13 thoughts on “Large Space Structures”

  1. A similar concept was proposed, IIRC, by Harry Stine in the 80s. Rather than spools of carbon fiber, it used spools of aluminum sheet that were extruded into truss shapes.

    1. No, that was actually a NASA project, going back to the seventies. It was potentially envisioned as the means to construct SPS.

      Speaking of which, there used to be a mural SPS construction in the DEI room in Downey. I wonder if it was preserved when they dismantled the facility? The old Shuttle mock up was still there a couple years ago.

  2. My first job after graduating from college was at General Dynamics, where I worked (as a software engineer) on several projects. One was a research project on large space structures such as these that sought to address a specific problem: since there is no gravity, then there is no natural dampening of oscillations in the structure. The project was to create a series of sensors that could detect such oscillations, analyze them, and apply dampening counter-oscillations in real time.

    Sadly, this was in 1978, and we’ve hardly had use for such concepts in the nearly 40 years since. That’s probably as good an indicator of the ‘false dawn of space travel’ as anything. ..bruce..

    1. Many years ago, I saw a program about a simple system to dampen vibrations on large, flexible structures. It used piezoelectric strips to both sense and cancel vibrations. I don’t know if this was ever used or how well the materials hold up to the harsh space environment. It was a very simple idea.

    2. Langley was doing a lot of work on dynamic structure control in the late 80s/early 90s, as a technology for SSF. I had a contract with them at Rockwell to model the structural dynamics. One of the hardest things to model was stiction in the joints. Don’t know if they’ve solved that yet.

      1. While I was working in one of the sim labs at JSC, we had a robotics and math whiz working on a better model of the RMS that included all the dynamics of the arm and joints, including stiction/ It was a couple of years work and testing of the code until they got it to accurately model the observed motions.

  3. Commercial space advocates are constantly looking for things that can be better manufactured in space than on the ground, and very few of them ever realize that there’s only one thing that fits that description: spacecraft. Hoyt hits the key points, but in extending it to space solar power and other huge projects, he misses the bread and butter. Having an assembly capability in orbit for GEO comsats would allow a small fleet of small RLVs to operate constantly, bringing up components. The launch rate for GEO is about 14 a year, and the economics show that it would be almost impossible not to cut the cost by 30% or more, and increase reliability. His use of robots may allow even bigger cuts.

  4. Fundamentally nothing here that we didn’t work on in the ’70s for SPS.

    Everything old is new again – it better be, despite the “lost decades.”

    1. Yes. There are plenty of audacious concepts floating around. Actually implementing one in a cost effective manner is the remaining non-trivial challenge. Everyone likes to be the “Big Picture” person. But, it is the detail oriented design that determines whether it is a viable concept, or pie-in-the-sky.

      1. Thanks, Trent, I’d like to. Got a link?

        The linked space.com article about SpiderFab only talks about lifting the coils of carbon fiber up there and spinning them into structures in orbit, not creating the fibers themselves in orbit.

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