[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] Re: Are dwarfs better for long duration spaceflight?

[Terry W. Colvin]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 23:29:55 -0700, "Terry W. Colvin" 
<fortean1 at mindspring.com> fwded:

I wrote:

Designing for absolute minimum weight aerospace vehicles is fraught with 
problems...


Granted, however we are discussing only *scaling* as a function of the 
needs of the astronaut.


<snip>

Two of my arguments about current space exploration projects are that 
(a) their designers are obsessed with building to miniscule performance 
margins and (b) they are monstrously over-engineered. You've only to 
look at the problems with the shuttle orbiter's thermal tiles - they 
only work as heat shields, not debris impact shelds, and it only takes a 
tiny level of damage to severely compromise the entire vehicle. We 
should be designing bigger, simpler, more rugged and more flexible, not 
smaller, lighter and more fragile.

Designing a cramped, highly confining vehicle for an undersize crew will 
never happen simply because of the sheer psychological problems of 
cooping-up a crew in a baked-bean can for years at a time. Unless your 
psychological profiles throw up hermit-types with agoraphobia and a 
desire to return to the womb, then you're going to have extreme problems 
from the moment you close the hatch.

Besides, bigger means that you can work with a number of economies of 
scale - such as mass production and system duplication to make enough 
redundancy to cope with discrete failures. It's all very well reducing 
your air conditioning needs such that it can be provided by one CCU, but 
if that fails and you've no fall-back then you're in serious trouble. 
You're going to need prime systems and back-ups anyway. Larger devices 
tend to be more efficient. There is a point that as you reduce the mass 
of astronauts, a given number of duplicated support systems is not going 
to get any smaller.

Indeed, why even stop at dwarves? Why not amputees? There's a lot of 
redundant skeletal tissue in legs. We're starting to make serious 
headway into tapping directly into the central nervous system. Why not 
interface your robotic controls directly with the astronaut and do away 
with limbs altogether? Then your space capsule would be the size of a 
rubbish bin.

I'm afraid I'm not convinced.

We should be building bigger spaceships, with multiple cabins, 
workshops, equipment bays and the like, so that if anything catastrophic 
happens to one compartment it can be sealed off to protect the rest of 
the ship. We want space ships not space canoes! Bigger is Better. Let's 
go for Saturn Vs for the twenty-first century, not bottle rockets!

Another big no-no is sending a human crew all that way and not letting 
them land. You might as well just send robots. The only advantage of 
putting a human crew into orbit around Mars to supervise machines on the 
ground is that it reduces the radio-transmission lag. And Mars rovers 
have already demonstrated that they can be made smart enough to deal 
autonomously with exploring without human hands on the controls. Again, 
bigger spacecraft could support bigger, smarter, more versatile machines 
with greated power and longer endurance, but what would you rather see 
on the flanks of Mons Olympus, another robot or a human in a space suit?

Robin Hill (thinking of founding the Campaign for Real Space 
Exploration), STEAMY BESS, Brough, East Yorkshire.


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Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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