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NanoRacks Plans To Turn Used Rocket Fuel Tanks Into Space Habitats (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via IEEE Spectrum: A couple of weeks ago NASA announced it 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. One of the six companies, called NanoRacks, is attempting to take empty fuel tanks from the upper stages of rockets and turn them into space habitats on-orbit. IEEE Spectrum reports: "A rocket like the the Atlas V, which can deliver payloads of nearly 19,000 kg to low Earth orbit, consists of three primary pieces: on the bottom, you've got the first stage booster, which consists of a huge engine and some big tanks holding kerosene fuel and oxidizer. Above that, there's the second stage, which consists of one or two smaller engines, a big tank for storing liquid hydrogen fuel, and a smaller tank for oxidizer. The payload, which is what all of the fuss is about, sits on top. The first stage launches the rocket off of the pad and continues firing for about four minutes. Meanwhile, the second stage fires up its own engine (or engines) to boost the payload the rest of the way into orbit. On the Atlas V, the second stage is called Centaur. Once Centaur gets its payload where it needs to go, it separates, and then suicides down into Earth's atmosphere. Getting a payload into space is so expensive because you have to build up this huge and complicated rocket, with engines and guidance systems and fuel tanks and stuff, and then you basically use it for like 15 minutes and throw it all away. But what about the second stage? You've got a whole bunch of hardware that made it to orbit, and when getting stuff to orbit costs something like $2,500 per kilogram, you then tell it to go it burn itself up in the atmosphere, because otherwise it's just useless space junk." NanoRacks thinks this is wasteful, so they want to turn these tanks into deep space habitats. IEEE notes that the hydrogen fuel tank on a Centaur upper stage has a diameter of over 4 meters, and an interior volume of 54 cubic meters, while the inflatable BEAM module that arrived at the ISS earlier this year has an interior volume of 16 cubic meters. For more details, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Jeff Manber, CEO of NanoRacks, and Mike Johnson, NanoRacks' Chief Designer. You can read their responses here.
I just want to be sure this isn't an advertorial for yet another Kickstarter.
#DeleteChrome
I don't understand how this can possibly be cost effective. Can anyone explain?
I guess tinytits.com must have already been taken. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
For some reason, when I was reading the summary, I kept reading it as "Saturn V" and I was like "since when is anyone building those anymore?"
As I recall the inflatable module has a multilayer lining to protect from radiation and micro meteors and other stuff. I don't recall fuel tanks having the same concerns. Also the inflatable module used for comparison is a prototype and full size inflatable modules will be substantially larger.
All in all I don't see how a second stage tank will compete.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The original US space station Skylab, was made from a rocket fuel tank.
Too bad it's too late for them to be able to use the Space Shuttle external tanks.
There were around 135 launches (so I guess the number of tanks that made it almost to orbit would be 134). Of course many (most?) of these missions were not in the correct orbital plane for use as space habitats (I guess they would not be easily reachable by subsequent manned flights). Still when one considers the sheer volume (about 2 million liters!) you'd think they'd be very useful. Also because they didn't have much heavy external hardware (like engines) they'd be easier to move around and keep in orbit.
What could they have been used for? I'm not sure but a whole bunch of interesting applications come to mind. If they could hold a full atmosphere's worth of pressure they'd make huge living spaces. If only a low pressure environment could be maintained, perhaps plants could survive in a mostly CO2 atmosphere; with a slow rotation about the long axis and a central light column running down the length of it, it could be a huge hydroponic garden for waste recycling and food. If they turned out to be pretty durable then perhaps propellent storage or even reuse as fuel tanks for interplanetary expeditions could be envisioned. Since they are light, perhaps they could be sent, empty, to a passing comet to refill with water and then sent back to earth orbit using some of the collected mass as fuel. If nothing else, they could have been cut up and used as raw materials for use in providing shielding against micrometeorites.
Anyway, there were well over a hundred of these giant things that, with just a little more delta-V (and admittedly, long term boosting to counteract atmospheric drag) could have been a valuable orbital resource. I guess it wasn't done because some infrastructure wasn't available (cheap orbital "tugs" perhaps using ion drives for low fuel consumption) and the vision and political will wasn't there. Too bad because this could've been like Skylab but hundredfold.
There's lots of research demonstrating that long periods of time spent in space cause serious health issues. Absent simulating gravity, such as with a rotating donut-shaped habitat, it is unhealthy for humans to be in space for any significant length of time. Used rocket fuel tanks can't really be used for simulating gravity, so this isn't viable.
i have new video about walktrough and tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhEgy0IG6_g
The concept of a Wet workshop (reuse an upper stage as a habitat) was first proposed by Wernher von Braun in the early 1960s.
From the interview: "The reason that Skylab wasn't build like this is kind of a strange story: [NASA] had fewer Saturn IBs than they had Saturn Vs, so von Braun just decided to use a Saturn V and fly up a "dry" lab, with all of the equipment aboard it already."
Um, not quite. When a 'spare' Saturn V became available (because a lunar mission was cancelled), they swapped from a IB 'wet' lab to a V 'dry' lab because the 'wet' labs were very expensive for their very low capability. The expense came from needing to have considerable amounts of structure and infrastructure designed to survive inside the cryogenic conditions inside the tank, from redesigning the tanks to serve a dual role, and then re-certifying the whole deal for flight. The low capability came from the requirement that everything that couldn't survive a bath in deep cryogens having to be manhandled into place via the very narrow docking hatch. While a dry lab was more expensive than a wet one - the leap in capability was far greater than the leap in cost.
That's also why NASA built their ISS modules with the large CBM hatches - manhandling large amount of stuff through tiny hatches (like those the Ixion will use) simply isn't very efficient. (And that's without considering the headaches that splitting all your equipment down into tiny chunks brings. Not just handling - but installation and integration too.) All of the ISS cargo craft that NASA is responsible for uses CBM, as does the Japanese HTV.
"In the commercial sector, it's getting interesting, because people are taking more risks. Not unnecessary risks, but acceptable risks to reduce costs."
Moving your man hours (outfitting the module) from expensive ones on the ground to hellishly expensive ones on orbit is not a recipe for cutting costs. Especially since you still have to pay for the launch of the module (Centaur) *and* the launch of the stuff to go inside it. (You can't piggyback because no Centaurs are headed anywhere near the ISS.) Even in lower inclination orbits, the mission module, the rendezvous systems, and outfitting the Centaur to survive years on orbit are all going to cost money and cut into it's payload - which will make piggybacking unattractive to Centaur's usual customers.
"We want to keep hardware costs as low as possible: it's not about building something on the ground that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Why do that when you have perfectly good hardware going to space, paid for already?"
You don't have perfectly good hardware going to space already. You have a vehicle designed for a completely different purpose and completely lacking the "stuff" customers will pay you for going to orbit.
Or, in short, nothing in the article or interview leaves me with a warm fuzzy that they've solved any of the well known problems with 'wet' systems.
This must be easy.
1) Construct the habitat/fuelcontainer here on earth.
2) Put a big plastic bag inside and fill the plastic bag with rocket fuel.
3) When in space, attach the habitat to ISS and rip out the plastic bag.
4) Open all windows for a while to remove any remaining smell of rocket fuel.
. . I've heard the story, on and off over the years, that Sen. William Proxmire stopped funding for NASA studies on taking the External Tank into orbit, and using it for the basis of a Station.
But I can't seem to find an actual reference, anybody seen one, or is this an Urban Legend of the Space Program ?
Poor people in India harvesting feces from the sewers have a better habitat than living in a fuel tank in free fall.
Give it up, Space Nutters. Space is a dead end fantasy.
"And they kept building and building, and never went back down the gravity well."
Time be time, man.
Just imagine how much we could accomplish with all that welfare money? (3 trillion a year).
is already there. I personally do not think it would be useful or cost-effective as a habitat.
The cost to purge, wire, insulate, reinforce, hatch installation, etc... may be too much - as well as the down-time for experiments.
However, it would be ideal to store non-critical things... like food, water, He, and N2, and O2...
Bigelow is way ahead of this thing...
Skylab came out of a set of proposals that included exactly this kind of "wet" (because formerly full of fuel) habitat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Story by David Brin, using Shuttle external tanks. Whaddya know, the whole story is on the web: http://www.davidbrin.com/tankf...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Isn't the contents of the tanks kind of nasty? Will opening the tanks to the vacuum of space be enough to evaporate it all out?
As long as we're sharing related SF, see also Michael F Flynn's novel "Firestar" and its three sequels. It's basically a series about a Space X-like company that wrapped up the year Space X was actually founded, and has the reuse of fuel tanks as habitats as a side note.
And in response to all the people saying that the cost of either modifying the tanks to server dual purposes or performing additional construction in space makes it infeasible you're probably right. If we were talking about a one time deal. However if we ever get to the point where we have enough people in space that we need to start doing construction work anyways the economics will seriously change, so it's not unreasonable to start looking into it now. And if nothing else just the materials alone might be well worth the small cost to boost the tanks a little higher, even if they end up just getting disassembled for parts and raw materials.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Something to bring down the cost of space habitats. I was going to move to space earlier this year, but I couldn't believe the cost of the habitats.
This was a minor plot in some scifi novel from the ~90's. Damned if i can remember the name though but they built a large station out of used space shuttle tanks.
Which they are now, orbiting junk, and a hazard as long as they drift along.
But recycling them offers an opportunity to raft a few together, build a new, viable habitat, and reduce the clutter.
Oh, and when do we send up the garbage scows to harvest the real junk and delitter the low orbits?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Why not use these as server farms? Solar power would be easy. Microwave comm link. No need to waste energy cooling it.
Come to space for the view, stay because you're a crispy critter forever stranded in a blown up fuel tank, drifting farther out into space, forever.
He had the idea of using a "wet workshop" for Skylab from a Saturn V stage (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab). Generally I think all plans to date are WAY TOO under-provisioned for such an undertaking. The human transport vehicle itself should be bigger. The landing site from Mars should be pre-provisioned with water, structures, power source, etc. There should be emergency way-stations on the way. The current plans are on too tight a budget.
Surely they could be used as storage tanks, instead of living spaces. I doubt they'd be rated, after the stresses of launch, for long-term habitation, but there's going to be ample need for the bulk storage of mass. One of the sad things that is done, is the jettison and burning of trash; perfectly good organics and mass that might be someday useful in orbit, when the technology is developed to make use of them. Then the containers themselves could be used as raw material for some hypothetical future process.
Whether it's worth the investment is another question entirely, though the existence of a tank full of vacuum-dried sewage co-orbiting the ISS might inspire some thinking about what to put it to use for.
The investment, unfortunately, would also have to include the cost of periodic reboostings, keeping it all fastened together, keeping it balanced along a thrust vector, and several other considerations. It could get very expensive to maintain that orbital junkyard as a future investment, which may or may not even pay off.
In my day, the girls with nano racks were undatable.
Have gnu, will travel.
Back in the late '80s there was talk about having the space shuttle hang on to the big external fuel tank until it got into orbit. The idea was the tank could be modified on the ground to have a docking port and basic necessities like basic ventilation ducts and electrical harness already installed. Since the shuttle almost never had anything near its max cargo load the added weight of the tank would not have been an issue for the shuttle to get into orbit. Sadly the idea never went anywhere.
After the US population is fully aware of where their money went, do spies think they will hide in space?
What I'd like to see is
Send up a hub.
Slot the used Centaurs into the hub as spokes
Connect the spokes on the outside rim
Spin 'er up as a rotating wheel space station.
You've always known you want one of these!
The thin walls of the Centaur won't provide any radiation shielding. Now if they were talking about using a Space Shuttle solid booster segment as the second stage, that would be different. The thick walls would provide the necessary shielding. Then all that is needed is solar cells, a cube sat for electronics, some inflatable walls, some cooling, attitude control equipment, 2 docking adapters and hatches, and bunks, or storage bins. I was going to propose this, mine not the version in the article, for the recent NASA project but a heart attack stopped that.
sda1950a
Who are you getting quotes from that are $2,500 per kilogram? No one I've ever heard of, that's about $1000 per lbs.