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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)
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\ /
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.