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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."
radiation sheilding on the space station isn't so good.
but my tan is great!
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?
How much for a trip to this baby?
And where can I pre-order a ticket?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
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 And the previous scientific leader of NASA has been replaced by an accountant (cut and slash).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.
"If you sent two people to Mars, one of them would die," says Marco Durante of the Federico II University in Naples
I think the key to preventing this is to pack enough food that the astronauts are not forced to resort to cannabalism.
The explorer part of me is saying, "Yay! It's about time we started building more structures in space. The Lagrange point would make a good neutral spot halfway to the moon." But then the realist in me says, "Given that NASA has proven that it can't stick to a budget, how much is this overrun going to cost?" And the article agrees with me.
Government is not the answer to promoting outer space as a new resource -- market forces have shown to be the driving force in all new ventures. We need competition in getting things into orbit, tourism to build hotels, industry to build fab plants, mining on the moon...
From a physics standpoint, getting men and material to and from the Lagrangian points would be vastly cheaper than getting them to and from the moon. Until we could utilize the raw materials of the moon to produce things, it isn't going to be cost-effective to have a moon presence.
the reason to put it at 5/6 of the way to the moon (or so) is that that is the location of a LaGrange point, a point in outer space where the gravity between the earth and the moon cancel each other out perfectly, so a space station at a LaGrange point (in this case L1) wouldn't have to use thrusters to maintain a stable orbit and would never leave it's stable orbit around the earth. if you put it on the moon, you'd have to overcome lunar gravity to leave, costing both fuel and money.
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.
Someone file a patent on flying to the moon! I can see NASA paying some major royalties.
Fault loves the past, worry loves the future, but content enjoys the present.
Why not just build on the moon?
Apples and oranges. Having a station in zero gravity is really useful for launching probes and ships from, and as a gateway between the Earth and the rest of the solar system. Having a moonbase gives you mining capabilities and so forth.
They're both very important aspects of stepping into space, for different reasons.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Lead is really heavy... Maybe? Do you know how many N*Sync members you could get in space instead of a couple of sheets of lead?
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that lead is heavy, and heavy things cost more to get into space?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
After the Sun and Moon. Its been fascinating to watch it get brighter as they add more cylinders and panels every year.
The station is visible in the evenings about one week a month and mornings one week a month, so the orbit can wobble over the US, Russia, Europe, and Japan. Sky & Telescope (set zip code, click on almanac) shows pass times & locations, as do other websites.
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.
Why not just build on the moon? Why stop at 5/6 the way to the moon?
Because the whole point of staging at L1 is that it allows low-energy transfers to other points in the solar system. Launching a trip to Mars, for example, from L1 would require much less energy than from either the surface of the Earth, or low Earth orbit, or the surface of the moon.
Of course, this ignores the biggest problem with the L1 point: it's unstable. A body placed at L1 will tend to either fall inward toward the Earth or outward toward the moon at the slightest push. Any space station at L1 will have to correct its position regularly, probably using simple chemical rockets. These rockets will have to be refueled periodically and so on, making for a nontrivial amount of effort to keep an L1 space station in position.
The L4 and L5 points, on the other hand, are gravitationally stable. If a body at L4 or L5 starts to drift out of position-- due to a collision or outgassing or whatever-- the Earth-moon system will tend to pull it back to the point of stability again. But since L4 and L5 are farther from Earth than L1 is, it takes more time and energy to get there from LEO.
I write in my journal
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.
a space station at a LaGrange point (in this case L1) wouldn't have to use thrusters to maintain a stable orbit and would never leave it's stable orbit around the earth
That's not true. L1, L2, and L3 are all gravitationally unstable points. A space station at L1, if nudged out of position even slightly, will tend to spiral inward toward Earth or outward toward the moon. The L4 and L5 points are the only stable Lagrangian points in a two-body system.
I write in my journal
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.
To the tune of "Home on the Range"
Home on Lagrange
Oh, give me a locus
Where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved
Where the microwaves play
Down at 3 degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Useful in what sense? There's nothing on the moon that we need or want, at least not with current technologies at hand. If you put some kind of space station in a gravitationally unstable point, like L1, then you can use it to launch trips to points elsewhere very inexpensively. (Assuming the cost of maintaining the orbit of the L1 station turns out to be manageable.) Once you're at L1, you've basically spent all the energy you need to spend to get out of the Earth-moon system. Refueling or restaging at L1 for longer trips to Mars and elsewhere makes a lot of sense.
Science fiction from the late 1900's aside, moon bases just don't make that much sense right now.
I write in my journal
Yes, it is true that the International Space Station has taken a horrendous amount of money that could've been spent on real science. I admit that I'd like to see more money spent on real science missions like probes to Pluto or Europa or on more Space-based telescopes, but unfortunately as these devices increase in size (satellites, space telescopes, probes, etc.) it becomes infeasible to launch them in a confined shuttle (I believe Chandra X-ray telescope reached the volume limits on what could be launched in one piece).
That said, we need to be building an infrastructure for launching larger and more complex devices into space. This requires places where things can be assembled once in orbit, places such as the ISS or another station at a Lagrangian point. In and of themselves, these stations aren't spectacular, they don't produce good science and they are very expensive, but they need to be created to assist other scientific endeavors as our technology continues to develop. As an example, routers, fiber, and transcontinental backbones are expensive and to the layman, they produce no real science or pretty pictures, but they are necessary as an infrastructure over which people can do some really cool things.
Anyway, I think that even if this doesn't get passed by congress or the things run behind schedule, it is good that we are at least PLANNING to do some really cool stuff like this.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
The New Scientist is to Nature what the National Enquirer is to the New York Times. But, hey, lots of people read the National Enquirer for fun as well. Only that when people start taking it seriously that people get hurt.
This!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I don't get your last paragraph... Why isn't everything in Earth orbit being gradually drawn towards L4 and L5? Why isn't there some large body captured there already?
That's all well and good, but you have to get TO L1 FROM the Earth or low Earth Orbit, or the Moon before you can enjoy the benefits of a low energy launch.
Wouldn't getting your launch ship there in the first place, nullify any benefits of relaunching from there?
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Sure, it would be fun to go into space in person. But that's entertainment and tourism, and the best way to finance that is through private funding. It's the science, the big questions, that require government funding, and there we should concentrate on what gives the biggest payoff--and that is unmanned space flight with robotic probes.
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.
now that you have publicised the radiation risk, there is no way that Nsync singer will go into space ... and there dies our last chance of getting him sterilised and stopping him from having offspring ...
I've long felt that human progress into space has been on some form of hold since the 1960s. JFK announced that we would goto the moon not many years before we actually did. Then we went back a couple of times. Then not much.
The major achievement of the late 70s was the Space Shuttle. The major achievement of the turn of the century will be the ISS. Obviously these are significant achievements but why we haven't been back to the moon in 40 years is baffling.
I'm very happy to see a station being considered that won't just be in orbit. I hope it is a sign of things to come. I'd really like to see a moon base in my lifetime. I don't know much about space but I'd expect it must be easier to build a big station if you build it on something.
We need to be up there. In large numbers. We need private industry up there. NASA should be focussing on putting human living quarters in space and providing transportation up there. I think there should be some kind of space oriented general contracting agency focussing on getting as many people up there for as long as possible. We need scientists, professors, entrepeneurs, the media...all sorts of people to go up and see what we can make of it.
If space really is the new frontier, it should be accesible. I hope this is a step in the right direction.
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.
Fair question, but one with a fairly simple answer. Lets do some numbers...
To within a factor of a few, what matters in radiation shielding is "surface density", i.e. how many grams of material per square centimeter there are in your shield. So you can have a thick shield of light material, or a thin shield of dense material; for the same area they will provide the same shielding effect if they have the same mass.
Say for a moment that you want as much shielding as provided by the Earths atmosphere; that works out to be about 10 tons/square meter. (If you SCUBA dive: remember that the pressure goes up by 1 atmosphere for every 10 meters of depth. A 10x 1x1 meter column of water weighs 10 tons.) Those ten tons/m2 can be in any form you want: a 10 km thick air shield, 10 meters of ice, 2 meters of rock, or a meter of lead.
So, you want to put a couple of guys in a spaceship and send them to Mars? Well, put them in a cramped tube, say 10 meters long and 3 meters in diameter. That gives you about 100 square meters of surface area.... or 1000 tons of shielding.
At current prices it costs about $20,000 to put a kilogram of material into low Earth orbit. The biggest rocket flown to date can put about 100 tons into orbit. With current technology you either hit up Bill Gates for the 20 billion, or you can skimp on the shielding. The space station skimps by a factor of 300 (you get a years ' worth of background radiation in a single day). You could also play games like have most of the spacecraft lightly shielded, but have a lead-lined "storm shelter" for the times when solar flares erupt. This works because much of the radiation comes in bursts. However, it isn't useful for going to places with continuous high levels of radiation, like Jupiter.
That's why we need a new and cheaper space launch system.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I've wondered about this too. I would imagine that the power required could be generated with a combination of solar cells and a decay reactor. Both for redundancy. This would also have the advantage that you could allocate more or less power to the shield depending on whether the station was occupied, or if you needed it for other things, or if there was a solar storm, etc.
The disadvantage is that the radiation would only be redirected toward the poles, so you would still need protection there. Hopefully this would still lower costs. There is also the issue of how strong the field would have to be? Would it affect electronics in the station? Would it take away a lot of usable space with a magnetic iron pole running through the station? Is it even feasable to generate?
Eventually lead could be a solution for future space stations but it would only be practical if it came from a shallower gravity well than the earth.
Mine it on the moon and ship it up with a rail gun. For better radiation shielding find an asteroid that can be manouvered into position and hollow it out by mining it. It's former interior can be used as reaction mass to get it into position in the first place, and can be used as raw material for other construction and manufacturing projects.
Unfortunately, we cannot do anything of the sort yet. We need to make do with less adequate space stations untill the infrastructure is available to build really livable homes in space.
Of course, if you still really insist on using lead as radition shielding in the earlier stages of space exploitation then their is possibly a practical way to do it. First send up the initial inflatable habitat. Preferrably it would be sausage shaped or better yet several sausages linked into a doughnut that could be spun to gererate artificial gravity. With every subsequent mission to the station a certain amount of launch mass would be allocated to a roll of lead foil. This would be unwound over the sausges just like a gauze bandage is unwound over a wounded arm. One other thing to consider, lead has a fairly low melting point and the temperature fluctuations in space can be fairly extream. Another material or a roll of various other materials layered would probably be more effective and provide more protection from other hazards such as particles of rock and junk travelling at high velocity.
Now, to change the subject.
I do not believe that NASA as a US Gov't funded organization will ever be capable of going where humans NEED to go in space. There needs to be a new organization that receives worldwide funding from governments, industries, people in general, and even slashdotters. Such a centralized organization with more encompassing funding than NASA and other private space efforts would have a much more likely chance of getting us on the road to the effective usage of space than an underfunded government beauracracy and a few small companies competing for a paltry X Prize or quick revenue from pay TV/phone satelite launches.
Oh, just one more thing.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke(possibly not exactly) "The dinasaurs became extinct because they did not have a space program."
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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.
It's good to see the L1 (and L2!) buttons getting more use.
Now if they could also implement R1 and R2.
L1 is about 5/6 of the way to the moon, along a direct line from the earth to the moon.
L2 is opposite the L1, over the far side of the moon from the earth.
L3 is close to the moon's orbit around the earth, but on the opposite side of the earth from the moon.
L4 and L5 are also in the orbit of the moon around the earth, but one is 60 degrees ahead of the moon in its orbit and the other is 60 degrees behind.
You can find more information at this web site and there is even more detailed information to be found here
Sapere aude!
>>
That's all well and good, but you have to get TO L1 FROM the Earth or low Earth Orbit, or the Moon before you can enjoy the benefits of a low energy launch.
Wouldn't getting your launch ship there in the first place, nullify any benefits of relaunching from there?
Well, if you are putting a ship together in space, like the ISS, then it is worthwhile. You send up pieces that get assembled in the low gravity and then *launch* from the low gravity point. You save energy by not having to break out of LEO with such a large vehicle. Otherwise, the vehicle will have to provide it's own propulsion for the breaking away - a costly proposition.
Think of getting to L1 as storing kinetic energy in the components of the vehicle. After construction, launch can entail causing the craft to drift toward the sun to use the slingshot effect for accelleration. After the craft is accellerated, onboard propulsion can be used to provide the extra impetus to extend the curve of the orbit to the point where the craft will end up at a predetermined solar destination.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Third-body perturbations? Anything too big to capture that comes by them would tend to remove the clutter. The Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun systems aren't anything like, say, Jupiter's. Now there's a junkyard!
Dyolf Knip
If you have a station at L1 you can launch the pieces of the spacecraft up from earth in parts and assemble it there, and it only has to be able to withstand whatever gravity or thrust you expect it to experience during it's mission.
On the other hand, if you build it on earth, it has to be able to survive the many G launch from the surface of the earth up into space, which would require it to be built much heavier and therefore be less efficient once it leaves earth's gravitational field.
Why carry all that extra weight around when you can construct it in orbit instead and dodge the whole issue?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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
My take on the subject is that we don't have any materials heavy/stable enough to reflect high energy radiation.
The problem is that conventional materials of all types misbehave as photon energy substantially exceeds the chemical binding energies. You go from having materials acting like ideal classical conductors or dielectrics interacting with photons that act more or less like classical EM waves [normal reflection and transmission], to having materials that act like a set of quantum energy levels and photons that act like particles [photoelectric effect], to having materials that act like a diffuse sea of particles that scatter photons which also behave like particles [Compton scattering].
As the valence shell binding energies in atoms are at most on the order of a few tens of eV, there is a hard upper limit on the frequency of radiation that conventional optical elements made of normal matter can handle.
The limit's mushy in one respect, in that grazing-incidence devices see an effective frequency that's inversely proportional to the angle of incidence. However, practical devices limit the benefit of this to between a factor of 10 and a factor of 100 (so you can see some x-rays, but gamma rays are still tricky).
Non-conventional optics made of normal matter can still work under some conditions. Because the inter-atomic spacings in crystals are in the same ballpark as high-energy photon wavelengths, you can get diffraction occurring when an x- or gamma-ray beam passes through a crystal (due to scattering off of inner-shell electrons and the nuclei). This is commonly used to identify materials (x-ray diffraction patterns have been used to image atoms in everything up to and including crystals of viruses). Gamma ray telescopes using crystalline blocks to construct diffractive optics have been built.
Lastly, the final and most difficult way to cheat involves using plasma as a mirror. As it's a gas of free ions, it should have near-perfect reflection even at high wavelengths (subject to a few probably-nontrivial conditions). Keeping a cloud of ions confined to an optically flat surface is left as an exercise for the reader.
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.
If the habitation module was built in annular form, it would be possible to have on the outermost layers offices for administration (they get the windows) and keep the scientists/engineers in the middle. Thay way administration gets to absorb the radiation first (a nice radiation burn will add to their tan).
That's not true. L1, L2, and L3 are all gravitationally unstable points. A space station at L1, if nudged out of position even slightly, will tend to spiral inward toward Earth or outward toward the moon. The L4 and L5 points are the only stable Lagrangian points in a two-body system.
Even then the actual L4 and L5 points are not entirely stable in the real solar system, because the solar system has a lot more that two bodies and nothing is a point mass. This also means thet the "points" are actually regions. Which is why Jupiter can capture many asteroids in it's L4 and L5 points with Sol.
If the SOHO satellite and the proposed space station are both at L1, how close will they be? Visible distance?
SOHO is at Earth/Sol L1, this station would go at Luna/Earth L1. Different points. The size of the "points" is a function of the mass and mass distribution of the larger 2 objects. In the case of the proposed location these objects are Earth and Luna.
The moon was original part of Earth that was torn off. It recollapsed into a sphere (as did Earth) because of it's own gravity. The reason it DOESN'T change it's visible side is because of tidal locking. It's not a perfect sphere so one side was pulled on more than the other, which eventually causes the rotational and revolutional periods to become equal (Pluto and Charon are so simliar in size that both have become tidaly locked with each other, and always show the same "face" to each other). Our Moon has become locked with Earth, but Earth, because of it's larger mass, has not become locked with the moon, but is in the process of doing so. This is what is causing the moon to drift farther out (though the orbit is completely stable. if Earth finally became tidally locked than the moon would simply stop drifting out. the Sun will die before this happens though). Earth's rotational speed is also slowing down because of this tidal locking. It's estimated that the planet had an original rotational speed of about 15 hours. If it became completely tidally locked, the rotational period (and the length of a day/night cycle) would be 28 current days.
So, I'm wondering if the LaGrange (sorry bout the spelling folks) points are completely stable
In a perfect two body system. The lagranian point is stable. In our solar system, not even a normal orbbit is stable. So any station at L1 would need to correct it's possition once in a while. But this is already true for ISS. No problem.
Cheers
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
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?
GiliadGreene has made some good points already about SOHO being in a halo orbit around the L1, not at the actual L1 "point".
Orbit corrections are performed every 17 weeks (four months, not one).
The halo orbit is much saner than trying to stay at the L1 point, and it attenuates solar interference. Ironically, the COMSAT link that DSN uses to get data from Madrid to California gets more solar interference than the spacecraft to ground link.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson