No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations

mikkupikku

Nobody can even come up with a coherent reason for any of these proposals to exist. Even the ISS is more of a political instrument than a real science thing. NASA likes to say its about studying how to help humans live in space, but those results were in decades ago: more than a few months in zero-g wrecks people. So why are we still trying to build old modular Salyut/Mir derivatives instead of trying to figure out the minimum spin humans need to stay healthy? Because the whole point is to do familiar safe things while providing full time jobs for ground control.

cl0ckt0wer

It's liability laundering. If an openclaw blackmails a politician while hosted in space, what's the legal recourse?

codexb

NASA hasn't had a proper goal or mission for decades. That's their problem. And the spaceflight goal that everyone wants -- making things cheaper -- is not something that government agencies are particularly good at producing.

vaadu

Not enough opportunity to grift off the taxpayers. Private enterprise will focus on faster, cheaper, better while the government and its contractors focus on keeping the gravy training running.

le-mark

It seems obvious to me there will be methods and techniques using solar energy to disassemble asteroids and output large structures such as cylinders or spheres that will then become habitats. Example given a spherical grid one kilometer in diameter, apply a charge to it, place several tons of steel at the the center. Focus a mirror at the steel, vaporize and electro deposit the steel on grid. Voila steel sphere. I’d like to see someone working on this, could be done in LEO.

ck2

wait 1,000 days this is the lost decade of science and progress unfortunately

1970-01-01

You can have private or you can argue to Congress about the budget and get nothing. Take your pick.

xoa

It's pretty wild to me that in both the article (written by Eric Berger, who really knows his stuff and did two fantastic books on the history of SpaceX and the rise of new space) and the first 31 comments made here on HN as I write this that a Find for one word has zero results: "starship". That's the overwhelming behemoth elephant in the room. For the purposes of launching/building a space station, it doesn't matter if Starship can't reenter, or refueling doesn't work or any of the other hard problems. It just needs to get to orbit. Which it has proven it can. And that means that any space station developed using anything before that will be rapidly completely obsolete from a commercial perspective. Starship will just offer so much more volume and mass for the same cost or less. NASA may want very hard to hit their 2030 deadline, but the technology may simply not line up to do it on the budget they want and desired partner concerns, same as how the retirement of the Space Shuttle didn't line up with American private launch (though of course in the end that has made it and been a big win). No company that actually wants to make money is going to risk billions on something that somebody else can lap them on by an order of magnitude in a few years or less. I suspect that of "continuous presence in low orbit", "longer term new capabilities", "in budget", and "commercially successful" NASA is going to be forced to pick one or two and that's what they're resisting. Rushing things along almost always costs a lot of money and features. If you want to hit a budget and features then you have to be willing to wait for the various bits to line up and preferably spend some time experimenting and exploring new capabilities and strategies before big hardware commitments. There's a lot of moving parts here to think through. This would all be true even if that was NASA's only concern, vs going to the Moon and all the normal and importance science and so on they're getting pushed on.

youknownothing

Well, I'm happy about NASA's idea for private space stations. Maybe I'm not happy with the timing, but I definitely think that this is the future. If you make space stations a valid, self-sustaining industry, that frees up budget for NASA to pursue other non-economically viable missions like going to the Moon and to Mars. It's like someone else's comment about the space shuttle: I was sad to see it go, and maybe it was premature, but private space transport is a more economical way of reaching space.