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.
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.
I want a country to make one. Any country. I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station. You have no idea how badly I want to live in the kind of futuristic future depicted in science fiction.
> I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station.
How much would you pay? Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Staring out the observation bay for hours on end with my favorite mood music playing through my headphones. Then going for a spacewalk, before heading back inside and having dinner with my friends in the rotating orbital restaurant. After that, I'll play an online video games with Earth-based players. To conclude my day, I'll return to my luxury pod, lay on the side in bed while looking outside at the planet through the port window, a mere inches from my face, and let my dreams, and the low humm of the station's machinery, take me to sleep.
> Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Yeah, estimated using the inflated cost of the ISS and other historic projects... give a tenth of the money to a private company not bound to political pork interest like NASA/ESA and they'll manage it just fine. Alternatively, give NASA/ESA free rein to do things the efficient way.
The problem at the root is that, historically, space access never was a plain "we need task X accomplished" - there always was the political interest of those with decision power to spread R&D and construction far across the country, so that everyone got a little piece (and every politician could claim of having brought jobs to their voters). That caused enormous inefficiencies - stuff needs to be shipped three times across the continent (look at Airbus supply chain, it's insane), there's an enormous amount of red tape and coordination efforts required, and turnaround times are insane. Meanwhile SpaceX has like two manufacturing plants and four launch sites and especially they manufacture a lot of what they need completely on their own so they don't have the typical delays you have with a classic vendor-supplier relationship, and they save on profit margins of all the intermediates as well.
I think you're seriously overestimating Chinese economic capabilities. They are still constrained by the same economic realities as everybody else, and -- much as we wish it were possible -- they cannot afford to just do whatever.
Presumably the problem there is that even a sea of expendable labour's useless, if what you need is a Von Braun[1]-esque figure and a paddling pool of engineering talent... .
Space stations and exploration can be a difficult proposition to justify to any economic system; democratic, socialist, communist, etc. For China to want to "beat" us, building bigger and better space stations would somehow have to align with the current and future five year plans.
I would rather have China and the US pouring tons of money into space stations and exploration, but it is hard to figure out the rationale for such a massive investment. China seems to make rational decisions, those of which I am not defending. I am trying to figure out how rational a $500 billion dollar investment in a space station would be to Chinese interests.
The space race was motivated by competition with Russia, notably the imperative to establish a tactical nuclear advantage. We could conceivably see another space race between the US and China, but maybe not if "space" doesn't have the same tactical appeal?
I suppose it could lead to a race to build a new generation of heavy lift vehicles or other propulsion systems. Maybe a return to the NERVA[1] engine! That technology was an interesting story point in the "For All Mankind" series alternative timeline.
Presumably everyone already has access to enough nukes such that there isn't much of a point in investing in nukes, whether terrestrial or satellite? The arms race might lead toward building more, better interceptors?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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...