NASA Offers $200m for an Orbiting Gas Station

[Ichingcarpenter]

The future of human and robotic exploration will mean trips to deep space destinations like the moon, Mars, or asteroids. But getting there and returning home on one tank of gas while carrying a sizable payload is almost impossible. The solution? In-space refueling technology, which enables spacecrafts to tank up in low Earth orbit.

Last year, the Augustine Commission, a blue-ribbon panel charged with reviewing America's human spaceflight program, emphasized the need for NASA to purse this technology in their final report to the White House. Now NASA has put out a call for a $200 million mission to show how to store and transfer rocket propellants in space.

In-space refueling technology would allow smaller and cheaper rockets to be used for missions that would otherwise be outside their weight class. It will also considerably enhance the capabilities of larger rockets. "Instead of sending the rockets fully fueled to asteroids or to Mars we would launch them partially fueled to get more payload into orbit," Chris Moore, deputy director of advanced capabilities for NASA told Foxnews.com. "Then we'd top off the propellant by docking with depots in lower Earth orbit."


http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/deltav/26749/?ref=rss

[TheMadMonk]

1. NASA should have thought of this when it chose to make sure...

...the shuttle's external tank burnt up, rather than take it all the way into orbit. They actually sacrificed payload capacity to guarantee it.

Every mission to the ISS could have brought a tank, along with a few thousand pounds of residual fuel inside. If nothing else it would have been enough to fuel an OMS (orbital maouevering system) for the station, freeing up at least that much extra mission payload capacity.

Emptied, with only a minimum of hardware, the tanks could be turned into habitation space or farms.

[krispos42]

2. Wasn't that in "Red Mars"?

Where discarded external tanks were melded together to turn them into space stations and whatnot?


Although I think I can see NASA's reasoning... with no plans to use them, putting them in LEO would only mean they would eventually decay into a fireball anyway. Best to make sure they come down someplace empty.

[TheMadMonk]

3. Among plenty of other books. Using the tanks this way was a part...

...of the original shuttle program, right beside the Shuttle-C.

Shuttle-C got shitcanned toot sweet, because of the potential threat it represented to the manned program.

And I suspect, the comercial suppliers to NASA put the kybosh on using empty tanks as cubage, since if (launch) weight became the only major constraint on cargo, the equivalent of ISS could probably have been built using mostly off the shelf hardware in half as many launches (or less) at a fraction of the material and hardware cost.

With shuttle-C as well, there is no reason why we could not have had a wheel type space station with space for a hundred or more people, all for about the same price we've paid for the "off white" elephant we do have up there.