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Nautilus-X: the Space Station With Rockets
astroengine writes "So we have a space station, now what? We've heard some rather outlandish ideas, but this is one concept a research group in NASA is taking seriously. By retrofitting the ISS with rockets, Nautilus-X will act as an interplanetary space station of sorts, including room for 6 astronauts, an artificial gravity ring, inflatable habitats and docking for exploration spaceships. When can we take a luxury cruise to Mars? 2020 by the project's estimate. It all sounds very 2001, but the projected costs of retrofitting the space station seem a little on the low side."
It's a damned cool idea. Probably won't happen, but still, an awesome second life for the ISS, and one that has an actual point to it.
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I wonder what the fuel budget for moving from Earth orbit to Mars orbit is, compared to moving from the surface of Earth to the Surface of Mars is? I'd imagine it's a small fraction.
We can already do a lot more in space than we are doing. If only NASA's budget get increased... This space station looks amazing compared to what we currently have, but we already have everything needed to build it. It will be hard, it will take time and money, but it will work. We should already have space station like that one.
It's very nice, I love the concept.
But I'm dreaming of space hotels for a dozens of people at least.... Following a similar design.
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With government shutdowns impending and with budget shrinking, not growing, over the next several years - I doubt we can afford this, and I doubt if anyone will consider it seriously.
Actually, the Nautilus -X plan doesn't propose fitting "the" space station rockets and sending it to other planets (which would require making a goddamn huge rocket!), it proposes building "a" space station with rockets and sending it to other planets. The idea is to use a modular system that's actually built in space like the ISS to go to other worlds. Pay attention.
for long distance human travel is if we already had massive space stations at destination orbits.
You would only need to move human transport shuttles between stations, instead of transporting entire launch-shuttle-landing systems.
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seriously, it would be great, but it's not going to happen at that cost, in that time frame.
at best, Ad Astra will be allowed to put a VASIMR on it and boost it to a geosync orbit.
The summary leaves out the most important part of the story: Nautilus-X is an acronym for "Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States eXploration".
The Nautliux-X design doesn't propose fitting "the" space station with a rocket and sending it to other planets, it proposes building "a" space station with rockets and sending it to other planets. The idea is to use a modular design like the ISS that is built in orbit and use it as the vehicle for interplanetary missions. The modular design cuts costs and enables NASA to customize the design for different missions.
Is... is that a cow?
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they aren't going to actually reuse the ISS, btw. They just put that in the article for people with no imagination, for which every modular spacecraft looks like the ISS.
A truss, with a VASIMR and a bunch of Bigalow inflatable modules attached is what they are proposing, as a lunar transfer ferry.
That might (probably will) happen SOME day, but i doubt by 2020.
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Bad summary of what Nautilus-X is about, but the article itself fails in the opening paragraphs as well.
A better summary of the idea from physorg of the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle.
The idea is NOT about taking the existing ISS and strapping rockets to it. Nautilus-X IS about building something that would ride permanently in space out of technologies similar to what was used in ISS, along with inflatable modules such as Bigelow Aerospace's expandable space habitats. Separate crew modules would provide the ability to land and lift off from planets.
About the only part ISS itself would play is hosting a demonstration version of the ring centrifuge.
Pretty much the "real" interplanetary spacecraft as it has been discussed for decades, but Nautilus-X would be built with mostly known technologies.
I keep waiting for us to do something halfway exciting in space. Instead we blow our money on being world police. Screw all that. Cut the military budget in half and we could have a colony on mars.
In hindsight... this should have been planned from the get-go. The costs of building a space station are so huge that it can barely be done. The added cost of making this possible would have been small compared to building a second space station.
Yes, nothing to see here. Move along.
what if they had flyweels for energy storage? because in a vacuum it ought to be possible to obtain large rpms.
The only difference between a space station and a space exploration spacecraft is which body it is orbiting.
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I would think they'd assemble it in LEO, use an ion drive/solar sail to slowly move it to a higher orbit, launch the astronauts to board it, and finally fire the main engines.
We go to the airport in a car, then get on the plane. This sort of craft should be dedicated to the bulk travel, and not stop at either end. A smaller resupply shuttle to transit on & off would save all sorts of energy, rather than stopping & starting this huge system twice for every round trip.
He says:
The Nautilus has a huge deep-space antenna where laser transmission may make more sense. It also has a shuttle-derived remote manipulator arm which also seems like excess weight.
As for the manipulator arm, yes, it is excess weight. Excess weight isn't necessarily a bad thing if you are already going to be lifting a lot of mass to orbit. If, say, one launch for constructing this vehicle required a Dragon, HTV, Progress, or some other supply vehicle to be lifted (for the purposes of a lifeboat, or some such thing), one could piggy back the manipulator arm on as an extra payload and outfit it to the new spacecraft. If the arm would require an extra launch then, yes, it is an expensive addition. However, in the event that this spacecraft would be landing a crew and then picking them back up again, the manipulator arm would not be unnecessary mass, but, in that case, a critical system for redocking surface-to-orbit ferries.
The oddest thing about that assessment by the author is when he says this previously in the article:
To significantly lower mass and therefore reduce transit time, why not simply send unmanned landers ahead and put them into a parking orbit to wait until the crew arrives.
If the spacecraft is supposed to be linking up with landers in a parking orbit at the destination, you can bet your sweet ass that a manipulator arm will be necessary to capture the landers. Of course, alternatively, the crew could also take a ferry to the on-orbit lander modules instead, but then you'd be carrying around the crew ferries rather than the landers and/or the arm, which means, again, a trade study should be conducted and the folks at NASA have probably already done so.
One other thing to consider is that while a higher mass requires a higher delta-v to hop from orbit to orbit, if the excess mass is a small enough fraction, it may not make a practical difference. Rocket engines that are in production produce a certain amount of thrust. If that thrust can boost "up to X many kg of mass to this delta-v" then reducing your mass below X is somewhat unnecessary, unless you need or want a higher delta-v margin.
It's important to remember that the first European colonists to North America didn't land on the East Coast and then drag race to the Pacific. Rather, they established a colonial foothold in the East first (like we should in LEO) and then, after developing their on-continent infrastructure some, they set off to explore further. Baby-steps lead towards progress. One off, epic publicity stunts lead to debt.
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Imagine a small rotating ring, as seen in 2001. Imagine yourself crouching near the floor, then suddenly standing up. Conservation of rotational momentum would accelerate you in the direction of rotation, hard, and maybe give you vertigo as well. So you'd puke, fall down, slide in it for several feet. To be practical the ring would have to be about a mile in diameter.
Can't work, won't work -- and there's no money in any case.
Some basement dweller needs to get a girlfriend. And a smack around the head for wasting everyone's time for even suggesting it.
There are some excellent reasons why this stupid idea (literally) won't fly:
The station is designed to have a very limited lifetime of 20 years.
It's designed to be serviced, refueled and resupplied by LEO spacecraft (Shuttle, Soyuz, visiting vehicles). Without regular resupply, it's useless
Shielding. Move it too far, and shielding wouldn't be adequate for protecting human occupants. Adding shielding is a total non starter.
Thermal issues: the station is very carefully designed to cope with the thermal environment of it's low Earth orbit. Move it too far, it'll overheat quickly. It's flat-out radiating away heat from Station systems as it is without being exposed to the full brunt of the Sun 24/7.
Or put rockets on an orbiting shuttle and send it interplanetary. Add some tundra tires and land it on Mars!
Back in the 1960s (maybe earlier) there was some talk about building such a ramp up the side of Pike's Peak. For transporting goods, I think it might work pretty well. The container vehicle might be based on a pure SCRAMjet, since the speed off the top of the peak could be Mach 5 - or, if possible, maybe the railgun could accelerate it to orbital velocity directly, so no fuel or motors required other than steering. To accomplish this in perhaps 10-15 km of track, the G forces might be too much for anything living. I'm also too lazy to figure it out.
distance equation is d = 1/2 a * t^2 + vt
If not, to reduce the mass of fuel required, perhaps the vehicle could have a minimum fuel load and be caught by an orbital vehicle, which could later slingshot it farther using collected electrical energy (an orbiting railgun)
Ahh, I found a reference. It was Heinlein. Space Launch System (a forum discussion message). Rather than a railgun, it was a magnetic launcher. This would have a much lower potential acceleration but with the height (14000 feet) and the length of the hypotenuse (the side of the mountain) the launch track, starting perhaps with a length along the flat could easily be four or five miles.
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One thing that is not the same is resupply, and that (not surprisingly) is the sticking point with all these sorts of schemes.
Main problem with resupply is: why we need resupply? It is outrageous that we are wasting rocket fuel to send up something that will ultimately become space junk, and will need to go back down and burn on reentry. Without autonomy, our vessels are hopelessly tied in our planet's orbit.
So, first task is developing extreme waste recycling technologies of life-supporting necessities (except energy, which is to be harvested from the Sun) for space station environment, some sort of biosphere capsule.
However, living of daily rations of phytoplankton and worms' soup, fortified with chemically extracted essential mineral salts, all harvested from a muck tank, for prolonged period, is not going to be very pleasant experience.
Furthermore, since all of the resources would be precious, nothing should be wasted, ejected into space. Everyone will have signed contract that says that, should you die on the journey, you agree to your body being completely recycled into drinking water and food.
Deep space exploration requires tough stomachs and a dose of cynicism.
Second, the ship must be equipped to almost completely replicate, or at the very least reform, most of itself, to create patches to the damaged hull or solar sail (if it is going to have one, and I believe it should), reform structural beams, etc. New techniques and materials will probably need to be devised for this.
Comforting thought is that technological advances needed for all this would probably help us reduce our environmental footprint down here on Spaceship Earth.
At first it sounded like some idiot was talking about strapping rockets to ISS and launching it into space, which would be a suicide trip. But this is more of a "Space Ship" built on orbit, using techniques similar to ISS's construction which I think is a very good idea at our current stage. They need to get rid of (most of) the solar arrays though, give the thing a bank of the new RTG Generators (ASRG) and a bank of Ion engines or better yet VASIMR rockets and we'd have ourselves a real spaceship. Just make sure you can swap the tanks or refuel on orbit and it could be used for trip after trip instead of our current idiotic system of sending up a skyscraper (or two) and getting back a closet with several people crammed in it.
The cost of adding rockets wont be that much, seeing as it is not really that expensive, they do not need to be huge like those to get out into orbit, they can be as small as canisters of hairpsray, the many of them there could be, would all add propulsion and also would need some stabilizers in opposite directions...a full 360 is the most advantageous, but also almost impossible, unless you use dyson vacuum principles
It is an idea, not sure it is needed. We first need to see what the VASIMIR engine can do in terms of mission speed from LEO to Moon orbit. If it can do that in 12 hours or so, there is no real need for something at EarthMoonL1.
Vision:
Create an interplanetary craft with a VASIMIR on Earth and launch the parts to space. Assemble in space, docked with ISS.
Launch the astronauts to ISS via SpaceX or something similar.
Astronauts board craft and depart from ISS, once clear fire engine and leave GEO. Go to various spots and come back to ISS. Working up to moon orbit. Working up to Martian moons, working up to Martian orbit.
Are we starting to see how we should be handling interplanetary space flight now???
Actually I think some calculations have shown that a proper VASIMR cluster with a not unreasonable generator (with a high output to weight ratio) and quite a bit of fuel could get people from earth orbit to mars in "a handful of days". I would bet though to do that it would be a big fuel tank with an Orion sized capsule strapped to one end and a generator/VASIMR at the other. So it wouldn't be first class travel but it would be pretty quick. But you would have to have ALL of your survival/descent equipment already in orbit/on the surface of your destination. Personally though I think the "Space-station-like ship" is the better route, If something goes wrong you have the hardware and supplies to make surviving an unforeseen catastrophe much more likely. A stripped down speed ship would be nice, as long as NOTHING went wrong, if it did, you are going to die.