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Spacecraft, Heal Thyself
carpdeus writes "The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don't glue ourselves together when we nick ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibers in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft's skin with hollow fibers containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility."
Okay... so you have a spaceship that not only meets requirements of getting folks safely into space, but has to carry enough "glue" to repair itself. Mind you, it would probably need much more glue than it would ever need, because it would have to be stored relatively uniformly around the exterior of the ship.
Would the excess weight requirement make this not practical?
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How about making use of decentralized computing systems? I'm aware that not all instruments could be "backed-up" with this method, but by distributing a cluster of computers around the vehicle that could assume new functions on-the-fly, you could theoretically absorb a great deal of damage.
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This again raises the concept of Gaia. Isn't the Earth itself just a big living spaceship? If we want to travel beyond our solar system, we ought to build something like Earth, only smaller.
This idea has been well-represented in sci-fi for decades.
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The key word in the article is "minor". This would work for small abrasions, but would it really be useful? Think of all the accidents in space we have had so far. None of them would have been prevented by this technology.
We haven't done a lot of long duration spaceflight yet. As the larger-than-expected particles collected by the Stardust mission show, cumulative minor damage could be a major issue for flights lasting years, so I'd say yes, it will be useful.
Oh no... it's the future.
Self-sealing aircraft fuel tanks date back to WWII. This is a comparable level of self-repair: a material that expands to fill and seal gaps.
not some small-size cosmic garbage. Mir flew for more then decade at once, under protection of magnitosphere, but not atmosphere. Did it have any problems with "small damage"? Not really (collision with supply ship is a big damage). Do interplanetary probes suffer from micrometiorites? If memory serves me well, they suffer from human mistakes and radiation/cosmic rays...
Perhaps this is the first step towards bioships, à la species 8472? As well as the ability to heal themselves, I've often thought that deep space vehicles should be able to actively find fuel and even to reproduce. This is largely based on the notion of interstellar unmanned probes, which have to be intelligent enough to make decisions on their own. The best way to do this may be to make use of the amazing systems which Evolution (or the Creator) have provided us with, and have biological elements in our probes. Of course there are serious ethical questions we must ask ourselves before beginning such an endeavour, but this is something to take seriously.
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Or more to the point, how does the current stuff work? What is the trigger for it turning from the liquid form into a solid?
I can make two guesses, either it hardens in the presence of oxygen (or something else in the air), which won't work in space, or it remains liquid under pressure and hardens once the pressure eases (eg it has sprung a leak). The pressure thing would result in the whole lot hardening once a hole occured, which still wouldn't work.
hmmmm....