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More on Inflatable Space Hotels
StJefferson writes "It's anything but a traditional Budget Suites room, with a price tag projected to be somewhere in the range of US$50,000-100,000 per night. But Bob Bigelow's inflatable space habs will get their first trial next November, and are expected to go into production in 2008. There's even speculation that Bigelow is in talks with Burt Rutan regarding the small problem of getting customers to the door of his high-flying outposts. And the best part? Bigelow's doing this all on his own, as a private entrepreneurial venture. He's only answerable to his wife regarding the wisdom of this investment, and 'so far, she's on board.' Remind you Heinlein fans of anyone?" We've mentioned this guy before.
The first test flight of Bigelow Aerospace will use the cheap Falcon V launcher that is currently developed by Elon Musk, the former owner of paypal. So there is a good cooperation between the different private companies in the alt.space community.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
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There are plenty of people developing new space transports. Most notably spacex. But there are many more such as the mysterious Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos and of course Burt Rutans followup to the SpaceShipOne.
And even if these efforts all fail, there are plenty of relatively cheap launchers available today, most notably the russian proton and the zenit sea launch.
And we most definitely do not need a new shuttle. We need cheap access to space, and the shuttle was a total failure in this regard.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Its the same kind of material that is used in bulletproof vests. But it is multilayered and much thicker. So of course it is micro-meteorite proof.
Tests with the NASA transhab design have shown that multi-layered inflatables are more resistant to space debris than aluminium hulls. That should come as no surprise since the materials involved have much more (mass specific) tensile strength than aluminium.
Have you ever seen a flak vest made from aluminium?
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Another origin of things like the $500 hammer, is almost always lineitem allocation of overhead.
Suppose NASA contracts to Missile And Rocket Systems to provide some enormous system, including among other things: A rocket engine, and a hammer. MARS subcontracts out the rocket engine and a hammer to Engines and Hammers, Inc. E&H bills MARS $1,000,005 for one rocket engine ($1,000,000) and one hammer ($5).
MARS adds their 10% overhead for managing the E&H contract, and bills NASA at $1,100,006. Now, because of a policy called Line-item allocation, the overhead has to be prorated, not over the COST of the contract lineitems, but the COUNT ... So, the $100,001 in overhead gets divided in two ... the rocket engine cost NASA $1,050,000 .. and the hammer a staggering $50,006!
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Me, for one. So did my astronautical design professor. Our design project was to design a system to launch into space for no more than $5,000 / lb (current cost ~$10,000 / lb).
We were working on systems for satellite payloads, not people, but 5 out of the 6 teams wrote viable proposals that met the (realistic) criteria of the RFP, largely by cutting a ton of energy expenditure by starting by flying in the same direction the Earth orbits to an altitude where the air is considerably thinner, and firing the big rockets from there.
The reason we need a new concept is because we keep sending things straight up from the ground, which has massive energy costs without any lift. It works much better to launch from a higher altitude - you still have to overcome gravity, but when you make the send-off to space you don't have to pack as much fuel (read: expensive) because you're already at a speed contributing to orbit. Cutting fuel cuts cost so much not because you don't have to pay for the fuel as much as you don't have to pay to launch the extra fuel with more fuel, which you need more fuel for, etc, and by the time you're ready to launch you've got a relatively small transport vehicle strapped onto an obese big fuel container.
Remember everyone who talked about putting a staging area for deep space missions (e.g. Mars) on the moon? Same idea here.
It's not easy to make work in the real world, plenty of people working on it for a while have already been listed. But it will be done, and it will make our brute force concept look like trying to move a refrigerator without a dolly.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
Except that neither this hotel nor the ISS are in geo sync, they are in low earth orbit.
It is HARD to read geosync - that is why you did not see the shuttle going up to fix or retrieve broken communications sats, as the delta-V needed far exceeds the shuttle's ability.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yes, Spaceship One is not a Spaceship, it's a Spaceplane, true. NASA confirms this in their article on their own space plane, which bested spaceship one's mark forty years ago for roughly the same amount of money (adjusted for inflation) but without all the near-death control problems.
But you're missing the point. Yes, they still need orders of magnitude more power to reach orbit, and YES, they haven't solved any of the major problems relating to actual spaceflight. And yes, all they have to do to solve their engineering problems is call NASA, because it's all been done before.
But what you're missing is, everyone has to start somewhere. And this is capitalism's first, impressive start.
Get a grip!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
TransHab was killed because of politics, pure and simple. Congress was so irate at the cost overruns of the ISS that they stupidly forbade NASA from doing any further research or development on inflatable structures. The Houston Press did a story on this a few years ago.
Silly comparison.
Vacuum flasks are made of glass because they need to be rigid; the air outside is trying to get in, the flask is in compression. Space balloons are made of fabric because the air inside is trying to get out, the balloon is in tension.
If the space balloon is normal sea level air pressure inside, we have inflated it to a whopping 15 psi. My bike tires can take 60 psi, a 2l coke bottle can take about 200 psi.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
That would be Trans-continental ...
According to NASA studies on centrifugation of people, and IIRC, humans can't tell whether they're subjected to centrifugal acceleration or gravity when the radius of rotation exceeds roughly 60 feet.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
High velocity sniper rifles have muzzle velocities of about 1000m/s. Worst-case space debris has velocities of 8000m/s, so it has 64 times as much energy per mass.
But it is not as bad as it sounds. First of all space debris is not designed to penetrate armor. Usually it is quite small stuff.
And when a piece of space debris hits the outer shell of your space station it instantly vaporizes. So the inner shells of your space station just have to cope with vapor.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
It's a request from your government to other governments to please treat you nicely because you're their citizen or subject, and in particular it's a request to let you travel through their country. It usually includes a committement to accept you back if the other government wants to kick you out. Many countries have rules about checking passports when you get on international airplanes or boats because the airline/boatline doesn't want to have to take you back if you're refused entry.
So if Free Enterprise Space Stations Inc. wants to be rude to visitors who've paid a very large sum of money for a ride and insist that they have their papers in order before they take the trip, well, they can do that, and government passports might be useful. It's more likely that you'd need a working Visa card than a visa, however - the papers-in-order bit is more likely to apply to government-run (i.e. military-run) space stations.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks