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Bigelow Aerospace Fast-Tracks Manned Spacecraft
Raver32 writes "Following the successful launch and deployment of two inflatable space modules, on Monday the owner and founder of Bigelow Aerospace announced plans to move ahead with the launch of its first human habitable spacecraft, the Sundancer.
The decision to fast-track Sundancer was made in part due to rising launch costs as well as the ability to test some systems on the ground, company CEO Robert Bigelow said in a press statement.
'As anyone associated with the aerospace industry is aware, global launch costs have been rising rapidly over the course of the past few years,' Bigelow is quoted as saying. 'These price hikes have been most acute in Russia due to a number of factors including inflation, previous artificially low launch costs and the falling value of the US dollar.'"
TFA said 180 meters**2 of livable space. I have no intuitive feel for that, so I did some quick conversion: that's about three 18-wheeler trailers.
Inflatable, eh? Sounds, er, dangerous. No sharp objects, I hope... And there's a joke here somewhere.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm looking forward to the rushed development of their man-rated vehicle. This is for space, after all! What could possibly go wrong?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It seems to me that there has to be some sort of quantum leap in design, manufacture, and fuel in order to make space travel economically possible for even the most wealthy human beings. I mean, why would I want a flight from NY to LA to take 20 minutes when it's going to cost me $30,000+? (estimated) I don't care how much money you make in a year. Anyone would be insane to waste that kind of money.
I, for one, welcome our space-borne overlords... at affordable prices...
The game.
With the threat of mirco-meteorites, radiation, paint chips, styrofoam, old satelites, and other space refuse; this technology should be scraped! I'm sorry really. I know materials are hard to get into space but protection is paramount for the Astronauts. Perhaps investing in deflector shields, structural integrity fields, defensive lasers, and more powerful thrusters for space craft that can traverse back and forth between earth an the station quicker would be wiser. I know it's a tall order but sitting at a terminal in a balloon in space with potential darts flying around is a numbers game that NO ONE should participate in no matter how good the money is. This technology is better suited for underwater research instead?
Maybe we can put RMS into orbit wearing a silver suit, and use him to bounce signals off of?
theres prolly somethin wrong with the 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 modulator on the hd wing sensor;)
This is good! I hope they have a great success, as I can see them being used like demountables are used on constructions sites.. Once there are enough of these we can start building a manufacturing base in space
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I can see it now, "Deuce Bigelow: Extraterrestrial Gigolo".
*shudder*
-Peter
I'm sure Rob Bigelow is a great guy, that said, if my last name was "Bigelow," I'd probably name my company after a planet, a big cat, or something catchy that you only find in a thesaurus.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I'm pretty excited about this news, as it seems like Bigelow might have his human-rated space station up and running as early as 2009. Here's the text of the official announcement:
h p#update
http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/multiverse/news.p
Also, here's a pretty good article from Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log.
Hopefully SpaceX will have some successful launches soon, in order to provide Bigelow with a drastically more cost-effective way to launch modules and people. It'd be beautiful to see a SpaceX Dragon crew capsule taking people up to Bigelow's Sundancer habitat.
narwhal
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Bigelow Aerospace. The tea that launched a thousand spaceships?
Yeah, a lightweight inflatable tube of air is great for underwater research. Sinks like a rock, it does.
Except, of course, that this material is more resistant to the dangerous objects you just mentioned than the solid aluminium and kevlar of the ISS. Its flexibility allows it to absorb much more of the energy from an impact than a rigid structure.
What is bizarre is that slashdot does not have a comment-editing feature.
Skipping a step or two in the development of a space craft (or habitat) is not without precedent. After the Apollo 1 disaster, NASA stepped back for a year from its already horrific schedule to rethink safety. By the time they were ready to restart they were so far behind schedule that, had they stuck to the original plan, they would never have made it "before this decade is out" (John F. Kennedy).
Then some particularly enlightened (and ballsy) director made a brilliant decision. Instead of testing first the booster, then the booster plus the second stage, then the booster and the second stage plus the third stage, and then everything with the spacecraft "stack" and finally all of this with the command module having an (unmanned) re-entry at escape velocity speeds (the third stage would be used to propel the space craft DOWN) he had the following idea. (Actually I'm sure the idea was floating around, HE had the power to make it happen).
Since everything is ready (on the ground at least) why not test everything at once?
It worked. The unmanned Apollo 5(?) not to be confused with the launcher Saturn 5 (or in Roman numerals V) worked flawlessly and was a huge success. With it, NASA made up all of its lost time and then some and was able to land man on the moon in the summer of 1969.
The things the United States (and the world) is capable of, given the will and dedication of its people, is simply astounding. Gives me hope at the same time I despair as how it has been squandered by the present administration.
Perhaps you should look at the "balloons" you're riding on (cars and motorcycles at least). Talk about an application where "the rubber meets the road"; it shows how you can engineer (and on a vast industrial scale) almost anything, even safety critical equipment. Also look at the skirts of military class hovercraft. In addition to taking the abuse of pounding surf and various shrubs and other land obstacles they might blow over, they have to take direct (light) enemy fire as well as the occasional land mine.
If BG (or ellis, or McNealy, ....) could fly from NY to LA in 20 minutes, they (or their company) would gladly pay 50K+ for that. Their time really is worth that. Somebody once showed that BG would actaully lose money to bend over and pick up a 100 bill from the sidewalk (and that was in early 90's). Why would they pay this? Because travel is expensive in terms of time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
his aunt owns the tea and funded his initial start into hotels. If not for that, then he would not be here. But he is, so this is good.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have been watching fro any info about the next launch. My guess is that if the next couple of launches are successful, then we will see them servicing the ISS AND bigelow.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Informative!
The headline is a bit misleading - I've heard several interviews with Bigelow on Coast to Coast AM and AFAIK this habitat is not going to be "Manned", rather "Manned-capable". They are not sending up any people, not have any plans (or even launch vehicle) to do so. That said, I fully support what they're doing! We'll have the egg, now all we need is the creamy yolk stuff (i.e. people) to go inside. Not sure where the chicken fits in...
Where is the science in it ? Its pure commercial development, it has nothing to do with NASA or CERN, apart from the technology heritage. Space is finally becoming a place of conducting other business apart from telecom and remote sensing sats, and you tag it the boring old "science" ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
What about the Cosmonauts and Taikonauts, one wonders...
I suspect that Bigelow will hook this one to the ISS. Perhaps for free. They would have redundant systems via the ISS. All that was needed was to prove that the concept and manufacturing quality worked. Well, genesis is doing just that. The cool part about this, is that it could be up there by end of 2009.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, the thing is, the space race has been mostly about international penis size, rather than any actual benefits. The moon _still_ has no economic or military value, for example, and getting a man there was just an artificial milestone, for example. "Oh yeah, we're so much greater than the Russians because we put a man where neither of us had a reason to," basically.
Yes, there have been some materials and technologies which then trickled down to civillian use, but then the same advances could have been made by just funding more research without the overhead of the manned space race.
Some would have been made anyway because either the private sector (e.g., computers) or the military sector (e.g., ablative tiles) needed them anyway, and there's no difference between developping them for an ICBM and developping them for a manned shuttle. (Unmanned) Satellites would have happened even without the Apollo program, for example.
Some space stuff has been just a monumental waste all around with nearly zero benefits.
The original shuttle concept for example, was more like a car: a small reusable vehicle for the humans and maybe some small satellites, doing up and down trips all the time, and lifting all those small satellites. There were a _lot_ of those little trips needed even so, to recoup the costs.
But then NASA wanted the Air Force's budget, so they had to promise that they can lift those huge spy satellites _and_ be able to put them in a polar orbit. So the shuttle got inflated to the space equivalent of an 18 wheeler, and costs raised through the roof, to the point where it's a huge waste to actually use it for its original purpose. Everyone still puts their small satellites up by normal rockets, which was a job the shuttle was supposed to take over. But it's just not worth using it. It's big, it's unreliable (now it has damaged tiles again, for example), it needs hideous amounts of fuel, and it's grounded most of the time.
It's telling that even Bigelow puts this stuff up there with Russian rockets instead. Yes, I know, prices are lower in the poorer ex-USSR, but the propaganda was that the reusable space shuttle will make liftoff so damn cheap, that the russkies and their rockets will be obsolete overnight. It sure didn't work that way, eh?
And, oh, the Air Force still didn't get its money worth either. They still ended up using their own rockets to put those spy satellites in orbit.
It's one thing that was a waste all around, and kept around only as a national penis size symbol. No better than other historical wastes, like the pyramids. (Contrary to what Civilization said, they don't give you a free granary in every city;) It's just a national "look what a big expensive thing we can build" symbol, nothing more.
So, much as I'm a Star Wars and Star Trek fan too, sometimes it's time to call a waste a waste. Lamenting that we could do more of that instead of doing what actually works down here (you still use oil, don't you?), is a bit weird. It's a bit like saying that we should invest more in building obelisks instead of roads.
Yes, we can do great achievements if we want to, but a lot has been artificial achievements which cost a lot and delivered very little that was actually needed at that time. Similarly you could say that it's depressing that we could build a pyramid as big as Cheops's when we wanted, but the evil current administration isn't building one for Bush. Why would it want to?
And please note the "at that time" in the above paragraph, if someone feels like letting it rip with how important it will be in the future, or how the human race needs to expand before the Sun goes red giant in 5 billion years. If we'll actually need that stuff in the future, we'll do it in the future. Maybe we'll have invented better engines in the meantime, or maybe we'll have better materials, or maybe (as with Bigelow) someone will have imagined an actual economic benefit for doing so, as opposed to being just a pork barrel exercise.
In a nutshell: why do you find it depressing that we don't waste more?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... nobody is fast tracking a man-rated orbital launch and crew vehicle. Nor should they. They don't have a design that can be.
SpaceX has altered their plans, but it's to make improvements to the design. Kistler is tearing itself apart again with its usual money flow induced turbulence and bad management induced harmonic oscillations in its structure; Rocketplane is probably sorry by now they teamed with them. And Rutan is dealing with his recent problem while keeping things on his planned track, and I'd trust his judgement over all the others combined -- he'll pull it off when intended to with or without the recent and most any following problems. He is following the path of NASA in the 60s, with engineers making the decisions rather than having management involved in that. He'll make the metaphorical "moon by the end of the decade", but not before he intends to and his craft are built according to those intentions.
Bigelow may well have his habitat ready sooner. If so, it'll be due to the Spanish outfit's announcement last week of a 2012 deadline for a similar goal. That's a bad reason, but he's launching a habitat, not a powered vehicle. I believe he can do it. If anyone tries to fast track a launch system to keep up with that race, or to beat each other (most likely, to try to beat Rutan) they'll replay the historical "In Soviet Russia, rocket launch YOU -- in pieces."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The moon _still_ has no economic or military value
There are large amounts of titanium, selenium and Helium III on the moon that would probably be highly offended at this remark.
+++ATH0
And here's another thought: if it _had_ any economic value, private initiative would be all over it. You wouldn't need government money to go there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I remember reading when I was a mere youth, an SF book called "Bubbles in the Sky". My recollection is that it was by Frederick Pohl. For the last several years I have been trying to track down this book, without success. It might have been 1/2 of one of those pocket books with two novellas printed back-to-back. I even remember the picture on the front, kinda. When I read it the copy was already somewhat old, the pages already browned and somewhat brittled by oxidation.
The story was about how the folks (using 1940's or 1950's tech) building a space station were initially housed in inflatable bubbles with self-healing multilayer plastic inflatables. At first crew were shipped up and down every six months, but more and more of them volunteered to stay in space and live in the bubbles. As time went on, the folks in the bubbles developed their own oxygen systems (using plants), and became increasingly close to self-sufficient.
The microgravity environment allowed body type variance to increase, and several men and women, who had by chance developed medical issues that would have killed or crippled them if they had to live on the ground, were able to live just fine in orbit. Eventually they had their own radio station, which despite low power could be heard at the appropriate times everywhere on the planet and became a popular inspiration to the folks on the ground.
About the station construction was completed, the 'suits' and 'uniforms' decided that it was time to get rid of the riff-raff and was going to force them all to abandon the bubbles, but they used the radio to broadcast their plight and generate public support on the ground, and they were also able to demonstrate that with only a little more support they could become self-sufficient, and that they were able to provide future necessary labor at much lower cost shipping people up from earth repeatedly. And thus, life in orbit became an economic and social possibility for anyone.
This story was very inspiring to me (at age 12?), and when I first heard about Bigelow I was immediately reminded of this. I even sent Bigelow and email, but I don't recall getting a response (but that's OK). I would dearly like to see and hopefully read again another copy of this story.
The bubble fabric was interesting - its self-healing qualities were such that if you stuck a knife through the side, after removing the knife it would gradually pull itself back together, and IIRC could actually cut through softer things (like flesh) to do so. The skin was also made of multiple overlapping layers, so that if a micrometeoroid went through, the cells that it penetrated would collapse and the pressure differential would maintain a temporary seal while the skin healed itself.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Do you think art is a waste of time/money/resources as well? I won't debate your finer points about the relative merit about the Space Shuttle as realized versus what it could've/should've been (mainly because I have no idea, and think it's quite possible you're right), but I think that manned space travel is important in and of itself. Sure, anytime the government gets involved things tend to cost more than most of us (including me, in case that's not clear) think they should, but I think that's a separate problem from the value of manned space travel. I do agree, of course, that Bigelow (or similar strategies) might be a shining example that could yield the best results.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Well, I guess I should be grateful that you brought up art, because it's probably a better illustration of what I'm trying to say.
See, art so far has been created by private initiative. You have, say, a novellist writing a novel on his own time (and thus expense), then they take it to a publisher who's privately owned, which then try to sell it to individual people like you and me. Which can jolly well decide whether they want to buy it or not.
It's capitalism at its finest. The market can and does decide how much they want of any particular novel, or how much of the whole. And how much they want to pay for it.
And in true capitalism fashion, duds die and get silently buried. It doesn't get to be artificially kept alive and costing billions in tax dollar money, like the Space Shuttle was.
I'd have nothing against space exploration being like that too. Honestly.
Conversely I would have something against it if the government wasted my money to keep a bunch of guys doing art for art sake, in some ivory tower where they don't actually have to fulfill any social need or appeal to anyone's taste.
Sure, maybe we'd get some great works of art, if the state sponsored unpopular artists to keep working on it anyway. But chances are we'd just get crap. I don't know if the USSR actually had such an establishment (though it wouldn't surprise me), but half the plot of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" makes fun of exactly that kind of an artificial literary establishment of the Soviet state. I'm guessing Bulgakov didn't like it much.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Be careful what you wish for.
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