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Orbital Resort to Launch by 2010
Neil Halelamien writes "Popular Science has a cover feature on self-made billionaire and space enthusiast Robert Bigelow (who's been mentioned before on Slashdot). The article has new info on Bigelow's plans to launch a 'CSS Skywalker' orbital resort by 2010 and sell space habitats to others, such as scientists, manufacturers, Hollywood producers, and countries. The habitats will be made of inflatable modules with multilayered kevlar-like walls. A prototype habitat will be launching on a SpaceX Falcon V next year. To help ensure cost-effective access to the station, Bigelow is also running the $50 million America's Space Prize. In the long run, he plans to use the modules as the basis for space yachts and moon cruisers."
I can't wait for the day I get a chance to get to space. Hopefully in my lifetime it will be affordable... and by affordable, I mean like SouthWest Airline's $79 one way to Vegas from Chicago.
Space amazes me, and good luck to Robert Bigelo.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
It's like no cheese I've ever tasted, lad.
So is this like those Moon Walk things you see at birthday parties and fairs?
Fallout 3 will suck.
Even if some of his plans are a bit crazy, he at least has the guts to try to innovate!
And since this is a private enterprise, it should come out much cheaper then anything NASA can dream of(probablly not as safe though, but NASA's stuff is very safe so its kinda hard to compete with them on that front.)
I'll believe it when I see it....
Not to say it cant be done.. but 2010 ? Gotta love the marketing departments.. oh wait, no.. they put impossible demands on us...
can't hardly wait to have my GM chickens grown all globular in zero G. Think of how tender they'll be with no gravity to stress the muscles! delicious.
permaveal 3000
chicken a 'la 'blimp.
Space Gigolo........
Robert Bigelow gained his fortune from owning Budget Suites of America - a discount motel chain.
Only in America could someone go from renting rooms at 49 dollars a night to building a Space Resort.
Pretty Cool.
We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon,
For they ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.
Am I the only one who would hesitate to be the first resident of an inflatable Vectran habitat in space? I'll wait 'till V2.0, thanks.
Does the idea of inflatable modules make anyone else nervous ?
I dunno about you, but I'd really like the walls around me that contain my breathing air and keep me warm and from exploding into the void of space made of something nice and hard... like reinforced steel. Maby it's some sort of expandable material over a hard superstructure, but then there are some other issues:
The article mentions:
"lightweight but extremely strong and long-lived inflatable "soft goods" to form modules made of proprietary advanced aerospace materials"
Maby i'm just a traditionalist holding back the frontier, but man, that sounds like a bubble just waiting to be punctured by one of those little paint chips zipping around the earth at a million miles an hour (from old missions, etc). Support structure or no, if you puncture that balloon it vents, and I'm inside, and i will NOT be a happy camper.
Also, I'm wondering what kind of radiation protection these things provide. These materials sound "thin and lightweight" which is what they want for good launch weight, but thin often means poor radiation blocking ability.
My opinion ? Keep the crew in something nice and solid.. keep supplies in these inflato-things, and make sure they can be quickly locked down from the rest of the ship/station/whatever.
Playing Darts is Strictly Forbidden!
My grandmother, who is about 80 or so, will have seen it all I figure by the time she takes an infitie space yacht cruise. I mean when she was born, her idea of high tech was the radio. She probably heard about the mysteries of radar and soon saw TV and was definitly blown away. Cars became more and more "modern" and soon computers came out and even people, gasp!, in space! Not to mention the countless things I haven't mentioned, like the Internet, and now she has a chance to take a space cruise before she dies. That is considering this happens.
There is no way if she had to write a paper back in her school days, about the future, that if she mentioned this, se would be told she has such a creative mind but not realistic.
Obviously I am not the first person to say we;ve come a long ways in X years (and in some ways we haven't moved!), but this is insane.
It makes the future more exciting for those of us younger because we cannot even imagine how quickly we are going to see new technology become realities.
At this rate I say why stop at the moon? I'm saving my cash for a trip to Mars!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
What about gravity? Granted, I just had a quick glance over the article, but I don't see any mention of gravity. Zero Gravity might be fun for several hours, a day, maybe. But I wouldn't want to spend a vacation completly without gravity. With the space-yacht ideas, it looks almost like a cruise in space. But that pesky no-gravity thing is really gonna come up and bite em.
You know, the big problem with all these prizes in the past was that one heck of a lot of people got themselves killed attempting to win them. Culturally it wasn't such a big deal back then, in fact it was considered noble, courageous and daring.
But society has changed. Our values have changed. I can just imagine the great cry WHEN (not if) some of these spacecraft start failing, and people start dying. That's what happens when you rush to compete for a prize that other competitors also want - shortcuts get taken, like they did historically, and people get killed.
Now, way back when, it wasn't such a big deal if a plane dropped into the atlantic, or crashed on some farm somewhere. The density of our population has increased a bit since then and although our planet is still primarily ocean, there's a greater chance of having the remains of some failed launch or deorbit falling on a populated area than before. Or if a space station design fails to meet some contingency or other, causing all inhabitants to perish. Ooops we forgot about that...
Are we ready for this? Is it a risk that we are each willing to take in a personal sense - in order to fully open up travel to space? Or is everyone going to whine at the first accident, causing all this pioneering to get legislated and regulated to oblivion?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'd be impressed if he was successful, but he doesn't need to succeed. He just needs to get closer than anyone else ever has. The first person who can demonstrate the possibility of commercial gains in space will be doing us all an enormous favor.
I've always felt that the non-exploitation pact--that international agreement that says it's a Bad Thing to stripmine on Mars--was a really bad idea. Taking the possibility of commercial gain out of space travel is an excellent way to ensure that all space travel is done by governments and universities. I don't trust governments to do the job efficiently, and I doubt many universities could pull it off without strings-attached grants and funding.
The best way to ensure, over the long run, maximized efficiency and high-level accountability is to leave the job to private enterprise. Companies competing for a profit will find ways to do things cheaper, faster and safer. The trade-off is that there are more likely to be some really bad ideas getting launched, and in space, no one can hear you scream... but that's another detail. Private enterprise might be more willing to take the risks that a post-Challenger United States (for example) is not.
But private enterprise won't even bother if there's not a bottom line. So I say, encourage the strip-mining of Mars (hell, better Mars than one's hometown, don't you think?). Encourage orbiting vacation spots for the wealthy. Encourage claim-staking and competition.
Once we're already up there and comfortable, then we can let the galactic treehuggers cry foul. But let's get up there first.
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
read the damn article. the skin is made of 18" thick woven materials like kevlar. micrometerorites will not penetrate it. and don't say "wouldn't a nice piece of metal work etc". look at bullet proof vests. are they made of slabs of steel?
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
In many respects, NASA already laid a lot of the ground work for his idea.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
MicroMeteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) shield - "Composed of five layers of graphite-fiber composites separated by foam spacers, the MMOD is the outermost section of Nautilus's hull. Schneider's crew's original TransHab design had more stopping power than did aluminum three inches thick. Ground-testing of Bigelow's MMOD has shown that it can stop impacts by 5/8-inch-diameter aluminum pellets fired at it at 6.4 kilometers a second, several times as fast as a rifle bullet. No rigid spacecraft design can match this performance, and it's one of the reasons Nautilus has an expected life span of at least 15 years."
I mean, a formative childhood of Buck Rogers / Star Trek / Battlestar Galactica aside, what's so great about space? The real thing is not like that.
It has an enormous impact on the body from the G force, gamma rays, muscle atrophy, and long term consequences. (Doesn't NASA advise astronauts to have children before going into space, due to the impact on reproductive DNA?)
And when you're up there, aren't you just going to see what going to an IMAX theatre could show you, just in rather less comfort?
I don't know, maybe I'm being unadventurous. Pioneering is cool and I wholeheartedly support the professionals going up there, but "space tourism," I'm just not sure I get it.
I'm quite happy for the Neils and Buzzes of our time to do it for me.
I am a mechanical engineering student at Texas A&M and have had Bill Schnieder (one of the former NASA engineers mentioned) as a professor. He hold a patent on inflatable space habitats, and was deeply involved in TransHab. I did a lot of work with inflatable space habitats while I was Dr. Scnieder's student for a year long senior design class. This is some amazing technology.
An inflatable structure makes complete sense. For starters, it works around one of the major design constraints imposed by rocket launch, payload diameter. This enables you to create much higher working volumes inside your spacecraft. For a space hotel this is definitely a Good Thing.
IIRC, Micrometeorite protection is better than on the current ISS modules. It works in a fundamentally different way. Several layers of a tough fiber are separated by expanding foam. When a projectile hits a layer of fibers, the fibers are so strong and hard that even though they break, they also break the projectile into smaller pieces. This dissipates a lot of energy. These pieces then move apart from each other and continue through the foam layer, hitting the next layer of fibers, but this time its several smaller, lower energy pieces each hitting a different part of the fabric, and being broken up again. This is ingenious, you essentially "divide and conquer" the incoming impact energy until your "bulletproof" fiber stop the projectile fragments completely.
The vessel cannot (ok, should not) pop like a balloon. The bladder layer is made up of a very tough polymer that is not very notch sensitive. A hole does not mean a critical failure is immanent. The plastic will probably yield slightly around the hole, but should not tear catastrophically. This leaves a hole about the size of the debris, and a slow leak that can be repaired. The bladder is supported by a network of high strength straps that actually carry the load. Think about putting a huge garbage bag of water in a hammock and then filling it with water. Normally, the bag might break under the weight of the water, but the netting of the hammock is carrying the structural load, while the bag is primarily containing the fluid. Poke it with a pin and you would get a leak. Same principle with the inflatable space habitat.
As far as radiation goes, semicrystaline polyethylene is actually pretty good at stopping the lower energy stuff. It would be comparable to what was on the lunar lander, and what is available for spacesuits. Add water, like they seem to suggest, and it can only get better. I would still probably want to hide from a solar storm, though.
Ok.
How's this then: put up your habitat, then give it about 1/6th G equivalent spin.
Many, many people have thought it likely that reduced gravity will extend the human lifetime signifigantly, like maybe even a 50% increase.
Reduced gravity would also make some of the problems the elderly face less of a bother; getting around would be MUCH easier.
If someone puts something like this up, I can easily see the upper-class elderly (who are capable of making the trip) putting there $$$ into a trust to pay for their living in orbit.
And, when their money runs out, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to send them back to 1 G, so you can just shove 'em out the airlock.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Good chance to slip in a plug for heavy lift rockets powered by Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines. Here is a really interesting design for a fully reusable, non-polluting nuclear rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor, which could lift 1000 tons of cargo into Earth orbit (for comparison, the Space Shuttle can carry 30 tons) and return to a soft landing. It's a fully reusable spaceship that could haul up entire resort hotels (not just "inflatable modules") in a single trip.
Another great use for GCNR rockets would be interplanetary trips such as a Mars mission. Their cargo capacity would allow for a tremendous amount of supplies and equipment. Transit time would be half that of a conventional ship, reducing the effects of prolonged zero-gee and cosmic radiation exposure, and a host of other problems. The ability to make a powered landing on Mars would eliminate the need for an aerobraking system, Apollo-style lander/return combination or other engineering. The crew could fly there, land, take off and return home in a single vehicle, just like in all those old black and white space movies.
I don't understand why people want to go to space?
For the same reasons Europeans colonized the Americas:
1. Economic. Asteroids contain tons of minerals. The Moon's surface contains large quantities of He3 (although an efficient method of mining it as yet to be invented), and its low (relative to Earth) gravity well and lack of atmosphere makes it easier to get things into space. (The first Space Elevator may be built from the Moon to (actually, through) the Earth-Moon Lagrange point (L1, I think) out of material mined from asteroids.
2. Political. It used to be that one could get away from government interference by moving to a place on the Earth where there was no government. There is no place on Earth where that is the case any more. Once space travel becomes more commonplace, humans will be able to move to the asteroid belt, then to the Kipur Belt, to avoid governmental interference, or to set up their own governments without interference from more established governments. (My guess is that planets and moons will be brought under the control of large governments, and will thus be unsuited for colonization by freedom-loving peoples.)
and, probably most important, from a human spirit point of view,
3. Because it's there.
Last year Aviation Week & Space Technology had a detailed article on Bigelow Aerospace. I don't believe I've ever heard somebody refer to them as a pulp rag by any means.
1: Bush is pushing for expanded funding for NASA, even as he cuts all other domestic spending.
2: Bush is claiming there is a Social Security crises because we'll soon have too many old people collecting and not enough young people paying.
BUSH WANTS TO JETTISON ALL OUR OLD PEOPLE INTO SPACE!