowly and gradually. We will learn so much more this way rather than putting a thermometer and a seismometer on the moon as quickly as possible.
This!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
IANARS (rocket scientist) but what are the possibilities of utilizing the asteroid just discovered that shares the earths orbit for some form of station. A snippet from this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2347663. stm
"Although only about 100 metres across 2002 AA29 may play a role in the manned exploration of space out of all proportion to its size.
Already researchers are speculating that it could be visited by an unmanned spaceprobe or even become the first object after the Moon to be stepped on by astronauts.
The object could tell us a lot about the composition of asteroids.
Some have speculated that it could be nudged into a permanent Earth orbit where it could be studied at greater length."
If you could nudge this thing into the right orbit wouldn't it make a wonderful station? Lots of room, some raw materials, and you could burrow into to escape the radiation. I understand that some asteroids are nothing more than loose collections of rocks and dust. But it's an intriguing, and plausible idea.
Mostly incorrect, if you had read the article about radiation, you would understand the fundamental problem with lead is because of its weight, but not the way you are thinking. The problem is that the large nuclei (the middle of the lead atoms). These are struck by the cosmic ray, releasing more deadly radiation to the crew inside, so your precious lead sheilding would kill them all. Which is why the shielding described in the article (copied below) is a light plastic.
Radiation inside the ISS, and the now defunct Mir, is caused when the fast, heavy ions that make up cosmic rays collide with the aluminium hull, releasing a shower of secondary particles into the living quarters.
To mitigate this effect, the ISS has been fitted with additional polyethylene shielding that contains lighter atomic nuclei, which are less likely to throw out neutrons when hit by cosmic rays.
It's like a playground spat: "We don't want you bringing your friends to our treehouse, it's for members only!"
Of course, the reason Russia can afford to keep contributing to the ISS, is because of those "jackasses". The US needs to stop whining. Russia obviously has a huge interest in the ISS, or they wouldn't bother selling rides to finance their parts of the project.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I thought Lagrange points collected a lot of dust, which would be bad for optics. Its not like you can vacuum that stuff up either. If you are 5/6ths of the way to the moon already, why not just go the rest of the way? A luna's gravity keeps the dust down and provides many other benefits. I expect Luna would also supply SOME building materials, like maybe 10 foot thick rock walls to stop cosmic rays, for example. The lunar gravity would be a disadvantage for launching other missions from there, but perhaps that could be compensated for.
If there are more informed people out there who see what I don't, I'd love to hear it.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Many here have spoken of the "insane" "horrendous" "crazy" amounts of money spent on IIS. How many think that this money was spent *mostly* to make sure that no one died?
.005% of risk reduction? Unwise, because we lose the ability to pursue our dreams. We're deadlocked.
Was it a good thing to spend that money on? Is the IIS over-engineered in favour of preventing un unfortunate death? (Aside - How many of you, after viewing the interior of an Apollo era craft, would still go into space in one of those?)
Let's look at a little history. If during the 18th century, we had spent an equivalent amount of dough on sailing ships (with the (un)stated goal of preventing deaths (monarchs HATE to look bad)) I think we'd still be looking for our assholes with a mirror. We'd never have left Europe. The economy of the day would not have tolerated it.
My father-in-law was one of the Canadians who helped develop the nuclear power station system called CANDU. His stories are quite telling. His take on risk? - during development of CANDU the engineering studies required would fill a couple of banker's boxes. Today, those studies would fill a small stadium. With a exponential rise in cost. Why? What's the return? A couple of lives? A dozen lives?
My point is - we have tried to reduce the risk to zero and this is not only stupid, but unwise. Stupid because there will always be a risk. How much money are we going to let timid politicians/bureaucrats spend on that last
"Acceptable risk" is a term that has been lost from the West's vocabulary and it is time to bring it back.
Stoptional
While reading about the problems with radiation shielding, I came up with perhaps one way they could reduce exposure: Add improved shielding to the sleeping closets. If they can cut out 90% of the radiation in an area that the average astronaut will spend 30% of his or her time in, that`s a significant savings for relatively little added weight.
Well, I don't like it. What gives NASA the right to squat on what is probably one of the five most valuable places in the universe (from our perspective)? Will there be a deal arranged that in 50 years, when a better space agency comes up with a better project for the liberation point, they'll move their junk out of there? There had better be. Seriously, the UN has to get on this fast. Right now, the USA has basically called dibs on two of the five liberation lunar liberation points, plus there's that second-generation telescope that they want to put into the liberation point behind the earth, where it is always shielded from the sun. Well, this is the ideal place to build a telescope, and once something is there, everybody else, even people with a better telescope idea, are shit out of luck. They'll have to spend billions to make heat shielding because NASA is squatting on the one spot where the heat shielding is natural (permanently in the shadow of Earth).
If I were the UN, I would set a squatting limit of 30 years on any given liberation point. If somebody wants to use it after that, whoever was there before has to get the fuck out and clean up after themselves. I think it's likely that in 30 years all the liberation points will have something, and in another 30, countries will be duking it out over who gets to go there next. The people who want it most will have to compensate the other people who want it. In any case, this is not too soon to be thinking about making international laws about this.
The article talks about IONS colliding with atoms and causing secondary radiation. I would like to get clarification on this point.
If it really is ions causing the problem then a strong magnetic field should provide some protection, just as the earth's field does. In fact the article talks about a significant increase in radiation when outside the earth's magnetic field.
A strong magnetic field might be enough to allow deep space travel. If it's primarily electromagnetic radiation, i.e. photons then your screwed, of course.
Absolute statements are never true
Not that you'd probably want to use the water afterwards, but there is no reason you can't use it beforehand.
Using waste water could work. Wether reclaimed from air, or from body fluids, this would only have been jettisoned into space or reprocessed (and reprocessed water tastes like crap!) anyway.
For that matter, waste biomatter may actually be good at shielding radiation, but you wouldn't want a leak anywhere on the inside of the station! Ewwwww!
Also, you could generate oxygen and hydrogen from water by electrolysis (well you'd have big solar panels anyway). You could use these as a propellant, since any craft at the L1 point still would need some sort of station keeping thrusters (any craft docking/departing the station, or small impacts from space debris, will change the station's balance and momentum, knocking it out of the "perfect centre" it should be sitting at), and this could provide some of the required fuel. Or you could use some of the oxygen to add to the air mix, and the hydrogen in fuel cells.
Only problem with using a liquid as a shield is that when the station is in darkness it'll be frozen, and when it's in light it'll be warm or boiling. Water changes a LOT in volume with heat, so the hull would have to be able to stand that change. And any leak where there is liquid or steam would have to be plugged, otherwise you'd end up with the liquid ejecting into space and propelling the station out of it's nice stable placement.
In the meantime, just make sure the astronauts dose up on their caffiene and they'll be fine. *grin*
Why is this stupid? Here's why:
So what do you have when you break it down: A dynamically complex region of space that will make proximity maneuvers extremely difficult to perform. And if you make one small mistake in those difficult maneuvers, you're basically headed for Pluto. Bottom line: L1 is just about the stupidest place to put a space station that you could pick.
This is obviously a richly researched topic with lots of published papers. Some of them talk about new algorithms for tackling the complex dynamics you're talking about. And of course there's always Moore's Law; the computers used for Apollo missions were about as powerful as (or maybe much less than?) Palm Pilots.
It's probably quite feasible to give the L1 station a radio link to an orbital mechanics cluster on the ground, which can be as big as is needed, and could run equations of motion for a couple dozen nearby orbits in faster-than-real-time.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?