Made In Space has tested Archinaut in a thermal vacuum chamber. Only part of the environment missing is free fall.
7 thoughts on “Space Assembly”
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Made In Space has tested Archinaut in a thermal vacuum chamber. Only part of the environment missing is free fall.
Comments are closed.
AAReST self-assembling space telescope has a nice alternative on blowing $9 billion and two decades on trying to deploy segmented mirrors. Imagine how far in-space assembly would be with a fraction of the investment
None of the AAReST money would have been spent in Maryland, though, near Goddard Spaceflight Center, whose Patron sat on the Senate committee funding NASA. Barbara Mikulski was not about to let that money slip away to elsewhere.
More useful is to imagine competitors or vendors to SpaceX’s satellite mass production facility here on Earth producing systems on orbit with apertures that are 1/10th the mass for the same aperture surface area. Soon, this can grow into manufacturing spaceships themselves at EML-1, high on Earth’s gravity well, where their Ion/VASIMR/Hall Effect engines can take them anywhere in the Solar System. Whether this is funded by NASA may matter less and less if the current growth in private space investment continues.
I think that 3D printing has it’s place in making some structures, I wonder if larger structures would be cheaper and faster is made via other techniques. For example, large structural members such as beams for solar power arrays and the like might be better made from extruders that use a roll of metal and bend to shape. It would be similar to the systems used to make rain gutters for houses.
Sorry for the typos. A little tired today.
Some jobs are easier when not fighting gravity.
…and some are harder or impossible.
The fact that mass still has inertia can be very dangerous.
It seems to me that space assembly makes the most sense in the place where there is the most demand for structures: geostationary orbit.
So, how hard is it to put a space station there? The big issue would be shielding, I think. The radiation environment there has two parts: cosmic rays (solar and galactic) and outer Van Allen belt electrons. If I’ve done the BotE calculation correctly the latter could be largely handled by magnetic shielding techniques, using a large loop of aluminum conductor energized with a sizeable current. You’d want to shield a large enough vacuum volume so workers in spacesuits could EVA without excess exposure. The shield would only have to be energized when the workers are actually out there.