Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Delivers World's First Inflatable Room For Astronauts (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship which launched from Cape Canaveral on Friday delivered the world's first inflatable room for astronauts. It arrived at the ISS on Sunday after station astronauts used a robot arm to capture the Dragon, orbiting 250 miles above Earth. The compartment should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air next month. It will be attached to the space station this Saturday, but won't be inflated until the end of May. NASA envisions inflatable habitats in a couple decades at Mars, while Bigelow Aerospace aims to launch a pair of inflatable space stations in just four years for commercial lease. Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be restricted from the six on-board astronauts while NASA tests the chamber to see how it performs. The rocket used to launch the cargo ship successfully landed on a floating drone ship for the first time ever. It was the second time SpaceX successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company's Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space.
Think less 'tent' and more 'bouncy castle' that's intended to have kids bounce all over it, except even stronger.
The inflatable module is rated to be as or more penetration resistant as the non-inflatable modules already up there, and at the pressure differential it will have, it will be roughly as stiff as well.
I don't read AC A human right
"suffers damage from radiation and temperature swings, and eventually cracks and shatters."
Odd, the SR-71 is said to get stronger with time as each flight tempers the metal more and more.
Mostly random stuff.
Let's figure out how to build structures like space stations on a larger scale or a moon base. When we're able to successfully put a colony in space or on the moon, then perhaps we can look toward going to Mars. For now, though, this is a tremendous waste of time and resources.
Space stations and a moon base are an even bigger waste of time and resources.
I get that we'll eventually need to colonize other worlds
A small and fragile colony on another planet isn't going to add any significant improvement to the odds of survival. We could use the same resources to improve the odds here on Earth by a greater degree.
I have been wondering lately: How much extra effort would it take SpaceX to do a manned moon mission?
They will soon have most of the pieces. Two Falcon 9 Heavies (first flight planned for November) have nearly the payload of a Saturn V, the manned Dragon (first flight planned early-mid next year) would work as a command module*. Missing is a lander, and possibly a stage to transfer from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, which could probably be a lightly modified stage 2 of the existing Falcon 9.
The 'only' expensive bit still to do then is the lander. Not coincidentally, this is also the only bit which has no other use, so money spent on design has no future pay-back (except for more moon missions.) I don't know how much this would cost, but I doubt it would be under half a billion dollars, likely much more.
*The Dragon is about the same diameter as the Apollo module, but about twice as long. I don't know how it compares by mass - it is bigger, but modern materials are lighter.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"Winds" are not hazardous, turbulence is. The high wind speed (superrotation) is a significant benefit, not a negative; you circle the planet at no energy cost, and it dramatically reduces your day length.
There's still a good deal uncertainty about the degree of turbulence that can be expected, and like Earth it probably varies greatly by latitude and altitude. At this point, the only data that we have on that comes from the Vega probes. From what we've seen, it's probably in the same ballpark as that on Earth.
Hydrogen fluoride rain will not occur on Venus. We're not sure if any rain (or snow, or hail, or icing, or other forms of precipitation) occurs on Venus, and if so, from what compounds (that will depend on the altitude). But hydrogen fluoride is too minor of a constituent to form a significant portion of rain at any altitude.
Hydrogen fluoride's risk comes from (like all chemicals on Venus) permeation through the envelope. Plants are rather sensitive to HF, moreso than to H2SO4 and H3PO4 mists and SO2. The rate of permeation of a compound depends on the surface area and the permeation rate data for the compound, which is usually based on the material and relative to thickness and temperature. The VEGA balloons used old-school PTFE, which has rather high permeation (as one might guess, given that expanded PTFE is used in breathable waterproof fabrics). But plastics have moved beyond that. The next big shift was to liquid crystal polymers like vectran. They're not as chemical-resistant as PTFE, but generally considered "good enough" for Venus; they're also much stronger and they have incredibly low rates of permeation. The big problem with liquid crystal polymers is that they're very complex, chemically; it would be difficult to produce them locally. Hence the ideal approach IMHO - if one wants low permeation but also easy production chains - is modern PTFE variants plus a UHMWPE ripstop.
There have been big advancements in PTFE in recent years, such as Teflon NXT and FEP (among many others). NXT is PTFE plus a fraction of a percent PPVE, which dramatically reduces its permeability as well as improving a lot of its other properties. They're not as good as vectran, but the permeability levels are acceptable. PPVE could be supplied from earth, but it's not the only such comonomer that provides such benefits. IMHO the most interesting is HFP, because that can be produced from the same process that produces TFE, just at higher pressures. Indeed, FEP is a copolymerized HFP/TFE. As for the ripstop, UHMWPE is even simpler than PTFE to produce, and more to the point has already been demonstrated for space applications, so it's at a high TRL (though fabric production from it is a lower TRL). While UHMWPE doesn't have the heat tolerance of PTFE, it's otherwise excellent - acid resistant (in case anything permeates through), extremely abrasion resistant, and a very high tensile strength to weight ratio. It's UV sensitive, but Venus isn't a high UV environment, and 0,2% HALS absorbers imported from Earth render it quite stable (there's a lot of other absorbers that can be paired with it). For the PTFE you'd also want ATO or ITO (0,2-0,5%) to make it high-E.
Did I mention that I've been researching this topic? ;)
It's more hospitable than Mars. :) People focus a lot about Venus's cloudtop acids (which are actually a resource - heating 85% H2SO4 mist (which your engines that compensate for meridional drift can suck across adsorption bed) yields water (both directly and by the decomposition of H2SO4 to H2O + SO3) and oxygen (from the catalytic decomposition of SO3 at elevated temperatures)). But the acid mists
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)