This idea began while I was thinking of CubeSats. On one hand, it’s great that our technology has gotten to the point when so much function can be fit into so small a space, but on the other hand I worry about orbits being filled with thousands of small, difficult to detect objects. So I wondered about a, sort of CubeSat mothership. The idea would be to have a larger satellite that would handle power, propulsion, and communication, but there would be attachment points for twenty or so CubeSat approximate instruments. And if one of these fails, or if it was just a test of some system and the company wants to test something new, a spacecraft – crewed or robotic – could visit and remove the old and replace it with a new one. As a benefit, the old one could even be returned to the ground for study.
Not all CubeSats
would end up on these motherships: they’d work great for Earth observation, not
so much for testing new propulsion systems.
Also, I read that CubeSats have an average lifetime of a little over a
year, which is good enough for some projects, but does seem short for someone
with a passing interest in the industry.
So I had this idea
that was filed away in my brain for a year or more, but I remembered it one day
and expanded it into my idea of an everything space station. The ESSs, would be mass produced and I could
see hundreds of them in orbit. These
would consist of four modules that would be launched on two rockets and dock in
orbit. Two of the modules would basically
be the CubeSat mothership idea, just bigger.
There would be telescoping arms with attachment points and power/data
jacks for twenty or more instrument packages.
This would be connected to a command module that would handle all the
power and communications. The third
module would be a basic living space for four people. The last module would have two docking ports
and an airlock.
How I imagine this
would work, is you find some clear orbit, and you’d put twenty or so ESSs into
this orbit, evenly spaced. And instead
of launching twenty Earth observation satellites, and twenty telecommunication
satellites, and twenty whatever satellites into this orbit, you’d just attach
the instrument packages to the twenty ESSs.
Instead of 400 satellites in whatever orbits, you’d have twenty in a
well-defined orbit. And you could have
twenty more ESSs in a different orbital plane at a different altitude to give
better coverage of the Earth. And you
could have normal satellites filling in whatever gaps there are.
But wouldn’t
having hundreds of crewed space stations just make things more difficult? Well, they’re not permanently crewed. I was thinking they may only be crewed for
one week every year. A cargo craft would
launch and dock, and then a crewed craft would launch and dock. The crew would go in and do any maintenance
or repair/replace any damaged instrument packages. And once they’re done, instead of returning
to Earth, the cargo and crew craft would just boost into a slightly higher
orbit and wait for the next ESS to come into position and then dock with them
and repeat the process for however long their supplies last.
In addition to all
the Earth observation and telecommunication packages, each ESS could have
telescopes and other instruments on the outside. And some could be set up for long-term experiments
inside. Some of these could be crystal growths
or whatever, but you could even run the life support in the crew area for a
week, then turn it off for a week, then turn it back on, and just see how many
cycles your life support can go through.
That’s a random bit of data that might lead to something interesting,
but there’s no other way to really get it.
I do think these ESSs would, not only reduce the number of satellites in
orbit without decreasing the benefits of satellites, but would also give plenty
of space for interesting and weird experiments that could never be done on permanently
crewed space stations.
No comments:
Post a Comment