Cmd. Frost
The last one standing.
- Location
- The Summer Stretch
Good, infrastructure is important.
SpaceX Launches, Landings and News
- Thread starter Shadows
- Start date
- Megathread
Also can see the effects and requirements for people being outside the Earths magnetosphere for extended periods of time. Good to get some tech development going on that as well if we ever want to venture beyond the Earth-Moon system.
RRoan
Technogaianist
- Location
- 'round a far, distant star
I'm not sure why the magnetosphere is important here? It doesn't actually do much.
RRoan
Technogaianist
- Location
- 'round a far, distant star
The magnetosphere provides protection from solar radiation, which is pretty easy to stop. It doesn't provide meaningful protection against high-energy cosmic rays, which is the one that people worry over because it's nigh-impossible to stop.
Even Starship with its big boy size pretty much has zero protection against cosmic rays. It is just going to have a solar storm shelter and keep its big butt pointed to the sun for all its solar radiation protection to. Though it might have the spare volume and mass to make the sleeping quarters also the solar shelter, maybe. The general idea for it is simply have a reasonably quick transfer and use up every last bit of a persons entire life time budget of radiation on a single round trip.
Well we are fairly sure that the linear no threshold model is wrong but doing research to see the thresholds is quite unethical. So everyone defaults to the model they know overstates risk which also means you can get lots of pushback when you want to use a more risky model. Risky in that it allows now risk and is riskier to use for to lack of research.
That would be understating the effects of solar particle, Solar radiation outside the Earths magnetosphere is actually the majority of radiation, especially in cases like Solar Particle Events when the Sun has massively increased activity for a short while. And now yes, many parts of it should in theory be something one can protect against in various ways to a good degree. But this has never been done in practice, which means we don't have practical data on if those work as well as we'd want either.
In comparison galactic cosmic rays are already a part of daily ISS life, we know how dangerous those are and have data on what to expect.
As such, getting practical long term data on the component we lack and ways to mitigate it would be quite useful.
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- Location
- California
The ESA astronaut limit for career radiation exposure is something like 50% higher than NASA.
Take it with a grain of salt, but I read something on atomic rockets that suggested a fairly unshielded journey to Mars (including a stay and return, based on radiation exposure of Curiosity en-route) would put ESA astronauts just over their safety limit. Basic shielding would bring it down, though to NASA requirements would be trickier.
In any case the project rho/atomic rockets page on radiation is an interesting read.
Take it with a grain of salt, but I read something on atomic rockets that suggested a fairly unshielded journey to Mars (including a stay and return, based on radiation exposure of Curiosity en-route) would put ESA astronauts just over their safety limit. Basic shielding would bring it down, though to NASA requirements would be trickier.
In any case the project rho/atomic rockets page on radiation is an interesting read.
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galahad
Seeker of Truths
- Location
- Searching for a better world
SpaceX released an official Crew Dragon simulator where you can play the ISS docking portion of the flight.
iss-sim.spacex.com
SPACEX - ISS Docking Simulator
This simulator will familiarize you with the controls of the actual interface used by NASA Astronauts to manually pilot the SpaceX Dragon 2 vehicle to the International Space Station.
iss-sim.spacex.com
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
People are already speedrunning it.SpaceX released an official Crew Dragon simulator where you can play the ISS docking portion of the flight.
SPACEX - ISS Docking Simulator
This simulator will familiarize you with the controls of the actual interface used by NASA Astronauts to manually pilot the SpaceX Dragon 2 vehicle to the International Space Station.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
Then I really hope they cut out the data from speedruns.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
People really, REALLY should know better than to use randos on the internet for training data by now. -_-
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
IIRC there are very strict regulations on how quickly a capsule is allowed to approach the ISS, and that retro thrusters are barely used on the final approach to reduce contamination of the exterior. Even a sensible approach in the game would break those rules. I do like the UI though.
Ugh, no way, absolutely not. The difference in controlled-descent low Earth-orbit and something more akin to GPS / geo-synch altitudes is so staggering, that millionths of a millisecond are lost, precisely the clock rate that AI need to check if they just doggy-paddled left limb or right, so to speak. We just aren't there yet.
In all seriousness, both SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's Starliner are already designed to dock autonomously:
www.spacex.com
www.spacex.com
Dragon
Crew Dragon
Crew Dragon was designed to be an enjoyable ride. With three windows, passengers can take in views of Earth, the Moon, and the wider Solar System right from their seats.
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Igla (spacecraft docking system) - Wikipedia
US achieves autonomous docking in space
Two free-flying US satellites separate and dock without any human guidance – the tests could one day lead to spacecraft that repair damaged satellites in orbit
www.newscientist.com
It has been a thing since the late 60's for Russian Spacecraft and the US and ESA figured it out by 2008. I mean Boeing's Starliner launch had issues because it was being overly good at holding it's heading during launch because they had the wrong level of accuracy turned on during launch and wasted lots of delta V.
It is reassuring to see successful field tests of a simple interface, but that is where the similarities end. Tasking two AI at different azimuths to rendezvous on their own power is incredibly risky. The only way I think it could work is with StarLink latency mitigation and any supporting hardware near the maneuver at quantum number crunching levels.
I think you are massively overstating things. Please elaborate on why you feel that automated docking is such a complicated problem?
I'm not sure why you believe latency would be an issue. By the time you need to be very precise you are going to be within a few KM of each other with only a few m/s of velocity difference between you and the target craft. I will point out again that this is an issue that was originally solved in 1967. It wasn't perfect in 1967 the only damaging docking accident that happened did so because the automated docking wasn't used as an experiment to see if they could cut the system out for cost savings. Actually this year something far far harder then docking with a cooperating space station was done. MEV-1 actually docked with a communication satellite that was in geosationary orbit when the other satellite didn't even had a docking port. It had to guide a probe into the thruster on the other satellite and then expand it in the thrust chamber so that the two vehicles were matted.
Why wouldn't you just use a sensor to get distance, like a laser range finder. And then work via an absolute orientation coordinate system (for instance the station can give you an orientation compared to it via a signal) so you approach from the right side. In the end this isn't really much different then how you'd handle docking of craft on the planet either. Never needed GPS for that and still don't.
So that would completely eliminate the need for any kind of GPS or any such thing. That's really an over complicated solution to a simple problem.
I hope that resolves your confusion on the matter.
