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.
The Starship is also built to house astronauts for longish trips. It’s not a stretch to think of it as a larger Skylab station. If the can figure out how to attach six or eight of them in a ring with bridges and spin, they could have the artificial gravity station that’s been the stuff of science fiction (and the movie The Martian)
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.
Extended space spays doesn't really wreck people, it's just that your body adjusts to the new environment so your strength decrease, your bone density decreases, your orientation mechanisms shift to 6 degrees of freedom, and so on. Of course when you get back to Earth you're body again has to go through a readjustment phase because those previous adjustments are now unfit for the new environment, but it's nothing beyond that. It'd be interesting to see what an extremely long stay of like a decade+ would do, but that's a major ask of anybody not only in time commitment but also because it's basically asking whether or not the transition would be fatal, and the answer is unclear.
As for a spinning station, that's something NASA will probably never do. They're extremely risk averse and you're opening up an unknowable, but very large, number of new possible failure scenarios there - many of them likely catastrophic. If anything that's something of an argument for genuine private stations who may have different levels of risk tolerance. Or we can just wait for China, because they'll 100% do it and probably relatively soon.
At risk of crassness - human lives are pretty cheap and there are plenty of people willing to take the hit for a chance to be in space for an extended timeframe. Meanwhile building something with enough spin and shielding is a huge ask
If manned stations aren't doing any particularly unique research, especially research that couldn't be done with automation, why spend huge resources on them?
Maintain american capacity to put technicians in low earth orbit. People forget a big part of the shuttle mission for example was to capture and put technicians not just on your satellite but any satellite the shuttle was capable of intercepting and getting into the bay. Consider the fact that the shuttle didn’t really die, in fact the airframe form is still flown but its mission is now classified.
An entirely different form of research could be done by sending large quantities of normal people into space. Astronauts are such a small sample size (and so thoroughly vetted) that you get a different statistical view.
We don't even know how much spin we'd need, and this is an important question to answer if lunar or martian habitats are something we're serious about. Maybe enough spin to match lunar gravity is enough, maybe less, maybe a lot more.
Obviously, we know that the gravity of Earth is sufficient.
But the results make probable that two thirds of the gravity of Earth might be enough, while the gravity of Mars may create some problems and the gravity of the Moon is very likely to be insufficient, so the time spent on the Moon must be limited, though not so much as on the ISS.
I agree with the previous poster that any spaceship designed for carrying humans to Mars or even farther must be designed to spin and anyone who accepts to go on something else is stupid.
Making a spinning spaceship may be cheap if dual bodies or one body and a counterweight are used. It is likely that the safest solution would be to have 2 identical spacecraft, which could also be used independently but which could be coupled with cables to spin around the common center of mass at a distance big enough to create enough gravity at a low rotation speed.
The problem is not the price but the fact that nobody has tested how difficult is to control such a configuration (avoiding oscillations and instabilities) and how difficult is to solve problems like docking in a manner that does not waste energy (i.e. without changing the rotation speed of the more massive spinning spacecraft, which can be done by having 1 or more docking ports on the rotation axis, like on the hub of a wheel; in the case when the rotating spacecraft would be made with 2 bodies or a body and a counterweight that would be linked with cables, one could have the equivalent of an elevator for transporting crew and equipment from the docking port to the main body or bodies).
But someone must build and test such a spacecraft, otherwise we will never learn how to do it right and which are the real problems that are hard to predict in a simulation.
I agree that a "long term fractional g spin test" is one of the most valuable things a LEO station can do. But there are others too.
For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay can be tested in any microgravity, spin or no spin. Development of in-space manufacturing and assembly can happen on any sufficiently capable space station.
All of that, however, requires a good amount of ambition. And I'm not sure if NASA under the current political system can deliver ambition.
Nobody cares about ground control. They care about aerospace industry in their states. Public space programs aren't about science and engineering, no they are primarily about jobs. We burn enormous capital in strange ways in order to divert a small amount of capital into useful places. Its the only way to get it done, so I can live with it.
NASA is the goverment agency routinely favored by the general public. They can't meaningfully reduce funding, now that "race to space" with China is heating up.
Right!
And because China has a good chance of pulling of a moon and then mars landing first, they are lurching into, hmmmm,ok,they are lurching flat out trying to bluster up a program without disturbing the space grift industry, ie: SLS , Shuttle Leftover Systems
and the whole thing disolves into cringe
Cargo cult requires a confusion of cause and effect. Airplanes carrying cargo didn't land because there was a control tower; they landed because of prior causes that also caused the construction of a control tower.
And here, the US does not decline because of some symbolic action, but rather decline causes the action.
This confusion of cause and effect is literally a kind of magical thinking.
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.
You can point to any administration in the government and make the same statement. They're mostly defensive administrations; making sure things aren't getting out of control. NASA almost by definition needs a technical project and problems to solve. They were never a defense administration keeping the status quo.
Their goal and mission of returning to the moon turns 25 this year. But you're right, it has hardly ever been a proper goal. But that's the manned program only. The unmanned planetary science program has been hugely successful relative to the amount of money they get.
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.
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.
The person will argue since it was in space, no laws were broken. You think the type of guy busy trying to put data centers in space right now is gonna say “mea culpa”?
There's literally no difference between putting it in space and putting it in North Korea or some other country who won't extradite to the US or wherever. Except the massive cost.
My worry is that networks can be established on and orbiting the moon which become extremely difficult to get data from if someone decides to abuse it.
You can raid a data center if bad actors are utilizing it to break the law, but if some billionaire is using a moon relay to do bad stuff, the best you can do is de-allocate their bandwidth on the spectrum since you can't just hop over to the moon. Or to some craft in space. De-allocation would depend on international cooperation, inevitably. It would suddenly be far, far easier to break the law on networks and become effectively untraceable. This equipment will certainly be privately owned (like the prototypical versions already are) and it will be an extremely potent tool for breaking the law without consequence.
Also it looks like allocation of spectrum doesn't mandate logging, so you could in theory have data centers floating around which don't even trace who did what and how. If any country chooses to facilitate this and allows this communication to be received, and propagates it to their internet, what does the rest of the world do? Is it cause for conflict? Are there ways to stop the traffic from outside of the country?
I'm sure I'm missing tons of pertinent details here and this isn't meant as a totally impenetrable statement about the future. It's more so that I have concerns that this could actually happen based on the limited understanding I have. So feel free to tear it apart and let me know how dumb my idea is.
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.
The Starship is also built to house astronauts for longish trips. It’s not a stretch to think of it as a larger Skylab station. If the can figure out how to attach six or eight of them in a ring with bridges and spin, they could have the artificial gravity station that’s been the stuff of science fiction (and the movie The Martian)
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.
Extended space spays doesn't really wreck people, it's just that your body adjusts to the new environment so your strength decrease, your bone density decreases, your orientation mechanisms shift to 6 degrees of freedom, and so on. Of course when you get back to Earth you're body again has to go through a readjustment phase because those previous adjustments are now unfit for the new environment, but it's nothing beyond that. It'd be interesting to see what an extremely long stay of like a decade+ would do, but that's a major ask of anybody not only in time commitment but also because it's basically asking whether or not the transition would be fatal, and the answer is unclear.
As for a spinning station, that's something NASA will probably never do. They're extremely risk averse and you're opening up an unknowable, but very large, number of new possible failure scenarios there - many of them likely catastrophic. If anything that's something of an argument for genuine private stations who may have different levels of risk tolerance. Or we can just wait for China, because they'll 100% do it and probably relatively soon.
At risk of crassness - human lives are pretty cheap and there are plenty of people willing to take the hit for a chance to be in space for an extended timeframe. Meanwhile building something with enough spin and shielding is a huge ask
If manned stations aren't doing any particularly unique research, especially research that couldn't be done with automation, why spend huge resources on them?
Maintain american capacity to put technicians in low earth orbit. People forget a big part of the shuttle mission for example was to capture and put technicians not just on your satellite but any satellite the shuttle was capable of intercepting and getting into the bay. Consider the fact that the shuttle didn’t really die, in fact the airframe form is still flown but its mission is now classified.
An entirely different form of research could be done by sending large quantities of normal people into space. Astronauts are such a small sample size (and so thoroughly vetted) that you get a different statistical view.
I'd be very surprised if they're genuinely out of research ideas to test in space. If that is actually true then humanity has a problem.
>research that couldn't be done with automation
I'd think there is room for both. Automation makes sense, but don't think the versatility of meatbags is entirely there yet.
Horses for courses micromanagement business administration and lobbying gravy train.
We don't even know how much spin we'd need, and this is an important question to answer if lunar or martian habitats are something we're serious about. Maybe enough spin to match lunar gravity is enough, maybe less, maybe a lot more.
Due to research done on mice on the ISS, we have some idea:
"0.33g mitigates muscle atrophy while 0.67g preserves muscle function and myofiber type composition in mice during spaceflight"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12985678/
Obviously, we know that the gravity of Earth is sufficient.
But the results make probable that two thirds of the gravity of Earth might be enough, while the gravity of Mars may create some problems and the gravity of the Moon is very likely to be insufficient, so the time spent on the Moon must be limited, though not so much as on the ISS.
I agree with the previous poster that any spaceship designed for carrying humans to Mars or even farther must be designed to spin and anyone who accepts to go on something else is stupid.
Making a spinning spaceship may be cheap if dual bodies or one body and a counterweight are used. It is likely that the safest solution would be to have 2 identical spacecraft, which could also be used independently but which could be coupled with cables to spin around the common center of mass at a distance big enough to create enough gravity at a low rotation speed.
The problem is not the price but the fact that nobody has tested how difficult is to control such a configuration (avoiding oscillations and instabilities) and how difficult is to solve problems like docking in a manner that does not waste energy (i.e. without changing the rotation speed of the more massive spinning spacecraft, which can be done by having 1 or more docking ports on the rotation axis, like on the hub of a wheel; in the case when the rotating spacecraft would be made with 2 bodies or a body and a counterweight that would be linked with cables, one could have the equivalent of an elevator for transporting crew and equipment from the docking port to the main body or bodies).
But someone must build and test such a spacecraft, otherwise we will never learn how to do it right and which are the real problems that are hard to predict in a simulation.
I agree that a "long term fractional g spin test" is one of the most valuable things a LEO station can do. But there are others too.
For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay can be tested in any microgravity, spin or no spin. Development of in-space manufacturing and assembly can happen on any sufficiently capable space station.
All of that, however, requires a good amount of ambition. And I'm not sure if NASA under the current political system can deliver ambition.
> For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay
This seems obvious but I’ve never heard of anyone working on a drug to address it. Strapping astronauts to a treadmill yes, pills no.
Because that’s like saying you’ll develop a fuel additive to stop the body from rusting. Physical damage and weakness can’t be stopped by a pill.
Seems like a very broad statement. Do you have anything to confirm this opinion?
Do you have any grounds to deny it? If it were easy it would have been done already
Nobody cares about ground control. They care about aerospace industry in their states. Public space programs aren't about science and engineering, no they are primarily about jobs. We burn enormous capital in strange ways in order to divert a small amount of capital into useful places. Its the only way to get it done, so I can live with it.
Senators care about ground control. Jobs is the whole reason any of them agree to fund NASA at all.
NASA is the goverment agency routinely favored by the general public. They can't meaningfully reduce funding, now that "race to space" with China is heating up.
Right! And because China has a good chance of pulling of a moon and then mars landing first, they are lurching into, hmmmm,ok,they are lurching flat out trying to bluster up a program without disturbing the space grift industry, ie: SLS , Shuttle Leftover Systems and the whole thing disolves into cringe
Disbanding NASA would be one of those symbolic things thay people will associate the dusk of American empire.
Nah. It will probably be either the Space Shuttle or Artemis. That is to say, programs that showed NASA lost control of its mission to graft
Avoiding something for such symbolic reasons is negative cargo cult thinking.
> Avoiding something [disbanding NASA] for such symbolic reasons [???] is negative cargo cult thinking.
Cargo-cult requires a rigid through-line.
What criteria would you use, to choose to avoid something in order to preemptively avoid hindsight analysis? It's a nonsensical line of thinking.
Cargo cult requires a confusion of cause and effect. Airplanes carrying cargo didn't land because there was a control tower; they landed because of prior causes that also caused the construction of a control tower.
And here, the US does not decline because of some symbolic action, but rather decline causes the action.
This confusion of cause and effect is literally a kind of magical thinking.
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.
You can point to any administration in the government and make the same statement. They're mostly defensive administrations; making sure things aren't getting out of control. NASA almost by definition needs a technical project and problems to solve. They were never a defense administration keeping the status quo.
Their goal and mission of returning to the moon turns 25 this year. But you're right, it has hardly ever been a proper goal. But that's the manned program only. The unmanned planetary science program has been hugely successful relative to the amount of money they get.
That said, SpaceX exists entirely due to early NASA funding.
You can have private or you can argue to Congress about the budget and get nothing. Take your pick.
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.
wait 1,000 days
this is the lost decade of science and progress unfortunately
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.
It's liability laundering. If an openclaw blackmails a politician while hosted in space, what's the legal recourse?
Why would the chatbot be liable instead of the person who instigated that process?
The person will argue since it was in space, no laws were broken. You think the type of guy busy trying to put data centers in space right now is gonna say “mea culpa”?
And then it's up to the courts to decide.
There's literally no difference between putting it in space and putting it in North Korea or some other country who won't extradite to the US or wherever. Except the massive cost.
It just doesn't make sense.
International law says you spank whoever launched it. There’s treaties on this.
Barring that, we have anti-satellite missiles.
What law?
The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
A person who wrote the prompt, the person who spawned the instance, the person who provided the access to infra, the person who launched it.
At the end of the day, there is somebody who profits from it or could have prevented it
My worry is that networks can be established on and orbiting the moon which become extremely difficult to get data from if someone decides to abuse it.
You can raid a data center if bad actors are utilizing it to break the law, but if some billionaire is using a moon relay to do bad stuff, the best you can do is de-allocate their bandwidth on the spectrum since you can't just hop over to the moon. Or to some craft in space. De-allocation would depend on international cooperation, inevitably. It would suddenly be far, far easier to break the law on networks and become effectively untraceable. This equipment will certainly be privately owned (like the prototypical versions already are) and it will be an extremely potent tool for breaking the law without consequence.
Also it looks like allocation of spectrum doesn't mandate logging, so you could in theory have data centers floating around which don't even trace who did what and how. If any country chooses to facilitate this and allows this communication to be received, and propagates it to their internet, what does the rest of the world do? Is it cause for conflict? Are there ways to stop the traffic from outside of the country?
I'm sure I'm missing tons of pertinent details here and this isn't meant as a totally impenetrable statement about the future. It's more so that I have concerns that this could actually happen based on the limited understanding I have. So feel free to tear it apart and let me know how dumb my idea is.