A Space Selfie….Spelfie:Nick Hague Completes First Spacewalk

“I can remember sitting watching the moon landings and dreaming of being there, never missed one if at all possible. And don’t forget Skylab a wonderfully bit of re purposing when the politicians had lost interest in their new toy.”

Vice President Pence just announced that the U.S. wants to put people back on the Moon by 2024.

Skylab, I remember it well. America’s first space station. Constructed out of an empty propellant tank built for the Saturn 5 launch vehicle.

Skylab was the perfect way to economize on space development by using already-available hardware.

The Space Shuttle could have put an empty propellant tank in orbit that was even bigger than Skylab. That would be the large, orange External Tank (ET) to which the shuttle was attached at launch. Had NASA so desired, instead of dropping the ET back into the atmosphere to burn up after launch, the shuttle could have remained attached to the ET, and the shuttle had enough power to put both the shuttle and the ET in orbit.

One ET would have had more volume than the International Space Station. The ET was 27 feet in diameter and 154 feet long, and contained a tank for the hydrogen and a separate tank for the oxygen. NASA launched 133 External Tanks.

NASA decided not to go the Skylab route during the space shuttle era, although they had a certified design for using the ET in orbit called Option C, when they were deciding on what kind of space station to build in the early 1990’s.

Option C would have only required about four launches of the shuttle to complete the space station. Whereas, Options A and Option B both required dozens of shuttle launches before completion because those two designs used space station modules carried inside the space shuttle cargo bay, so they were much smaller than the ET and required many more launches to equal the volume of an ET, not to mention numerous space walks required to assuemble in orbit.The ET space station required just a few space walks before final completion.

The ET space station was mostly comleted when it first reached orbit since a fully-outfitted habitation module (15 feet long by 27 feet in diameter) was attached to the bottom of the ET at launch. The only thing the ET space station needed after the initial launch was the placement of solar panels.

Unfortunately, NASA management at the time thought that rather than doing space development as inexpensively and quickly as possible, it would be better for the NASA bureaucracy to choose a design that required the maximum use of the Space Shuttle.

This would keep their gravy train going for as long as possible, so the choice was plain: the space station option that required the most launches of the shuttle and that definitely was not the ET space station which could be completed with about four launches.

Of course, if NASA managment had a little bit of vision they could have thought about putting up an ET Space Station using four shuttle launches, and then they could put up an ET Moonbase using say 12 space shuttle launches, and then they could launch an ET Phobos base requiring dozens of shuttle launches. And an ET Marbase.

But NASA management didn’t think big enough.

So NASA management could have maximized the use of the shuttle while pursuing a vigorous space development program using the ET as a basic building block, but they chose to piddle around in low-Earth orbit for decades, and to top it all off, they threw away the Space Shuttle heavy-lift launch system and are trying to replace it by spending billions more dollars to produce a vehicle that is no more capable (less capable, imo) than the space shuttle launch system.

The answer is of course, free enterprise space development. At last we are on this course, and now Trump and Pence have jumpstarted the human race back to the Moon, featuring private space development companies.