Space Station Module Could Carry Humans To Asteroid

Soulskill writes "Brian Wilcox, a JPL roboticist, spoke at a NASA workshop about the possibility of detaching one of the International Space Station's modules and using it as the primary living space for astronauts on a trip to an asteroid. 'The node could be connected to two space exploration vehicles and have add-on inflatable modules. ... The space station is slated to operate through at least 2020, which roughly coincides with the earliest likely launch date for human exploration of an asteroid. In April President Barack Obama set a 2025 goal for a manned mission to an asteroid.'"

Comments

Earth return?

[MichaelSmith]

The cheapest and safest way to finish the mission would be to load the crew and samples into an apollo style capsule and reenter directly. The article doesn't describe that.

Also the module doesn't seem big enough for the centrifuge they describe. They could have a module on a boom, then rotate the whole vehicle. Perhaps the high gravity module could slide along the boom and dock with the main vehicle. If this goes anywhere I expect the centrifuge will be dropped. It is just too hard to engineer.

Re:Earth return?

[sznupi]

OTOH aerobraking doesn't have to end up with immediate full reentry; some of our unmanned spacecraft performed many gradual ones when arriving at their destination (and becoming artificial satellites there), many "orbital tug" projects envisioned using aerobraking routinelly, and it is generally an extreme form of skip reentry - a good way to save on weight.

One problem could be how ISS modules are meant for long term habitation inside of Earth's magnetosphere; on deep space missions it will be good to have something built at least partially as a radiation shelter / essentially inside fuel tanks. Which presents another problem with artificial gravity - it's fairly easy when the spacecraft can be easily divided along the crewed mass vs. propulsive mass lines, not so when it's good for them to partially "mixed"...

Re:Earth return?

[QuantumG]

The designs I saw come out of this workshop, which of course are very preliminary, did indeed have direct return vehicles, but the goal is also to get the "mothership" back to Earth so that it can be used for the next asteroid mission, and the next, and the next. The goal being to develop a capability to visit asteroids of greater and greater travel time / delta-v. This is important because we don't get to choose killer asteroids, they choose us, and as the robotic missions guys said on the first day of the conference, they're all surprised they even managed to get data from their missions, and wouldn't want the fate of the human race resting on it.

Re:Earth return?

[MichaelSmith]

This is probably a rotating drum inside a module.

The radius is too small for that.

So what?

[mmcxii]

In April President Barack Obama set a 2025 goal for a manned mission to an asteroid.

Seeings how much NASA gets pushed and pulled by every administration and every budget I wouldn't count on anything NASA has as far as long term goals being so concrete as to put a date to them. Politicians really need to stop using NASA as a token in a pissing match. It's petty and counterproductive.

Hell, if it weren't for JFK taking a bullet to the head we may have never even gotten to the moon.

Re:So what?

[macraig]

"Careful there", my ass. He's quite possibly right in spite of being so refreshingly blunt and transparent... unlike certain creatures who get chosen and paid to make decisions for the rest of us.

Further, I find this lazy-days-of-summer spacefaring timetable ridiculous, if not downright suspicious. THIRTEEN YEARS to plan a mission to an asteroid? It sounds suspiciously like plausible deniability, if you ask me: set a date so far in the future, so many administrations hence, that it's virtually certain to get killed or watered-down before that date arrives.

Personel/Crew

[Sinn3d]

BP might also end up flooding (oops pun) the market with rugged drillers looking for a job. So the crew should be easy to put together.

Re:And

[QuantumG]

wow, it's such a shame you didn't go to the workshop, you could have saved us two days.

Hurrah!

[greg.harvey]

We now know what to do with an ageing Bruce Willis!

Re:And

[mbone]

There are a number of Near Earth Asteroids that are dynamically easy to reach (i.e., with very low delta-V's). The "Plymouth Rock" presentation to the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) last year lists 12 that could be reached with Orion. These are being found fairly rapidly, so there is no shortage of targets.

Re:Not a bad idea

[mbone]

Because there was not an immediate need for them, and (to be blunt) because in many ways "the system" is set up to spend money building things, not to save money reusing things. Look at the Jules Verne - a man-rated cargo carrier (i.e., an actual pressurized spacecraft) that was used once, filled up with garbage, and disposed of via re-entry.

There were many plans in the early days of the space shuttle to take the Space Shuttle External Tank (which certainly could be used in orbit - it actually is brought to orbit, and then energy is expended to make sure it re-enters immediately) and make them into space stations in the Skylab fashion. (Skylab was the 3rd stage of a Saturn V outfitted as a space station - this was originally intended to be launched "wet" in a 1973 Venus Flyby Mission. Nixon killed this mission and all plans and infrastructure for manned deep space flight and we are still trying to get them back.)

The Space Shuttle External Tank space station could have been done, there was even a start-up I had a remote involvement with trying to make one into a space hotel, but such ideas got no support and no funding and all died on the vine.

The actual presentation

[mbone]

Here is the actual presentation, from the agenda (which has all of the presentations).

Perusal of that shows that gravity was to be obtained by a rotating tether, not within a module.