Tsiolkovsky, interesting choice for an outpost location! I'll be excited to see where the next ones are - we've broken from the Shackleton status-quo for now, but who knows, perhaps we shall return on a future Minerva flight. Brilliantly done so far, I absolutely eat up any new lunar content of course. I wonder, will we end up with a Minerva at one of the other proposed Apollo sites that got canned? Tycho, or maybe Hyginus, or Marius Hills?
Boldly Going: A History of an American Space Station
- Thread starter e of pi
- Start date
This is also the longest time (so far) spent in the gravity well of another body other than Earth, an invaluable source of information on how the human body adapts to a different gravity.
I bring this up because in OTL we have next to nothing about health in les-than-Earth-more-than-freefall gravity since short of actually going there or setting up an orbital rotating lab there's no way to gather real data on the subject. Without hard data on 'gravity minimums' on long-term health, there is always the risk of discovering some rather terrible effects of planetary 'colonization' (yes, I will forever be a skeptic of colonizing Mars for this reason).
It's going to be interesting for NASA's medical branch to study the lunar outpost's crew to see if health effects from gravity are linearly proportional or not.
The probability of there being a negative effect of low-gravity that isn’t present at a more intense degree in free fall is so low as to be nonexistent. That kind of talk would have us conduct endless studies to step outside our front porch, on the grounds that there “might” be a Slenderman out there.
that is not the point. the point is to determine if low gravity is also detrimental to health in the same way zero gravity is, and to what extent.
If lunar gravity is far less negative, that means people can stay there much longer without problems, and less issues when returning to 1 G
Not really. What needs to be done first is see if the colonization/permanent basing is even possible from a technical standpoint. After that the decision has to nbe if it is possible from a logistical standpoint (e.g if you have to spend 1,00,000 liters of fuel to get one liter to the base, the situation is unsustainable). Next is to decide if it can be built for whatever sum of money is available, Then it has to be determined if a short term occupation by humans is medically possible (high energy radiation all the way to keeping food down). Only after you know you can do it, can supply it, can build it, can afford it, and send crews up to construct it without having to write them off every damned time, can you start ti determine what, if any, long term impact actually living in low gravity/exposed to solar magnetic outbursts/living without the various and sundry things that the "natural world" contains for truly extended periods. Once it is established that a human can thrive for a couple years then you can go to the next step which is actually having people live their lives there.
The other method may get "boots on the ground" faster but if everyone wearing those boots dies after six months or a year, all that has been accomplished is that incredible amounts of funding has been spent to let a few people commit suicide. Then, after a couple expeditions get wiped out, a half trillion dollars has been wasted the "let's figure out what the F### we are doing here method" kicks in. This assumes that the lost expeditions don't turn the powers-that-be entirely off the entire concept and those early failed efforts are the only efforts humanity ever attempts.
My point is that the issues with free fall have proven manageable, for periods of six months to a year, with a decent exercise routine and acceptance of a slightly higher risk of cancer later in life (tiny compared to, say, breathing the air in Beijing, much less to smoking). Thus, we can accept the risks of six months to a year on a moon base, based solely off the experience on the ISS.
…ah. I think I understand the miscommunication here. Yes, it makes sense to send up monkeys on Mercury before humans. Yes, you should do short-duration missions and build up to long ones. But my point is that we’ve *done* the reasonable risk-reduction for an off-earth base. It can hardly be worse than the environment on the ISS, which we are (evidently, at least according to NASA) willing to accept.
One experiment that it’s ridiculous we haven’t done yet is flying up a couple rabbits and getting them pregnant. It is *extraordinarily* unlikely that freefall will have an effect, since the fetus is in a neutrally bouyant soluation, effectively already in free fall, but it is such an easy expirement that it’s unconscionable that it hasn’t been done yet.
It has happened, actually, though not in a decade or so:
Rat gestation during space flight: Outcomes for dams and their offspring born after return to earth - Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
Sprague-Dawley rats were studied to learn whether gestation in the near-zero gravity, high radiation environment of space impacts selected mammalian postnatal events. Ten rats spent days nine to twenty of pregnancy aboard the space shuttle orbiterAtlantis (STS-66). Their movement, was studied...
link.springer.com
The effects of microgravity on the development of surface righting in rats
The active interaction of neonatal animals with their environment has been shown to be a decisive factor in the postnatal development of sensory systems, which demonstrates a critical period in their maturation. The direct demonstration of such a dependence ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Orbital Spaceflight During Pregnancy Shapes Function of Mammalian Vestibular System
Pregnant rats were flown on the NASA Space Shuttle during the early developmental period of their fetuses’ vestibular apparatus and onset of vestibular function. The authors report that prenatal spaceflight exposure shapes vestibular-mediated ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Results were inconclusive as I recall (it's been a while since I looked into this in detail and I'm not in medicine), but pointed to some issues being potentially problematic, while others aren't.
I think the question is more "Will some (ie Lunar) gravity mitigate negative effects of no gravity, and if so how much?"
Unrelated to the gravity issue but nevertheless a concern: medium- or long-term Lunar outposts better have a radiation shelter or else a plan in place for immediate return to Earth orbit in the case of a solar flare. ISS/SSE is inside Earth's magnetosphere. The moon isn't.
Part 27: Enterprise acquires an understudy, Galileo. Mir-II acquires a new lab, Curie. Hubble comes to stay.
Boldly Going Part 27
With the launch of Minerva 3 in 2001, NASA had established the first of a new generation of human outposts beyond Earth orbit. However, it wasn’t the only new outpost launched that year. After many delays, Russia finally launched the first modules of Mir-II. Funded by contributions from Europe and a number of private tourists, Russia spent the next two years launching and assembling their third generation modular space station in a 52 degree inclination orbit shared with the existing and still intermittently occupied Mir-I. Assembly began with the DOS-8 Zvezda station core module, then the Spektr lab module. As soon as the first modules of the new station were launched, it became home not only to ESA astronauts and spationauts, but also to a stream of private tourists whose dollars helped pay the bills of the cash-strapped Russian program. The first resident in the temporary tourist crew quarters in Spektr was internet dot-com billionaire Paul Allen. He had been debating founding his own space launch company for tourist purposes and justified his flight experience as a “fact finding” expedition (for which he was able to take a tax write-off). In 2002, the Europeans launched their Curie laboratory to become the third module of the station. The same small size which made Mir-II less capable than Enterprise in both lab volume and power supply ironically also produced a purer microgravity environment. Though still intermittently disturbed by the motion of tourists and crew aboard, for a time Curie was the preferred site for housing experiments which depended on high-quality microgravity, such as pharmaceuticals and crystal growth. Until the launch of the first Russian power module in 2003, Curie’s 15 kW solar panels would also provide half of the power generated aboard Mir-II, exceeding the capacity of the smaller arrays aboard Zvezda and Spektr.
Beyond being the primary home for microgravity experiments and its contributions to the power grid of Mir-II, Curie was also the debut of a new generation of European multi-purpose spacecraft. The base design, named the Multi-Purpose Space Vehicle, came from coupling an MPLM-derived pressure hull to a service module developed from the Kepler-L lunar crew vehicle.In Curie’s case, modifications were made to the basic MPSV hull to add additional solar panel capacity, uprate her thrusters for on-orbit refueling and longer use, and increase the rated lifespan of her micrometeor and orbital debris protection by providing an outer layer of metal shielding. By removing these modifications, the same basic MPSV design became the “Automated Transfer Vehicle,” a 20-ton logistics carrier for launch aboard Ariane 5. With the benefits of this large additional logistics stream for both Mir-II and (more regularly) Space Station Enterprise, the new ATV would pay the way for a stream of European astronauts to both outposts. With this, ESA continued to be the only agency to maintain a continuous presence on more than one space station. A final derivative of the MPSV bus would stretch this claim further. In 2005, ESA launched their Galileo space platform. Galileo was the full embodiment of the concept of a “Man-Tended Free-Flyer” which had originally spawned the ATV type and the Columbus and Curie lab modules aboard Enterprise and Mir-II. By European reckoning, Galileo was both a tug and a space station. Modifications to the MPSV bus for Galileo would consist of the same long-life modifications from Curie, but with only the reduced solar power of the ATV. The performance of Galileo was further increased by adding additional propellant tanks inside the pressurized cabin, taking advantage of the non-toxic propellants selected for the MPSV design. Much like Curie, Galileo featured a second docking port located between the four OMS engines, connected by a short pressurized tunnel to the habitable module. By mounting an APAS port on the main pressurized module at its other end, Galileo was thus capable of both docking independently to APAS ports, or being berthed by robotic arm to a station’s CBM port to transfer the larger ISPRs it was fitted to carry.
Galileo’s first major mission began with its launch in August 2005 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. Rather than flying to the 52 degree orbit of Mir-II or the 39-degree orbit of Enterprise, Galileo started its career in a 28.5 degree orbit. With its propellant tanks full to overflowing, Galileo began the burns to chase down its first customer: the Hubble Space Telescope. Conducting servicing operations at an orbit distinct from that of Enterprise had been a problem for decades, and the Americans had been heavily interested in solving the problem by relocating the telescope to a more convenient orbit. Unfortunately, Congressional leadership had repeatedly declined to fund the expense of an American Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) or Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) which might only be used once. With autonomous docking ability and massive propellant tanks, Galileo was the perfect pinch-hitter for the role of a reusable orbital tug. After three days spent chasing down the telescope, Galileo gently docked to the port left behind four years earlier by STS-125.
Over the next several weeks, a series of gentle burns eased the telescope’s inclination higher and higher. Even with the augmented propellant tanks, Galileo wasn’t up to the task of moving the combined 30-ton stack to a 39-degree orbit coplanar with Enterprise in a single operation. Instead, Galileo burnt off just over 5 metric tons of the ethanol-LOX propellants, adjusting Hubble’s orbit by 4.5 degrees. Leaving it at the new 33 degree orbit, Galileo continued on to Enterprise using the more than three tons remaining in its tanks. Arriving in September 2005, Galileo docked and was refueled with supplies sent up on the Space Shuttle and ATV. With its internal tanks topped off, Galileo burnt its way back to Hubble and powered it through another 3.5 degrees of inclination adjustment. The reduced capability, in spite of the increased propellant load, came from the need to not just boost down to Hubble, but also to retain propellant to come back to Enterprise for the final refueling which would bring Hubble to an orbit coplanar with the station. The complex operations interrupted Hubble’s observing time off and on through the rest of 2005, but by 2006 the telescope had been inserted into its new 545 kilometer 39 degree orbit.
With this first mission complete, Galileo was berthed to the station rather than docked, and began to receive an overhaul to suit its new role not as just a tug, but as a free-flying scientific platform which could also serve as a tug. This new mission would not require the large propellant tanks needed for the Hubble move, and the tanks could be reused for other purposes. The LOX capacity was repurposed to store additional oxygen and nitrogen to sustain a breathable atmosphere during independent operations. The ethanol tanks were drained, purged, and eventually refilled with water for both cooling and bioscience research. As a result of the slow “boiloff” of residual stored ethanol from the remaining supplies stockpiled aboard the station, the crew of Enterprise enjoyed a very happy year of holidays throughout 2006. While the tanks were being repurposed, Enterprise crew installed experiments into ISPR racks that had been left empty on Galileo’s launch. These experiments, specifically launched via shuttle and MPLM to Enterprise for installation on ]Galileo, would take advantage of the independent nature of the platform. Smaller and free from crew-induced vibrations, Galileo would offer a dramatically superior environment for long-duration microgravity than Enterprise or even its cousin, the Curie laboratory aboard Mir-II. Additionally, experiments aboard Galileo would be free of the safety concerns that precluded open combustion experiments from being conducted on other stations. After the conversion, Galileo was refueled for station-keeping and cast loose from Enterprise again to take up its own co-orbital position a few dozen kilometers behind the larger station. By European reckoning, Galileo’s largely independent operations made them the third agency to operate their own space station. However, NASA and many American news sources typically regarded Galileo as an adjunct to the American outpost, as integral to its operational tempos and capabilities as Space Shuttle launches, Hubble servicing, or Kepler lifeboat rotations.
By 2009, Space Station Enterprise was at the center of a network of off-Earth outposts. In addition to playing host to a normal crew of 8, which surged as high as 18 during Space Shuttle and European Kepler crew visits, Enterprise also was the logistics base for Galileo which typically orbited within a few dozen kilometers. The Hubble Space Telescope was left in its orbit coplanar with but roughly 50 kilometers above the station, within easy access but far enough away to avoid conflicts with station operations or impacts by station-generated debris. Galileo made roughly annual visits to the main station for upkeep and maintenance, and was also assigned to bring Hubble to Enterprise roughly every 2-3 years for maintenance and reboost. On the moon, the Americans had constructed “cabin-in-the-woods” outposts at the landing sites of Minerva 2 at Oceanus Procellarum, the Minerva 3 mission on the lunar farside at Tsiolkovsky Crater, and the Minerva 4 outpost at Shackleton Crater near the lunar South Pole. The latter had been expanded with an additional pair of LSAMs and an arched, regolith-covered roof, to form “Shackleton Base.” There, drawing on the station’s 8 Habitanks and two Minerva Core Modules, crews were able to stay up to nine months to conduct increasingly detailed examinations of much of the lunar south pole region. The base had begun accumulating the detritus every long-duration human outpost seemed to eventually develop. The base’s galley still featured a cardboard standup of Quark, signed by Armin Shimerman, which the Minerva 4 crew had left behind in the airlock to greet the arrival of Minerva 5’s crew to “Deep Space One,” More noticeably the base also possessed an increasingly large pool of un-converted “surplus” LSAMs which grew by one for every additional crew that visited the base.
As for the rest of human spaceflight, Mir-II had been recently completed, though the station still had echoes of its Soviet roots. Moreover, the constant supply of millionaire and billionaire tourists often gave it a reputation as the tabloid center of spaceflight. The flight of billionaire Charles Simmons and his fiancée Lisa Pérez in 2009 didn’t help matters. The pair were engaged before their flight, and once on orbit revealed their intention to be married in space. They presented a marriage license from the State of California, and asked the station’s rather amused Russian commander to perform the official ceremony. By exercise of the ancient privilege of vessel commanders, he pronounced them husband and wife. The two then proceeded to spend much of their time in the supplementary tourist quarters located in the pressurized module at the root of the station’s portside solar truss. Within weeks, the module (home to two supplemental crew quarters and an additional hygiene station) had shed its original inevitable nickname of the “Orbital Hilton” and been equally inevitably renamed the “Honeymoon Suite.”
Tabloid interest was immediate in the orbital marriage ceremony, and how any ensuing consummation might have been achieved. Other media fanned the flames, if more tastefully. On their return, the newly married couple helped recoup some of the $120 million cost of the 3-month “honeymoon of a lifetime” by publishing a book, which went on to be a New York Times best seller. Largely a boilerplate romance of a dot-com billionaire and a mere dot-com millionaire falling in love over a joint interest in spaceflight, the book’s marketing push teased that it made references to the mechanics of sex in space, a matter of interest to gossip hounds but which the stodgy NASA Public Affairs Office considered verboten. The couple’s time in space was confined to a few chapters near the end, before a discussion of their relationship since their return home, but contained just enough prurient details to titillate the audience turning up for them. However, perhaps the book's most famous line was an assertion that the experience combined with the so-called “overlook effect” of seeing the Earth from space “left them feeling like they were experiencing something no one had ever felt before--a connection that transcended bodies and borders to create a bond to last a lifetime.”
Originally, the book’s marketing had carried the pitch that it was the story of the first married couple to fly in space. In a rare breach of silence about the entire topic however, NASA’s Public Affairs team had pointed out this wasn’t true when the book was submitted to them for comment early in publication. Though the Simmons were the first to be married in space, they were not the first married couple in space. Following a whirlwind romance during training, NASA astronauts Mark Lee and Jan Davis had flown together on STS-47 in 1992. By the time the pair’s romance had come out, the agency had been unable to arrange to replace one or both in time to avoid disrupting the mission of carrying a Spacelab module full of Japanese experiments to Space Station Enterprise. The matter had raised eyebrows inside the agency at the time, but now the Simmons’ honeymoon getaway brought the matter back to the forefront. Officially, NASA refused to answer any questions about any activities the two newlyweds had gotten up to in space in the early days of Space Station Enterprise, before permanent crew were aboard. Presumably then, the pair had been too busy, too professional, or too closely chaperoned by the rest of the crew for anything to result. With the Simmons honeymoon, the matter came back to intense public attention nearly two decades after it had occurred. Divorced since 1999, Davis and Lee were both reluctant to comment on the events of a marriage now a decade in the past or risk the wrath of the NASA PAOs. The closest thing to a public answer came when Jan Davis visited Texas A&M for a speaking arrangement and small-group meetings with aerospace engineering students. According to posts later circulated on the internet, one of the young women in a small-group arranged by the campus Society for Women Engineers had dared ask the question which NASA preferred to never have addressed. Asked if she had found any experience of orbital flight and related activities to yield something like Simmons’ famous line about a “connection to last eternity,” Davis had simply said “I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that myself.”
Some within space advocacy circles shook their heads in horror that in just a decade space headlines had gone from a return to the moon to such tabloid-level tawdry questions. They saw it as a sign that space was becoming just another place polluted by the worst of humanity, not someplace to look for humanity to achieve something better than its worst impulses. Of course, it also reflected that space was becoming a destination for humanity at large, not just for the government-selected and screened few. In some ways, the immaturity reflected the growing maturity of human access to orbit and beyond, as it required regular flights of multiple tourists at a time to a station large enough to assure them privacy. The main practical effect of the controversy was that another three couples expressed interest in registering for a “getaway in space'' aboard Mir-II, further driving space tourism. Given the arrangements for profit-sharing of tourism flights to the station, these deals meant almost $40 million apiece in the coffers of ESA and CNES, enough to ensure the two agencies also developed a relaxed attitude about what private citizens (or at least the ultra-wealthy) might be getting up to in the privacy of Mir-II’s tourism cabins. For all the immaturity of the Earth-side reactions, access to space was becoming increasingly mature. However, portions of the systems for accessing space were becoming not just mature, but worn by age.
[1] Historically not a station mission, obviously, but with a biomedical focus and utilization of Spacelab, the mission would benefit from going there. Moved from the OTL STS-47
Artwork by: @nixonshead (AEB Digital on Twitter)
With the launch of Minerva 3 in 2001, NASA had established the first of a new generation of human outposts beyond Earth orbit. However, it wasn’t the only new outpost launched that year. After many delays, Russia finally launched the first modules of Mir-II. Funded by contributions from Europe and a number of private tourists, Russia spent the next two years launching and assembling their third generation modular space station in a 52 degree inclination orbit shared with the existing and still intermittently occupied Mir-I. Assembly began with the DOS-8 Zvezda station core module, then the Spektr lab module. As soon as the first modules of the new station were launched, it became home not only to ESA astronauts and spationauts, but also to a stream of private tourists whose dollars helped pay the bills of the cash-strapped Russian program. The first resident in the temporary tourist crew quarters in Spektr was internet dot-com billionaire Paul Allen. He had been debating founding his own space launch company for tourist purposes and justified his flight experience as a “fact finding” expedition (for which he was able to take a tax write-off). In 2002, the Europeans launched their Curie laboratory to become the third module of the station. The same small size which made Mir-II less capable than Enterprise in both lab volume and power supply ironically also produced a purer microgravity environment. Though still intermittently disturbed by the motion of tourists and crew aboard, for a time Curie was the preferred site for housing experiments which depended on high-quality microgravity, such as pharmaceuticals and crystal growth. Until the launch of the first Russian power module in 2003, Curie’s 15 kW solar panels would also provide half of the power generated aboard Mir-II, exceeding the capacity of the smaller arrays aboard Zvezda and Spektr.
Beyond being the primary home for microgravity experiments and its contributions to the power grid of Mir-II, Curie was also the debut of a new generation of European multi-purpose spacecraft. The base design, named the Multi-Purpose Space Vehicle, came from coupling an MPLM-derived pressure hull to a service module developed from the Kepler-L lunar crew vehicle.In Curie’s case, modifications were made to the basic MPSV hull to add additional solar panel capacity, uprate her thrusters for on-orbit refueling and longer use, and increase the rated lifespan of her micrometeor and orbital debris protection by providing an outer layer of metal shielding. By removing these modifications, the same basic MPSV design became the “Automated Transfer Vehicle,” a 20-ton logistics carrier for launch aboard Ariane 5. With the benefits of this large additional logistics stream for both Mir-II and (more regularly) Space Station Enterprise, the new ATV would pay the way for a stream of European astronauts to both outposts. With this, ESA continued to be the only agency to maintain a continuous presence on more than one space station. A final derivative of the MPSV bus would stretch this claim further. In 2005, ESA launched their Galileo space platform. Galileo was the full embodiment of the concept of a “Man-Tended Free-Flyer” which had originally spawned the ATV type and the Columbus and Curie lab modules aboard Enterprise and Mir-II. By European reckoning, Galileo was both a tug and a space station. Modifications to the MPSV bus for Galileo would consist of the same long-life modifications from Curie, but with only the reduced solar power of the ATV. The performance of Galileo was further increased by adding additional propellant tanks inside the pressurized cabin, taking advantage of the non-toxic propellants selected for the MPSV design. Much like Curie, Galileo featured a second docking port located between the four OMS engines, connected by a short pressurized tunnel to the habitable module. By mounting an APAS port on the main pressurized module at its other end, Galileo was thus capable of both docking independently to APAS ports, or being berthed by robotic arm to a station’s CBM port to transfer the larger ISPRs it was fitted to carry.
Galileo’s first major mission began with its launch in August 2005 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. Rather than flying to the 52 degree orbit of Mir-II or the 39-degree orbit of Enterprise, Galileo started its career in a 28.5 degree orbit. With its propellant tanks full to overflowing, Galileo began the burns to chase down its first customer: the Hubble Space Telescope. Conducting servicing operations at an orbit distinct from that of Enterprise had been a problem for decades, and the Americans had been heavily interested in solving the problem by relocating the telescope to a more convenient orbit. Unfortunately, Congressional leadership had repeatedly declined to fund the expense of an American Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) or Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) which might only be used once. With autonomous docking ability and massive propellant tanks, Galileo was the perfect pinch-hitter for the role of a reusable orbital tug. After three days spent chasing down the telescope, Galileo gently docked to the port left behind four years earlier by STS-125.
Over the next several weeks, a series of gentle burns eased the telescope’s inclination higher and higher. Even with the augmented propellant tanks, Galileo wasn’t up to the task of moving the combined 30-ton stack to a 39-degree orbit coplanar with Enterprise in a single operation. Instead, Galileo burnt off just over 5 metric tons of the ethanol-LOX propellants, adjusting Hubble’s orbit by 4.5 degrees. Leaving it at the new 33 degree orbit, Galileo continued on to Enterprise using the more than three tons remaining in its tanks. Arriving in September 2005, Galileo docked and was refueled with supplies sent up on the Space Shuttle and ATV. With its internal tanks topped off, Galileo burnt its way back to Hubble and powered it through another 3.5 degrees of inclination adjustment. The reduced capability, in spite of the increased propellant load, came from the need to not just boost down to Hubble, but also to retain propellant to come back to Enterprise for the final refueling which would bring Hubble to an orbit coplanar with the station. The complex operations interrupted Hubble’s observing time off and on through the rest of 2005, but by 2006 the telescope had been inserted into its new 545 kilometer 39 degree orbit.
With this first mission complete, Galileo was berthed to the station rather than docked, and began to receive an overhaul to suit its new role not as just a tug, but as a free-flying scientific platform which could also serve as a tug. This new mission would not require the large propellant tanks needed for the Hubble move, and the tanks could be reused for other purposes. The LOX capacity was repurposed to store additional oxygen and nitrogen to sustain a breathable atmosphere during independent operations. The ethanol tanks were drained, purged, and eventually refilled with water for both cooling and bioscience research. As a result of the slow “boiloff” of residual stored ethanol from the remaining supplies stockpiled aboard the station, the crew of Enterprise enjoyed a very happy year of holidays throughout 2006. While the tanks were being repurposed, Enterprise crew installed experiments into ISPR racks that had been left empty on Galileo’s launch. These experiments, specifically launched via shuttle and MPLM to Enterprise for installation on ]Galileo, would take advantage of the independent nature of the platform. Smaller and free from crew-induced vibrations, Galileo would offer a dramatically superior environment for long-duration microgravity than Enterprise or even its cousin, the Curie laboratory aboard Mir-II. Additionally, experiments aboard Galileo would be free of the safety concerns that precluded open combustion experiments from being conducted on other stations. After the conversion, Galileo was refueled for station-keeping and cast loose from Enterprise again to take up its own co-orbital position a few dozen kilometers behind the larger station. By European reckoning, Galileo’s largely independent operations made them the third agency to operate their own space station. However, NASA and many American news sources typically regarded Galileo as an adjunct to the American outpost, as integral to its operational tempos and capabilities as Space Shuttle launches, Hubble servicing, or Kepler lifeboat rotations.
By 2009, Space Station Enterprise was at the center of a network of off-Earth outposts. In addition to playing host to a normal crew of 8, which surged as high as 18 during Space Shuttle and European Kepler crew visits, Enterprise also was the logistics base for Galileo which typically orbited within a few dozen kilometers. The Hubble Space Telescope was left in its orbit coplanar with but roughly 50 kilometers above the station, within easy access but far enough away to avoid conflicts with station operations or impacts by station-generated debris. Galileo made roughly annual visits to the main station for upkeep and maintenance, and was also assigned to bring Hubble to Enterprise roughly every 2-3 years for maintenance and reboost. On the moon, the Americans had constructed “cabin-in-the-woods” outposts at the landing sites of Minerva 2 at Oceanus Procellarum, the Minerva 3 mission on the lunar farside at Tsiolkovsky Crater, and the Minerva 4 outpost at Shackleton Crater near the lunar South Pole. The latter had been expanded with an additional pair of LSAMs and an arched, regolith-covered roof, to form “Shackleton Base.” There, drawing on the station’s 8 Habitanks and two Minerva Core Modules, crews were able to stay up to nine months to conduct increasingly detailed examinations of much of the lunar south pole region. The base had begun accumulating the detritus every long-duration human outpost seemed to eventually develop. The base’s galley still featured a cardboard standup of Quark, signed by Armin Shimerman, which the Minerva 4 crew had left behind in the airlock to greet the arrival of Minerva 5’s crew to “Deep Space One,” More noticeably the base also possessed an increasingly large pool of un-converted “surplus” LSAMs which grew by one for every additional crew that visited the base.
As for the rest of human spaceflight, Mir-II had been recently completed, though the station still had echoes of its Soviet roots. Moreover, the constant supply of millionaire and billionaire tourists often gave it a reputation as the tabloid center of spaceflight. The flight of billionaire Charles Simmons and his fiancée Lisa Pérez in 2009 didn’t help matters. The pair were engaged before their flight, and once on orbit revealed their intention to be married in space. They presented a marriage license from the State of California, and asked the station’s rather amused Russian commander to perform the official ceremony. By exercise of the ancient privilege of vessel commanders, he pronounced them husband and wife. The two then proceeded to spend much of their time in the supplementary tourist quarters located in the pressurized module at the root of the station’s portside solar truss. Within weeks, the module (home to two supplemental crew quarters and an additional hygiene station) had shed its original inevitable nickname of the “Orbital Hilton” and been equally inevitably renamed the “Honeymoon Suite.”
Tabloid interest was immediate in the orbital marriage ceremony, and how any ensuing consummation might have been achieved. Other media fanned the flames, if more tastefully. On their return, the newly married couple helped recoup some of the $120 million cost of the 3-month “honeymoon of a lifetime” by publishing a book, which went on to be a New York Times best seller. Largely a boilerplate romance of a dot-com billionaire and a mere dot-com millionaire falling in love over a joint interest in spaceflight, the book’s marketing push teased that it made references to the mechanics of sex in space, a matter of interest to gossip hounds but which the stodgy NASA Public Affairs Office considered verboten. The couple’s time in space was confined to a few chapters near the end, before a discussion of their relationship since their return home, but contained just enough prurient details to titillate the audience turning up for them. However, perhaps the book's most famous line was an assertion that the experience combined with the so-called “overlook effect” of seeing the Earth from space “left them feeling like they were experiencing something no one had ever felt before--a connection that transcended bodies and borders to create a bond to last a lifetime.”
Originally, the book’s marketing had carried the pitch that it was the story of the first married couple to fly in space. In a rare breach of silence about the entire topic however, NASA’s Public Affairs team had pointed out this wasn’t true when the book was submitted to them for comment early in publication. Though the Simmons were the first to be married in space, they were not the first married couple in space. Following a whirlwind romance during training, NASA astronauts Mark Lee and Jan Davis had flown together on STS-47 in 1992. By the time the pair’s romance had come out, the agency had been unable to arrange to replace one or both in time to avoid disrupting the mission of carrying a Spacelab module full of Japanese experiments to Space Station Enterprise. The matter had raised eyebrows inside the agency at the time, but now the Simmons’ honeymoon getaway brought the matter back to the forefront. Officially, NASA refused to answer any questions about any activities the two newlyweds had gotten up to in space in the early days of Space Station Enterprise, before permanent crew were aboard. Presumably then, the pair had been too busy, too professional, or too closely chaperoned by the rest of the crew for anything to result. With the Simmons honeymoon, the matter came back to intense public attention nearly two decades after it had occurred. Divorced since 1999, Davis and Lee were both reluctant to comment on the events of a marriage now a decade in the past or risk the wrath of the NASA PAOs. The closest thing to a public answer came when Jan Davis visited Texas A&M for a speaking arrangement and small-group meetings with aerospace engineering students. According to posts later circulated on the internet, one of the young women in a small-group arranged by the campus Society for Women Engineers had dared ask the question which NASA preferred to never have addressed. Asked if she had found any experience of orbital flight and related activities to yield something like Simmons’ famous line about a “connection to last eternity,” Davis had simply said “I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that myself.”
Some within space advocacy circles shook their heads in horror that in just a decade space headlines had gone from a return to the moon to such tabloid-level tawdry questions. They saw it as a sign that space was becoming just another place polluted by the worst of humanity, not someplace to look for humanity to achieve something better than its worst impulses. Of course, it also reflected that space was becoming a destination for humanity at large, not just for the government-selected and screened few. In some ways, the immaturity reflected the growing maturity of human access to orbit and beyond, as it required regular flights of multiple tourists at a time to a station large enough to assure them privacy. The main practical effect of the controversy was that another three couples expressed interest in registering for a “getaway in space'' aboard Mir-II, further driving space tourism. Given the arrangements for profit-sharing of tourism flights to the station, these deals meant almost $40 million apiece in the coffers of ESA and CNES, enough to ensure the two agencies also developed a relaxed attitude about what private citizens (or at least the ultra-wealthy) might be getting up to in the privacy of Mir-II’s tourism cabins. For all the immaturity of the Earth-side reactions, access to space was becoming increasingly mature. However, portions of the systems for accessing space were becoming not just mature, but worn by age.
[1] Historically not a station mission, obviously, but with a biomedical focus and utilization of Spacelab, the mission would benefit from going there. Moved from the OTL STS-47
Artwork by: @nixonshead (AEB Digital on Twitter)
Last edited:
Ah, there's the miscommunication, I was thinking of much longer-duration missions than the single year that's still considered a marathon stay in freefall.
Because we don't have good data on long-term effects anywhere in the gap between 1G and 0G, the relatively brief stay on the Moon will be our first dataset to answer what your maximum-length stay on a 'permanent' lunar base would be. That data, combined with follow-up missions could then be used to extrapolate figures for working on Mars.
As I've mentioned before, I am deeply skeptical of talk of 'colonizing Mars' when we don't even know if the gravity's strong enough not to cripple anyone who spends more than a decade there. I'd hardly call that being afraid of a fictional boogeyman.
These long-term stays on the moon, equal in length to (what I believe is) an 'average' stay on Enterprise, form a perfect set of comparative data on gravity's effects on health, over and above radiological effects of staying so long outside of Earth's magnetic field.
Also, Well done, Galileo! Good to see a space tug get up into space, being able to double as an 'isolation ward' close enough to Enterprise to see out the window is a great benefit.
Orbiter replacement incoming. Though the orbiter element of Enterprise is presumably also showing her age. While the focus as shifted to the newer ET tank and modules she's nearly 30 years old.
Fantastic though surely a roof big enough to cover a 4 LSAM base must be massive and thus the structural supports comparatively heavy.
Question: With all this extra emphasis on Earth-orbit and Lunar outposts, how has that impacted Mars and outer-planet exploration? Galileo and Cassini-Huygens? The pile of Mars rovers and landers? New Horizons?
Ladies and gentlemen... we got 'em.
called it.
jokes aside, another fantastic part - it really feels like things are coming together. The saga of Enterprise has made me realize just how much NASA can (and could've) done with the Shuttle - I suppose I'd gotten used to seeing it as this anchor around spaceflight's neck, keeping it locked to LEO, but it really could've done so much more with proper funding and planning.
Um…
What he said. It takes about three days to get back. You’re not gonna have more than 8-12 hours of warning, and probably no warning at all. Dump regolith on top of the hab.
Yay update! Also, wow, NASA not being a bunch of stuffed shirts. I’d expect them to flush it away.
But the maximum-length stay will be, logically, longer than the maximum-length aboard freefall station.
Going to have to disagree, here. Space adaptation hasn’t ever caused any problems while the astronauts are up there. A colonization mission is by definition one-way. Mars colonists might (unlikely) need a walker to visit Earth again, but they’ll be fine while there. Well, at least for a year. There *should* be a base program to build up to ten years before permanent commitments are made. Mars One is totally premature, in addition to being a scam.
Have they found water ice at the South Pole yet?
Also, I laughed at how quickly that 'excess fuel' got around. Even made it's way to the Moon!
Any thought given to using the Hydrogen fuel tank to start testing hydroponic food production or trying to introduce biological life support systems for the long flight to Mars?
I imagine having a room full of green plants might considerably boost morale.
Also, I laughed at how quickly that 'excess fuel' got around. Even made it's way to the Moon!
Any thought given to using the Hydrogen fuel tank to start testing hydroponic food production or trying to introduce biological life support systems for the long flight to Mars?
I imagine having a room full of green plants might considerably boost morale.
Last edited:
It was mentioned earlier that Galileo was launched on a Shuttle-Centaur in 1986, as planned, due to Challenger not having its date with destiny. Thus, it most likely did not suffer the antenna failure and provided significantly more data to scientists before end-of-mission in the mid-1990s. Cassini-Huygens was probably mostly unaffected except in details, since it was building on quite a lot of design heritage in the form of multiple studies and concepts for a Saturn orbiter dating back to the 1960s (and the 1970s for more detailed concepts). The main change it would experience would be the absence of Titan IVB or a suitable direct replacement for launch in 1997, which should require a different trajectory. It's not clear to me whether an extended gravity assist program (two or even three Earth gravity assists in addition to Venus and Jovian gravity assists) could allow a Shuttle launch with IUS at approximately the same time, or whether a Shuttle-C launch using the EUS later using a direct trajectory or a single Jovian gravity assist would be more feasible.
As for Mars and New Horizons...that's a more interesting question. The Mars program in the 1990s and early 2000s was closely related to the development of the Faster, Better, Cheaper program by Dan Goldin, and AFAICT he isn't here ITTL, so it will certainly be heavily affected. New Horizons, meanwhile, was the first mission selected in the New Frontiers program, which was something of an extension of the Discovery Program that was created to implement FBC in planetary science to a larger mission class, so again it is likely to be affected. The fact that the Space Exploration Initiative has not been wholly repudiated also creates a motivation for Mars missions, although something of a dismotivation as well (since the post-Bush administration and Congress are likely to have not that much appetite for funding a program leading up a crewed Mars landing based on Bush's proposals)
That being said, there was building pressure within the planetary science community to create funding mechanisms for smaller and medium-sized missions in addition to larger ones, which IOTL were addressed through the creation of the Discovery and New Frontiers programs. The details will not necessarily be the same, though, and certainly it's difficult to see an alt-Discovery having any Moon missions (i.e., no Moon Prospector!). In addition, in the case of New Frontiers specifically there was the desire to "close" the Solar System by visiting (at that time) the ninth planet and (also significantly) the only one discovered by an American. I would guess that there would probably be a Pluto mission at some point, most likely of a similar scale due to difficulty reasons (for why it couldn't be much smaller) and funding limitations (for why it couldn't be much bigger).
Mars exploration would likewise continue, but the mission details could be considerably different in unpredictable ways. There would very likely be some equivalent of Mars Global Surveyor, since that was largely a rebuild and refly of Mars Observer instruments that were lost with the failure of that mission (of course, this could hypothetically be a successful Mars Observer). There probably would not be direct equivalents to the Mars Climate Orbiter and Deep Space 2, since those were very FBC missions, but there is a fair likelihood of a mission like the Mars Polar Lander occurring, since it was a fairly high priority mission for Mars scientists (as you can see from the fact that they flew a very similar mission again ten years later). There is also a decent likelihood of at least one rover mission happening, since that had been an obvious next step and a subject of intensive JPL investigation since the late 1970s. Otherwise, hard to say.
Last edited:
Delightful update! I might have missed an earlier reference to LOX transfer in-orbit--is this a new tech? How are they doing it for Galileo--surface tension, paramagnetism, thruster-settling? Revolutionary breakthrough any way.
I like the Quark cutout at the LSAM galley.
Interesting commentary on the celebrity visits--including the space honeymoon. I can broadly sympathize with the people annoyed at the...'desecration,' perhaps? But it's something we'll have to get used to if we want to build a spacefaring civilization.
Another celebrity candidate is NSYNC's Lance Bass--who IOTL completed training but the business deal fell through. Though his celebrity status might be butterflied by now.
I like the Quark cutout at the LSAM galley.
Interesting commentary on the celebrity visits--including the space honeymoon. I can broadly sympathize with the people annoyed at the...'desecration,' perhaps? But it's something we'll have to get used to if we want to build a spacefaring civilization.
Another celebrity candidate is NSYNC's Lance Bass--who IOTL completed training but the business deal fell through. Though his celebrity status might be butterflied by now.
Not necessarily. Given low lunar gravity, and the fact that you can use inflatable structures as support columns, you might be looking at the equivalent of just a big bouncy castle, with a tarp laid over on which regolith is piled.
The MULEs were a real design that came out of the Marshall Space Flight Center Lunar Lander Preparatory Study Phase II Concept, which is described in After LM: NASA Lunar Lander Concepts Beyond Apollo by John F. Connolly.
Ya, but it's not the REAL Lunar MULE
We figure a small porthole as shown is included, as it is on all the CBMs on ISS--it's very useful to have a small 3-4" port to look into any vestibules, and similar to on ISS, any exterior ones can be covered with insulation or padding as needed for protection and thermal isolation:
This is based on a specific set of studies! As we mentioned in Part 20's notes, this Habitank is mostly drawn off the version from this PDF report from late in the design cycle, but you can read about the idea and some of its antecedents and other configurations considered for applying it in the section about them in the fantastic After LM: NASA Lunar Lander Concepts Beyond Apollo by John F. Connolly. There was even a real mockup made OTL!
I see what we missed. Figure 34 on page 17 of the report clearly shows that the "door" and mating interface for the pressurized, inflated tunnel is actually mounted outside the tank on the other side of the "inspection" hatch. There would be insulation between the hatch and door. So once you strip away the outer 'covering' and cut away the inspection hatch, you the remove the insulation you have an operable hatch with attachment face all ready to go.
The 'odd' thing is figure 29 on page 15 (HabiTank Galley Concept) which shows a connection in one of the tank end-dome "angles" rather than the end where a door instillation would make sense. Considering the need for a strong door 'interface' connection and the distinct issues with having more than one of the heavy vacuum rated door assemblies for each tank I suspect artistic license
Randy