uname@pyuxqq.UUCP (uname) (01/11/84)
References: Organization: CSO Lines: 3 All the space station designs shown on TV were basically cylinders. I wonder why the traditional sci-fi image of a ring structure is not under consideration?
danhart@aluxp.UUCP (HART) (01/27/84)
Perhaps the cylinders under consideration for orbital space stations are not sufficiently large to require wraping them around into rings. In time, the length of the station will require wrap around, and in more time the circumference will be a long walk so cross tubes will be added. Eventually we will build a "Death Star" type vehicle which we can stroll along the surface of, taking in some rays. The Wanderer Dan Hart aluxp!danhart
eder@ssc-vax.UUCP (01/31/84)
31 January 1984
The reason most space station modules are designed as cylinders
is they are designed to ride up in the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle's
cargo bay is a cylinder 15 feet in diameter and 60 feet long.
You will find, as a consequence, the diameters of station modules
designed by different companies will be almost identical.
Dani Eder
Boeing Aerospace Company
ssc-vax!ederhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (02/02/84)
The reason why nobody is looking at ring-shaped space stations is
that the current space-station plans do not use centrifugal force
to supply artificial gravity. Currently-planned stations will have
a free-fall environment throughout. Interest in artificial gravity
declined steeply in the 60's, when experimental evidence confirmed
that human beings were not seriously affected by moderate periods
of time in free-fall conditions. It may well be necessary in the
more distant future, when really long stays start to become a serious
possibility, but current plans aren't that fancy.
There is also a secondary issue here: current thought is that if
people are going to be coming and going between a rotating section
and a free-fall section, the rotation rate should be quite low.
This is not a mechanical question but a matter of worries about
things like inner-ear upsets. Last I heard, the best guess was that
if you want arbitrarily-chosen people to come and go between the two
environments over long periods, anything above 1 RPM is dubious.
Given the nice simple relationship between spin rate, radius, and
acceleration, it turns out that a 1-RPM structure giving a useful
fraction of 1G has to be *big*, hundreds of meters at least. This
is a bit too big for timid NASA planners just now.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henryEdward.Tecot%CMU-CS-H@sri-unix.UUCP (03/13/84)
Yes, I agree. This is a trickle-down budget. However, the $0.90 that would not be spent on a station would not go to science either. I prefer to have a space station up there than an extra nuclear warhead in my backyard. _emt