Von Braun Space Station Docking Hub and Thermal Control

by

The Von Braun Station will be a dual-use station that is economically self-sustaining. Von Braun Stations creation will also form a space construction industry with bots, pods, drones, construction arms, new space suits, and large-scale truss building machines designed for building large structures in space.

This video was made for NASA and other aerospace engineers to see that this is a technically feasible design, with a solid business plan, that will allow NASA and other space agencies to buy, rent, or lease space on this station very affordably.

SOURCES – Gateway Foundation
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

46 thoughts on “Von Braun Space Station Docking Hub and Thermal Control”

  3. I agree that, at this point, lunar gravity testing could be done on the Moon almost as soon as it could be in orbit. But I’d hesitate to go all in for lunar colonization without that data, if 1/6 G proved to be insufficient, it would have a major impact on how you went about building a Moon base.

    And either way, we need that data, both for lunar gravity, and higher accelerations.

  4. want to bet hammer has German ancestors? care to guess how many nazi ancestors his family will have in the next several generations?

  5. Dave, there’s serious problems with living in zero G, muscle atrophy being the biggest, that and other problems force us to rotate astronauts regularly on the ISS.

    it is not a place you can permanently live in, but a rotating space station you might be able to.

    Now you might be able to get a working stationary section in the middle, but that has its own mechanical issues.

    that said, even if it’s rotating, the centermost section may also be useful for many kinds of low, or near zero G research.

    Or you can just ferry people to a near by non rotating space station for zero G research.

  8. I do not see this working out for NASA. The reason why the current space station is not generating rotational gravity is not because they couldn’t build it to do so, it’s because they built it up there to do zero gravity research.

  10. I’m with you on the multiple g levels. Of course 1/6th is pretty easy to replicate once you are in LEO, just go out a bit more to the moon.

  11. I’m for this is for no reason other than we could take it out to a NEO and mine the crap out of it or just use it as the base of a industrial hub.

  12. Jesus when did my country become full of so many people so terrified of the past that the needed to wipe any trace of it from the world.

    Something you should think about. EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING…..every last one…has a Whore, a Rapist, a Murderer, a Slaver and a Slave in their background…everyone.

    The weak or ignorant seek to forget the past or think they have “grown beyond it”. The Wise know that they must always keep a eye to the past lest they forget that the beast is but a step away from taking control.

  14. I am with Brett on this. Coincidentally I had the pleasure of hanging with NASA folks few months ago at an offsite dedicated to how simulated g impacts the human vestibular and other systems. Simple answer – no one really knows, and it’s better to figure out first what g-levels are needed than to start building huge, and complicated space stations. Here is a good article that talks to the topic.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4470275/

    btw, on the von Braun remarks, the reason this space station is called that is, well, because von Braun proposed it, and among space-folks the “2001 Space Odyssey” ship is a “von Braun Wheel”. just pointing this out….

  15. I think the ‘boom’ would tend to orient the station toward the Earth, not the sun, assuming you’re talking about using a tidal effect to passively orient the station.

    But you could probably periodically extend a boom at the right point in your orbit to turn the station as desired.

  16. Unless this were done very soon, I don’t see much point testing lunar gravity – more useful and not tremendously harder to just build a moonbase.

    And for that matter, if one built a moonbase and if it was discovered that lunar gravity was sufficient for long term health (with exercise and some medication), there’d be little point testing Mars gravity either.

    This test would have been useful to do 10 years ago, or even better 20 years ago instead of ISS.

  17. Goddard did plenty of rocketry work for the US military during WWII. He didn’t die in obscurity.
    As for Von Braun, he aimed for the stars, but sometimes he hit London. These things happen.

  18. ridiculed… died in obscurity…

    By which you mean was Head of the Physics department at a prestigious university, sponsored for years by the Guggenheim billionaire family and was hired by the US Navy to head a research project developing various rocket technologies during WWII.

    No he didn’t get the resources that Von Braun received, but let’s not start yet another internet urban legend when wikipedia is available.

  19. The guy mostly just built rockets for them and he DID help get us to the moon.
    No amount of pandering is going to change that.

  20. You actually *need* precession if you’re going to keep the axis of the station pointed at the sun, since you’re orbiting the sun. You just need to control it, keep it at just under 1 degree per day. A gravitational tether out on a boom might be able to provide the necessary torque without consuming reaction mass.

    Two sets of counter-rotating habs connected by hefty bearings would simplify this quite a bit, at the cost of the bearings, and of course having two sets of habitats.

  21. I’m sure we can find a better name for the space station than using Nazi officer name.

    Beliefs are so comforting, no matter how unsupported.

  22. I for one have no problem with some German that who could not stand up for other humans against the obvious crimes will go into oblivion.

    And you assume that nobody else could have helped American rocket program.

    Extremely unlikely that he was the only one to handle the program. One way or the other US would beat the Russian in the space game. It was the team work, massive effort of numerous people, not a single person achievement or some single idea that pushed us ahead.

  23. I’m sure we can find a better name for the space station than using Nazi officer name. We have so many famous Americans to admire and remember.

  24. Oh, absolutely. But my point is that at present we really have no idea what the minimum level of gravity needed for long term health is. And, isn’t that something you need to know before you build a big, rotating station?

    Suppose we find out 1/2 G is perfectly fine for long term health? The structural savings by building the station to only provide that would be enormous.

  25. What about counter-rotation to cancel precession, as O’Neill, even Bernal, have in plans? How about a central stationary hub or bearing, with fast flywheel for energy, counter-r habs, but only a small load on the bearing, relative to supporting on Earth. Just the force of precession, not *support*.

  26. Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, was ridiculed and ostracized, got blown off when he tried to warn about its military implications, and died in obscurity, but the guy who used rockets to bomb Allied cities got a hero’s welcome and was loved by all.

  27. While that’s true, for engineering purposes it’s probably easier to use two identical habitats at different distances from the hub, and add a counter-weight on a winch “beneath” the nearer one to balance the system and keep the hub at the center of rotation.

  31. Hadn’t him coexisted and cooperated with the german nazi regime, there won’t have been Werner Von Braun the rocket scientist that enabled America’s first lunar mission.

    He had no choice on the matter, except not doing anything and pass into oblivion.

  32. Einstein left Germany in 1933, about the time Hitler came to power, and well before he started seriously cracking down. But, of course, Einstein was a Jew, von Braun a non-practicing Lutheran. So Einstein had a lot more reason to escape early.

    I’m definately not claiming that Von Braun was in any way courageous, or even admirable. Just that, in the context, his decisions were not startling.

  34. A bolo design with more bolos added in to gradually create full circles is the way I would go too. Though I would be inclined to put duplicate habitats at the ends of the tethers (or trusses).

    I think three levels at earth, martian & lunar gravity would be the way to go for testing biological effects of different gravity. The other major bodies in the solar system have surface (or cloud top) gravities quite close to those 3 values. (plus Jupiter at about 25 m/s^2)
    http://www.gdnordley.com › _files › QSG

  37. Wow, he did it despite being under duress. I mean we all know that duress makes people less likely to do things.

    I guess that does make it worse, somehow; Voluntarily building weapons for the Nazis using slave labor would have been far less evil, after all!

    All joking aside, would it have been heroic of him to not cooperate with the Nazis anyway? Yeah, sure.

  38. The modules are 12m in diameter. If they are aluminum walled then their is no current or planned launcher with a fairing size that large. If the Modules are inflatable like the Bigelow beam module currently attached to the ISS, then it may fit in the planned SpaceX Starship with its 9m diameter. This is based on a the stowed and deployed diameters of the currently Beam module at the ISS.

  39. To suggest that he was under duress when he was constructing his rockets, and he still did it anyway, is even less reason to name a monument after him.

  41. The easiest configuration for a bolo style station is two habitats. Once you add another you either have to hang it in a different direction, (A real nightmare) or pass through one to reach another. Unless, of course, you add them in pairs. That’s just two bolos connected at the hub.

    But there’s no reason one of them can’t be at 1 G. My initial thought was that we already know the effects of 1 G, but it’s true that the controls really should be subject to everything the same except for acceleration.

  42. I understand your concern about this design being too big for a first rotating station. You probably are correct about that, but I don’t know how they settled on that size, so I’d like to their reasons.

    I like your suggestion that it would be good to do some testing at different artificial gravity intensities to try to determine the minimum level of artificial gravity needed to maintain health. However, testing without having a control group in the station at earth’s surface gravity intensity seems inadvisable. You’d like there to be only one thing that varies between the groups under test.

    I think the approach of using a small number of modules linked by cables still could be used. It would be a little more complicated than your suggestion, but still within reason.

  44. I’m a bit concerned about the delta V requirements of placing the habitat in a polar orbit, though I understand the motivation here, avoiding spending considerable periods in shadow.

    My main criticism, though, is just that this is much too large for an initial effort at building a rotating station.

  45. This strikes me as both too ambitious and too limited for a first rotating station.

    Too ambitious, because it is much too large for the first rotating station.

    Too limited, because it doesn’t provide multiple gravity levels for research.

    The first rotating station should be dedicated to testing of biological responses to partial gravity, in order to determine the necessary level of ‘artificial’ gravity to maintain long term health. Without knowing that, you can’t properly design subsequent stations, and will likely end up designing them for higher G levels than is actually necessary.

    It should be a “bolo” design, a docking hub, two habitats at different distances from the hub, and a counter-weight to achieve balance. This allows two different acceleration levels to be tested at the same time, (Initially, Lunar and Mars gravity levels, I’d assume.) with the minimum amount of hardware. Each of these components could be independently powered, with enough station keeping capacity to stabilize and reunite if the cables are severed while rotating.

    I estimate the whole thing could be launched with one Falcon Heavy launch.

    I believe they’re correct that the axis of rotation should be aligned with the Sun for a constant thermal environment. (This will require precessing the axis once a year, which might be achievable with a boom off the hub and a dangling weight.)

    Cont.

Comments are closed.