Ten tons of imported matter per square meter on the inside of the hull for radiation shield implies a total mass for Kalpana One of perhaps seven million tons. – Globus et al 2007.
This is the closest the paper gets to a mass breakdown of the habitat, and it’s basically useless because we knew the radiation shielding dominated the total mass. What you need to know is the non-shielding mass – most of which will presumably be launched from Earth. Launch costs dominate price – and thus how soon we could see something like this built – as a habitat in LEO for 3000 people has economic value right now. One could build the radiation shielding up over time to first reduce the amount of reboost needed as the orbit is raised into the Van Allen belts, and then to allow longer term stays, and finally to permit healthy reproduction.
Unfortunately, it seems that once again people want to talk about “the future”. In the future we’ll have space colonies. When? Oh, when we have asteroid mining, or when we have cheap launch, or when we have more money than sense. If you approach an engineering problem as something you can do now you get better results that actually have a chance of happening.
Ten tons of imported matter per square meter on the inside of the hull for radiation shield implies a total mass for Kalpana One of perhaps seven million tons. – Globus et al 2007.
This is the closest the paper gets to a mass breakdown of the habitat, and it’s basically useless because we knew the radiation shielding dominated the total mass. What you need to know is the non-shielding mass – most of which will presumably be launched from Earth. Launch costs dominate price – and thus how soon we could see something like this built – as a habitat in LEO for 3000 people has economic value right now. One could build the radiation shielding up over time to first reduce the amount of reboost needed as the orbit is raised into the Van Allen belts, and then to allow longer term stays, and finally to permit healthy reproduction.
Unfortunately, it seems that once again people want to talk about “the future”. In the future we’ll have space colonies. When? Oh, when we have asteroid mining, or when we have cheap launch, or when we have more money than sense. If you approach an engineering problem as something you can do now you get better results that actually have a chance of happening.