NASA Awards Companies $65 Million To Develop Habitats For Deep Space (techcrunch.com) 88
An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: NASA has committed $65 million to six companies over the course of two years for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars. TechCrunch reports: "It's part of the organization's NEXTStep, an ongoing partnership program under NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems that funds private research into technology for space exploration. Last year's NEXTStep contracts were for a variety of things, but this year they're all on the same track: "deep space habitats where humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth." The lucky companies are all taking slightly different approaches to the problem of deep space habitation." The six companies include Bigelow Aerospace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada Corporation's Space Systems and NanoRacks.
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two wrongs do not make it right
even if defense contracts were secret, corrupt, and larger, that should not protect nasa from being open about its contracts to prevent corruption and improve efficacy.
for the record, most of the defense contracts have very strict guidelines and oversight(even secret ones which are a minority), and feature frequent bidding wars(even for huge ones) etc.
Re:how do I (Score:5, Informative)
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Write a proposal for any you are qualified to undertake.
Usually the problem with government projects, is that folks write proposals that they are not qualified to undertake.
And they win the contract anyway.
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Secure funding from NASA, how do I learn about the opportunity to secure funding, I am sure they advertise it somewhere, and have all sorts of guidelines, but it seems as if they send out invitations only, because it's only the same companies who ever get funding. I think the process to secure government money needs to be more accessible, and not hidden in bureaucracy only a select few can navigate to.
Just because it doesn't show up on your Facebook page doesn't mean it it is hidden in bureaucracy. If you have an idea for NASA, here you go:
https://prod.nais.nasa.gov/pub... [nasa.gov]
If you are just looking for money, here you go:
http://www.grants.gov/ [grants.gov]
The same companies seem to get chosen over and over is because they usually have some expertise in that particular area and can show a good reason why NASA should spend the money with them. Yeah, it helps to know the system but they bend over backward to make it trans
Re:how do I (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because it doesn't show up on your Facebook page doesn't mean it it is hidden in bureaucracy. If you have an idea for NASA, here you go:
How dare you! You've completely run over some whiner's precious beliefs!
Cor - you people and your true facts and stuff.
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The "fair and competitive" bidding process is actually a rather corrupt system.
You put a bid in, you force the bidders to jump thru a bunch of hoops.
If they don't get the bidder they want they stop bidding, and try again.
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There is also no seasonal reference, which is a component of traditional Haiku. For a 'Haiku lover' it was quite terrible.
The Haiku Lover
Like a fetid Summer wind
Repels us with rotten verse
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My expectations are lower than that. Mostly I shit on the ones that are just a big sentence that simply hit the enter key after five and seven. You and daughter post are fine.
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You no longer have to project. May your soul find peace.
Glass blowed 0g habitats (Score:4, Interesting)
Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.
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I guess you missed the "0G" part of the post's topic line?
I believe he refers to orbiting habitats fashioned from asteroid material using solar mirrors (also in orbit) so periods when sunlight is unavailable are typically short when placed in an orbit suited for purpose. Neither the manufacturing infrastructure nor t
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One of the shielding materials I have heard suggested for Mars missions is water. Water is pretty common in space, so getting some to use for shielding material shouldn't be too hard. Supposably, water makes an excellent radiation shield; not as good as lead, but much easier to construct.
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Duh! We do that all the time on Earth to make houses because it's such a trivial process. Isn't your home a lava gas home made with mirrors?
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Well, to be fair there are lots of reasons that it's a bad idea at surface level. You need much larger mirrors, gravity distorts the shape, etc.
But, yeah, it's well oversimplified. Still, once we get enough experience that approach should be possible. OTOH, it's starting to look like most asteroids are mainly dustpiles, so you need to melt them once to fuse the material, then you do some preparatory work, and then you heat them to blow the bubble. But since volatiles may be as important as the solid stu
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At surface level, half of your surface is insulative (the ground). Earth's surface also receives more sunlight than most asteroids.
It's a silly concept. Look at how big [mistbreaker.com] solar tower farms are to raise a building-sized receiver to only a couple hundred degrees, and remember that heat radiates away proportional to the fourth power.
It also is sheer ignorance of what molten rock is like. News flash for these people: molten rock is not a blob of glass on a stick. It's not some easily workable yet visc
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I doubt that you would get the same effect in the absence of gravity, the absence of convective cooling, and with a pre-heating to fusion (i.e., just less than molten) starting from dust...which would allow outgassing.
OTOH, there might well be problems with different fractions having different melting points. So you might need to do a crude mass-spectrometer of the dust before starting. Anyway you do it it's going to be a lot of work, and I don't see anything wrong with the concept of working the stuff on
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> Isn't your home a lava gas home made with mirrors?
My house is brick on the outside, and making brick involves heating it to where it starts to melt. Historically that's been done with a furnace, but there is no fundamental reason it can't be done with concentrated sunlight.
As a practical matter, the Sun doesn't always shine on Earth, but it does in space. The heating cycle for bricks takes longer than a day, so using sunlight is complicated.
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Morbo Voice: "BRICK DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!"
Sintering does not involve melting. Sintering is where particles join by diffusion. It occurs at significantly below the melting points of the individual particles. For example, modern bricks are made at much hotter temperatures than ancient bricks, usually in the ballpark of 1000C. But the melting point of silica (largest constituent) is 1713C, while aluminum oxi
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Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.
Which was central to the plot of the Troy Rising [wikipedia.org] series by John Ringo.
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Use big mirrors
Only in science fiction would "giant mirrors" be available for a purpose like this, but not a ready built habitat.
Bingo! Give the (anonymous) man a cigar.
Much of what gets posted here when it comes to space exploration are just science fiction plot gimmicks having little bearing on reality.
Re:Glass blowed 0g habitats (Score:4, Informative)
Use big mirrors and sunlight to heat space rock until it goes lava. Then blow gas inside the molten blob until it is big enough for your needs. Let it cool down, add holes for doors and windows.
Glass is brittle and tends to fracture. Don't expect junky mystery glass to hold up well long-term against micro-meteorite impacts - especially if it's made thin enough not to crack right away from thermal contraction during the cooling process. Cracks = leaks.
Even if it turned out to be practical to make something truly airtight via your technique, the result would still be super heavy compared to the high-tech alternatives favoured by the space industry: even homogeneous, high-quality synthetic glass has a poor strength-to-mass ratio as compared to structural metals (aluminium, steel, titanium) or synthetic fibres (kevlar, carbon fibre, etc.).
NASA wants maximum reliability (for both political and moral reasons) and minimum weight, because the cost of sending even lightweight manned spacecraft to Mars and back is already more than they can actually afford. What problem does melting space rocks solve for them?
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Heavy? I'm not sure you understand the goal here, which is to create a habitat in space that never leaves the orbit in which it was built. You aren't launching this from Earth or landing it on Mars
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The subject of the article, and my reply, was NASA, an organization which currently has no mandate or funding for establishing random asteroid bases in the middle of nowhere. They are, however, theoretically working towards a manned Mars - or maybe Moon - mission, which will require habitats light enough to economically move around.
Even if they were commissioned to build a habitat on some random asteroid, the proposed glass bubble doesn't actually help with that unless it can be made strong and airtight ver
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The cure for cracking while cooling is to cool very slowly, and possibly annealing. The point about micro-meteorites is much better, and there'd clearly need to be a lot of work. OTOH, any glass made this way wouldn't be transparent...and you're right about it not being thin...it would need to be reasonably thick. My WAG would say it would need to be a foot or two thick, but I've done no calculations, so it wouldn't surprise me to be off by a factor of 5.
OTOH, it would be best to have two layers and run,
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You're not talking about glass if you're talking about melting meteorites. You're talking about a high-iron basalt. Slowly cooled basalt is known as columnar basalt. It has gigantic planar faults in it. Not to mention the effects of volatiles. Or differentiation. Or the effects of uneven cooling (which is why lava tubes form). And on and on and on.
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The volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest). The faults are handled by annealing during the slow cooling. You don't get "differentiation" due to density differences because gravity isn't present. You would get differentiation due to chemical differences, different melting points, etc. and this would need to be handled. (I'm not thinking of this as a simple process, and I'm willing to consider that you might need to run the entire th
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The volatiles demonstrably do not "go off with pre-heating". That doesn't happen in volcanoes, and it's not going to happen in an asteroid.
Columnar basalt demonstrably does not "anneal during slow cooling". The columns form during slow cooling.
Differentiation is driven because not all components are readily compatible with each other in the newly cooled matrix, and is responsive to thermal gradients as much as gravity.
Spend some living in a volcanically active location like I do, then get back to me.
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I have lived on a volcanic island. It wasn't active at the time. But you aren't starting with a mass that's been gravitationally compacted into a solid, you're starting with something that's a weak, friable, mass of stuff. It's likely to be a pile of dust held together by ices. You will get the volatiles going off, and you'll probably get more of them as you bake the remaining solids to remove the ices adsorbed by the dust grains. Even the dust won't be the same as you find on Earth, because there won'
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... cool very slowly ... annealing ... foot or two thick ... best to have two layers and run, say, paraffin (US meaning) in between ... volatiles go off with the pre-heating (and are collected separately, because there are as valuable as the rest)
All of that makes sense, and would probably help a ton - but, it also makes the whole process a lot more complex than the AC's proposal, and majorly ups the required equipment and technology level. It could be useful to a hypothetical far-future colonization project, but would certainly be far more trouble than it was worth for any of NASA's planned activities over the next few decades.
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Basalt fiber (more or less "mystery glass" in fiber form) turns out to have surprisingly good mechanical properties, and a composite hull would be much tougher than a blown bubble, plus you would have more flexibility in the shapes achievable. Additional layers of basalt fiber fabric and "sandbags" filled with waste rock wrapped around the outside could provide radiation and micrometeorite shielding and thermal mass. Nothing you'd want to haul around the solar system, but for setting up habitable volume nea
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Covering a habitat in space rocks as extra shielding is sensible, as long as you don't need to change your trajectory while taking the extra shielding with you.
However, I don't think NASA has any zero-g activities planned for the foreseeable future which meet that criteria, and even if they did it would probably be much cheaper and safer to just bring some empty bags with them, instead of trying to fabricate them out of asteroid glass in space. Making things during the mission only really makes sense if it'
Event Horizon (Score:2)
In addition to material science and structural factors, you might want to re-think the whole "transparent" structure idea. Likely in an environment with little or no atmosphere you would be constantly staring out into the depths of vastness of space that wants to kill you every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day...
So unless your want your habitat to resemble something out of Event Horizon you'd probably be better with opaque walls and video screens decorated with trees, grass, sunshine. sky
Deep spcae; duh... (Score:2)
"developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used for future missions to Mars."
Mars is deep space?
I guess poster hasn't watched deep space 9.
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Well yes. At the current state of technology, anything beyond low Earth orbit is "deep space".
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Steve Jobs already did it. (Score:2)
They could have saved their money, as usual Steve JObs was ahead of his time and created NEXT Step years ago.
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It was pretty good with a 64040 (NeXTstation Turbo), I mean snappy, even in color. Always been critical of the performance of OS X when I remember that a 68030 with 16MB RAM did a decent job with NeXTStep, and a 68040 with 32MB RAM was damn whippy.
Nonetheless, NeXTStep 3.3 did run on PA-RISC and SPARC [wikipedia.org], and successor OpenStep [wikipedia.org] continued to support SPARC (but PA-RISC was dropped for some reason). BTW, you mentioned capitalization? It's NeXTStep [blogspot.com] (the "e" is a little "e", but the "step" might be anything [wikipedia.org]).
I u
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Thank you for those memories. The NeXT workstations was where I could see the power of UNIX by being able to navigate their filesystem from their file browser. And being able to click and run anything made things so smooth. Yeah, I know that NeXTstep was ported to the PA-RISC and SPARC, but it wasn't the OS of choice that shipped w/ those. I'd have liked it had NeXT themselves based their workstations on one of those.
Also, one of the reasons that NT had promise at the time was not cheap Intel PCs, sin
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imagine a beowulf cluster of those !
The nineties called. They wanted their in-joke back.
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Agreed. SPARC + NeXTStep (with productivity apps like Lotus and WriteNow!) Alpha + Windows 7 (with Word, Excel). But could those machine have ever been made cheap?
The (evil) genius of NT and i386 was that i386 was commodity hardware, whereas Sun and HP and DEC and even Apple wanted (and deserved) a premium for the effort they spent on developing their platforms. I can't imagine sourcing a truckload of Alphastations for around $2500 apiece, including monitor and CD-ROM and 10-base-T network interface, but
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While DEC did not make cheap Alphastations, there were other companies that made valiant attempts to make NT workstations from either Alpha or MIPS. Companies like DeskStation, NeTpower, Carrera, Aspen, Microway, et al.
What made the computers expensive was not the CPUs themselves, but the supporting chipsets. The ones made around Suns or HPs were high end so as to not be a bottleneck in terms of computing. The Alphas started off somewhat proprietary w/ the Turbochannel buses, but once they switched to
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On Sun's side of things, they had some low end workstations that could have done wonders running NeXTstep
Like this one [garblfarz.de] (SPARCstation ELC [wikipedia.org]). This one [wikipedia.org] was relatively affordable, too.
Come to think of it, there was a time when Apple and Sun could have joined up [theregister.co.uk]. Then maybe we would have had cheap Sparcs running a NeXTstep variant atop a Solaris kernel, with a classic-Mac compatibility layer? An OS X that never happened.
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"... and a fantastic free development environment, back when NT was in its infancy..."
And today, OS X includes an even better free development environment.
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Back in the 90's UIC's MS/CS department [uic.edu] had a computer lab with workstations running NeXTStep. The lab had mostly Intel-based pizza-boxes, but later on they purchased some HP-PA machines (models 715 and 815 IIRC). Some of the professors had a NeXTstation or NeXTcube (some with the NeXTdimension board) in their office. I really got a kick out of the magneto-optical drives.
I worked as an admin in the lab for a time and compiled a lot of open source code on those machines. GNU's autotools weren't used by
This is awesome! (Score:2)
Sorry, not much else to say about this, except awesome.
Re:This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was called a slab [wikipedia.org], my friend. Pizza-boxes were SPARCstations [popcorn.cx].
Radiation is the Deal-Breaker (Score:3)
Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back [space.com] exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease [nature.com]. Mars [nytimes.com] could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.
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Right, because when a team meets to decide a low-risk landing site, they're all going to collectively sit down and decide, "Let's navigate a habitat down this gaping hole onto who-knows-what kind of bottom and hope we don't induce a collapse in the process, then have our crew members climbing in and out all day."
When it comes to space, the KISS principle applies way more in reality than in sci-fi. You build things here on earth. You only even do seemingly simple in-space activities like connecting premade
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Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back [space.com] exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease [nature.com]. Mars [nytimes.com] could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.
There are lots of deal breakers. Radiation is just one of them. Another is loss of atmosphere. Spaceships leak. The ISS has to get constant resupply of gas because the atmosphere is constantly leaking out into space. They could take more with them as supplies and no doubt will, but that just makes the entire thing heavier and harder to get there. There will have to be some significant work on seals and keeping atmosphere from escaping over the periods of time a Mars mission will take (at least 22 months) be
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The 7 individuals led to a mouse study, which was statistically significant.
Of course, mouse studies don't always apply to humans. But you have suggestive evidence on humans, and statistically significant evidence on mice. That's not something to ignore.
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Ironically, Bigelow may now be the party with the most demonstration applicable to the contract, with three test articles on-orbit. (BEAM plus I believe they've separately orbited two others.)
Habits for deep space? (Score:2)
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Just good old-fashioned Space Nuns [google.com], of course.
Space Station -- Deep Space Habitat timeline (Score:2)
This sounds like the Space Station Phase B (preliminary design) contracts we worked on back in 1986-1987. We built some prototype modules back then too. Then it took a decade, from '88 to '98, to get to first hardware launch. Based on that history, look for first Deep Space Habitat launch in 2028.