This is really awesome and I have never came across this. I have been following Bigelow Aerospace since around 2004 so it is cool to see their inflatables still being worked on. Also it was hilarious you said "Why we can't simply fly that whole sumbitch to Mars, such that the astronauts inside can luxuriate in roomy comfort for the duration of the trip?" That cracked me up. I imagined a hill billy with a Mississippi mud flap mullet saying that. Hahahah, But it is still sort of a good question. I know you said "The ISS wasn't built to withstand the forces involved in escaping Earth orbit." I guess that is really interesting to me because they use the Soyuz to push the ISS into higher orbit so I don't get why they couldn't just push it into a higher and higher orbit so there is less atmospheric drag because there is still faint atmosphere up there and I think that is why the orbital altitude decays overtime. Then once they get it into a really high altitude they could push it faster so instead of constantly "falling" around the Earth it would escape orbit. What causes all the pressure when trying to escape orbit? Is it still the faint atmosphere causing friction? Or the acceleration would crumple it like an aluminum can because it wasn't made strong enough to accelerate?
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
The acceleration, as I understand it. But really, we needed to learn certain lessons about multimodule spacecraft first before attempting such a thing, and do it close enough to Earth that we could evacuate astronauts in a hurry if necessary.
I guess the Russians are planning to detach some of the newer modules when the ISS is decommissioned and build a new space station out of them. So the entire thing won't be thrown away which is good. I guess over the lifespan of the space stations (Mir and ISS) eventually maintenance becomes such a significant fraction of the astronauts time that they can't do much research anymore.