"We have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so."
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The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch
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And even more limited vision! Don't forget the limited vision!
I've gotten tangled up in stuff while scuba diving and that was (a) scary as all get out even though I was pretty darn safe and (b) a real pain to get clear of simply because I couldn't see what I was doing without twisting around, which then got me even more tangled!
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It looks like a vast improvement on their competitors, but not (yet) the ancestor. The ISS replacement program started late ...
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Wouldn't working on the outside be similar to working on earth (i.e. working in 1G)? Construction practices are pretty refined at working in the presence of gravity. The structure would be build differently with walkways on the outside oriented with "down" aligning with the spin.
The station doesn't really need to do space or ground observation since we have dedicated telescopes for that.
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1. You're in a bulky environmental suit.
2. Outer ring work (facing away from the hub) means working over your head while your body is being pushed away.
3. Material is trying to push you away as well - and big parts are hard to maneuver in space.
4. Walkway would get in the way of the material being assembled.
Not even close to working like on earth.
Extra credit: try working on the ceiling while trying to stay attached to the ceiling, and the ceiling is 20 feet above ground. Not an option to have something pushing against the earth floor since we're trying to simulate outer edge of a 1G space station - no floor in space.
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5. The Coriolis effect means that 'raising' or 'lowering' material also requires accelerating it laterally. A simple crane isn't enough. This also applies to suspended work platforms.
6. The rotating starfield could potentially cause vertigo.
7. A dropped tool is now space junk in your orbit.
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What would be the point of a space station if it can't do space or ground observations, or do micro-gravity experiments?
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First, that's a terrible pun. Take your like. Second, baby steps. This is their Skylab. Third, a lot of things NASA should have been doing decades ago are woefully late and under-performing. At least CLD isn't grossly over budget.
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Crew movement makes space stations too bouncy to be useful for telescope observations. Microgravity and reduced gravity are the only practical reasons to build them, and the latter can be achieved with an on-board centrifuge. The only reason to build a rotating station is if it is entirely dedicated to reduced gravity work, and even then you'd want to spin it down before doing any external work.
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Astronaut health. Also many things get easier with gravity, including basics like cooking and using the lavatory, and many of our current industrial processes rely on gravity. Much of that can be mitigated, of course, and in low Earth orbit you can rotate out crews every six months before the health issues get too serious. I think rotating stations will become crucial if we ever venture much beyond the Moon's orbit, but that's some decades away (excepting Mars, which has its own gravity).
It may be simplest to have two stations, one rotating and one not. The rotating one is where crew spend most of their time, and control the micro-gravity activities remotely. Again not needed in LEO, because you can teleoperate from Earth's surface, but light speed delays make that harder beyond Mars, and you want crew nearby to fix the occasional problems that only humans can fix. This would be one model for asteroid mining.
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In low Earth orbit space tourism could be a major industry, and the tourists will want their views of Earth.
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Or perhaps a single station with a nonrotating module at the central hub, and any microgravity work gets done there.
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The problem is how do you connect the rotating section to the non-rotating section? That would be a bearing, a really large bearing, that has to large 20-30 years because it can't be replaced without separating the two sections. The bearing would be facing space so lubrication would be a challenge, unless the entire rotating section was enclosed inside the non-rotating section.
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8. Any extra material/tools/bodies at the worksite has to be balanced by the same mass of material/tools/bodies at the opposite end (180 degrees around the circle) of the workspace.
At least as far as mass and gravity goes, bridge construction would be equivalent: during construction of long bridges, they have to balance the workload on both sides of the pylon until construction reaches the point where the roadway connects with the other supporting pylons.
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Maybe. As beb01 says, the engineering looks quite hard. Especially if you want the microgravity section to be free of vibrations carried from the inhabited section when it is unoccupied. And you need crew to be able to get from the rotating to the rotating section and back.
Transferring crew would be inconvenient with two stations, also. The stations would need to be some distance apart so they didn't bump into each other. You'd need a shuttle craft to go between them. We do know how to do that, though.
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That's a lot of malarkey - including Trump's mantra. He says that only to take credit for what Obama built and Biden sustained, US energy independence as net oil exporter. In Trump's first term the USA was a net exporter for one week, when Trump sold off stored oil to create that talking point, not increased production or reduced consumption. Even that stunt stood on the shoulders of the energy independence development that Obama/Biden drove since their 2011 policies conducted for the rest of his two terms, reducing consumption including strongly developing renewables while also increasing production. And then under Biden/Harris the USA became a reliable net exporter.
This is not a rhetorical question: Where did you get the disinfo that Trump made the USA a net exporter and Biden reversed it?
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Can you provide a source for ANY of that? Remember, Trump is not a primary source.
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And also remember, I provided a source (sources, in the cited page footnotes) to my rebuttal in my own reply to Dark Jaguar's comment. There are citable facts, and there's concocted malarkey.
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The original comment wasn't mine- thank all that is still good in this world.
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Yes, I know. I should have phrased it as "we can remember" rather than imply that you were the one who I was addressing, as I meant it as a recommendation to any reader.
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Put the rotating section inside a pressurized non-rotating hull. It isn't the most mass efficient, but it solves a lot of the problems sustainably. We just need to get the ability to do large assembly projects on orbit.
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Magnetic bearings that large are either very heavy or require a lot of power to maintain the field. Edit: they also don't play well with pressure seals because they don't provide precise alignment.
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Pretty much what I said before: an end-to-end dress rehearsal to allow for observing unknown unknowns. It's a matter of risk, not a matter of specific concerns to address. Specific concerns you know about can and should be addressed before launch, of course. So, also like I said before, if folks don't think that's necessary, that's fine. I know I would want it to be tested in space first if I were on the first astronaut team going up, is all I'm saying.
It's a bit of surprising whiplash to go from endless threads where people are criticizing Artemis II reusing the same heat shield design from Artemis I (even after NASA says they understand and replicated the problem observed during Artemis I and determined a resolution), to this thread where people think an unmanned test for this spacecraft is unnecessary or wasteful.
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Haven-1 is being sent up uncrewed. Crew Dragon is pretty much proven by now. So it's only the interface between the two that is new to crew. That interface is the IDSS standard, that is quite well known from ISS and the several vehicles that dock with it.
And presumably it will have been tested on the ground. I just posted this about Blue Origin's implementation of the docking standard. I'm reposting it here because the X post includes a video of the hardware NASA used to test the Blue Docking System. If Haven-1 has been through similar testing, I would have a lot of confidence in it. I think it's a very different situation to Orion's heat shield, where we can't even get very close to recreating the flight environment on the ground.
Edit to add: and where the first flight threw up surprises that showed the ground testing was inadequate. Where-as I'm guessing the first docking of crew dragon validated not just the dragon itself, but also the ground test rig used.
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The only part of Haven-1 that an uncrewed flight can test is the capture system. If that fails then Dragon aborts back to Earth. There is no additional risk to the crew in that scenario so there is no point in not bringing crew.
Artemis II involves A) a known-defective spacecraft that B) has no abort option if the defect results in a failure and C) the defective part could be safely tested without crew. That's a completely different situation so a different response is warranted.
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