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A Gas Station In Outer Space


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2020 Aug 10, 2:07am   465 views  4 comments

by ohomen171   ➕follow (2)   💰tip   ignore  

#angryastronaut When I worked at Occidental Petroleum, I got involved with offshore oil rigs off the coast of Scotland. I was assigned to work with an engineering firm that did a lot of the design work for these big rigs. The president was a young man named Ed Lowry. He kept quite a number of marine engineers on the payroll. He did something most unconventional. When a new project came in and he did not have all the answers, he called together secretaries, accounting personnel, human resources people and everyone except the engineers. He asked them to come up with solutions. They always came up with better solutions than the engineers. There is a saying in English that applies here:

"From out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom."

Elena is a doctor and not an aerospace engineer. She looked at all the plans to send humans back to the moon and Mars. She saw one huge problem. She pointed out that when pioneers came West in the US there were forts and other stations where pioneers could get supplies, medical care, and repairs. She commented that such a thing was needed in space. Sure enough, NASA agreed with her belatedly. They hired Lockheed Martin to build the Lunar Gateway. Here is a fascinating video on the subject:

www.youtube.com/embed/Uy5ZizaYZPo

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1   RWSGFY   2020 Aug 10, 8:04am  

ohomen171 says
He kept quite a number of marine engineers on the payroll. He did something most unconventional. When a new project came in and he did not have all the answers, he called together secretaries, accounting personnel, human resources people and everyone except the engineers. He asked them to come up with solutions. They always came up with better solutions than the engineers.


So the guy was basically a raging idiot: paying for shitload of engineers while seeking advise from secretaries and HR toads...
2   Shaman   2020 Aug 10, 8:20am  

Most of the engineers I’ve known have been borderline autistic, able to hyper focus on one aspect of the technology but often unable to see the entire machine in a way that they totally understand how and why it works. I can see running a creative brainstorming session without them, as they also have a serious tendency to monopolize any work related conversation and hold forth on their area of expertise. Or ask gotcha questions designed to show how smart they are. It’s seriously annoying.
3   rocketjoe79   2020 Aug 10, 8:58am  

Elon Musk has a similar idea: the new Starship is being designed for in-space refueling. The idea is to refuel in earth orbit to reduce transit times?

With his planned 1000-ship fleet, couldn't he put several refueling stations along the way to speed the travel time to Mars? Currently we're worried about the radiation hazards on a nine month trip, but if this could be reduced to say, 2 months, not as much of a problem.

If it turns out we can make fuel and oxidizer ON Mars in quantity, On-orbit or deep space refueling should be possible FROM Mars.

This is a logistics problem....
4   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Aug 10, 9:54am  

We need to test ISRU on the Moon, by breaking down H2O at the polar craters into Hydrogen and Oxygen.

The moon is only a few days away and in the event of catastrophe or failure, you jump in the "lifeboat" and are back home on Earth quickly, just like jumping on a lifeboat on a sinking ship. It's also more feasible to control things remotely from Earth, esp. if we have repeaters encircling the moon to the far side. On Mars, "abandoning ship" would take months at a minimum and it would be better to "shelter in place" with cached resources in event of emergency.

Then we can do a completely automated version on Mars with a larger MOXIE, since Mars unlike the Moon has Carbon, so CH4=Methane. H2 from broken down Water, Oxidizer from also from Water, and the addition of Carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere. The test would be to send soil samples back to EARTH (fuck the Lunar Gateway). Shit travels all over the solar system via meteorites and we already have tons of Martian rocks on the Earth, most famously the one that has organic material found in Antarctica. The paranoia about containment isn't an issue with Mars, it's just an excuse to make it more complex (and more likely to fail) by sending it to a lunar or LEO gateway for analysis.

Another Alternative for the Moon is alumina and oxygen used as a low impulse thruster, since the Moon is stuffed with that at all latitudes, but it would be mostly useful for transferring things to Lunar Orbit or Earth rather than long distance travel beyond due to weight and low efficiency as a propellant.

We coulda done all this shit by now if we weren't sending up 6th Grade Science projects on the Space Shuttle 1981-2010, and had just made and kept a dozen more Saturn Vs instead.

We also need NERVA which we already prototyped in the 60s, as well as testing rotating tethered craft to create artificial 0.3G and having people live up there for a few weeks, months, and a year. Then we need ship to ship refueling in space. The last two can be done very quickly and cheaply.

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