I've been refining my Timberwind-based evil plan for the Single-Stage-to-orbit thread (BTW, I think if those things work, and no one worries about the various potentials for disaster, they could serve as bases for a real SSTO vehicle--but I still think that overall it would still prove far more sensible to use the same technologies to put payloads into orbit much more efficiently using disposable stages--however, recovering the nuclear engines, at least for reprocessing and waste disposal purposes!)
However I can't find my calculator, so I've been learning to estimate exponentials in my head. Typically I have neither scrap paper, reliable pens, nor time to even write things down--and when I do much of it is literally on the backs of envelopes! Then my pens die, this seems to be either a consequence of living in a high semidesert (Washoe County Nevada) or a personal jinx.
Google has a pretty nice calculator built in (due to rocket equation calculations, I now get about a hundred "you recently searched for e^((4000km/s)/(421 s* 9.81 m/s^2))" things when I start one...), and Excel's can handle it as well. Excel's is nice because you can then use formulas to do multistage or multiburn missions (like a lunar mission: what do you need to get back to Lunar Orbit, so what does you descent stage carry as payload other than that ascent stage and fuel).
I really believe chemical TSTO makes more sense than nuclear SSTO, especially since chemical TSTO can be done with large margins, while getting any payload out of a nuclear SSTO is kind of marginal, especially with thrust levels.
Garriot did fly on Skylab 3 as OTL, though it was a few months later than OTL due to Apollo 18. He's likely to fly to Spacelab, since OTL he stuck on until STS-9 to fly again in '83.I believe your Skylab missions that correspond to ours OTL had the same crews; Garriot presumably had his good times on your second mission.
Well, there's only been 2 more missions than OTL to date in the TL: Apollo 18 and Skylab 5. The real differences in US flight rates are still to come in about '78, since the Saturn IC first stage is taking its sweet time in development. However, it may interest you that Rusty Schweickart was the commander of the Skylab 5 mission (as backup commander of Skylab 2, he rotated into the slot) and he was sort of the prime guinea pig for space sickness OTL which is why he didn't get a chance to fly again in Apollo, they basically stole him for ground research during prime training periods.With more astronauts kicking around Skylab, do you suppose there'd be more insight into the nature of human mental adaptation to zero G?
As I said, the real differences in US flights won't come until Spacelab in '78, so it'll be the early 80s before we really know a ton more than OTL. However, I feel some need to defend Rusty: in my understanding it wasn't that he was unusually susceptible so much as that he made some bad decisions that delayed his adaption period. In an attempt to minimize the symptoms, he avoided rapid head movements (which read differently to the inner ear in space, and essentially have to be re-adapted to) and avoided the LEM (with its local down at 180 degrees to the CSM). Then, they go to get the LEM ready, he gets busy and starts moving his head around a lot and all of a sudden the fact that avoiding the symptoms also delays adaption comes to bite him on the butt and he gets sick. By the next day, he was feeling much better and the mission could go ahead, but he'd gotten a reputation he never had a chance OTL to fix since he missed Apollo missions spending time with the docs working out stuff to mitigate space sickness in the future.For that matter in 1978 of OTL, when I believe Stardance was evolving from a short story to a novel, while a number of Soviet space stations (all smaller than Skylab) had flown and some cosmonaut missions had been extended to many months, information from those missions would not have flowed freely, and with less space to kick around in in any of the Salyuts I suppose the Russians had fewer chances to observe variations in human adaptation, and were focused on the obviously crucial questions of physical adaptation (and for the most part, how to stop it!) But in this timeline, a few more missions of US astronauts made it to Skylab and shared its spaces, most of which had been designed to provide a particular vertical reference. So they'd know more by the late 70s than we did.
So OTL with Mir and the ISS, have there been signs of this diversity of human response, with some people like poor Schweickart having an especially hard time, a norm of people who can handle it as long as there are visual cues that there is still some sort of up and down, and more cases like Garriot showing up who sometime in the course of the mission find they can do just fine without pretending some direction is up and are mentally at ease?
As to your question about whether there are different "tribes" of people in terms of adaption to zero-g...I don't know. If you're interested, you might try looking around the NASA Technical Reports Server and reading up on zero-g adapation research yourself.
Well, the Russian segment is largely in one plane, but it's actually the vertical plane: modules stretch up and down from a central line of modules. the US segment is more horizontal, but there are modules that stretch above and below the plan: Kibo's storage module goes up, and the PMM and Cupola stretch below Node 1 and Node 3 respectively. However, Node 3 was altered from the originally planned location on Node 1 Nadir (down) to the installed location of Node 1 port because of issues with verticals, especially since it was going to see a lot of travel. It limits the usefulness of the module for future expansion, but since the other modules that were to berth to it were cancelled, it was done anyway.It seems to me that the modular nature of Mir and ISS tends to make it easy and automatic to design in local verticals--for one thing, the modules are not only designed but assembled on the surface of the Earth, where just for practical reasons of layout during construction we'd impose the actual vertical on the module. Then, when the modules get linked up, there may well be a deliberate policy of lining up the visual verticals of each module so that as much as possible, any line of sight even through several (and from footage I've seen, one can typically only see two or three at once--the one you are in plus the next ones up and down the chain) would be consistent. People would tend to think of the ISS as a flat array of modules laid out on the "ground" on pretty much one level--kind of like Bag End--"no going upstairs for the hobbit!"
(1) Roughly, that is my understanding. Space sickness is more technically known these days as Space Adaption Syndrome specifically because it goes away after a few days of letting your body re-orient.With I forget how many men and women spending some time up there, what has been the verdict? (1) Do people tend to evolve out of the spacesick phase at least into comfortable-as-long-as-it-looks-Ok phase, given time, and (2) given time do some of that middle majority get more adventurous and comfortable with orienting any which way that happens to be momentarily convenient?
(2) As I understand, yes, but if you're really interested you should dig into the NTRS I linked to earlier and look for more detailed information from people who spend their careers studying this for real, not just the off-the-cuff impressions of an engineer in progress.
Glad to hear you like it.Just like to let you guys know I am following the timeline and liking its direction. I'm not too science/math-savvy and the space race is not my forte, so, sorry if I can't give more constructive criticism.
Even Winchell Chung (the Atomic rockets webmaster) thinks solid-core NTR is pretty marginal in terms of being a "good trade-off" for chemical, and especially for launch from the ground. You really have to get to liquid or gas-core reactors before the ISP advantages can consistently outweigh the issues of added mass in reactor and shielding. So...my off-the-cuff answer would be "No and no."So, sorry to go a little off-topic with this, but is there any situation in which building a nuclear thermal rocket would be cost-effective? Or is it really just a waste of investment? Is there any way the space race could have seen them?