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NASA Uncertain How To Proceed In Developing Deep Space Module (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: One of the provisions of the new NASA spending bill, which provided a hefty $1.3 billion boost to the space agency's budget, is a mandate to build a prototype habitation module for deep space exploration by 2018. Space News suggested that NASA is uncertain how to proceed with this sudden largess. Quite some time has passed since the space agency has gotten more money than expected and been told to speed up the development of an item of hardware. Usually, the opposite happens, with accompanying delays and increases in overall costs.
A deep space module needs to be able to maintain a crew for years without resupply. That means bulky life support spaces - either a huge amount of food and oxygen storage or a farm module - along with enough spare parts to repair any and all possible faults that might occur. With the habitable parts wrapped up in heavy radiation shielding. You're not getting that up in one piece - it's going to have to be assembled in orbit using a modular design, probably involving a few habitation and life support modules connected up to non-habitable supply modules. Skylab is about the biggest you can launch in one piece, and it's far too small to go to deep space. A manned craft for deep space is going to look a lot like a smaller and more linear version of the ISS.
The article talking about a 'habitation module' isn't helpful. Surviving for years without supplies doesn't need a module, it needs a whole complex of modules that fit and work together.
Humans in deep space for any length of time will need serious shielding to avoid the health risks of ionizing radiation (gamma rays, etc). Traditional shielding is heavy and crowds out payload. Without a breakthrough in shielding manned space flight can't leave our planet's protection (the magnetosphere) for any length of time. No moon base - at least on the surface, no Mars missions, no Lagrange point space stations.
As of 2012, NASA is undergoing research in superconducting magnetic architecture for potential active shielding applications. Active Shielding, that is, using magnets, high voltages, or artificial magnetospheres to slow down or defect radiation, has been considered to potentially combat radiation in a feasible way. So far, the cost of equipment, power and weight of active shielding equipment outweigh their benefits. For example, active radiation equipment would need a habitable volume size to house it, and magnetic and electrostatic configurations often are not homogenous in intensity, allowing high-energy particles to penetrate the magnetic and electric fields from low-intensity parts, like cusps in dipolar magnetic field of Earth.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Bringing back some Mars rocks would be nice in my lifetime. Even in unmanned missions.
An unmanned mission to bring back Mars rocks is probably doable. I'm dubious that we will send humans there in my remaining lifespan.
Beginning of asteroid mining too.
I think asteroid mining is a ridiculous concept. To be economically viable one of two things has to happen. Either 1) you have to bring the materials back to Earth to be refined and utilized or 2) you have to develop technology to refine and utilize them in space. If you choose option 1) you have to drop VERY large rocks onto the surface of the Earth. Do I have to explain that dropping large rocks onto Earth's surface is REALLY destructive? If you choose option 2) you have to replicate entire supply chains in space and we have ZERO technology in the pipeline to do that. We have no smelting or mining equipment that works in space on anything close to an industrial scale. We don't have the robotics. We don't have the control systems. Even if we did we have no power systems adequate to drive them on an industrial scale except maybe nuclear fission and that's pretty dicey even here on Earth.
These are completely realistic goals.
Depends on your timescale.