Re: BBC's Pegasus spaceship

From: Henk Boonsma (hboonsma_at_teranet.news)
Date: 11/19/04 

Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:49:58 +0100

"Earl Colby Pottinger" <earlcp@idirect.com> wrote in message
news:sNednZ_X97UKZgHcRVn-tQ@look.ca...
> "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!

The ship itself weights in at 400 tons but that's including its own mass and
propellants. That doesn't necessarily leave a lot of room for consumables
and water. The pictures don't seem to show a lot of storage space aboard
either.

The thing I like about the ship is the spinning gondola. I've been
advocating for years that NASA should stop all research on trying to find a
'medicine' that alleviates the bone and muscle loss and instead focus on
artificial gravity using spinning wheels or gondolas. It would also remove
the need for a lot of other research, such as how to operate on someone in a
zero-g environment.

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