Re: ISS New Role?
- From: Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 23:49:51 -0500
David Spain wrote:
Hm, to keep plugging my traveling habitat idea, maybe a proposal for a
new module to attach to the ISS that would be designed to house 3 people
for up to six months without resupply from Earth, to be extended to 1 to
possibly 3 years as a means of testing what it would take to keep people
in space for extended periods of time w/o Earth resupply.
Watch out for radiation from solar storms in that regard... the ISS might be able to tolerate that due to its micrometeor shielding like the Apollo CM could via its heavy structure, but there's a real problem in ascending through the Van Allen belts from its present orbit to HEO or GEO, which it will really have a problem with if there is a crew aboard, unless you can figure out a way to de-crew it as it ascends or get it up there really fast.
When adding to crew tho' we'd need to attach a Soyuz or Orion
for emergency return since we'd be adding to the total crew.
A return vehicle will of necessity need to use a hypergolic fuel system (or solids) to be usable over that time-frame, as any form of cryogenics is not going to stay liquid for that long.
Jorge, would the ISS infrastructure be up to the task of housing 3 more
people in a separate module? (The module could connect to the rest of the
ISS, the important part is that is be capable of self-sustain of 3).
Heavy module for that period of time; food alone would be very heavy, even assuming near 100% efficiency in water and atmosphere recycling.
You'd probably want to make it very small and use it as a solar storm shelter.
Assuming that you don't get the water recycling down perfect, then making that module with an inner and outer hull...with water between them... kills two birds with one stone, as water is a great radiation shielding.
(As far as storing food outside of the "storm shelter", that's no problem as long as you don't stick it in any sort of metal packaging. In fact, we eat a lot of food that's preserved via hard radiation exposure to kill all life in it today. Stick it in metal and it gets bombarded by X-rays under radiation impacts to the metal around it, and things like iron in the blood in it get turned into radioactive isotopes, with "bad" effects to those who eat it.)
Pat
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