Uh, how safe are these things really?

>entire point of the experiments is to find out how safe it is
>Uh, how safe are these things really?

You're a faggot OP

And hides in for a sneaky space wank.

>You're a faggot OP

dang man, youre a meanie dude.

thanks for ruining my self esteem super early in the morning, fuck

Fucking christ

Cheer up faggot

>haven't masturbated in 3 months because of spaceman duties
>finally have the storage bubble all to yourself
>really getting into it, despite lack of good porn
>suddenly you hear a sound not unlike paper tearing followed by all of existence being dragged screaming into the void

>pepsimax

That's classified.

probably not much more so than a pebble hitting anywhere else on the station

When asked about whether or not astronauts masturbate on the international space station, Chris Hadfield simply replied that the station is a big place and one can find privacy if they need to.

Composite of hull material found on an alien spacecraft sewn together with bigfoot hair.

at least you can celebrate your trips, seeing as how you are unlikely to ever do anything more substantial in your shithole of a life, user

Good to know.

Holy shit! They finally used an inflatable module in space?! The absolute madmen!

I've been hyped for this tech for like a decade. I didn't even realize they were planning this let alone doing right now.

Wow, looks like shit irl

the concept image looks way better

It looks fine.

Likely you just got your hopes up from PopSci pictures of large inflatable modules and think it looks lame because it's small, which I point out is a really stupid complaint for a fucking prototype.

>Hey how safe would this shit be against space debris?
>Let's figure it out

t. the people that thought of this before building it

This is a subscale technology demonstration/test of inflatable habitats. The point is that if you launch a balloon instead of a can, it can fit in a smaller fairing, which means you don't need to build a special rocket for it.

Packed diameter: 2.36 m
Packed length: 2.16 m

Inflated diameter: 3.23 m
Inflated length: 4.01 m

This little balloon is not a very useful product by itself, although a variant of it is in development as an airlock. The point is to demonstrate that the technology is safe for human occupation before launching a larger version, particularly the B330:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B330

The B330 will have an *interior* diameter of 6.7 m, and an interior volume of 330 cubic meters, over a third of the (oversized) ISS, yet it will go up in a single launch, in a standard 5-meter fairing, on an ordinary launch vehicle, on the borderline between being a medium-lift or heavy-lift payload (the first is planned to go on an Atlas V, but it could go on a Falcon 9 in fully-expendable mode or Falcon Heavy with booster landing, or it could go on Ariane 5 or Proton).

It could be used for a space station or a habitat for long-range travel (such as to Mars).

but here is the real question

would YOU feel safe floating all the way to mars in a god damn balloon?

I much prefer my can.

>instead of super sleek sci-fi ships, future humans are going to zip around in giant post-it note scrotums with sails

top fucking kek

I don't even want to go to space anymore fml

To be honest, I don't think it offers a real benefit for a Mars transit habitat. You just don't need that much volume unless you're sending a crowd, and it's a lot of mass.

For Earth-to-Mars transit, I think you could do pretty well with a single-launch Falcon Heavy mission, especially if they get crossfeed working.

A Cygnus-like cylindrical pressure vessel could fit in the Dragon trunk. That's better than a BEAM, even though the diameter's a little smaller, because there's more volume, no inflation step, and you can pack it full of stuff. So you detach from it, turn around and dock with it, like they did in the Apollo missions. Then you've got nearly 40 cubic meters. If you can use the empty upper stage as a counterweight to produce light artificial gravity, it can be quite comfortable.

Maybe send a married couple. It'll be a little claustrophobic, but they can look out windows and play VR games. You want people who are okay with snuggling up together during a solar storm, with all their supplies and (sealed) waste piled around them.

it's a temporary tech, until we can get a cheaper way to put heavy shit into orbit or figure out how to mine/refine/shape asteroid ores in zero-g

... come on man, did he cum or what?

Too bad. That is fantasy, this is reality. Most spaceships in sci-fi are just battleships and fighter jets in space.

You still gotta keep mass low and get rid of heat

Why wouldn't you want more space for the same mass and payload diameter? Is docking not more difficult than inflation?

Would you feel safe flying in a plane made of fabric that's been glued together? Pah I much prefer flying in planes made of metal*.

*metal that has no fatigue limit and could randomly fail in flight if the airlines decide to skimp on inspections.

You have a point, but our canvas plane is not trying to contain pressurized gas in a vacuum. I guess all that is why were are thoroughly testing this before doing anything interesting with it.

>obviously comes to Veeky Forums to cheer up

>Why wouldn't you want more space for the same mass and payload diameter?
Do you get more space for the same mass, though? If the payload diameter isn't a problem, that's the only thing that matters.

Cygnus (1800 kg empty, 27 cubic meters) has roughly the same mass-to-pressurized-volume ratio as B330 (20000 kg empty, 330 cubic meters).

Inflatables are for reduced launch diameter/volume, not mass.

>Is docking not more difficult than inflation?
It's certainly not more difficult than inflation + docking.

A Tie Fighter is basically Soyuz with the solar panels at a weird angle.

Closer to the Salyut 3
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3
>Ivan! let's put cannon on a satellite with less than 1 second worth of ammo aboard so that we will shoot down all the filthy capitalist space craft
>But Boris, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard
Tens of billions of rubles later, and we got this.

>Seems like a pebble could fuck your shit up

Even if a pebble punctured a hole in it, it'd be a pebble sized hole. It's not like a balloon where it'll explode once punctured. It'll just leak a little air till they fix the hole.

>a pebble sized hole
>It'll just leak a little air till they fix the hole.
I think you mean, "air will rush out alarmingly until they either patch the hole or die".

Think of how quickly a tire would go flat with a pebble-sized hole. How many tires worth of air have you got?

The ISS gets hit with "pebbles" from time to time. None have caused a breach. Only one knocked out some of a solar panel. Another hit one of the windows.

>The ISS gets hit with "pebbles" from time to time.
More like paint chips.

>I think you mean, "air will rush out alarmingly until they either patch the hole or die".
No, Hollywood is not real life.
A tire is at a higher relative pressure than the ISS, and the volume of the ISS is enormous compared to that of a tire. Plus, each module of the ISS can be isolated in the event of a pressurisation. If there was a hole, they'd have plenty of time to move people and anything important out off the affected module(s), and close off the door and air vents. Then they could suit up and fix the damage.

Seriously, do you think nobody bothered to plan for that?

Could you pump some kinda hardening sealant type shit between a multiple-membrane inflatable to make it more sturdy?

you can say that it was literally sucked out of him

The pressure differential a 787 resists is about 0.6 atm. You could say it's halfway to space
Your argument makes sense. As long as we launch habs from earth payload diameter is a problem. Using the largest payload diameter available we can get more volume.

>More like paint chips.

The "chip" that hit the windshield which was about 7mm in diameter. That is "pebble" size. It caused a chip to break out of the window..

NASA isn't letting the ISS crew occupy it.

It is basically a multi million dollar ballon on the side of the ISS.

And Space Lemon Pledge

>The "chip" that hit the windshield which was about 7mm in diameter.
The crack that it made in the window was about 7mm. If there's a mile-wide meteor crater, does that mean the meteor was a mile wide?

A paint flake is one of the more likely causes:
esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/05/Impact_chip
"ESA astronaut Tim Peake took this photo from inside Cupola last month, showing a 7 mm-diameter circular chip gouged out by the impact from a tiny piece of space debris, possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimetre across."

>windshield
srsly?

I've heard a grain of sand at orbital velocity hits like a .45.

That's probably an exaggeration, however, it emphasizes exactly the point you are responding to: the chip was not 7mm.

Supplies!

I'd shit myself if I saw that happen to my space-window

Imagine blowing your space loads out the airlock or the space shitter and it eventually through the miracle of infinite possibilities reaching a planet where all it needed was your cosmic jizz to propel the planet into having life which eventually evolve into space faring entities that form a space empire and dominate the entire universe.

All from one errant load.

It doesn't matter. So long as there is radiation shielding it is no more safe than anything you can put into space. After all, a softball-size chunk of debris traveling 17k mph hitting you while you're going 17k mph won't give a shit what you are in. That is 25,900,000 Joules or nearly 26 sticks of dynamite or 19,102,859.6 foot pounds.

ISS has just been extremely lucky.

How old are you? It'd merely fall to earth. ISS is in LEO.

Shit, I hope it doesn't come back and start asking for child support

If people are worried about rad shielding, why not capture an ice asteroid or something and melt it to get water, and use a double-hull inflatable design with the inter-hull space filled with water to shield the station.

>why not capture an ice asteroid or something and melt it to get water
even if this wasnt a extremely difficult and inefficient task, it also woud make the station heavy as fuck

>heavy
>microgravity

>>ice asteroid
we call those comets. We should do that eventually. In Situ Resource Utilization is something we need to do to survive as a species

Water is pretty good rad shielding though, and it would be better than launching it up from earth since you'd need minimal weight for the inflatable + some heating gear that can be used many times.

Maybe not a good idea for a station but it could work for a ship e.g. that marsone thing, inflate a bubble around the ship with drinkable water for the flight to mars and then use it as part of the supplies once the colony lands (assuming it ever does)

It is about inertia. They have to make small maneuvers with the station. That aside, bringing an asteroid with enough water to leo is a pretty difficult task

>>>haven't masturbated in 3 months because of spaceman duties
I appreciate the naivety that was required for your story to work user.