One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected
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The ISS is/was scheduled to be retired in 2024 (aka 3 years from now) but there are calls to keep it going. My fantasy would be to have SpaceX move it into the Lunar L1 Lagrange point which would keep it in use but it would have to deal with more cosmic rays, also station keeping would be an issue unless we could really get energized tether station keeping to work (lots of solar energy to provide power, but not a lot of mass to provide thrust, so tethers are energized conductors that push against the Earth's magnetic field)
Parking it in L4 or L5 could keep it for future generations but it would be even more of a challenge to go visit.
The ISS has no doubt been important and I remember how excited I was when it was being assembled. Is it really so historically significant it's worth the amount of effort you're describing?
However, while searching I found this search excerpt:
Which metals diffuse into other metals and how? | Naked ...
www.thenakedscientists.com › forum
Sodium and potassium metal (both *soft solids, like cold butter*) react
It's why aluminum airplanes are supposed to get inspected for cracks regularly, and why aluminum bicycle frames must be so uncomfortably rigid. If there's cyclic stress occurring, it's a question of when, not if they will crack.
If I had to guess it's from Carroll Smith's 80s-era Engineer to Win, it sounds like something he'd write.
My bet is the issue is most likely stresses due to vibrations under pressure and pressure changes. It is complex but also well known problem. As the astro/kosmonauts move about the station, resupply dock, pressure changes, etc. some parts are being subject to constantly changing stresses while already being stressed due to pressure.
It might also be possible that there are some additional thermal stresses but I think it is less likely these are source of the problem.
So you are saying it's degrading?
Mechanical stresses leading to failure at a particular point are certainly a form of degradation, but I believe they mean degradation in the sense where the entire body of the material is undergoing some change (like a plastic bottle fogging or such).
I think seeking clear descriptions is fine, treating it as a "gotcha" game is tedious and unnecessary.
I am not into mechanical science that much, I have always treated degradation as a kind of surface or volume phenomena where the material looses its properties due to temperature, radiation, age, chemical reaction, etc. For mechanical effects there are already very good terms like metal fatigue and stress induced cracking.
I agree but you can say the same thing in reverse. This is a public forums, you don't need to claim something isn't right because it doesn't fit the technical description.
The post said "is this materials decomposing or degrading".
While I may have not been precise about "degrading" part, we can assume the metal is definitely not "decomposing".
My remark is at the person claiming tit for tat about the tat instead of the tit.
Space launches are getting a lot cheaper, so moving the ISS to another orbit might not be such a big deal as it used to be. We don't really need to keep the ISS around forever, but on the other hand, losing it would in some ways be similar to the burning of Notre Dame in 2019 (I can't believe that was less than two years ago). It's mankind's first permanent foothold in space. In that sense, it's irreplaceable.
Let's say moving the ISS at the end of its usable lifespan costs a half billion dollars. That's like asking every U.S. taxpayer to pay about two dollars. Is it worth it? To me I think it's worth a lot more than two dollars, even if it unlikely that i'll ever actually be able to visit the ISS in my lifetime.
Mir?
I had briefly considered Skylab, but figured it didn't really count as "permanent". Wikipedia says it was up for 24 weeks.
Definitely sounds like it. They can't identify the leak on the inside so it doesn't sound like a micrometeoroid impact and they suspect a second leak that is so small they need a microscope to verify:
> "So far, we have found one place and suspect another, where as some kind of leak exists. We must bring a powerful microscope on a cargo spacecraft and use to examine this place. We are not totally certain so far," Solovyov said.
IANAMS but that screams microfractures. The Zvezda is made largely of an aluminum magnesium alloy [1] that has a fatigue limit so even small repetitive stress can cause it to eventually fail. I'm curious whether this is wear and tear from just being in space and getting irradiated or if its repetitive mechanical stresses like a small tidal force as it orbits the earth.
It can be as high as 50% max tensile strength for steel, but I use 30% as my working figure when rigging, and I regularly re-inspect and age-retire gear (at least use annualized color coded markings).
When I’ve rigged circus in the past I’ve taken to replacing aluminum gear I find with steel, especially if it’s going to be installed for a while.
That said, I climb on aluminum. I just age out my equipment. I’d hate for my last thought to be “huh... I guess aluminum really does degrade with repeated stress.”
When I commented to a bike designer/engineer that it was a strange failure, he said that it was intentional, at least on hardtail mountain bikes like mine. A bent frame is ruined but doesn't lead to a catastrophic loss of control. A detached wheel or twisted fork would be next to impossible to control to a stop.
He looked at my frame and explained that that the two bends were in exactly the place they'd been designed to be, just behind the last butting. It's an impressive bit of forethought.
My guess on road bikes with steel forks, though, is that it's a matter of aerodynamic performance calling for compactness to reduce frontal area, something that would be harder to do in aluminum, and for far less weight savings than the longer tubes on the frame.
There's always titanium... The only big drawback is the cost...
It does oxidize at high temperature, so you'll have to coat it with something. It's also fairly brittle, basically a strong ceramic (it caused us to loose Columbia during re-entry).
which is carbon-fiber in graphite, apparently, so the name is apt in that it's a composite of two different forms of carbon with different properties.
Other ways are to just infuse the porous matrix with more resin, before pyrolyzing again. Then loop a (few) dozen times.
As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Brittle materials are more temperature sensitive and can rapidly fail. Brittle fracture is no joke look for WWII Liberty ships split in two as an example. We didn't really understand why at that point in time.
The answer though is actually pretty simple and why you can't get a perfect material. The lattice structure of the molecules connected to each other can be soft (plastic) or hard (steel).
In the plastic example just take a milk jug and poor boiling water into it. Don't actually do this without protective gear (oven mit should be fine). The molecules holding everything together get excited from the energy (heat) move around and since they are not closely bonded end up in a different configuration. Your milk jug at this point does not look the same and is deformed.
In the hard example just boil the water you are using for the plastic test. The pot you used does not change because the molecules are tightly bonded.
It turns out the the tighter the molecules are bonded there is still a point where that bond will break. Hence the brittle fracture, which is every molecule mic dropping and going home at the same time.
While I could go down another rabbit hole to the atomic, subatomic, level of how those lattice structures work. I won't as I think this example gives you what you need.
Finally in this case we have a very old, by modern space technology, structure that is made of material that was most likely never expected to last this long. If you want a space ship to last you just have to make sure the engineers understand what "last" means. :)
I wonder if it's already implemented.
Yeah. It's called steel and it's too heavy to put in space in the quantities needed for a space station.
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a...
(NASA stands for Not A Standard Acronym, of course.)
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
My general experience with glues is I'll use bolts. I can't get superglue to stick anything together other than my fingers. My rear view mirror fell off again, the third time I glued it on with superglue.
[1] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/vhb-tapes-us/ [2] https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-double-sided-ta... [3] https://www.itapestore.com/3M-DualLock
I used some of this [0] in a last ditch effort to patch a small tear in a Miata canopy (rubber-coated canvas?). Everything else fell off. It's still happily holding, past 3x summers and winters.
[0] https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Scotch-1-88-in-x-35-yds-Tough...
The annoying thing is, glues work best when you use them in the exact situation (material, pressure, etc) they are designed for, but manufacturers are really vague about active ingredients or fillers, so you end up having to buy broad-spectrum glues that are not particularly good at anything.
When in doubt, I'm a firm believer in two part epoxy [0]. Fiberglass impregnated when necessary. Also stores easier!
And where water is involved (e.g. fiberglass shower tubs), marine epoxy like PC-11 [1]. Can attest it works fine as a multi-year shower patch.
[0] https://www.loctiteproducts.com/en/know-how/build-things/epo... [1] https://www.pcepoxy.com/products/permanent-repair/pc-11-past...
I was also suspicious of the special rearview mirror glue being special. For example, I have a VHS head cleaner tape that comes with magic head cleaner fluid, refills cost $$$$. One sniff told me what it was - alcohol. I use alcohol with it, and it works just great.
I also remember years ago you could buy special vinyl record cleaning fluid for $$$$. It's just vinyl. I use liquid dish detergent, which does a superb job. Doesn't hurt the vinyl one bit, and all the grease, dirt, hair, and who-knows-what-that-is is all gone. (I buy old records at the thrift store because I like the easy listening style from the 60s and 70s.)
Assuming the ISS is never going re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, how permanent a solution is tape? Presumably the fracture underneath will get worse with time.
Effectively the major issue is “larger”width/diameter cracks/holes create greater pressures that eventually exceed the ability of simple “tape” to suffice for a workable patch. This is all ignoring any NASA engineering manuals and limits, I’m talking entirely theoretical “how long can my duct tape keep me from suffocating” type of engineering, just to be clear.
What needs emphasis in the long term for more permanent structures in space is on the poorly explored topic of welded joint fatigue, with respect to joints that were welded in low earth orbit.
We have welded with several techniques in space before (the Soviets did it) but it basically stopped there and not much has gone into studies of the long term fatigue of the resulting welded joints. If we want permanent space stations we need to be able to “patch them up” in a way that we can rely on and at least have some idea what the lifespan will be. It’s ok if we have to re-weld pressure hull segments every decade or two but not if the large scale structural welds on a space station hull assembled in space only hold for a few years before they start leaking.
This is something I have to consciously remind myself of a lot when thinking about space technology. I have this reflex-like feeling that "the vacuum of space" must be a huge obstacle. But then one remembers that 1 atmosphere is the equivalent pressure of a water depth of 10 m. This always blows my mind. In some sense, humans do live naturally pretty close to one end of an absolute scale (pressure). Dealing with near-0 temperature is hard. Dealing with near-0 spatial distance is hard. Dealing with 0 pressure is actually not that hard in the grand scheme of things.
"Dear lord! That's over 150 atm of pressure!"
"How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"
"We'll, it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between 0 and 1."
There aren't that many Lagrange points, so we should probably avoid cluttering them with objects that don't need to be there.
Put it in a high orbit, and point a telescope at it every now and then to update our record of it's orbit. By the time we are ready to visit it, even if its orbit changed, its new orbit would not be any more inconvenient then where we left it.
I encourage everyone to get a sense for the sheer scale of this. Do it on your floor or walls. Try a scale of 1cm = 5000km or 1cm = 10,000km. Cut out little Earths and moons and map out geosynch, the lagrange points, etc.
Geosynchronous orbits are above the worst parts of the radiation belts, so maybe that's a good place for the ISS. Or even higher; it doesn't need to be geosynchronous. The main advantage of a low orbit is that it's easier to get to from Earth, but if you're just parking it long-term as a museum piece that doesn't matter as much.
I wouldn't expect Lagrange points to have much of a problem with clutter unless we decide to start parking enormous quantities of stuff there. Objects can spread out and orbit the points; as long as they're all going in about the same direction they should be able to avoid running into each other.
Thankfully, we do have SpaceX et. al. who really are making some big strides -- but how do we multiply & speed up that effort? ... sorry, I'm being selfish, but I really want to go to Mars.
I think it's pretty much politically impossible. The first big space push was mostly a political pissing match (i.e. not really driven by doing it for its own sake). It's pretty easy to come up with other major challenges that most people will consider more important that also aren't getting funding ... so private industry looks more likely to get some traction. States might get interested if/when those efforts start to get more interesting or threatening.
Mars in your lifetime is implausible, but not impossible I suppose.
Chinese paper on plant-based life support systems for extended crew stays. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.12.426282v1
And then next one will be too, only with China
My understanding is that the Defense Department was interested in human manned spy satellites liked the planned Manned Orbital Laboratory early on, but that automation progressed to the point where it was preferable.
I think that's one thing people miss when they talk about lack of progress in space. We use space, a lot. The thing is, in terms of things we actually want to do, automated vessels work a lot better than manned ones. People who are focused on manned space missions aren't focused on space, they're advocates for one particular tech stack that's extremely inefficient at doing the things we currently want to do in space.
It's also beneficial if you want to start space mining, really essential for that actually.
You can easily do it without having objects in orbit. You can simply launch a ballistic cloud of debris at suborbital speeds and kinetic energy of the targeted satellite will do the rest. Time to hit could be shorter for an orbital system, but not significantly so. This is why I consider the recent news about the Russian orbital satellite killer to be a cheap fearmongering.
And then it takes a big rocket to get them back out of orbit. Such a waste of effort.
- Moon moves across the sky very slowly (relative to stars) which means that your spy satellite would have about 30 days to cover full earth, and would be able to see only a part of Earth at any given moment (theoretically half, but lot of it would be from very bad angles) - Moon is in an ecliptic? orbit, so spying on anything close to the poles will be from an angle - this might not be bad in all cases but the lack of flexibility is a big thing - Putting any mass on the Moon requires much more delta V than putting something in orbit. If you can put a big telescope on Moon, you can put several in Earth orbit or put one much bigger one.
Having capability to stage on the Moon would be interesting, especially if fuel can be made on the moon. It would be easier on human bodies and you have access to lot of resources. If you can find water and decent metals, that's a pretty good spot to fuel your rockets.
Moon is in an inclined orbit, which is slightly elliptic. I assume this is what you meant by "ecliptic" (which refers to the orbital plane of the Earth around the Sun). The orbital inclination has the most significant implications to Earth surface visibility, but the Moon is far enough that almost half of Earth surface is visible at all times.
For Earth observation, satellites are better positioned than a lunar surface observatory.
The moon isn't a great place for an outpost or staging point for exploration. Launches and descents are expensive and spoil all the savings. Maybe if LH2/LOX could be manufactured on the moon very cheaply (from water ice), it could make sense to do refueling for exploration vehicles parked on a halo orbit near Lagrange points.
But orbital refueling of cryogenic propellants (especially hydrogen) or manufacturing them on the moon aren't viable in the near future.
There aren't a lot of good economic or exploration incentives to go to the moon, unfortunately. It only has scientific and prestige value. The long lunar night (14 earth days) makes it a poor location for a permanent outpost.
All of that said, I'm all for going to the moon with humans on board.
About the ecliptic, I was trying to say that any observatory on the moon would have issues observing polar regions because the Earth surface in polar regions would be at a low angle. I know some spy sats "look ahead" to get better detail resolution but they have ability to look from different angles as well. Moon would be a bad spot for that.
Rest of it I mostly agree. One thing up to debate is whether an outpost on the moon would be useful. If you can manufacture fuel on the Moon, it would be very useful. Another aspect is human health in zero G. Moon with low gravity may be enough to help with long term human stay.
That's Earth's axial tilt of ~23 deg + the inclination of the lunar orbit w.r.t. the ecliptic of ~5 deg.
This means that when the moon is at its northest (above southern Florida), it has a pretty good view over the north pole (but it's at quite an oblique angle of ~60 deg), and the south pole is not visible. About 14 days later it's the opposite.
But yeah, I agree with the conclusion that the Moon is not a good place for a Earth observation for a lot of reasons.
The milestones that get people existed are when men reach places hitherto unreached, but there is no practical purpose to risking the life of a man who needs far more complicated facilities to survive, other than bragging rights.
The I.S.S. was largely a political and not a scientific endeavor, and it's a shame it consumed so many resources, that could have gone to more serious scientific efforts.
The cost of the I.S.S. could have easily given mankind nuclear fusion, — the ability to power entire countries with a couple of litres of seawater. It's strange where priorities lie.
There's no proof of this because viable nuclear fusion has not yet been achieved. Humanity may never achieve this for all we know (though I sincerely hope we do).
Making a reasonable estimate when both started, nuclear fusion seems to be a smarter investment, for if it finally be there, the benefits are incalculable.
"The benefits" are currently very calculable, and direct economics of nuclear fusion is very negative. (The research benefit is unique though.)
For nuclear fusion to be of incalculable benefit to mankind, we need insanely small nuclear fusion that is energy-positive and sustainable in a simple way. "Insanely small" means smaller than Moon-sized, when we know that Jupiter-sized is too small/light in nature.
Sustained nuclear fusion for energy generation still faces daunting challenges.
We clearly have issues with underestimating the complexity of these engineering problems and overestimating the pace of technological progress. I'd also argue, albeit more contentiously, that we systematically underestimate the utility of a physical human presence at exploration sites, and the cognitive dissonance of our biases cause us to scale back our ambitions so we don't have to admit to the limitations of the remote-controlled approach.
Exclusively committing to remote-controlled exploration also avoids the thorny issues around deliberately putting explorers into harms way or even actual harm. I think Musk understands, knowingly or at least intuitively, that the debate is basically impossible to have; our culture isn't equipped for it. Necessity will drive us toward human space exploration. Safety will be to some extent needlessly neglected, and then there'll be vigorous finger pointing and "I told you so"s after the fact--after the sacrifices have been made and after the benefits have been secured for all. Basically the same pattern will play out as with any other area where prohibition or abstention is the official choice despite its patent unviability.
The limiting factor is much more mundane. Getting humans to collaborate selflessly on complex projects is difficult. Effective communication in large groups is a massive unsolved problem. That is what holds us back, not engineering complexity. Perhaps the true genius of SpaceX is using Mars to bring people together. Something the bean counters at Boeing never thought of!
This is only true if you were sampling the people trying to build them (which is mostly what the popular press did). Really there wasn't anything like consensus, but there was a lot of optimism.
Do you say that to mean 'anyone living's lifetime', or on the assumption that GP was alive for the 'moon landing 51.5 years ago' mentioned?
See: FDR New Deal / The Green New Deal
It's also the framework I think of when I use my own phrase 'New New Deal', as in a jobs program that focuses on building fresh public infrastructure (not-broken window jobs).
https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-opt...
(similar to, but not the same as, zero attenuation fiber optic from the fictional book Artemis by Andy Weir) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_(novel)
It ain't The Martian, but if you like the hard sci-fi of The Martian, Artemis is more of that (except with a touristy moon base).
"Using estimates for the theoretical loss limit of ZBLAN glass, a 2,000-km length of ZBLAN fiber could have the same optical loss as 10 km of silica fiber, which would be an extraordinary performance gain."
https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zb...
"Fluoride fibers inherently provide naturally a much wider bandwidth than silica with up to 100x usable number of data channels, <2 petabytes per second of data with no amplification for 1,000km or more and no need to carry power for said amplification lines. By comparison, current undersea cables use one repeater for amplification every 100-150km, at a cost of ~$1M each."
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
There's a lot up there but it's still not that big and there's limited space for new arrivals. SpaceX largely exists because of the government contracts to launch to the ISS and for various NRO launches there's not enough public need for launches alone to sustain a rocket industry is what I mean. Especially for human launches, the only reason to have a human rated orbital capsule is to service the ISS.
Luckily we have SpaceX.
If you want to have an industry of people who make X, then there need to be people employed making X, every year, for decades. And at more than one company, so that it isn't too fragile a career path. When X is single-use rockets there is the advantage that after one flight you have to re-build, whereas when X is tanks (or other long-lasting hardware) you have to choose to throw the old ones away.
The taxes raised to pay for SLS actually are screwing over the rocket industry because companies actually getting things accomplished have to compete for the highly trained engineers and scientists being wasted on SLS. There's no amount of "trickle down theory" that makes the SLS a net gain for society.
The space industry is one of the major resource sinks that prevent runaway economic growth that would destroy civilization as we know it: the so-called "economic supernova".
The natural result of scientific progress is a kind of economic singularity beyond which is entirely unknown territory. What happens to our civilization when the primary underpinnings are obviated by technology? No one knows.
So, NASA, FAANG, the Financial Industry, most of the lawyers, accountants, and bureaucrats, etc. are just make-work jobs to occupy productive people to keep them from inadvertently causing the apocalypse.
(FWIW Bucky Fuller calculated that the inflection point to runaway wealth was in the mid-1970's. We're fifty years over due for the end of history.)
Also, the free market would never have built a design like the space shuttle. Pushing very heavy wings and landing gear into space doesn't make sense and never did.
Musk figured out a far better way to make a reusable rocket. All it needs is a bit of extra fuel that is burned at the last second.
(Playing the Lunar Lander game in college, I soon realized that the minimum fuel burn to land it was to fall ballistically and go to full power as late as possible, hitting 0 fps just as one touched down.)
Where the 2nd space shuttle was the fuel tank, and it lands somewhere down range, and is then transported back to the launch center by barge.
I think it might be time to accept that in these cases its pretty often not the inherent efficiency of the free market - which can often be less efficient than alternatives - but the ineptitude of the US government and it's agencies as far as doing things efficiently.
There are US politicians and functionaries that admitted publicly that they made the government less efficient for ideological reasons to make the free market look better.
That doesn't mean it was profitable. The price could have been set for political reasons. Or it could have been set by the marginal cost of the launch, ignoring entirely the development cost that was written off when the USSR collapsed. Or it could have been enough to simply pay for the weight of the astronaut in a rocket that was going up anyway, like a hotel will sell rooms at a deep discount just to not lose as much money if it cannot otherwise. If communism produces goods and services cheaper than the free market, we'd be awash in Soviet goods.
The US government produces goods and services at "cheap" prices, but the losses are made up for by the taxpayer.
> which can often be less efficient than alternatives
I'd like to see a case of that.
Which we aren't, because they're undercut by Chinese goods...
Well, perhaps I should have tried living in those fantasy Soviet Unions some people on the internet love so much. Those must have been magnificent states!
That said, it is certain that the soviet system was suboptimal in a great many ways.
But, crucially to the fact at hands, 1960s' USSR produced better rockets to send people to the ISS, at a lower cost, than 2021's USA, so there something beyond the free market in this particular case.
Also, Falcon 9 wasn't the product of a government contract.
Source: another anecdotal evidence, my youth lived under the horror of communism.
I just told my youngest kid this the other day:
When I was his age (~25 yrs ago), my dad told me with a bit of a sad look on his face, "I hope we return to the moon within your lifetime." At the time, I kind of laughed because, hey, we're sending people to the moon CONSTANTLY. It took me a minute to realize that I was sorely mistaken and that we haven't sent a human to the moon at ALL in my lifetime. I was taken aback.
All this history about Neil Armstrong and the Apollo missions and the space shuttles -- we even got to see from Cocoa Beach a shuttle launch on a family vacation. So much of it even from MY DAD's youth, him telling us about when he got to hear the famous "One small step for [a] man" live from his Scout Jamboree trip. All of that, and we haven't actually been to the moon in decades? It totally blew my mind.
I think before that moment, I must have assumed that it was Real Soon Now before we'd have a permanent base with people living and even being born. And to learn that we sort of gave up...
It's not unlike when I was six and remembered reading about fully autonomous cars that were coming Real Soon Now, too. Thirty+ years later and that reality actually seems farther away than I had imagined despite the actual progress we've made.
Said another way, such a mission could probably be completed with one or two falcon heavy launches. That's basically equivalent to 3-6 falcon 9's worth of fuel, and a falcon 9's fuel cost is something like $200k. So, $600k-$1200k in fuel.
A spaceship system actually suitable for going to Mars would probably use cheaper fuel than falcon heavy. By the time it's actually built, though, inflation and politics will have made the fuel expensive again. So my best guess is a cool $1million!
>The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth's surface.
>The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth's surface.
With supersonic retro propulsion on a rocket that can be reused.
How do you then have enough fuel to leave?
You don’t, so you need to make the fuel with robots landed on one-way missions first. Luckily there are plenty of raw materials on Mars (in the atmosphere, soil and water deposits).
It’s very hard but it’s certainly doable if you can do the first part.
Space is making progress at incredible rates right now. It's moving faster than it ever has in history. So I'm not sure what the issue is.
http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html
Men on the moon was just a gimmick. I'm pretty excited by all the stuff we keep sending to Mars. There's another rover landing there in just a few weeks' time.
It's not just NASA and SpaceX. We've recently seen Israel go to the Moon, Europe and India go to Mars, Japan return samples from an asteroid, and China return samples from the Moon. Who knows what one of them will do next. The only value I see in having people on the Moon or Mars is in working towards a permanent colony that could eventually become self-sufficient. Anything less and what's the point? We have robots to do almost all the stuff humans used to be needed for.
"If your planet has one or more broken down space stations on its lawn, you might be a redneck colony." (Sorry.)
If you mow the lawn, and find a buick (a car)... you might be a red neck.
If your TV sits on top of your old TV... you might be a redneck.
So you'd lose a lot of research capability.
The first wonder of the space: The ISS.
(The book also features the coolest design for a radiator I've ever seen anywhere.)
--
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24611668-saturn-run
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[0] https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Air_leak_rate_at_Russias_...
American components, Russian components, all made in Taiwan!
But Scotchweld is as easy to use as JB Weld and also very cheap.
Source: Am an spacecraft AIT engineer responsible for much gluing
I'm no astronaut but I wouldn't be sleeping with crack in my hull, leaking air.
If an aluminum bycicle frame cracks like that, it is useful to drill holes at the end of the cracks, to stop the cracks from progressing.
I had to check my collection of PCB drill bits when I was reading it, and yes, I confirm that I'm a proud owner of a 0.2 mm drill at home, it was the smallest one in the box ;-)
https://www.uniontool.co.jp/assets/pdf/catalog/drill_router2...
What sort of adhesives, covering materials, chemicals and application stuff do they have on hand for quick "we need to stop air escaping through this hole NOW" type situations?
Obviously the problem is sort of reversed, if you have a leaky zodiac you're patching it from the outside and trying to stop air escaping into the atmosphere. If you have a leaky ISS module you're inside it, and applying some sort of quick-setting malleable chemical goop into a hole that's sucking your air outwards...
Instantaneously, with a 1mmHg/min leak I think you'd lose roughly 1.5kg or a little over a cubic meter's worth in the first minute, given the 915.6 m^3 pressurized volume and a mass of ~1.3kg/m^3 for air at sea level (760mmHg, which is close enough). How long it takes to get down to an unsurvivable ~250mmHg (assuming an Earth-air-like breathing gas aboard ISS, which seems reasonable) takes more trouble to figure out than I care to go to on a Friday night, but the lowest possible bound (assuming a constant ejection rate) would be somewhere around 500 minutes, or between eight and a bit to nine-ish hours.
Honestly I'm more curious what area a breach would have to have to produce that kind of leak rate.
edit: Actually, given the effectively infinite volume at effective vacuum outside the hull, you wouldn't see the same "counterpressure" effect you would in atmosphere, that causes pressure equalization to slow down as it approaches equality - there's no equalization that can happen here. That said, you'd still lose less mass per unit time over time, as the internal pressure and thus the mass per unit volume drops.
On the ground, most radiation 'leaks' are mostly chemical contamination problems.
In space the volume of free material, and the pressure gradient should prevent anything outside coming in. Except perhaps on the exposed surfaces of the airlocks/docking adapters.
Come types of particle radiation might cause transmutation/activiation of the hull material - that could be a concern. I doubt it's major issue.
It's something that science fiction doesn't really explore - jokes about Trek's near-total lack of sanitary fixtures aside, even self-consciously grittier fiction like the Expanse series seems generally very disinclined to go there. I understand why, but that doesn't stop me thinking it'd be fun to see some hard-sf author really get into the weeds of why and how space makes something as elementary as the cleanly voiding of bodily waste into a surprisingly complex and difficult engineering problem.
> I shudder to think what the inside of those space
> suits must smell like...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/30jan_smellofmoondust....
I think it’s time to build a rotating space station.
We’ve got all the knowledge from a microgravity space station, as we’re going to get. The conclusion is that it sucks. Humans are not meant to live in space without gravity. The muscle and bone deterioration is too great. And the eye damage is too great.
We need gravity. The question is whether we can get it from centripetal acceleration instead, to provide a long term habitation in space for humans.
>He underscored that air loss due to the crack are insignificant.
>In November, Russian cosmonauts photographed the suspected leak location on the outside of the ISS, but found no hull damage at where the crack is supposed to be.
Granted, it's understandable, but it sounds like someone who learned English in school but never really uses it rather than someone paid to translate.
>He underscored that the air loss due to the crack a̶r̶e̶ is insignificant.
>In November, Russian cosmonauts photographed the suspected leak location on the outside of the ISS, but found no hull damage a̶t̶ where the crack is supposed to be.
These seem minor to me, compared with some horrific ad copy that I've seen, which mangled SVO order or used completely inappropriate terms. Articles and plurals are hard for non-native speakers whose mother tongue do not have them (not sure if Russian does or not), and prepositions require memorizing a large number of idioms.
Same as Arecibo happened because the USAF wanted a big radar and the Hubble happened because (I forgot which spy agency it was) had a spare satellite.
Sad when you think about it...
Nope. It's funny you seriously consider it being true. Building space stations and ICBMs are two VERY different fields for one thing. And number of launches to ISS is significantly smaller than number of satellite launches.
One of the main reasons for the US was a chance to buy space station building technology and transfer relevant expertise for a relatively cheap price tag. Russian/USSR scientists and engineers were far ahead in this field thanks to the Mir station. Creating a demand for the Space Shuttle was a good bonus as well.
I'm fine with ISS being open for commercial operations, but can't help but feel unease by the entire ISS being a commercial endeavour. But then again, about a fifth of NASA's budget goes to keeping the lights on in ISS.
It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test.
That's why the current trend moves towards ever smaller and thus cheaper satellites and big launchers like Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, and Falcon Heavy barely see any action at all.
Starship would enable single-launch space stations, yes. But there are no single-launch space station designs yet and building one will either take time (ISS/MIR) or end up being much more expensive per person day due to weak design (e.g. Skylab).
Using the traditional approach, yes. But SpaceX is proving that there are other approaches that yield fruit far faster and also for drastically less money.
And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"? Are you aware that Skylab was designed, built, and launched in under 4 years and consisted of a converted Saturn-IVB rocket stage?
The total program cost was $275M per year over 8 years (including design, 4 stations, 4 Skylab- and 3 Apollo launches, as well as operations), which translates to $1.6Bn/yr in 2021 dollars.
Today, Bigelow Aerospace would have - maybe (they're currently defunct due to the pandemic - the B330 more or less ready to fly, but that is launched on an Atlas V.
It took two demonstration models, launched in 2005 and 2007 to get them ready for prime time. In 2013 they developed the BEAM module under a 16 month NASA contract, which was launched and attached to the ISS in 2016.
So BA built and deployed two prototypes in 2 years and a crewed fully functional module in 16 months with just $17.8M. Yet you assume that SpaceX, who never built a space station before, can somehow do it even faster and cheaper? Why? On what factual basis and on which historical examples do you base this assumption on?
Why not? The ISS is a spacecraft in all but name. It wouldn't be strange if they decided to use starship as a space station development platform, since they already planned for starship to carry humans to Mars.
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the huge amount of work done to keep things light, thin, self-contained and fit within existing payload bay sizes and can be constructed with minimum number of launches.
If launch costs drop through the floor there is less need for that.
You could build heavier, more robust stations because mass to orbit prices are so low. You could build it without having to minimise the number of launches. You could have much bigger and heavier sections sent up in pieces and built "on-site" so to speak.
Much easier to consider when the price to move those heavy components up to space orders of magnitude cheaper and launches take place daily / weekly.
(Yes I know I am glossing over a lot of things here).
Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now, and robotic probes and missions to other planets have been perennially delayed due to cost, while their scientific ROI would truly be much greater than for ISS experiments in many cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the ISS and manned spaceflight in general, but this kind of money does require serious explanation to Congress to justify the costs. Oh, and there's the entire money pit that is Artemis/SLS that stays on NASA books.
Also, why now? The private space industry is at what seems to be the beginning of an inflection point with heavy launch capabilities (SpaceX Starship) looking likely to drive down costs by over an order of magnitude. A single Starship might provide 800 cubic meters of volume, and the whole ISS is 1,000 cubic meters. Why not wait for that to come online and then launch many many ISS' worth of volume to several labs?
Lastly, the privatization of launch vehicles in particular has a lot of people questioning if private industry might be better able to step up to this challenge of manned orbiting labs. It has a potential to expand the range of solutions, massively decrease costs, and provide efficiencies that NASA might not be able to provide. When you don't have to manufacture space parts scattered all across the globe, it's easy to see why this could be cheaper and more efficient.
It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth. Sure, if you judge it purely by the price tag, it's not doing very well. If you judge it by the scientific, societal and philosophical implications, we're not spending nearly enough.
How will it answer that question that we already don't know of? I don't think that was the aim of ISS anyways and will definitely won't be the aim of second ISS. Humans can survive in space for year without significant physical damage but with lot of training.
This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
I'm not the biggest fan of manned spaceflight, and I couldn't care less about the ISS in particular.
But how does "ethical calculus" tell you to care about killing the ISS, vs. say LIGO, or wasteful military spending, or the video game industry, or foie gras, or goldschlager, or TikTok or astronomy in general or the Xbox or selfie sticks or...
If I was dictator, I'd prefer missions like New Horizons, but I can't see what ethical calculation is involved, I'd just rather see pictures of far away stuff than pay taxes for a space station to go around in circles.
This is a bad time for the ISS program to ask for more money. The USA Congress is not going to give NASA and the ISS program more money when they've already committed to print an enormous amount of dollars for COVID stimulus and various other COVID-related bailouts. NASA and the ISS is going to be on a budget for awhile. Even moreso than they were before.
Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems as weapon systems has only driven more resolve for home grown/soveraign alternatives.
True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract.
The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typically, with outsourced high-value work, vendors will evolve to MORE closely align to their big customers. (It screws the small customers often, but hey, the govt isn’t small).
The issue in my mind is much more value extraction & leverage, but as long as there’s multiple players (including an in-sourced option), I don’t see how it’s a problem.
"Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.
True
> "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy
Also true
Still, an infinite series of one-off projects comprise a continuous market. If SpaceX royally screws up one project, then yes, the public is left holding the bag _on that project_. But you know who's getting a lot fewer projects? SpaceX.
A federal gov't monopoly isn't the answer, just as abolishing NASA isn't the answer. Both are good. But... SpaceX is proving they can launch cheaper, quicker, and just as safely - isn't that a thing worth encouraging?
BlueOrigin is a perfect Nasa 2.0 comparison.
> could you dream of nasa celebrating SN8 plowing into
> the ground as a raging success.
That means the US government directly controls which projects live and die, simply because they control the purse. Most space endeavors don't require this scale of money, and even a small token of innovation incentives can often result in outsized societal benefits. Even for SpaceX to just think about the Starship program, they literally had to corner the global orbital launch market for nearly a decade to come.
While I do agree that Boeing is a money-pit due to their involvement with SLS, I still wouldn't put Virgin or Blue Origin in anywhere close to that bucket. While these two might not be as incredibly innovative and capital efficient as SpaceX, they're still orders of magnitude better than anything like the SLS, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and others that are considered "old space".
China is pouring an absurd amount of its own money through thinly guised military development arms, and they're excelling at it. It's truly a shame that the US cut them off from the ISS, and its even more detrimental that the rest of the world has not paid close enough attention to their efforts. They're about the only player that's even close to competing with anything like SpaceX.
I wouldn't put India in the same club as China either. India has done extremely well at making cheap reliable orbital class launch vehicles by cost cutting and incremental improvements. Once SpaceX comes to the scene, they will be obsolete. They do not have the public appetite to invest the scale of money required to build programs the likes of US & China can build.
Russia meanwhile seems obsessed with trampolines.
The 5B also gives them more options.
In 10 years, when they complete their own Super Heavy Lift rocket, the Long March 9, of Saturn V class, then things will get interesting. It seems like they will ace this one as well. This can help them send human missions to the moon.
But the interesting developments, are their space plane research. Which they started back in 2006, and estimated it would take 15 years, and would require a heavy lift rocket, the 5B, which they now have. This would put it around the 2021 time frame, which is now. And last year, they successfully tested their secret space plane prototype. If they scale up their space plane, and enable it to transport humans too, then they’ll have an interesting mechanism to transport their astronauts to their space station, and return them gracefully back to the earth.
Then, it seems they will succeed with their Long March 8R, for reusable vertical take off and vertical landing, similar to SpaceX. It seems they will be the 2nd organization, after SpaceX, to achieve an operational VTVL system.
I figured, if they can robotically stick the moon landing in a vacuum, using retroactive propulsion, then they can probably land a reusable booster back on earth.
It’s higher than it was in the 70s and has remained pretty constant since then trending upward (when adjusting for inflation)
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa...
There's no need for a "new" ISS, per se. You just attach new modules and, if need be, detach and deorbit old modules.
It's less exciting, kind of like maintaining an old code base.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_E...
Private industry doesn’t need a station.
Still, it must be intimidating to know that you are performing your own due diligence for the very fabric of your own life-support systems.