Spacecraft / Station Design

For all the shit we give russia/soviet when it comes to the spacerace, they really knew their stuff on stations

The only one I know of that exists is the Beam inflatable attached to the ISS. I'm not sure where one would find specs of designs for such a thing though.

Russians seem to have this ability to cobble together random shit and make it work somehow.

You see it in their cities, their engineering and even programming code.

afaik the only company other than bigelow that is making expandable structures is energia. They seem more open and do publish some papers on their experiments, but again it's mostly in russian
energia.ru/ktt/archive/2016/02-2016/02-03.pdf
here's a short article from their own journal, there's more in several other journals

>being s brainlet
>He still believes that "space" exists.
Kek no, this is all there is just accept it and stop pretending.

are zubrin's designs for artificial gravity generation on Mars direct feasible? An inflatable Hab module tethered to a mile long cable with a spent SLS upper stage as the counterweight?

OP here. This is similar to my concept, but rigid.

Could probably work at around 50m radius, 4rpm with 0.9g at the end, progressively less towards the centre.

no
You'll need a rigid structure for rotating

Who in their right mind would ever give the soviets shit for the spacerace of all things?

brainlets and '''''patriots'''''

Why?

People who only focus on the N1-project and its outcome. And since it is compared to Apollo, which worked like a charm, they get shit on.

i assume you want references to things that will leave earth and come back not things that would work if constructed in space and never intended to land on a planet but could travel to another planet where a smaller craft or probes would be used to survey it

nasa doesnt like giving out to much data. the refractory bricks on the old shuttle before it was scrapped werent ever explained completely to the public its a proprietary mix. stab in the dark would be 1 part sodium silicate 1 part porcelain quality clay and 1/2 part plaster. no water to rehydrate clay or plaster its just sodium silicate and the 1/2 part plaster may not be through out the entire tile but a thin sheet extruded in a factory and squished onto another tile layer both made in sheets then cut after bonded with lite pressure before baking. it will be weaker in the area with plaster but more heat resistant or simply different composition at the nose cone area where there is expected to be more heat who knows

but its just 1 example of how little the general public knows about the shuttle

>not things that would work if constructed in space and never intended to land on a planet but could travel to another planet where a smaller craft or probes would be used to survey it

That is literally what I'm looking for.

design guidance for 'construct in space' structures that could be placed in LEO, or orbit of other planets/moons in the system

"Need" MAY be too strong.

Gemini's experiment with trying to create g-forces by getting a tethered spacecraft and Agena module going around each other showed it is hard to get it all going properly, maybe it will be easier now with better computers an shit.

Try this if you haven't already. It is better than expected.

highfrontier.com/

Add to that people who understand what the "Voskhod" program was all about. They forfeited a lot of their technological development time fucking around with ginned-up "spectaculars" that didn't move the ball forward.

That said, what they did during the "Space Race," and continue to do now, earns my respect as a US space buff.

Rigid will help a lot of something goes a bit wrong. A wave along a tether is a bad thing if there's a space station with people in it at one end.

Yeah but...

lets say you have something like the Gemini experiment as a permanent habitat.

Tied with a tether between a counterweight and an inhabited module.

How are you going to dock and resupply?

spin the station down?
somehow match a circular flightpath for a shuttle or module?

shit is difficult senpai.

if it turns out that humans do require Earth gravity for long term health in space then rotating space stations will be the main places where human will live, forget about Mars or asteroids, those will be only used for mining resources

rigid station with a docking port in the middle may be better

the docking port may rotate or be stationary with some kind of a bearing (magnetic?) connecting it to the rotating part

Even better read Dr. O'Neil's book (really good and quite cheap as an ebook) with the same title.

>A wave along a tether is a bad thing if there's a space station with people in it at one end.
A wave in a rigid structure is not much better honestly. They tend to have very complex vibration/oscillation modes, unlike the tethers under strain.

A tethered system:
- can be made simple
- can be made big to keep the gravity gradient small
- with a large enough radius, rotational speed is much lower, which possibly means simpler failure modes.

There are several problems though:
- tethered system would require propulsive rotation, unlike a rigid one
- balancing a tethered habitat while also using the tether as an elevator line is harder
- dealing with electric potentials is probably harder with tethers

etc etc etc
what approach is better is to be seen in practice

that said, I imagine a tethered station as something like this (not to scale). The habitat should have an escape capsule ready to undock in case of the tether snapping. The orbit should be chosen accordingly to the possible deltav change in that case.

>if it turns out that humans do require Earth gravity for long term health in space
That's less and less likely as the research progresses though, and if it's the case they still probably don't need full gravity all the time

With your arrangement, the centroid of the system is somewhere on the tether, you'd need huge amounts of mass to have the counterweight at the hub.

Extend the tether and balance the moments - much more efficient, and actually potentially feasible.

>(not to scale)

In addition to:You'd be better off having two habitats on either end of the tether, central hub.

That way you balance and have a similar amount of living space on each side of the station rather than wasting mass.

In the event you have an emergency, you would have to despin unless you were launching from the central hub, or you'd end up flying off into space.

Perhaps you could initiate a YoYo de-spin with masses attached to the modules and additional long tethers. - but this would require a rigid structure, because the jerk from releasing the yoyo's would fuck up your tether arrangement and make it slack.

>not to scale
Not a feasible arrangement either, or you would have shown a tether on the counterweight.

If you want to be able to design something, you have a lot to cover. Start with fundamental engineering structural mechanics and dynamics, as well as propulsion and compressible fluid dynamics

Here's a good list of topics you should study, arranged into modules

imperial.ac.uk/aeronautics/study/ug/current-students/modules/h401/

If you are just interested in concepts, I'd suggest documentaries about the Apollo program etc and hard sci-fi like Arthur C Clarke and Asimov

There are inflatable reentry vehicle concepts designed by NASA etc meant to make reentry into thin atmospheres like Mars' possible for heavier craft. Search for HIAD and ADEPT

I'm pretty well versed in structural mechanics, mechanics of materials and structural dynamics.

Along with Hydrostatics and fluid dynamics.

I've been a structural engineer for ~3-4 years.

Is there anything you'd point me to in particular in the imperial course that applies directly to human habitation structures, or space structures generally?

>That way you balance and have a similar amount of living space on each side of the station rather than wasting mass.
The counterweight can be just an unpressurized structure with anything not requiring immediate access. No need to waste anything I guess.
>In the event you have an emergency, you would have to despin unless you were launching from the central hub, or you'd end up flying off into space.
Can be countered by having a capsule ready to undock and compensate for deltav difference.

Those are useless memes
The only point of those is if you are doing an uncontrolled blunt body descent, you won't hit terminal velocity before you hit the ground.

If however you are a sane company like SpaceX, you will just use lift to "fly" through the martian atmosphere until you have burnt off your speed

yup, here is the atlantis mother ship leaving earth under fire from yahwh.
mother class uso.

Well, with the simulation you can at least design the cylinders and play with them to find the proper stable design for rotation and related.

They are all cancelled, no?
The only inflatable Earth reentry vehicle that was actually flown with real hardware was IRDT/Demonstrator. They tried to return the Fregat upper stage with it back in early 2000s (russian upper stages are compact and cost a lot, making them good targets for potential reuse). Despite losing it at the landing, they managed to receive telemetry after the reentry, indicating everything went OK. They decided to not continue the development due to poor landing accuracy (a common problem with these, they are poorly controlled and need a shallow reentry angle to extend the braking trajectory).

>you won't hit terminal velocity before you hit the ground
just FYI, these things were initially proposed for saving people from highrise fires, and IRDT was designed to descend slow enough to keep a fragile orbital stage from breaking (possibly requiring Soyuz-like retropropulsion at the final stage). They are parachutes.