* accomplishes almost no real science * half by design, half bc cost overruns ended up cutting out lots of stuff * mostly a jobs program for Boeing, etc. * a "wet lab" inside a single shuttle fuel tank (tech pioneered in 1970s w skylab) could've been launched in 1985 w 3x volumehttps://twitter.com/VeloMontaigne/status/1352204225154002944 …
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5/ open up a door in the exterior and move equipment into the now empty tank, then pressurize it with air. Voila. Massive space station.
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6/ In just a SINGLE space shuttle launch we could have had a space station in orbit with ~ 2x the volume of the ISS We could have done this in 1981 Imagine that - a (fully American) space station in 1981, twice the size of the shared space station that we actually have in 2021
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7/ We actually had 135 launches. Not all were to the same orbit, but imagine that just 60 of them had sent their tanks to the new station. We've have a space station today with 120x the volume of the ISS. Instead of a crew of 10, maybe a crew of 200, maybe growing food & air
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8/ Jobs program, pure and simple.https://twitter.com/VeloMontaigne/status/1352217475178524673 …
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10/ Here's video from the inside of Skylab in 1973https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLbxhNeSkw8 …
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12/ One launch (which took 1 day) gave us a wet workshop in the 1970s with 12,417 cubic feet (351.6 m3) of habitable volume. 30 launches over 10 years gave us ISS with a habitable volume of 32,333 cu ft (915.6 m3 ) One shuttle tank has a vol of 19,744 cu ft (559.1 m 3)
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13/ The EFT was designed for an operating internal pressure of 22 psi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank … The ISS has an internal pressure of 14.7 psi Skylab has a pressure of 5.0 psi.https://twitter.com/Pipboypope/status/1352223730965987330 …
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14/ an EFT space station would not have just exploded To be sure, things are always much more difficult in theory than in practice. How stable is EFT foam in vacuum and UV light for 20 yrs? How do the equipment hatches work? How do you connect power from outside to in?
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15/ Here's the canonical study. 171 pages of hard data. http://ssi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ssi_externaltanks_gimarc.pdf …
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