Living in space - doable? reasonable?

[TurkishMonky]

I've been researching for a paper i'm writing on space mining, and while doing so, the thought has struck me - Will an actual liveable (as in for life, not a week) space station ever come to exist, and/or will such an endeavor ever be economically feasable?

The amount of research and study done on making space stations is incredible, and living on a space station would be cool (although perhaps it's just my inner sci-fi fanboyism)

so, thoughts?

[Pent]

Well yes I would say that is doable since they allready have a space station in orbit around Earth. I don't think anyone can say "not economicly feasable" about anything, because we always find new technologies that make "not economilcy feasable" things very easy and eventually they become common place. "Not economicly feasable" can only happen whent the Earth runs out of resources. And when that happens we'll allready be growing food on spacestations and spacestations on other planets mining there resources. Eventually everything will be recyable and nothing will go to waste. All the water and oxygen and carbon dioxide in the space station will be continually recycled. All we'll ever need is a sun, and maybe a planet every once in a while to get some new resources to repair this or that on the ship. That's how effeciant we'll be.

[Puritan]

I think that life in space is possible with certain technological improvements. If we can field a long-term power source in space along with efficient recycling systems and an efficient (but probably small-scale) farm that could be run off of recycled waste, then life in space long-term is feasible. From my understanding we may already have the technology to do the farming and we already use waste for plant fertilization, so that may already be solved, and the Russians and NASA have been working on recycling systems for space, so at least some of that work has been done already as well. The power could come from either solar panels if you were close to a Sun or from a nuclear generator (such as the SNAP-10 or SNAP-100 reactor), technology we already have. The real problem would be supplying the space station with replacement parts and replacement materials (such as solar panels or reactor fuel) as the space station probably wouldn't be permenantly self-sustaining, which is something that is probably beyond our abilities right now but may become possible in the future.

[Slater]

I think that we have not done it yet. Living in a space station and living on a planet are two very very different things. When on a space station, bad things happen to your body. People who have spent 6 months or more in a space station had major troubles figuring out how to walk again when they came home, due to muscle deterioration that they suffered from in space. Our best bet would be something like Mars, but we need to make that machine from Doom3 that turns rust into O2 and water first. Then, send ships there, start converting its surface, add a few more chemicals that we need and try to reconstruct the earth's atmosphere... Give or take a few centuries after the progress starts, I guess that Mars could be an inhabitable place, tho probably still very inhospitable (due to distance from sun).

But really, as that dude in James Bond pointed out, why focus on making places in space hospitable when more than 70% of our sphere remains relatively uncharted? I think that creating living conditions under the water of our oceans would be much more fesible as well as much more fun... :3

[Dante]

I don't think the question is whether it is possible, but rather, whether we have the patience to see it through. The problem with these things, is that all the reasearch in this area will cost lots of time and probobly a good number of human lives. Unlike the next pentium proccessor, the next step in space will only seem like a relatively small advancement. Compared to the billion dollar flying techno-turkey called the International Space Station,`1 we may only advance to a slightly larger (possibly less useful?) space station within your life-time. Such things don't exactly imspire people to continue the space program. Further, whenever we have a space tragedy like the Columbia or the Challenger (R.I.P. brave souls) people tend to want to cancel the space programs human pilots for less human, robots. While robots do elliminate the risks of space travel, they also elliminate the desire by human beings to invest in the adventure. In other words, if there is no human ellement of excitement and exploration, why pay to send souless, emotionless robots out on exspensive rockets? Who among the general populace would care about the research and the researchers (the robots)?

This said, the opposite is also true. If humanity truly desires to reach the stars, instead of say... creating new freeways, getting a new football stadium or being able bully others through military power, than we can certainly increase the rate of our space exploration. But it is all a matter of human desire, and we can only do so much. Sports games or Nova? But the question comes down to general populace. Your desires for your future will be your reality with or without science. Personally I don't care which you choose, I am a theorist and as such, I can do every experiment I ever desire to do with nothing more than a reem of paper, a set of mechanical pencils and my brain.

Currently I see the trend heading back to the 70s. The space program's new idea is to return to the moon, elliminate the shuttles for space capsules and eventually build a moonbase. While the moonbase may be interesting, as a better jump off point, other than the materials for the ship, we are never told how NASA intends on bringing the fuel up to these ships. In which case, you might as well leave the rockets you used for the moon base in space and refuel them with fuel from bought up from earth to space. Frankly I don't see fusion as a viable fuel source when we can't build a fusion generator on Earth.

So in the end I don't see us going into space anytime soon. But hey, who am I. You're human and just as capable as anyone else. Why don't you figure out how to get us to space? See... There's my point, you probobly laughed at the last question and therefore displayed your desire for us to get into space. In other words people find space exploration as an interesting concept to read about in science fiction or see in pictures, but few really want to work in it and devote countless hourse to really seeing it work. That's not bad though, it just shows that the priorities of the land aren't the way people say they are. Good luck on your report!

Pascal

[mitsuki lover]

I think the only difficulties are 1)Financial:Having the right amount of money to build such a station and 2)Medical:That is doing with the problem of weightlessness on the human body.

[Lady Macbeth]

I think the only difficulties are 1)Financial:Having the right amount of money to build such a station and 2)Medical:That is doing with the problem of weightlessness on the human body.

The second problem can be addressed with a question, though - is it a problem if the people never experience anything beyond a limited amount of gravity again?

We assume, thanks to all of our sci-fi movies and books, that even life in space, on a space station, will require gravity and walking around like "normal".

The wonderful thing about human adaptability is that if a group of such colonists could survive long enough for their internal systems to adapt to functioning properly in a zero-gravity environment that they can run a full life cycle and have children in that environment, the childrens' bodies will be born "normal" but will adapt early in life. The cycle of adaptation will become more streamlined, allowing for births or people who would not be able to function in a gravity environment even if they had to.

We've adapted to our environment here on earth that "fat" is now a "disease", where it was formerly a luxury reserved for royalty and the aristocracy. We would have no more trouble than that adapting to an environment without gravity. The real question lies in the question revolving our "fat" culture - do we want that to be the reality, or do we want to take measures to prevent it becoming a necessity?

[Technomancer]

There are some very severe problems with radiation that will need to be overcome in addition to other difficulties already mentioned. Stations in earth orbit are fairly well protected by the Earth's magnetic field, although even then they will have an elevated exposure to radiation (as do airline pilots and stewardesses). Cosmic rays are one of the major sources, although solar activity can also contribute, especially during solar flares. A second radiation problem may also exist in the even that we also build transit craft which regularly cross the Van Allen belt.

On the other hand, problems such as launch cost can be overcome, provided governments are willing to invest in major heavy-lifting capacity. At the moment only the Russians are really capable of this, although they still fall short of what may actually be needed. The best plan though is to ultimately build some sort of space tether out of carbon fibres, an idea that may soon be feasible (there was a good article on this in IEEE Spectrum not that long ago). Such a dedicated platform would dramatically reduce the costs associated with escaping Earth's gravity.

[TurkishMonky]

I think that we have not done it yet. Living in a space station and living on a planet are two very very different things. When on a space station, bad things happen to your body. People who have spent 6 months or more in a space station had major troubles figuring out how to walk again when they came home, due to muscle deterioration that they suffered from in space.

actually, i heard that a space station that is circular and around 850m in diameter, when spinning at 1 rev/ min, would have normal earth gravity from the centripedal force.

[Puritan]

There are some very severe problems with radiation that will need to be overcome in addition to other difficulties already mentioned. Stations in earth orbit are fairly well protected by the Earth's magnetic field, although even then they will have an elevated exposure to radiation (as do airline pilots and stewardesses). Cosmic rays are one of the major sources, although solar activity can also contribute, especially during solar flares. A second radiation problem may also exist in the even that we also build transit craft which regularly cross the Van Allen belt.

Ahh, yes, the GeV cosmic radiation (where a GeV is an energy unit which indicates they are ~ 500-1000 times more powerful than most earthside radiation sources). Shielding against that will be VERY interesting. Doable, but it will require a great deal of radiation shielding as GeV energy radiation can punch through a lot of shielding.

[Little T-chan]

Gundam Wing!

[edit]
Sorry, that's the first thing that came to mind when I read this. But I didn't realize that's just an anime...^^; I don't know, maybe we can take ideas off of it and make it real! ...scary.