Hacker News Reader

Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

I hope mankind can move beyond building space stations as a handful of modular small cylinders, and start building space stations the way they appear in science fiction: dozens of rooms, cubical exteriors, hallways, human height doors that open and close, stairs, elevators, hangars, a nuclear reactor instead of solar panels, and modules that rotate around an axis to create artificial gravity. And a more diversified color scheme than all white, which is sterile.

I would like to see this:

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/futuristic-architecture...

https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/04/77/75/80/360_F_477758033_1n2FBtz...

View on HN

That requires a truly astounding amount of material. Unless the cost to place it in orbit gets within an order of magnitude of our current terrestrial freight, it's not happening.

Best bet is to construct these things in orbit, with materials sourced in orbit. But now you have a chicken and egg problem - need to send an incredible amount of material (and people) in order to (potentially!) save in the future.

Beltalowda!

That will probably require finding an efficient way to extract building materials in space (possibly from the moon), moving those materials to where you want your station (probably a Lagrange point), and building with those materials. These are non-trivial problems.

Also solar is far more efficient in space, without any annoying atmosphere in the way, it makes perfect sense to use it there.

To stay within the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, habitable stations are put in low earth orbit. Low earth orbit entails atmospheric drag, and bigger stations have more drag as well as larger propellent requirements to boost.

Even if the cost to launch would be way cheaper, that weigth allowance would be used for useful stuff like laundry machines, more "sterile" modules as you call them for more research, and potentially for industrial applications like factories to build low-gravity-only components and low gravity biomedical applications.

Your vision is useful for tourism and little else.

While I too look forward to that day, at least for awhile longer due to physics, we are going to continue to have “rounded cylinders”. The main reason for this is very simple: Pressurized vessels. If you look at any type of air tank, and there is a reason they are a certain shape. The moment you do any type of “point” or “edge” it becomes a weak point in the design.

That said… you can always make a really large pressure vessel and put things inside…

A torus shape has no sharp edges and can be pretty useful in space if it rotates.

Absolutely, but now you are talking pretty large structures… which will take time for us to get there.

from a mechanical engineering standpoint, a torus is also easier to construct than a sphere.

How so?

We need a reason to do it first.

More habitable space, more luxurious accommodations, more energy generating capacity, more space for laboratory equipment and experiments.

Here in SF, we have cars with bumper stickers that say "Leave space alone".

So it starts, the birth of space environmentalists.

More habitable space than the ground? Maybe some day but that would be a grim future indeed.

It sounds like you're saying that a bigger space station would enable more experimentation quantity and quality. I would still say that the benefits need to justify the costs. We've gotten better at being frugal/scrappy with how we use space resources, whether that's small experiments on the ISS or cubesats.

You should check out videos from inside Skylab if you haven't[1]. You can see people jogging around the perimeter like in 2001. It was so big that they worried that people who ended up in the middle would get stuck and have a hard time getting back to the walls.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZNKVnDvQY4&t=250s

Zero g tends to expand living spaces in general due to them becoming truly 3-dimensional. The volume of a tiny room on Earth can easily accomodate several people in orbit. Large spaces don't make much sense in these conditions, not just because of inefficiency, but because of the inconvenience of being stranded in the middle. You need some kind of handles or separators within the immediate reach - why not have actual walls then.

Some more recent launch providers are focusing on greatly lowering $/kg to orbit, which is an absolutely necessary step for such visions.

I think this company is highly optimistic, but this might fit the bill:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/space-hotel-orbital-assem...

It’s a scam ran by an ex airline pilot with no engineering experience whatsoever. https://youtu.be/lue35X4DFeQ

Unfortunately it’s about $2,720 per 2.2 lbs in even the best case scenario.

You are allowed to say kilogram on the internet.

You're also allowed to say 2.2 pounds, and many (though not most) will understand.

You're even allowed to be a pedant, as I am often accused! :)

How have you come up with this number?

>For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the ISS, the cost is just $2,720 per kilogram.

https://theconversation.com/how-spacex-lowered-costs-and-red...

TIL for about ~$3,090, I could send a 40oz of Old English to space.

As long as it's set on a collision course with the Sun. Although I'm not sure the latter would survive.

SpaceX aims to reduce that by two orders of magnitude with Starship. It will be a big deal if they can achieve it.

Translation: 2.2 lbs is around 1kg

Floors and ceilings are concepts that only make sense in the context of gravity. The reason that science fiction movie space stations look like that is because they were filmed on earth.

Why, there is already barely anything useful to do with the current crop of space stations.

Uhmmm...at least we get to find out how spiders spin a web in zero-g.

If only we could put down our differences and use the Flat UI color scheme.

Hopefully they solve more important problems first though.

Isn't this a logical fallacy? Rocket scientists and engineers are going to best suited to getting stuff into orbit, they aren't simply going to be able to go a solve a "more important problem". Other people are already working on those things and are likely specialists.

It's true in a way but just pushes things back a level of causality: if we train more people as aerospace engineers, then we will have fewer trained people in other specialties. We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change. The best answer of course is "do both" and make sure more of our young people are happy, enthusiastic, and able to access necessary training and education.

There are also skills that overlap: every welder that SpaceX or Lockheed employs is one less welder able to help install a water treatment plant somewhere. Here again, the solution is to train more welders.

> if we train

People choose those paths on their own, not because some human industrial policy plucked them out of middle school and put them on that path.

Nonetheless, if they choose to be an aerospace engineer, they've chosen not to be, for example, a surgeon, or whatever else.

Yes, that is how choice and specialization work, we don't live in a feudal or autocratic system where heredity or fiat determine your life path.

I didn't say any of that?

> We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change

And currently most of them go into trading, which is a zero-sum game, or into building another social network that causes depression.

Look at top-ten list of high paying jobs, and ask youself how much crucial work for society they do

Trading is not exactly zero sum. Trading is price discovery + arbitrage, both of which are useful even if imperfect.

You don't have a finite supply of people. Because people get to choose what they do. Even the dictatorships can't order people to become a good X if they don't have the interest.

It's the height of entitlement to think you're able to demand more of some profession come into existence. The worst regimes on earth can't manage it. The most you get to do is incentivize and make available the training and access and process to maybe get more of that. That's it.

We absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scientists and engineers, and nobody was coerced into anything. We trained enough engineers in that short time to staff a literal moonshot program plus every half-baked weapons system idea that crossed a desk anywhere in the Pentagon plus tons of other more speculative stuff like packet switching networks (aka ethernet, the internet, etc.).

It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.

It's hard to make items that achieve their function and can be transported into space. There are still improvements to be made with functionality and launch-ability. It's more important to focus on those - if you can make something fit a subjective standard of beauty at the same great. Except that's only 1 person's ideal so who cares.

form follows function though.

It will happen after AGI singularity.

It's extremely hard to join large structures airtight, with joints being stronger than the material itself.

Soviet, and Russian spacecraft, and modules were traditionally made with extremely uneconomical method of machining the vessel from a single giant piece of aluminium to not to worry about joints, and their strength under space conditions.

The difficulty is not about joining large structures airtight. otherwise we would have trouble with building commercial aircraft.

the problem is when you want to make something out from the absolute minimim weight possible due to economy of putting things into space, then you can't do with any connections whatsoever.

The pressure of -1 bar isn't particularly challenging engineering wise.

Jet airliners are not airtight, nor they deal with 1 bar of pressure difference.

In space, you have to make it airtight with most rubbers drying our, and constant intense thermal cycling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com