Project Space Station: Plans for a Permanent Manned Space Station

By Brian O'Leary

It’s happening now—plans are being formulated under the coordination of NASA to launch a permanent, manned space station by the year 1990. Studies surveying user requirements, system attributes, and architectural options have been conducted, and you’re on the top of these far-reaching considerations on the next big step taken within space!
Now that the Shuttle and Spacelab are realities, NASA has set sights on a new horizon—a permanent, manned space station in the high frontier. The precedents have been set—Skylab hosted human visits for up to 84 days, and the Soviet’s Salyut was and is a temporary base for cosmonaut crew. The differences are the term and scope of space station living and the accomplishments that can be realized with a permanent site and continuous experimentation within its facilities.
Brian O’Leary, writer, astrophysicist, and former astronaut, describes the “tinkermodules” that will be carried to the earth’s orbit to be assembled as a space station. His inside track information also lays the groundwork for fascinating disclosures on: Space station history, NASA’s studies and plans, space careers and human potential, commerce and homesteading in space, odds of a space war, spacelab, space station architecture, space factories and hotels, soviet space station programs, colonies and exploration.
Here are issues that will likely bear directly on the space station of the not-so-distant future and an expert’s interpretation of what that future holds. Unique and timely, Project Space Station gives you a distinctive foretaste of a new era in which homesteading asteroids, growing huge silicon crystals in weightless factories—and the possibility of real star wars—will be a way of life.

In 1982, NASA undertook the planning of the United States’ next major initiative in space: a manned space station program to be presented for consideration to the Administration and Congress. This painting depicts one possible space station concept based on the earlier Space Platform studiesby TRW Space & Technology Group (Redondo Beach, California) as commissioned by NASA’s Marshall’s Space Fligth Center. The rectangular panels extending to the right and elft of the main spacecraft would provide solar energy. The upward extension is a single radiator. Of the three modules on the main space station, two are manned for habitation and experimentation and the third, unmanned, provides logistics support. A communications antenna extends forward and downward from the spacecraft. (NASA-photo)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780811766654

Brian O'Leary

A publishing veteran with 25 years of operational, management and consulting experience, Brian O'Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Media, a management consulting firm that works with publishers seeking support in content operations, benchmarking and financial analysis. With Hugh McGuire, he co-edited "Book: A Futurists' Manifesto, published in three parts by O'Reilly Media. O'Leary blogs about a variety of issues related to book, magazine and association publishing on his firm's web site, www.magellanmediapartners.com.

Book preview

Winter.

BOOK I

Realities

Chapter 1

Tinkermodules in Space

Scenarios

The date is October 12, 1992—the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World. Picture traveling to a space station aboard a shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral. Within twenty minutes you are weightless and traveling 18,000 miles per hour some 250 miles above the African coast. You look up, and glittering against the blackness of space there appears a strange-looking assemblage of big tinkertoy modules dwarfing a dozen or so free-flying spacecraft swarming around like bees.

Moving ahead to the year 2001, imagine taking the same trip. Like an uncontrolled alien organism, some of the tinkertoys have grown bigger and there are more of them, the number of swarming bees are in the dozens, some modules swing slowly on long tethers, and others are strung out like beads on a string. Unlike the monolithic, clean lines of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 space station, the real 2001 space station is a floating suite of the oddest shaped objects, gyrating to music that more resembles random electronic dubs than a Strauss waltz.

These scenarios are not the product of a mad science fiction writer. They are conceived as the least expensive way to creating what will likely be NASA’s next big step: the launching of a multi-purpose, growing, permanent manned space station.

Political Realities

The space station idea is neither new nor the sole province of the United States. In a sense, space stations have already flown: NASA’s Skylab was the home of astronauts for three visits extending up to eighty-four days. Eleven Soviet crews visited Salyut 6 over its five-year working lifetime, and the newer, more sophisticated Salyut 7 is now receiving more cosmonaut crews.

But budgetary constraints on NASA have delayed attempts to build any permanent manned facility in orbit. The first attempts in 1970/71 were thwarted by the demands on NASA’s shrinking budget placed by the development of the space shuttle. Ironically, the shuttle was first conceived as a routine, reusable link between the Earth and a space station.

During the 1970s, while NASA’s efforts were focused on developing the shuttle, a number of studies revealed a staggering array of conflicting user demands on a space station that no one design or orbit could satisfy. In the end, the budget ceilings prevented NASA from going ahead with any of the concepts that they studied.

The situation now is different. With the shuttle now built and successfully flying, and with most of its development funds having been spent, NASA is looking for a new mission. They would like a project whose scale is similar to that of the shuttle, about $10 to $15 billion, or enough to carry the agency through the 1980s.

Their logical choice was the space station. NASA Administrator James Beggs and Deputy Administrator Hans Mark made this goal clear during their confirmation hearings in June 1981. Several steps taken since then have moved us closer to its reality. Their first step was to appoint a task force at NASA headquarters. Management shifted from the various competing NASA centers to Washington in the expectation that a broader consensus could be reached. In a speech given on Independence Day 1982, President Reagan reaffirmed the goal of a permanent presence of man in space but stopped short of promoting a space station.

In September 1982, NASA contracted eight major aerospace companies to study user requirements, system attributes, and architectural options for a space station. Participating were Boeing, General Dynamics, Grumman, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta, Rockwell, and TRW. Independently, these firms arrived at an overall rationale for the space station, along with design options that would accommodate an extraordinary range of customers who some day may be using the space station. The results, presented in April 1983, included stacks of volumes listing hundreds of uses and configurations.

The ball is now back in NASA’s court. Following its policy of fiscal austerity, the Reagan administration and the Office of Management and Budget have chosen to limit NASA’s 1984 space station budget to $12 million for in-house studies rather than the $60 million they asked for. Their original hope was to spend $250 million during 1984 and 1985 for a detailed design, commit a $5 billion-plus new hardware start in 1986, and fly the first parts in 1990. At this writing, the project is on hold while the space agency sifts through the mountains of data provided them by the aerospace industry.

The Rationale

That’s the bad news. The good news unfolds with the story of this book. For the history of human nature has shown us that bold new projects are born not of volumes of data bucking the tide of scarcity; rather, they move ahead at blinding speeds once a sense of urgency has been planted.

The urgency is latent, ready to spring forth. The Soviets, the military emphasis of space, and growing commercial interest are moving along regardless of the illnesses NASA has been feeling. The issue is not whether or not a U.S. space station is built, for eventually it will be. The question is when, how, and by whom. As we shall see, we will end up creating a needed product perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Appearance of the First Stations

The first step to understanding the space station is to visualize how it would appear and function around the year 2000. Although there is a divergence of views on what a space station may look like, how it would grow and when, how many of them there will be, and what orbits they may inhabit, there appears to be a consensus on some points.

The first station will be in a 28.5-degree inclination orbit, accommodating the heaviest payloads that can be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The altitude will be 215 nautical miles or somewhat higher—high enough to minimize the use of fuel to stay in orbit and to remove the risk that it will eventually be dragged into the atmosphere and end up burned into fragments falling to the Earth—a fate that befell Skylab.

A second station in a polar orbit would go up some months, or years, later. The polar orbit will become useful for military surveillance and space applications (global coverage of the Earth’s resources—oceans, fisheries, agriculture, forestry, cloud cover, and mineral and oil exploration). A particularly attractive polar orbit is sun-synchronous, allowing full-time global coverage and materials processing using solar furnaces that would bask in the sun all the time.

The core of the first stations would contain at least one module for living and working that would be launched aloft inside a shuttle cargo bay. It would be cylindrical, with a diameter of fifteen feet and a length of sixty feet or less. Probably the European-built Spacelab module will be modified to accommodate the first crews, with more modules sprouting out in time. Some of these will become hotels for the first space tourists.

The stations would have a number of other appendages added—spacecraft docking collars, air locks, logistic and service modules, solar panels for generating onboard electricity, antennas, and teleoperator maneuvering systems for moving satellites and components near the space station.

Nearby the first stations would be a cluster of free-flying unmanned spacecraft. This cluster of bees would include astronomy and applications instruments which need to be decoupled because of the need for accurate pointing and stability. (A man walking around an unmoored, weightless structure will jostle a telescope too much if it were attached to the station itself.) Among the instruments would be one or more telescopes pointing toward the sky and a set of cameras pointing earthward to survey its resources. Another free-flyer would house a materials processing laboratory where microgravity would be created by slow rotation.

Finally, around the 28.5-degree inclination station, there would be the upper stage launch base, the orbital gas station. Various floating tanks would contain liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that would refuel reusable boosters that would come and go as the traffic demanded. Perhaps some of the shuttle’s large external fuel tanks will also play a role in the space station complex.

The Big Picture

The real payoff of space stations will be in the long term. The contractor studies span the decade of the 1990s, and it is likely that in the year 2000 hindsight will be worth more than guessing now what benefits will accrue. Materials processing is a good example; the United States has just begun to fly commercial experiments. McDonnell Douglas and Johnson and Johnson have found that certain pharmaceuticals can be synthesized hundreds of times faster in weightlessness than on the Earth. But the results are new, the avenues barely explored. Perhaps one single experiment will yield unanticipated results and open the door to economic space industrialization that will require a space station.

Looking beyond the year 2000, we will see space stations becoming stepping stones to new worlds beyond the Earth. As we begin to gather resources from the asteroids and elsewhere, we will be able to remove the limits to growth on our finite, fragile planet. It is as if we have been living all this time on a tiny, overcrowded, overpolluted island and can now build the ships to span the oceans to vast new continents. The space stations of the year 2000 will be the shipyards.

Space stations will become nodal points through which people and materials will flow to and from Earth. The space stations will become a world resource—an international base camp for assaults to higher orbits, the Moon, the asteroids, the other planets, and, eventually, the stars. Located in low orbits scarcely beyond the earth’s atmosphere, these beehives will be the hubs for creating mankind’s next bold explorations. So near and yet so far, they are twenty minutes’ travel time from the Earth to a place where the planet’s curvature is barely perceived and yet an alien, infinite environment perfectly suited for taking advantage of zero-gravity and vacuum conditions. Space stations are located literally halfway up the Earth’s gravitational mountain; the energy needed to get from the Earth to a space station is the same as that needed to vault from the station to escape our gravity entirely.

Base camp, nodal point, stepping stone, beehive, tinkermodules, gas station, hotel, shipyard—the seemingly endless string of metaphors reveal the true diversity of the space station of the year 2000. They transcend the prosaic details of the engineer’s conservative extrapolation of the space program of the 1980s and reflect a reality beyond our current perspective. The shortsightedness of our times inhibits the vision, but the reality of the vision is greater than the reality of our times.

Events will probably accelerate the American space station effort. Forthcoming Soviet space feats and rapidly-growing commercial interest will soon stop our holding pattern in its tracks, and once again we can dust off volumes containing the boldest of our space plans. We are living in a time similar to the late 1950s—the Eisenhower years—when our government has chosen to ignore predictable events. One quarter-century after the founding of NASA, the agency created to close the space gap, we are approaching the threshold of perceiving and responding to another space gap. The next chapter describes the catalyst to our new awakening.

Chapter 2

The Soviet Spur

The emotional days of Sputnik are gone, the public hysteria subsided into a business-as-usual space age. Nowadays the launching of a U.S., Soviet, or other foreign satellite barely receives second page newsprint and a one-liner on the television evening report. Even the launches and landings of the space shuttle receive only a passing interest, a vivid contrast to the excitement of the Columbia’s first flight and the times of a Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flight.

Space travel has appeared to have become mundane, even boring, resembling the pre-Sputnik 1950s. Yet our sleep has dulled our senses to the unfolding of an accelerating Soviet space program. This, more than any other single factor, will eventually push the American space station over the hump of its uncertainty—doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

The keys to Soviet space efforts are persistence and continuity. While the pendulum of the U.S. space program swings wildly back and forth succumbing to the vicissitudes of short-term political winds, the Soviets plod forthrightly ahead. Less sophisticated than the Americans in automation and electronics, the Soviets compensate by repeatedly hurling large tonnages of man and machine into space for long periods of time.

The Soviets have a vigorous and constantly expanding military space program, stated the Pentagon in a 1981 publication, Soviet Military Power. "In the past ten years they have been launching spacecraft at over seventy-five per year, at the rate