NASA Awards Companies $65 Million To Develop Habitats For Deep Space (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: NASA has committed $65 million to six companies over the course of two years for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars. TechCrunch reports: "It's part of the organization's NEXTStep, an ongoing partnership program under NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems that funds private research into technology for space exploration. Last year's NEXTStep contracts were for a variety of things, but this year they're all on the same track: "deep space habitats where humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth." The lucky companies are all taking slightly different approaches to the problem of deep space habitation." The six companies include Bigelow Aerospace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada Corporation's Space Systems and NanoRacks.

Comments

how do I

[Anonymous Coward]

Secure funding from NASA, how do I learn about the opportunity to secure funding, I am sure they advertise it somewhere, and have all sorts of guidelines, but it seems as if they send out invitations only, because it's only the same companies who ever get funding. I think the process to secure government money needs to be more accessible, and not hidden in bureaucracy only a select few can navigate to.

Re:how do I

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you should instead ask about the funding for a defense program, which has a thousand times larger budget ?

Re:how do I

[sittingnut]

two wrongs do not make it right

even if defense contracts were secret, corrupt, and larger, that should not protect nasa from being open about its contracts to prevent corruption and improve efficacy.

for the record, most of the defense contracts have very strict guidelines and oversight(even secret ones which are a minority), and feature frequent bidding wars(even for huge ones) etc.

Re:how do I

[tomhath]

Just read the RFPs they have out. Write a proposal for any you are qualified to undertake.

Re:how do I

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, it will be by invitation only. The general process for these sorts of things is to publish papers, and have a track record of delivering projects in a related but "easier" area. Try delivering some complex aerospace projects or develop some exotic materials and NASA will come to you.

Re:how do I

[burhop]

Secure funding from NASA, how do I learn about the opportunity to secure funding, I am sure they advertise it somewhere, and have all sorts of guidelines, but it seems as if they send out invitations only, because it's only the same companies who ever get funding. I think the process to secure government money needs to be more accessible, and not hidden in bureaucracy only a select few can navigate to.

Just because it doesn't show up on your Facebook page doesn't mean it it is hidden in bureaucracy. If you have an idea for NASA, here you go:

https://prod.nais.nasa.gov/pub...

If you are just looking for money, here you go:

http://www.grants.gov/

The same companies seem to get chosen over and over is because they usually have some expertise in that particular area and can show a good reason why NASA should spend the money with them. Yeah, it helps to know the system but they bend over backward to make it transparent.

Re:how do I

[Ol Olsoc]

Just because it doesn't show up on your Facebook page doesn't mean it it is hidden in bureaucracy. If you have an idea for NASA, here you go:

How dare you! You've completely run over some whiner's precious beliefs!

Cor - you people and your true facts and stuff.

Re:how do I

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Write a proposal for any you are qualified to undertake.

Usually the problem with government projects, is that folks write proposals that they are not qualified to undertake.

And they win the contract anyway.

Re:how do I

[jellomizer]

The "fair and competitive" bidding process is actually a rather corrupt system.
You put a bid in, you force the bidders to jump thru a bunch of hoops.
If they don't get the bidder they want they stop bidding, and try again.

Re:how do I

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it doesn't show up on your Facebook page doesn't mean it it is hidden in bureaucracy. If you have an idea for NASA, here you go:

https://prod.nais.nasa.gov/pub...

If you are just looking for money, here you go:

http://www.grants.gov/

Yeah, it helps to know the system but they bend over backward to make it transparent.

Whoa. I had no idea grants.gov existed before today. I would have bet money that wasn't a real thing.

Still, just because an organization accepts online submissions from the general public, that doesn't mean that anybody is even reading the things, much less that they'll be given serious consideration, much less that they have a hope of competing with the customary incumbents. I have my doubts that the big-time players are even using these channels.

Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Anonymous Coward]

Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice but what when sun is not shining?

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course! It really is that simple.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[BlueStrat]

Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.

Nice but what when sun is not shining?

I guess you missed the "0G" part of the post's topic line?

I believe he refers to orbiting habitats fashioned from asteroid material using solar mirrors (also in orbit) so periods when sunlight is unavailable are typically short when placed in an orbit suited for purpose. Neither the manufacturing infrastructure nor the habitats ever leave space in such a case.

More needs to be known about the surface soil structures, densities, and behaviors in order to design a practical human habitat whether intended for the Moon or Mars, as it will almost certainly need to be buried and/or covered with topsoil/sand/rock as radiation shielding in either case. There's no practical/economical way to haul sufficient amounts of heavy shielding material from Earth or incorporate such heavy shielding into the habitat designs.

Strat

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[OzPeter]

Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.

Which was central to the plot of the Troy Rising series by John Ringo.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[legRoom]

Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.

Glass is brittle and tends to fracture. Don't expect junky mystery glass to hold up well long-term against micro-meteorite impacts - especially if it's made thin enough not to crack right away from thermal contraction during the cooling process. Cracks = leaks.

Even if it turned out to be practical to make something truly airtight via your technique, the result would still be super heavy compared to the high-tech alternatives favoured by the space industry: even homogeneous, high-quality synthetic glass has a poor strength-to-mass ratio as compared to structural metals (aluminium, steel, titanium) or synthetic fibres (kevlar, carbon fibre, etc.).

NASA wants maximum reliability (for both political and moral reasons) and minimum weight, because the cost of sending even lightweight manned spacecraft to Mars and back is already more than they can actually afford. What problem does melting space rocks solve for them?

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Anonymous Coward]

Use big mirrors

Only in science fiction would "giant mirrors" be available for a purpose like this, but not a ready built habitat.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Rei]

Duh! We do that all the time on Earth to make houses because it's such a trivial process. Isn't your home a lava gas home made with mirrors?

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Anonymous Coward]

Heavy? I'm not sure you understand the goal here, which is to create a habitat in space that never leaves the orbit in which it was built. You aren't launching this from Earth or landing it on Mars

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[HiThere]

Well, to be fair there are lots of reasons that it's a bad idea at surface level. You need much larger mirrors, gravity distorts the shape, etc.

But, yeah, it's well oversimplified. Still, once we get enough experience that approach should be possible. OTOH, it's starting to look like most asteroids are mainly dustpiles, so you need to melt them once to fuse the material, then you do some preparatory work, and then you heat them to blow the bubble. But since volatiles may be as important as the solid stuff, you'd better surround the entire thing with a bubble before the first time you heat it.

To me it sounds like the sketch of a good approach once you are "skilled in the art", but it doesn't sound like a good way to get started.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[HiThere]

The cure for cracking while cooling is to cool very slowly, and possibly annealing. The point about micro-meteorites is much better, and there'd clearly need to be a lot of work. OTOH, any glass made this way wouldn't be transparent...and you're right about it not being thin...it would need to be reasonably thick. My WAG would say it would need to be a foot or two thick, but I've done no calculations, so it wouldn't surprise me to be off by a factor of 5.

OTOH, it would be best to have two layers and run, say, paraffin (US meaning) in between them to use as a radiation shield. Water would also work, but paraffin has other advantages than just lots of hydrogen, it can also be easily doped to reveal any leaks, and it's a decent sealant.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Rei]

At surface level, half of your surface is insulative (the ground). Earth's surface also receives more sunlight than most asteroids.

It's a silly concept. Look at how big solar tower farms are to raise a building-sized receiver to only a couple hundred degrees, and remember that heat radiates away proportional to the fourth power.

  It also is sheer ignorance of what molten rock is like. News flash for these people: molten rock is not a blob of glass on a stick. It's not some easily workable yet viscous substance. It's irregular, heaves and fractures heavily and deeply, fractionalizes, cools highly unevenly (with lava tubes and dikes active much longer than other elements), kicks off trapped volatiles in an explosive manner, and a ton of other things you don't want at all, let alone in a structural object. People who promote this concept should visit at least one lava field before they do so (I live in Iceland, so I'm surrounded by lava). Basically, picture the most nightmare surface you could design for a car to drive over.... and that's basically what basaltic lava cools to. And it's a veritable sieve. The country is full of streams that appear and disappear because the water flows almost as easily through the highly fractured ground as it does on the surface. Is it even worth mentioning that you have to get it a lot hotter than glass, too? Asteroids, with their high nickel iron content, would need to be even hotter.

Maybe when you're talking megastructures might this be realistic. Maybe. When you're talking about anything in the even remotely near future, it doesn't even resemble reality. I totally agree with your statement that it's not a "good way to get started" - to say the least.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[DanielRavenNest]

> Isn't your home a lava gas home made with mirrors?

My house is brick on the outside, and making brick involves heating it to where it starts to melt. Historically that's been done with a furnace, but there is no fundamental reason it can't be done with concentrated sunlight.

As a practical matter, the Sun doesn't always shine on Earth, but it does in space. The heating cycle for bricks takes longer than a day, so using sunlight is complicated.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[cjameshuff]

Basalt fiber (more or less "mystery glass" in fiber form) turns out to have surprisingly good mechanical properties, and a composite hull would be much tougher than a blown bubble, plus you would have more flexibility in the shapes achievable. Additional layers of basalt fiber fabric and "sandbags" filled with waste rock wrapped around the outside could provide radiation and micrometeorite shielding and thermal mass. Nothing you'd want to haul around the solar system, but for setting up habitable volume near an asteroid, you'd just need to import some spinning/weaving machinery and resin and a pile of silicate-rich rock.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Rei]

You're not talking about glass if you're talking about melting meteorites. You're talking about a high-iron basalt. Slowly cooled basalt is known as columnar basalt. It has gigantic planar faults in it. Not to mention the effects of volatiles. Or differentiation. Or the effects of uneven cooling (which is why lava tubes form). And on and on and on.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[crunchygranola]

Use big mirrors

Only in science fiction would "giant mirrors" be available for a purpose like this, but not a ready built habitat.

Bingo! Give the (anonymous) man a cigar.

Much of what gets posted here when it comes to space exploration are just science fiction plot gimmicks having little bearing on reality.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Rei]

My house is brick on the outside, and making brick involves heating it to where it starts to melt.

Morbo Voice: "BRICK DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!"

Sintering does not involve melting. Sintering is where particles join by diffusion. It occurs at significantly below the melting points of the individual particles. For example, modern bricks are made at much hotter temperatures than ancient bricks, usually in the ballpark of 1000C. But the melting point of silica (largest constituent) is 1713C, while aluminum oxide (second largest constituent) melts at 2072C, iron oxide (third most) at ~1550C, and calcium oxide (fourth most) at 2613C.

Secondly, you use a giant furnace to make small bricks. So is your proposal to make a vastly larger space station in order to make a small one?

Third, while not all asteroids are fully sintered (aka, "rubble piles"), many are already that way. So what exactly is the point of what you're proposing?

The heating cycle for bricks takes longer than a day

Depends on the product. Low moisture bricks can take as little as 10 hours. And that's for the entire bake, which doesn't need to be done at once; there's multiple steps in the baking of a brick (base drying, dehydration, oxidation, and sintering)

And seriously, are we going to pretend that heat storage isn't a real thing, is that the plan?

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[HiThere]

I doubt that you would get the same effect in the absence of gravity, the absence of convective cooling, and with a pre-heating to fusion (i.e., just less than molten) starting from dust...which would allow outgassing.

OTOH, there might well be problems with different fractions having different melting points. So you might need to do a crude mass-spectrometer of the dust before starting. Anyway you do it it's going to be a lot of work, and I don't see anything wrong with the concept of working the stuff on site, or melting with mirrors.

That said, this is clearly an advanced approach only suitable for those already "skilled in the art" who know what needs to be done at what stage. I can easily imagine that it might be best to take the dustpile and feed it slowly through the focus of a large mirror so that the various fractions vaporise and are collected separately. Don't doubt the capabilities of a large mirror in space, even though they are quite limited on earth. The sun isn't weakened by passing through the atmosphere, and the size of the mirror isn't constrained by gravity. I'm not sure what is the best mirror design for this kind of thing, but I doubt that mirrored plastic would be reasonable. Plastic tends to degrade in space, and also when exposed to direct sunlight, etc. Aluminized glass sounds plausible, but then you've got to make the large mirror...not an easy job, even though it doesn't need to be accurate enough for a telescope. I suppose you could piece together a large number of small pieces with the appropriate curvatures.

Expecting me to know the right way to go about doing this is unreasonable, when nobody on the planet currently has the appropriate expertise...but I'm not convinced the basic approach is permanently wrong, just "wrong for now, because we don't have the right skills (and tools)".

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[HiThere]

The volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest). The faults are handled by annealing during the slow cooling. You don't get "differentiation" due to density differences because gravity isn't present. You would get differentiation due to chemical differences, different melting points, etc. and this would need to be handled. (I'm not thinking of this as a simple process, and I'm willing to consider that you might need to run the entire thing through a crude mass spectrometer and collect the fractions separately as an initial step. Please note the word "crude", you wouldn't get good separation, but you'd separate things by volatility and mass without excessive contamination. There's lots of difficulties that I can see in this process, but problems doesn't mean that you can't do it, it just means you need to solve the problems. I could easily see changing an asteroid into a habitat taking 50 years...and that may be an underestimate. But any other approach that doesn't involve lifting the mass off a planet looks more difficult. I suppose you could build the pieces on the moon and loft them with a catapult, but the moon doesn't have much in the way of volatiles, which you also need.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[legRoom]

The subject of the article, and my reply, was NASA, an organization which currently has no mandate or funding for establishing random asteroid bases in the middle of nowhere. They are, however, theoretically working towards a manned Mars - or maybe Moon - mission, which will require habitats light enough to economically move around.

Even if they were commissioned to build a habitat on some random asteroid, the proposed glass bubble doesn't actually help with that unless it can be made strong and airtight very easily (meaning, using less launch mass and research funding than just sending a hull from Earth). Better to just ship out a high-tech inflatable habitat or something, and maybe cover it with raw space rock/dust/ice for extra shielding from radiation and micro meteorites.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[legRoom]

... cool very slowly ... annealing ... foot or two thick ... best to have two layers and run, say, paraffin (US meaning) in between ... volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest)

All of that makes sense, and would probably help a ton - but, it also makes the whole process a lot more complex than the AC's proposal, and majorly ups the required equipment and technology level. It could be useful to a hypothetical far-future colonization project, but would certainly be far more trouble than it was worth for any of NASA's planned activities over the next few decades.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[legRoom]

Covering a habitat in space rocks as extra shielding is sensible, as long as you don't need to change your trajectory while taking the extra shielding with you.

However, I don't think NASA has any zero-g activities planned for the foreseeable future which meet that criteria, and even if they did it would probably be much cheaper and safer to just bring some empty bags with them, instead of trying to fabricate them out of asteroid glass in space. Making things during the mission only really makes sense if it's really easy and you need tons of the stuff (like water, oxygen, hydrogen, and maybe methane or ammonia).

Non-trivial space/extra-terrestrial manufacturing is unlikely to pay for itself unless and until mankind's activities grow beyond the level of the occasional tiny research mission. The contract discussed in the article is part of NASA's efforts to figure out how to send more tiny research missions beyond LEO, and has nothing to do (directly) with a hypothetical sci-fi colonization effort.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Rei]

The volatiles demonstrably do not "go off with pre-heating". That doesn't happen in volcanoes, and it's not going to happen in an asteroid.

Columnar basalt demonstrably does not "anneal during slow cooling". The columns form during slow cooling.

Differentiation is driven because not all components are readily compatible with each other in the newly cooled matrix, and is responsive to thermal gradients as much as gravity.

Spend some living in a volcanically active location like I do, then get back to me.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[HiThere]

I have lived on a volcanic island. It wasn't active at the time. But you aren't starting with a mass that's been gravitationally compacted into a solid, you're starting with something that's a weak, friable, mass of stuff. It's likely to be a pile of dust held together by ices. You will get the volatiles going off, and you'll probably get more of them as you bake the remaining solids to remove the ices adsorbed by the dust grains. Even the dust won't be the same as you find on Earth, because there won't be the massive quantities of organic matter, there won't be sedimentary grains, and there won't be anything metamorphic. I have my doubts that even igneous would be a reasonable categorization of the rocks that were the dust grains. It's probably more like aerogel without the aero, though with secondary inclusions of fluids.

OTOH, I'm speculating. We haven't actually dug up many comets. Some of them clearly do have large chunks of metal in them. And it's quite probable that the composition will be different at different distances from the sun. There is, however, good reason to suppose that they won't be much like rocks on earth at any distance. The mantel rocks are formed under enough pressure to create molecular forms that only form under pressure. The igneous rocks are formed at high temperature. Etc. In every case we can say "Asteroids don't appear to have had those conditions.". Their rocks probably form by accretion, sort of like sedimentary, only without the pressure, and without the water, and without the friction, and...in fact more the way aerogels are built, only without the air.

Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats

[Coren22]

One of the shielding materials I have heard suggested for Mars missions is water. Water is pretty common in space, so getting some to use for shielding material shouldn't be too hard. Supposably, water makes an excellent radiation shield; not as good as lead, but much easier to construct.

Deep spcae; duh...

[ls671]

"developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars."

Mars is deep space?

I guess poster hasn't watched deep space 9.

Re:Deep spcae; duh...

[Ihlosi]

Mars is deep space?

Well yes. At the current state of technology, anything beyond low Earth orbit is "deep space".

Re:Deep spcae; duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

"developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars."

Mars is deep space?

I guess poster hasn't watched deep space 9.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Re:Deep spcae; duh...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

With NASA's current lift capabilities, LEO is "deep space". Not blaming them, blaming Congress.

Re:Deep spcae; duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes the real world, where we burn up a majority of our resources in pointless wars (whos imaginary sky fairy is better, minor/imagined slights, war profiteering, etc), showing off (mansions, hand stitched dead animal carcass car upholstery, diamond encrusted phone cases, etc) and other vagaries. If we had handled our resources a little more wisely over the past hundred years (I don't even want to think about the past 1000 years) we would probably have solved most of our major societal problems, long since built colonies on the Moon/Mars and were beginning to make plans to go much further.

Re:Deep spcae; duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has lift capabilities but they are not using them to provide a delivery service to the ISS. They use the existing capabilities for putting military and other government related assets in orbit. Not to mention the X-37B which has been actively conducting long term orbital missions.

It's not the purpose of the government to run long term space operations. The governments job was spending trillions of dollars creating the technology that the private sector can build upon.

I expect space exploration and the related technologies will be well funded by the government. The US will not just sit around and watch the Chinese plant their flag on the moon. Increased NASA funding will skyrocket and they could also expect co-funding from the bottomless military budgets.

Re: Habitats should be free from the act in this h

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it isn't even a haiku.
* It should be 5-7-5 mora (usually translated as syllable but that's not quite right). "Man's" and "plugged" both have more mora than syllables.
* It should have a theme of change. This is just a statement of a single fact.
* In Japanese, they should contain a kanji for one of the seasons. Not really possible to do in English, but there's clearly nothing seasonal about sodomy.
* There's no emotional content either. What does the man feel about being "a faggot"?

All told, this haiku gets an F, must try harder. For example:

On mountain lustful,
Two men briefly entwined,
I wish I could quit.

Steve Jobs already did it.

[frnic]

They could have saved their money, as usual Steve JObs was ahead of his time and created NEXT Step years ago.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[unixisc]

You beat me to it. Reading about 'NEXTStep' - particularly w/ that unique CAPITALization - just screamed NEXT workstations to me. I know the company no longer exists and Apple doesn't seem to care about the brand or trademark, but there is no way I can read this and not think about those beautiful, sleek, black workstations, and wonder what they might have been w/ a PA-RISC or SPARC as opposed to a 68K Mot CPU

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[WheezyJoe]

It was pretty good with a 64040 (NeXTstation Turbo), I mean snappy, even in color. Always been critical of the performance of OS X when I remember that a 68030 with 16MB RAM did a decent job with NeXTStep, and a 68040 with 32MB RAM was damn whippy.

Nonetheless, NeXTStep 3.3 did run on PA-RISC and SPARC, and successor OpenStep continued to support SPARC (but PA-RISC was dropped for some reason). BTW, you mentioned capitalization? It's NeXTStep (the "e" is a little "e", but the "step" might be anything).

I used Jobs' sleek black NeXT computers for years, and they were a joy to work and program on. For users, they offered all the stability and multi-tasking capability of Unix, but with a decent, UI and a fantastic free development environment, back when NT was in its infancy, the best Unix had was Motif (ick), and Windows 3.1 couldn't really handle things like real-time feeds or database servers or really large dynamic spreadsheets, or even large-screen displays. I truly thought NeXT was the future at the time, but Jobs couldn't crank them out fast or cheap enough, and rumors of NT encouraged people to just sit tight until Bill would make the world safe for cheap Intel PC's.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[unixisc]

Thank you for those memories. The NeXT workstations was where I could see the power of UNIX by being able to navigate their filesystem from their file browser. And being able to click and run anything made things so smooth. Yeah, I know that NeXTstep was ported to the PA-RISC and SPARC, but it wasn't the OS of choice that shipped w/ those. I'd have liked it had NeXT themselves based their workstations on one of those.

Also, one of the reasons that NT had promise at the time was not cheap Intel PCs, since Intel at the time was falling behind the rest in performance (and hence, the alliance w/ HP over the Itanium). The reason that NT had promise was that it was ported to the DEC Alpha and MIPS. Too bad that there was never any follow-up w/ standard applications - imagine an Alphastation running Windows 7!!!

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[Applehu Akbar]

"... and a fantastic free development environment, back when NT was in its infancy..."

And today, OS X includes an even better free development environment.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[Anonymous Coward]

> imagine an Alphastation running Windows 7!!!
imagine a beowulf cluster of those !

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[Geoffrey.landis]

imagine a beowulf cluster of those !

The nineties called. They wanted their in-joke back.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

Back in the 90's UIC's MS/CS department had a computer lab with workstations running NeXTStep. The lab had mostly Intel-based pizza-boxes, but later on they purchased some HP-PA machines (models 715 and 815 IIRC). Some of the professors had a NeXTstation or NeXTcube (some with the NeXTdimension board) in their office. I really got a kick out of the magneto-optical drives.

I worked as an admin in the lab for a time and compiled a lot of open source code on those machines. GNU's autotools weren't used by a lot of projects, so I had to fix a lot of compile-time issues with header files and datatype names. Looking back, that was a pretty good learning experience for a newbie.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[WheezyJoe]

Agreed. SPARC + NeXTStep (with productivity apps like Lotus and WriteNow!) Alpha + Windows 7 (with Word, Excel). But could those machine have ever been made cheap?

The (evil) genius of NT and i386 was that i386 was commodity hardware, whereas Sun and HP and DEC and even Apple wanted (and deserved) a premium for the effort they spent on developing their platforms. I can't imagine sourcing a truckload of Alphastations for around $2500 apiece, including monitor and CD-ROM and 10-base-T network interface, but Computer Shopper was packed with deals from Packard Bell, etc. that delivered just that. NT shoe-horned a (just) decent, protected-mode OS into cheap '486 trash, and Gateway 2000 cranked them out by the thousands in wacky cow-pattern boxes. I miss my SPARCstation bad, but I never could have afforded one, much less got one for my parents.

An older programmer I worked with on the Street told me "you've got to be a whore" to make it as a developer. That was his reason for committing to Win32 back when Unix-based gear was still the clear choice for mission-critical applications. Fuck him, but he was right. Damn, this can be a weird world.

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[unixisc]

While DEC did not make cheap Alphastations, there were other companies that made valiant attempts to make NT workstations from either Alpha or MIPS. Companies like DeskStation, NeTpower, Carrera, Aspen, Microway, et al.

What made the computers expensive was not the CPUs themselves, but the supporting chipsets. The ones made around Suns or HPs were high end so as to not be a bottleneck in terms of computing. The Alphas started off somewhat proprietary w/ the Turbochannel buses, but once they switched to PCI, NT ran on them just fine. I believe that DEC did make some workstations that were CPU neutral, and where Pentiums and Alphas could be interchanged. But no, they weren't as cheap as they needed to be.

On Sun's side of things, they had some low end workstations that could have done wonders running NeXTstep

Re:Steve Jobs already did it.

[WheezyJoe]

On Sun's side of things, they had some low end workstations that could have done wonders running NeXTstep

Like this one (SPARCstation ELC). This one was relatively affordable, too.

Come to think of it, there was a time when Apple and Sun could have joined up. Then maybe we would have had cheap Sparcs running a NeXTstep variant atop a Solaris kernel, with a classic-Mac compatibility layer? An OS X that never happened.

Re: Habitats should be free from the act in this h

[dreamchaser]

There is also no seasonal reference, which is a component of traditional Haiku. For a 'Haiku lover' it was quite terrible.

The Haiku Lover
Like a fetid Summer wind
Repels us with rotten verse

Re:Habitats should be free from the act in this ha

[Ol Olsoc]

Do you realize that you are about the only person that even cares?

You no longer have to project. May your soul find peace.

This is awesome!

[backwardsposter]

Sorry, not much else to say about this, except awesome.

Re:This is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it awesome?

Re:This is awesome!

[tomhath]

They get all the feel good publicity without the need to actually deliver anything. Plus the government project project managers on the projects will have jobs waiting for them when they retire.

Too many companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Russia has its space station group, China is working on one, and the EU has had proposals to turn the ATV into a space station.... And NASA hands the money out to 6 different American groups. Me thinks NASA needs better management.

Pizza-box or Cube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the habs going to have pizza-box or cube workstations to run the NeXTSTEP operating system?

Re:Pizza-box or Cube?

[WheezyJoe]

It was called a slab, my friend. Pizza-boxes were SPARCstations.

Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[WheezyJoe]

Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease. Mars could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.

Re:Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you get to Mars it's simple to avoid radiation, live in a cave.

Re:Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[painandgreed]

Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease. Mars could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.

There are lots of deal breakers. Radiation is just one of them. Another is loss of atmosphere. Spaceships leak. The ISS has to get constant resupply of gas because the atmosphere is constantly leaking out into space. They could take more with them as supplies and no doubt will, but that just makes the entire thing heavier and harder to get there. There will have to be some significant work on seals and keeping atmosphere from escaping over the periods of time a Mars mission will take (at least 22 months) before they will be able to go. The process of building something capable of carrying at least four people to Mars will also probably need some improvements and then comes the question of moving it out of orbit and on it's way to Mars which will require some more engineering advances as it's not something we've ever done before. At least we hopefully have the living in zero-G thing worked out with study on various space stations. Still, the ISS is the most expensive human project ever, and a Mars trip will be looking at building an even higher tech one of those and then moving it out of orbit to Mats where there will be landers and then return to the station and Earth. There will be countless deal breakers out there and nobody is even really considering putting forth the money to get them done any time soon.

Re:Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[Anonymous Coward]

That article about the study indicating increased heart disease among astronauts was done with a total of 7 INDIVIDUALS. That is way too small to confirm anything.

Re:Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[Rei]

Right, because when a team meets to decide a low-risk landing site, they're all going to collectively sit down and decide, "Let's navigate a habitat down this gaping hole onto who-knows-what kind of bottom and hope we don't induce a collapse in the process, then have our crew members climbing in and out all day."

When it comes to space, the KISS principle applies way more in reality than in sci-fi. You build things here on earth. You only even do seemingly simple in-space activities like connecting premade modules together when it's absolutely necessary. It's cheaper and more reliable to do build on Earth and pay extra in launch costs than to engineer some sort of exotic assembly process in some offworld location to the point where you can trust it (with a million things that can go wrong, you really have to be confident about each one, otherwise you're statistically guaranteeing yourself failure). Heck, even the things one might see as "trivial" in-situ resource extractions - say, ice mining for hydrogen production - are looked at with a wary eye. Many mission designs just simply call for bring the hydrogen from Earth (getting oxygen is simpler, however - solid-oxide fuel cells like MOXIE are considered relatively reliable, and Mars's atmosphere a relatively consistent/trustworthy feedstock; Mars 2020 will be testing it in-situ for the first time).

Re:Radiation is the Deal-Breaker

[Rei]

The 7 individuals led to a mouse study, which was statistically significant.

Of course, mouse studies don't always apply to humans. But you have suggestive evidence on humans, and statistically significant evidence on mice. That's not something to ignore.

Per team breakdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I'm missing something the article seems oddly vacant on who was awarded what. Though if past endeavors are of any indication Lockheed/Orbital received a significant majority of the money even though their final capabilities will most likely be less than the runners up (Bigelow followed by Sierra Nevada). Not I suppose that I can blame NASA for playing the politics game, its probably the only thing that saved both the COTS and CCDEV programs from getting budget axed. But eventually we need to have a level playing field for contractors bidding for spaceflight contracts that rewards based on merit, not on who has the right defense/political connections.

Re:Per team breakdown?

[dpilot]

Ironically, Bigelow may now be the party with the most demonstration applicable to the contract, with three test articles on-orbit. (BEAM plus I believe they've separately orbited two others.)

More money

[Anonymous Coward]

I bid on a contract to set up a network for a small (20 person) office. I didn't win, but the person who did paid me to do all the work for twice the money of my bid.

Re:More money

[Anonymous Coward]

If the other person has a history of delivering satisfactory goods or services (similar to those being procured), they will generally be considered "qualified" when they bid on the project.

Without a history or a solid project plan, you will likely be weeded out.

Look at the winners' proposals to see what they offered, how they justified their costs, and how they demonstrated their ability to perform the work. Winning bids and the accompanying details are typically available upon request.

Government contracts tend to favor incumbents to some extent, but you would be surprised how many substandard proposals are made.

Re:More money

[Anonymous Coward]

the person who did paid me to do all the work for twice the money of my bid

Bids that are way low are usually tossed out. The government assumes you didn't understand the requirements and won't be able to do the work.

prior questions

[micahraleigh]

1) Who wants to live in deep space?

2) What is the commercial value of anything in deep space that can't be secured in a less expensive place (e.g. earth)?

3) Why am I paying for this out of my taxes when we're letting ISIS stomp on us every 2 weeks?

You want NASA to save? Here's how

[Anonymous Coward]

humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth." Sounds like some of the homeless *I* know.

Re: Habitats should be free from the act in this h

[Anonymous Coward]

I regret that I have but one upmod to give to this post.

Or none. I really have none. But it's the thought that counts.

Habits for deep space?

[blackanvil]

I have to admit, I misread the title as "Habits" instead of "Habitats," which immediately made me wonder what those habits would be. Close the airlock behind you so the next person can get through seems obvious, as does being aware of the location of the nearest radiation shelters in the habitat in case of solar storms, and getting enough exercise to to avoid the dreaded bone and muscle loss. But habitats are cool too.

Re:Habits for deep space?

[Rei]

I have to admit, I misread the title as "Habits" instead of "Habitats," which immediately made me wonder what those habits would be.

Just good old-fashioned Space Nuns, of course.

Bigelow Name

[Anonymous Coward]

I always want to do something funny with the Bigelow name. Big-e-Habitat? Big-e-Module? Big-e-Station??

It never works. Sweet-N-Low, now that name works.

Squirrel!

Space Station -- Deep Space Habitat timeline

[DanielRavenNest]

This sounds like the Space Station Phase B (preliminary design) contracts we worked on back in 1986-1987. We built some prototype modules back then too. Then it took a decade, from '88 to '98, to get to first hardware launch. Based on that history, look for first Deep Space Habitat launch in 2028.

Bad Long-Term Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because everyone so badly wants to live in caves that we build all our houses and workplaces in them. The sun causes our skin to burn and crucifixes (not to mention garlic) drives us vampires away.

Caves are fine for an expedition of maybe a year or less, and when dealing with 'explorer' type astronauts. Go much outside those parameters and you are going to have problems. The early Mars explorers are still going to have to spend a lot of time above ground and, while that addresses the psychological issues of being cooped up and no sunlight, causes them lots of radiation exposure.

Why not $130 million (2x)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you could also live in the core of the Earth?

Stupid human tricks.

Re: Habitats should be free from the act in this h

[Falos]

I've always been under the impression the lines are somewhat standalone. Particularly the last one, I think I was taught it's supposed to be reflective of the earlier, a remark or resulting thought or a hindsight's observation.

My expectations are lower than that. Mostly I shit on the ones that are just a big sentence that simply hit the enter key after five and seven. You and daughter post are fine.

Event Horizon

[DarthVain]

In addition to material science and structural factors, you might want to re-think the whole "transparent" structure idea. Likely in an environment with little or no atmosphere you would be constantly staring out into the depths of vastness of space that wants to kill you every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day...

So unless your want your habitat to resemble something out of Event Horizon you'd probably be better with opaque walls and video screens decorated with trees, grass, sunshine. sky. and whatnot.