NASA’s moon station orbiting port housing will be so small that astronauts won’t be able to stand upright inside, an engineer involved in the station’s design said.
NASA and international partners plan to fund its construction Gate station in the orbit of the moon for the next two years. When completed near the end of the decade, the lab space will be about one-sixth the size International Space Station (ISS), creating two home modules that force crew members to all but leave personal space.
“The International habitable module will have a habitable space of about 8 cubic meters” [280 cubic feet] and you will have to share it with three others,” René Waclavicek, an engineer and space project researcher at Austria-based LIQUIFER Space Systems, said in Czech Space Week conference in Brno (Opens in a new tab)Czech Republic, November 30, 2022. “That is, it would be a room of 2 by 2 by 2 meters. [6.6 by 6.6 by 6.6 feet]. And you are locked up there. There are other rooms, but they are not large and there are not many of them.
Related: Watch NASA build a next-generation lunar gateway space station in a concept video
Waclavicek was involved in the design phase Europe built an international housing module (Opens in a new tab)or the I-Hab, which is one of the two portal habitable elements, essentially rooms with lab space (the other being; Housing and Logistics Outpost (Opens in a new tab)HALO, developed by Northrop Grumman in the US).
When they were working on the design, Waclavicek said, the architects bowed to the practical demands of the project’s nature. Their initial hope for larger modules, due to the larger volume of habitable space available on the International Space Station, had to be abandoned due to the impossibility of launching them to large scale. the moon.
“For the first time, we’ve come across a column with external dimensions similar to what we know from the ISS,” Waclavicek said. “This is about 4.5 m [15 feet] in diameter and 6 m * [20 feet] long. But due to mass restrictions we had to reduce it to 3 m [10 feet] in the exteriors. And that for us with an internal cross-section of only 1.2 m by 1.2 m. had left [4 feet by 4 feet]. Most of the internal volume is consumed by the engine, so it’s essentially just a corridor where you have to turn 90 degrees if you want to stretch out.
The International Space Station with its 7.2 to 7.2 feet interior (2.2 to 2.2 m) where astronauts could also carry space gymnastics routinesIt offers a luxury experience compared to what awaits explorers of the moon at the gate.
“[The I-Hab] it’s really just a cylinder when it locks on both sides and locks two sides and crosses the corridor along the axis of length,” said Waclavicek. “Even if you want to cross each other, it’s already quite difficult, whatever you want to interpolate. you do it in a moment, so that the other may pass through you.
Somehow, the engineers managed to incorporate about 53 cubic feet (1.5 cubic meters) of private space with locked doors for each crew member living inside the i-Hab. But the experience of staying on a port boat will be challenging for more reasons than just the narrowness of the living quarters. As Waclavicek said, most of the life support technology modules will be occupied by noisy and vibrating, whose constant shoulder pains the nerves of most mortal goods.
“You really live in the engine room,” Waclavicek said. “The things on life support are noisy, they have a lot of fans, and only 1.5 cubic meters of private space where you can close the door and tame the noise.”
The architects explored their ways to ease the pressure of the crew and make the experience on board the ship more enjoyable, but they kept hitting the technical limits, including the vehicles available to send the launch module to its destination.
“We always asked, ‘Where’s the window?'” Waclavicek said. “On the International Space Station, the most popular place where astronauts spend every free minute is the window. But there are technical issues associated with it. The moon is thousands of miles away [than the ISS] and each window is a disturbance in the continuum of the structure. Also, the glass is very heavy so that the window is the first thing to be removed.
The smaller windows will be in the Porta, located in the ESPRIT refueling module, which will also be built in Europe.
While the American HALON module may be launched as early as 2024, the I-Hab trip to the moon is not expected before 2027. Now, Waclavicek said, the team is working on the Critical Design Review, an important milestone before hardware manufacturing can begin; and began to build a large mockup to experience human interaction with the living environment.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and Facebook.
#NASAs #lunar #orbiting #space #station #claustrophobic #engineer
