No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As for a spinning station, that's something NASA will probably never do. They're extremely risk averse and you're opening up an unknowable, but very large, number of new possible failure scenarios there - many of them likely catastrophic. If anything that's something of an argument for genuine private stations who may have different levels of risk tolerance. Or we can just wait for China, because they'll 100% do it and probably relatively soon.
However, the research done on mice on ISS suggests that the undesirable effects can be mitigated by creating an artificial gravity (i.e. rotation) lower than on Earth, e.g. of 2/3 of Earth's gravity.
The failure scenarios for rotating spacecraft need not be more severe than for non-rotating spacecraft. For instance if 2 or more spacecraft, which can be also used independently, are connected with cables to enable them to rotate around the common center of mass, if everything is designed carefully the failure of the coupling system should not have any other consequences than the loss of the artificial gravity and from then on the failure risks would be the same as for non-rotating spacecraft.
For one obvious problem with rotation systems, stations need to be regularly boosted. You'll also need to occasionally reboost the local rotation. This sort of basic stuff is already fairly complex with a static station, and becomes exponentially more so with a local rotation going on. Even moreso because you want to be relatively fault tolerant in case of a partial or failed boost. Then you need to compensate for impacts, docking and undocking, and much more.
It's viable and almost certainly a solvable, but NASA is not the appropriate organization to do so. Their risk aversion makes it unlikely that they'll ever be doing much of anything revolutionary where failure could be catastrophic. They're having a tough enough time just trying to recreate what we already did 50+ years ago.
[1] - https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...
[1] - https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...
There are not classified shuttle equivalents launching, not sure what you are talking about there. The X37 has the capability to land, but it is not manned and is tiny compared to the shuttle.
>research that couldn't be done with automation
I'd think there is room for both. Automation makes sense, but don't think the versatility of meatbags is entirely there yet.
A bigger problem is lack of expertise. Astronauts are not specialist in whatever is the topic of the current experiment. You need probably like 5 years of training (assume the second half of the undergraduate degree, and perhaps the first half of the PhD). So experiments must be fully automated except for a button to turn they on and off.
You can send up a lot of less versatile bots for the price of one meatbag.
"0.33g mitigates muscle atrophy while 0.67g preserves muscle function and myofiber type composition in mice during spaceflight"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12985678/
Obviously, we know that the gravity of Earth is sufficient.
But the results make probable that two thirds of the gravity of Earth might be enough, while the gravity of Mars may create some problems and the gravity of the Moon is very likely to be insufficient, so the time spent on the Moon must be limited, though not so much as on the ISS.
I agree with the previous poster that any spaceship designed for carrying humans to Mars or even farther must be designed to spin and anyone who accepts to go on something else is stupid.
Making a spinning spaceship may be cheap if dual bodies or one body and a counterweight are used. It is likely that the safest solution would be to have 2 identical spacecraft, which could also be used independently but which could be coupled with cables to spin around the common center of mass at a distance big enough to create enough gravity at a low rotation speed.
The problem is not the price but the fact that nobody has tested how difficult is to control such a configuration (avoiding oscillations and instabilities) and how difficult is to solve problems like docking in a manner that does not waste energy (i.e. without changing the rotation speed of the more massive spinning spacecraft, which can be done by having 1 or more docking ports on the rotation axis, like on the hub of a wheel; in the case when the rotating spacecraft would be made with 2 bodies or a body and a counterweight that would be linked with cables, one could have the equivalent of an elevator for transporting crew and equipment from the docking port to the main body or bodies).
But someone must build and test such a spacecraft, otherwise we will never learn how to do it right and which are the real problems that are hard to predict in a simulation.
Forgive my ignorance on the topic, but surely "same as earth" would be the starting point? With everything less being a trade-off that is suboptimal
For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay can be tested in any microgravity, spin or no spin. Development of in-space manufacturing and assembly can happen on any sufficiently capable space station.
All of that, however, requires a good amount of ambition. And I'm not sure if NASA under the current political system can deliver ambition.
This seems obvious but I’ve never heard of anyone working on a drug to address it. Strapping astronauts to a treadmill yes, pills no.
And if it's the body doing that, you can, in theory, find a biochemical way to make it stop doing that.
If you rephrase that to correct English then it would make sense. We aren't trying to stop physical damage or weakness we are trying to prevent it from happening. Pills can prevent many things that cause this.
Cargo-cult requires a rigid through-line.
What criteria would you use, to choose to avoid something in order to preemptively avoid hindsight analysis? It's a nonsensical line of thinking.
And here, the US does not decline because of some symbolic action, but rather decline causes the action.
This confusion of cause and effect is literally a kind of magical thinking.
I suspect that of "continuous presence in low orbit", "longer term new capabilities", "in budget", and "commercially successful" NASA is going to be forced to pick one or two and that's what they're resisting. Rushing things along almost always costs a lot of money and features. If you want to hit a budget and features then you have to be willing to wait for the various bits to line up and preferably spend some time experimenting and exploring new capabilities and strategies before big hardware commitments. There's a lot of moving parts here to think through. This would all be true even if that was NASA's only concern, vs going to the Moon and all the normal and importance science and so on they're getting pushed on.
For most satellites/space stations, you need a proper payload deployment mechanism. The pez dispenser mechanism was chosen because opening the entire payload bay and closing it back up for reentry is a tough problem. For now it has been put aside to focus on the goals for Artemis, but that also means not being able to launch stuff other than Starlink.
Starship is currently still stuck in development hell, Musk is already backing off from his Mars plans, SpaceX is moving to distractions and going public (something they previously claimed would not be done).
To me, these moves do not suggest confidence in Starship's ability to live up to its advertised capabilities.
NASA finally got a leader with a clear vision, and with technologies like Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn getting ready, the future is bright!
ISS is no longer the frontier, and I am glad NASA is focusing its resources on the future.
Orbit is scheduled for the test after next, if all goes well.
They don't really need Starship just for orbit. They've already got ships that get to the ISS and back. They really do need to get Starship to orbit or their plans really will be hosed.
I'm honestly kinda curious how you came to this thinking after watching the launches, like the last Flight 11 [0]? They have the velocity listed at all times right there in the bottom corner. It's peaking over 7.4 km/s, seems pretty clear they were stopping just barely short and maintaining a ballistic path on purpose exactly as they said they would in the flight plan they filed ahead of time with the FAA for deorbit safety purposes, not because they couldn't have technically squeezed out another few hundred m/s and different trajectory if that was the goal. It's a hardware rich program, and their testing sequence has been reasonably careful about controlling the space of out of bounds scenarios (on the scale of rocketry). What has lead you to believe that they can do 7.4+ km/s with Raptor 2 and Block 2 but v3 won't be able to do ~7.8 (or that they couldn't have done it with v2 for that matter)?
----
So yes, you are literally correct in that they haven't put one in orbit, but it's more out of caution than capability. What they've only demonstrated in the most recent tests is that they have good reason to believe to believe that they can deorbit in a controlled fashion. But... now they've upgraded everything: raptor 3, booster v3, starship v3. Those need to prove out those capabilities again.
So I wouldn't be surprised if they continue the suborbital program for the next 3 or 4 tests. Given all the redesign, they aren't exactly at the beginning, but they have to show that they haven't broken what they previously fixed.
I’d like to see someone working on this, could be done in LEO.
this is the lost decade of science and progress unfortunately
There's literally no difference between putting it in space and putting it in North Korea or some other country who won't extradite to the US or wherever. Except the massive cost.
It just doesn't make sense.
Literally no difference except the likelihood of it happening and therefore whether or not we should be concerned about it. What even is this type of argument?
Barring that, we have anti-satellite missiles.
https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
At the end of the day, there is somebody who profits from it or could have prevented it
You can raid a data center if bad actors are utilizing it to break the law, but if some billionaire is using a moon relay to do bad stuff, the best you can do is de-allocate their bandwidth on the spectrum since you can't just hop over to the moon. Or to some craft in space. De-allocation would depend on international cooperation, inevitably. It would suddenly be far, far easier to break the law on networks and become effectively untraceable. This equipment will certainly be privately owned (like the prototypical versions already are) and it will be an extremely potent tool for breaking the law without consequence.
Also it looks like allocation of spectrum doesn't mandate logging, so you could in theory have data centers floating around which don't even trace who did what and how. If any country chooses to facilitate this and allows this communication to be received, and propagates it to their internet, what does the rest of the world do? Is it cause for conflict? Are there ways to stop the traffic from outside of the country?
I'm sure I'm missing tons of pertinent details here and this isn't meant as a totally impenetrable statement about the future. It's more so that I have concerns that this could actually happen based on the limited understanding I have. So feel free to tear it apart and let me know how dumb my idea is.
You don't need to raid the data center, you just need to compel the flesh-bound weakling in your jurisdiction that has effective control to cede the effective control. Or hack into it by obvious means.
> If any country chooses to facilitate this and allows this communication to be received, and propagates it to their internet, what does the rest of the world do?
If a hostile country wants to do that they don't need space data centers. Case in point starts with r and end with ussia.
Even if it is in space, somebody assigns the AS numbers and provides peering. You don't have to reach the other end of the rope to cut it.
As a worst-case scenario, you just stop Internetting altogether and only allow information to flow to and from AS that are in your geopolitically aligned jurisdiction.
Or you arrest them, or drone strike them.