NASA will partner with SpaceX to make Starship space stations. This is part of NASA partnering with seven U.S. companies to make advanced space capabilities. SpaceX is collaborating with NASA on an integrated low Earth orbit architecture to provide a growing portfolio of technology with near-term Dragon evolution and concurrent Starship development. This architecture includes Starship as a transportation and in-space low-Earth orbit destination element supported by Super Heavy, Dragon, and Starlink, and constituent capabilities including crew and cargo transportation, communications, and operational and ground support.
Renderings of the interior of a Starship with a crew of 64.
Making Giant Space Stations Using SpaceX Starships
Each Starship has more than the volume of the International Space Station. They are also similar in size to the external fuel tank of the old Space Shuttle. There were many space station proposals based upon the external fuel tank of the Space Station. It will be easier to build with SpaceX Starships. The steel construction the SpaceX Starship makes them easy to weld, cut and modify. The SpaceX Starships will start being able to support astronauts.
Space radiation computations suggest that orbits below about 500 km and close to the equator have radiation levels so low that little or no radiation shielding is required.
A giant wheel of SpaceX Starships could rotate for the equivalent of one gravity and could be placed where they could easily have safe radiation levels. Having a large volume for space stations make it easy to stack supplies around the hull to boost radiation protection. Using up one meter thick space for shielding would use up all of the space of a small capsule but a 900 cubic meter volume would still have 90% of the interior space after stacking supplies for one meter shielding.
Fifty Starships at $20 million each would still only be $1 billion. There would be room for 350 people based upon International Space Station standards. The ISS was designed to hold seven people. Each Starship could hold the same and could surge up to 450. The ISS had a record of nine people during a handover in 2009. The ISS cost about $100 billion while a giant Starship station with 100 times the volume would cost about $2 billion.
Other NASA Projects
Think Orbital will use a CanadaArm to assemble hexagonal and pentagram pieces that will be stacked during launch. They will be assembled into large sphere shaped space stations as seen above.
ThinkOrbital is collaborating with NASA on the development of ThinkPlatforms and CONTESA (Construction Technologies for Space Applications). ThinkPlatforms are self-assembling, single-launch, large-scale orbital platforms that facilitate a wide array of applications in low Earth orbit, including in-space research, manufacturing, and astronaut missions. CONTESA features welding, cutting, inspection, and additive manufacturing technologies, and aids in large-scale in-space fabrication.
Blue Origin is collaborating with NASA to develop integrated commercial space transportation capability that ensures safe, affordable, and high-frequency US access to orbit for crew and other missions.
Northrop Grumman is collaborating with NASA on the company’s Persistent Platform to provide autonomous and robotic capabilities for commercial science research and manufacturing capabilities in low Earth orbit.
Sierra Space is collaborating with NASA for the development of the company’s commercial low Earth orbit ecosystem, including next-generation space transportation, in-space infrastructure, and expandable and tailorable space facilities providing a human presence in low Earth orbit.
ThinkOrbital is collaborating with NASA on the development of ThinkPlatforms and CONTESA (Construction Technologies for Space Applications). ThinkPlatforms are self-assembling, single-launch, large-scale orbital platforms that facilitate a wide array of applications in low Earth orbit, including in-space research, manufacturing, and astronaut missions. CONTESA features welding, cutting, inspection, and additive manufacturing technologies, and aids in large-scale in-space fabrication.
Vast is collaborating with NASA on technologies and operations required for its microgravity and artificial gravity stations. This includes the Haven-1 commercial destination, which will provide a microgravity environment for crew, research, and in-space manufacturing, and the first crewed mission, called Vast-1, to the platform. Development activities for larger space station modules will also take place under the Space Act Agreement.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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One question. They gonna have to have a hospital…how do your preform a surgery in zero gravity?
LOL. Yeah right. They’re gonna have to figure out how to get a single Starship into orbit without exploding first. Bit premature to be taking about building Starship Stations.
Musk derangement syndrome strikes again. X-D
Why are you displaying such ignorance of how “explosive” are the initial launches of EVERY ultimately successful rocket and missile?!
I’m no scientist but the Starship is designed to house roughly 10 people ,sealed and flown safely to Mars. Food goes with them and anything else they need. With the skill and know how Space X has. I’m sure they can connect 100 of the s Starship together .Scientist love to debate and argue about things. The tech is already thought out by many . SPACE X has a history of doing things that many scientists says can’t be done. There is a few people commenting on this post. Scientist living in the past so to speak.
Not scientist say it can’t be done; it was the heads of the legacy space industry.
Is it beyond SpaceX’s ability to detatch top half of a starship & still return the engines back to earth? If the unzipping was at an angle, two of them could join to form a segment of a circular space station?
*sigh*
Nasathink is so deeply embedded…
By the time any Starship solution bigger than a couple of ships could be designed and engineered you could design and engineer station construction elements that can be shipped up in bulk and assembled on orbit by remotes.
Then you have the custom station elements on orbit ready to build stations of arbitrary size without needing to divert and mess around with the elements of the transport layer.
Relatively safe pressure vessels in various configurations that are assembled on orbit isn’t a horror to be avoided.
It is an inevitability.
The true nightmare from the old days is the thought of requiring crew in spacesuits to do anything by hand in a vacuum as *SOP* instead of an as-needed emergency measure.
Tungsten-nickel alloys with the high corrosion resistance to acid, alkali, aqua regia and air at normal temperatures, are excellent shielding materials against gamma-rays. Tungsten alloys are also effective materials for gamma-ray shielding due to their high hardness and one third reduced thickness compared to lead.
Really, 6 inches of a Tungsten-Nickel alloy would be more than sufficient to line a Super Heavy Booster. Sure, it would be more expensive than lead, but on a $2 billion dollar project, what’s a few extra million to free up so much extra space?
Tungsten isn’t light, would never make it to orbit.
Tungsten is nearly the weight of gold; 19.25 g/cm3 vs 19.3 g/cm3
water and multiple fabric are superior to that.
Dumb idea to use Starships.
They can carry modular or inflatable habitats better suited for it
Correct me if I am wrong, but the Super Heavy Booster doubles as cargo space, and Elon is aiming to produce them by the thousands for ferrying materials to and from low earth orbit, to and from the moon, to and from asteroids for mining, and to and from Mars. I feel like the ease of installing Tungsten-Nickel alloys for radiation shielding, coupled with the affordability of producing Super Heavy Cargo pods, would make for a very durable, cost-effective option for a massive space station.
Of course, inflatables, properly designed, would be nice when used in conjunction with the Super Heavy Boosters. The open spaces of an inflatable would add some much needed spaciousness to offset the cramped confines of 9 meter tubes. As long as the inflatables have proper radiation shielding and durability…
You are wrong, super heavy booster is just fuel and rocket engines, no cargo space. Starship is what carries the cargo.
Super Heavy can boost [mostly] empty cylinders into orbit which can be connected together to assemble a space station. That makes more sense that connecting starships together with their fuel tanks, engines, wings, etc., to never be reused again.
you would have to expend the super heavy booster then which is more costly than a purpose built starship “station”.
You are wrong on just about everything.
Tungsten is a very poor choice. Water, along with hydrogen rich fabric do a much better job, in terms of weight and space and avoids secondary radiation.
Super heavy never makes it to LEO
Starship will be made by the 1000s.
And inflatables are better radiation shielding than tin cans. And that is without adding the water in the outer sleeves (or between floors).
You should be the head of NASA or even better – the POTUS
It would be much simpler just to deploy two linear artificial gravity habitats each with three pressurized modules joined by a pair of expanding telescopic booms. Then you can join the twin artificial gravity habitats together with just three spent Starship propellant tanks. An additional Starship launch could be use to deploy the third spent tank and an inflatable Kevalar torus that can be attached to the spent propellant tanks at opposite ends of each other. A single Kevlar bio-torus could be 48 meters in diameter or you could enhance safety by placing two 24 meter in diameter Kevlar bio-tori next to each other. Top half in each bio-torus could give you spacious recreational space 12 meters high and 24 meter wide. The bottom half you give you at least four habitat levels up to 3 meters high. Regolith bags containing regolith exported from the lunar surface could be used to protect the exterior of the Kevlar bio-tori from radiation, micrometeorites, and extreme temperature fluctuations.
Why not use use lunar basalt fiber to produce the bio-tori instead of Kevlar or combinations of basalt and Kevlar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt_fiber
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214785317331905
That’s an interesting Kevlar alternative or combination I’ve never considered.
Of course, you could always produce Kevlar on the lunar surface. But you’d have to import some chlorine for the manufacturing process– which you’re going to have to import anyway for other industrial processes on the Moon. Salt might be a source for chlorine on the Moon if its imported from Earth or from Mars for marine aquaculture on the lunar surface.
Thanks for the link. Very interesting!
Yeah, makes sense.
They are big habitable spaces already, why not use them to make a instant space stations as we know them today? use one or several docked together, in whichever way suits your fancy.
People complaining these are not legit space stations, give me a break.
We still are in the tin can stage of space industrialization. A sealed tin that can contain air and have power is a space station.
We’ll create better things later for sure, but for the moment, a couple of these docked together, waiting for you at Phobos or Ceres are a haven.
Also, the mass of a cubic meter of water is a ton.
A sphere is the most efficient shape. A 6-meter-radius sphere has a volume of 900 m^3 (4/3 pi r^3). A 5-meter-radius sphere has a volume of 523 m^3. That’s 58%. But it’s also 377 cubic meters of shielding, which is 377 tons, which is several Starship-loads. So you can’t launch a Starship and its shielding together.
On the other hand, if Starships are reusable then you can easily add the shielding later. But if Starships are reusable, then the design space opens up so hugely that it’s very unlikely for Starships to be the most convenient/efficient/desirable long-term space station.
It can still make sense to build out a Starship on the ground for a particular mission, launch it, and land it again when the mission is done. But that’ll be fairly short term, and it won’t necessarily have more radiation shielding than today’s space stations.
As much as I know Each starship cost $2 billion dollar not $20 million dollar!
It’s noteworthy that just each flight of falcon 9 worth $50 million dollar.
Each Raptor engine costs about $500,000 each now and is heading to $250,000 each. 7 raptor engines in the upper Stage Starship. 33 in the booster stage. If the cost of Starship metal, labor and other parts is 4 times the engines costs and the 8 engines cost $4 million, then the total cost is $20 million for the Starship upper stage.
Shell and engines only.
And I suspect that starship will be closer to 50M for this, but that is STILL dirt cheap.
Incorrect, you are quoting costs for creating a production line. The facilities, tooling, training, material, and research is what has cost $2 billion, just like with building a car factory, it is a large one time fee to set up the manufacturing facilities necessary to build many rockets or cars. Each rocket individually costs around $20 million at this point, with elon suggesting those costs will come down to under $10 million per rocket, and even lower per launch for reusable rockets with the cost of fueling one rocket currently at $900,000.
Just line the outside with 0.1mX1mX1m slabs of frozen water.
Water is literally free and NEEDED all the time, it is a great radiation shield, and easily reparable (heat and spray on more water).
Aliens will think it’s a giant snow cone and start licking it.
Human flavoured slushy.
Gives a whole new meaning to “First Contact”.
I think Starship is the wrong thing to be making stations from. We need inflatable modules now more than ever, think of the sheer volume you could pack into a Starship payload bay. Using Starships is a waste of engines. They’re a shuttle, not a raw material.
That was an expensive technology that mostly served the purpose of packing more volume for space Station modules into small orbital launchers.
Starships are mass produced from stainless steel and are MUCH cheaper. The idea of Starships as deployables make a lot of sense. If engines are the concern, they are easy enough to unbolt and ship back to earth.
Nope.
First off, we NEED multiple companies in this competing to have lowest prices, but also for redundancy purpose.
Inflatables are SUPERIOR to metal cans in terms of weight, radiation shielding, ability to be hit by meteorites and costs.
BTW, Bigelow was much cheaper than ANY of the tin cans that we put on the ISS.
You don’t waste the engines, you demount them and ship them back down to Earth as cargo, for reuse.
Inflatable habitats are a way of packing more volume into limited cargo space, they aren’t cost-effective compared to just using the launcher’s tanks AS the volume. Being able to dual use the same structure as fuel tank and living space is just enormously more efficient.
loads of tools, insulation, etc to bring up; safety issues with gases; radiation concerns; meteorite impacts are just a FEW of the reasons to not go with changing it over.
Even more so, is the redundancy issue. Skylab, Challenger, COlumbia, Russia, should have taught EVERYBODY that redundancy is needed throughout EVERYTHING. And that includes having 2+ different architectures.
“but a 900 cubic meter volume would still have 90% of the interior space after stacking supplies for one meter shielding.”
It doesn’t scale with the volume, it scales with the smallest dimension! Starship is 9m in diameter, if arranged as your illustration, that would be reduced to 7m interior. 49/81=60%, not 90%.
Show your math; I don’t think there’s any shape where 900 cubic meters of volume becomes 810 cubic meters after you’ve lined the interior with a meter of shielding.
I answered this comment (with math – it looks even worse than you thought) but it ended up at top-level.
I based my 60% on a toroidal station with a minor diameter same as the Starship, and a major diameter much larger, which simplifies to a cylinder with no allowance for end caps.
To reach Brian’s 90% available space, you’d need a genuinely enormous station relative to the size of the Starship. But, of course, in the orbit he’s taking about, you don’t need that 1 meter of shielding…