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Elon Musk will be close to making it, but then Trump will overtake him at the last minute and become the first man to walk on Mars. Or at least that's what he'll claim on his Twitter account after he settles into his golden Chinese-made Trump habitat.
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Nov 24, 2016 17:29
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Kind of a shame about the radiation environment around Europa, but what about a colony on Enceladus? Just think of the view.
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Dec 13, 2016 02:44
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One issue of built orbital stations I don't see come up often is that of just keeping up with the gradual decay of the interior and the structure itself. Condensed water, particulates, microorganisms, etc. is going to build up everywhere and corrode stuff, especially in inaccessible places like ducts and the insides of machinery, so it needs to be easy to keep clean. Even so, modules would have to be continuously broken up and replaced when their maintenance stopped being cost-effective. And with a small, closed ecosystem and low organic diversity you're going to be facing the space version of algal blooms. Simulated gravity, direct sunlight, clean air, downtime, etc: All luxuries. A space habitat is going to look (and presumably smell) something like this most of the time:  In general, I suspect there are big remaining challenges in a lot of relatively unglamorous fields like ecology, biology, industrial processes and modular design. The rocket stuff is mostly working, and it's just a tiny piece of the puzzle anyhow.
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Dec 13, 2016 04:16
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Concordat posted:Personally I'm of the opinion that simulated gravity via rotation is not a luxury, but necessary to a permanent habitat in space. And when I say permanent, I mean people living entire lifetimes in it, not just a year or two. Yeah, people won't survive for long in space without being centrifuged. What I meant though, is that you won't necessarily be able to assume that spilled/condensed fluids and detritus will find its way to a drain/floor/air filter everywhere. There'd likely be central storage/work areas where stuff weighed very little and instruments for comms and observation could be at ~rest relative to the central axis. People would spend a lot of time there. Also, space near the rotating edges may be at a premium, and animals (if any) and plants tend to need gravity too. I'm thinking maybe two orders of magnitude bigger than the ISS, though, not a far future megastructure where anything might be possible.
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Dec 14, 2016 04:44
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Trumps Baby Hands posted:Could we escape Donald Trump by building an underwater facility beneath the ice of Enceladus? Even better, just carve the base out of the ice sheet itself. It's really, really thick, so you'd have essentially infinite space. Then melt it for water and separate it into O2 and H2 for breathable air and party balloons.  
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Dec 15, 2016 02:35
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