Re: BBC's Pegasus spaceship

From: Earl Colby Pottinger (earlcp_at_idirect.com)
Date: 11/18/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:44:23 -0600

"Henk Boonsma" <hboonsma@teranet.news> :

> Those of you who've seen the BBC's Space Odessey documentary will agree
that
> the Pegasus is a pretty good design for an interplanetary tour around the
> solar system. The only thing that we didn't hear too much about was how
they
> would sustain themselves for 6 or more years. There's no way you could
carry
> that much food for a crew of 8 people.
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/spaceodyssey/pegasus.shtml

Did you try to do the math before making that statement? Basicly a person
needs about 0.5 metric tons of food per year and about 1.0 tons of water for
a total of 1.5 tons of supplies per person per year. 6 * 8 * 1.5 = 72 tons
of supplies needed at max.

Take another look at your spaceship, it is already carrying landers that mass
35, 45, 15, 28 and 29 tons each! What would be the problem adding in the
food? And worse to your claim is water is highly reclaimable and is being
generated the entire trip by the crew. You probably don't need to ship more
than 1.0 tons of water per person period, and maybe noteven that much.

So you get 6 * 8 * 0.5 = 24 tons of food.
And you get 8 * 1.0 = 8 tons of water.
Total 32 tons of supplies plus equipment to recycle the water, which I expect
to mass far less than 40 tons!

                  Earl Colby Pottinger 

-- 
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