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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.
i always wanted one, too.
Let's figure out how to build structures like space stations on a larger scale
A cheap way to do that would be inflatable rooms, so a large work environment can be launched with fewer (and smaller) rockets.Of course, once built, such a thing would need to be tested, but I suppose that's a "complete waste of resources"...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Yeah, they never would have thought of that...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160001632.pdf
And the ISS is between 254-258 miles up.
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
Whatever happened to good old titatium? Are we running out of?
Titanium is hard to work with, not as strong as kevlar fibers in this sort of application, suffers damage from radiation and temperature swings, and eventually cracks and shatters.
At a pressure differential approaching 1 atm, the inflated module will be approximately as stiff as a hard side structure at a fraction of the weight, and will actually be stronger in most respects. Should also last longer, but that's what testing is for!
I don't read AC A human right
Uhhhh... Last I checked they were doing exactly what you suggest - building structures like space stations on a larger scale.
Sure you did, the idea is almost 60 years old. http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRA...
If I wrote like that I'd submit anonymously too.
At the bottom of the
If it works exceedingly well as hoped for, the fact that it's an inflatable means storage is easier.
This would allow for much more construction to be performed or easier delivery. Like, more food, oxygen and water since the inflatable rooms are lighter and take less space while deflated.
Listening to NASA talk about how they would like to have these in Mars in a "couple of decades" is just depressing.
Seriously, when did America become the country of thinking small?
A couple of decades? For F's sake, we went to the moon nearly 60 years ago! 60 freaking years later and we are not even up to the same level as before the microprocessor was invented.
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.
I misread it as "first inflatable astronaut". That auto-pilot scene from "Airplane" came to mind.
Table-ized A.I.
Once inflated those walls will be hard as steel, albeit with a nice cloth covering.
Drop. In. The. Bucket.
We really do know. Bigelow has put up inflatable habitats for testing before, this is just the first time NASA's used one. NASA is a very conservative organization, in the safety sense, which is great but slow.
I'm surprised the Russians never went anywhere with this technology. Their safety record is somewhat equal to your average town carnival, but they've made a lot of discoveries about living in space that the ISS uses.
A traditional rigid module for the ISS is about 15 tons with 106 cubic meters of space. Bigelow's 330 module is 20 tons with 330 cubic meters of internal space. So 210% more internal volume for only 5 more tons of mass.
Filling that volume up can be done by several smaller rocket launches rather than 1 huge rocket launch for a traditional module, which is cheaper and easier to do. Furthermore, the internal components can be changed around unlike more traditional built in components.
There will still be call for the traditional rigid structures, especially for equipment it otherwise wouldn't be conceivable to send up individually. For large living space, hydroponics, or other general purpose zones the inflatable structures will be superior.
Meh, everyone has their own goals. I personally wish we'd be focusing toward a colony in Venus's cloudtops (the most Earthlike place in the solar system).
But Mars gets all the money.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Indeed - BEAM is built to the same debris impact tolerance standards as the ISS itself. High strength fibers, it should be pointed out, are also used in bulletproof vests.
Fibers tend to have far superior tensile strength to weight ratios vs. metals.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Hurricane-force winds and hydrogen fluoride rain will make that an exciting place to live. It might be the most earthlike, but outside of active volcanos and ocean trenches you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere on Earth less hospitable. It makes the south pole look like a pleasant holiday resort in comparison.
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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.)
In contrast, the landers used on the Apollo missions funded a lot of research that has quite widespread application. The light composites and the joints used to allow them to be folded and deployed have appeared in a load of other things. Modern folding bicycles are probably the most visible, as most of the other uses look a lot less like the lander.
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"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)