A SHLV, like the shiny, can put a sphere a little over 30 feet in diameter into GEO. Perhaps stacking this on top of a stubby shiny with no payload bay and/or bigger tanks. For the sake of argument, let’s say the interior of the sphere is 26 feet in diameter. Mounted on the outside is a collapsed Hoberman sphere and bladder modeled on these inflatable Max Space designs.
Once in GEO this sphere is docked with another identical sphere and an unspecified number of other lesser payloads. Then the water starts arriving. It could come from a couple different sources other than Earth but let us leave that for now. Eventually, about 6000 tons of water is transferred to the two spheres, 3000 in each, and the Hoberman spheres with their bladders expand to 60 feet in diameter. With larger outer spheres the interior space becomes geometrically larger as the outer sphere stays 5 meters thick. An 80 foot diameter sphere, with a 46 foot inner sphere, would provide about 5 times as much crew space as the 60 foot sphere. Bigger SHLV’s likely needed for that. Water is transparent so a soon-to-be-slowly-rotating-view outside would be available with some clever optical design.
A mile long multi-tether system then unwinds with the two spheres at either end with the lesser masses between them. It is then spun up to one revolution per minute. This would result in a pair of Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) crew compartments with about 9200 cubic feet of pressurized space each. With a view and with a long enough tether to eliminate centripetal induced nausea and vertigo.
This is a basic true Space Station. Depending on how much support equipment was required inside the pressure sphere it would likely have three or four astronauts in each sphere. The multi-tether system would allow the various masses and the spheres to change location. To some extent. One sphere or both could travel to the center of the system for microgravity and docking with spacecraft and then return to full gravity when desired.
That is a Space Station. Substitute a Nuclear Electric Propulsion system (maybe available soon) for one of the spheres and this would be a true Spaceship capable of year-long or longer voyages to places like Ceres or possibly farther out…with no dosing or debilitation. Much better with bigger spheres of course. That is the future.
Published by billgamesh
Revivable Cryopreservation Advocate
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