In order to develop a large space station most rapidly, and minimize the amount astronauts will have to spend working in space suits, the easiest solution would be to loft a large inflatable balloon type membrane into orbit, and work inside that, once it hardens from an internal coating of epoxy. It would still be fragile, somebody could easily stick a shoe through it, and would have to be augmented with strips of fabric and epoxy. Aluminized kapton has been recommended.
Assuming the inflated hardened shell of aluminized kapton will not shatter when in space, and allows astronauts inside it to apply fabric and epoxy to augment it, the best arrangement will be to have two shells about 3 meters apart, and be able to work between them. Brunelleschi used that technique to build his famous dome. Two issues arise – 1. how do workers travel between the shells, and navigate from place to place, and 2. how are things anchored to the shells?
For the first question, the shells are thin membranes, and would be incredibly hard to use to push or pull against, so there would need to be another structure or scaffolding developed between the shells for workers to use for travel. Such a structure would be needed eventually for structural stability and integrity anyway, so it would be logical to develop it as the next step in helping to augment the shell membranes. The simplest solution I can think of would be to set up a pvc pipe extruder in the interior of the station, and begin extruding 3/4″ pvc pipe to extend in great circles throughout the space between the shells to serve as scaffolding of a sort.
The raw materials could be shipped up in bulk, with little wasted space, and fill out any extra mass in any shipment to the station, and just continually crank out great circle sections of extruded pvc pipe. Or whatever the plastic is that works as a good cosmic ray shield. There is probably a most efficient sequence of placement of these great circles that would provide the most structural benefit soonest, not just sequences of meridians.
As soon as the first great circle scaffold pipe is in place, workers could scoot along it, applying strips of fabric and epoxy to both shells.
Attaching things to the shells would be much easier once the fabric and epoxy layer covers everything, so that a flap or strap could simply be sewn onto the fabric already in place, and then a layer of epoxy laid on, coating the joint.
Perhaps instead of the outer memebrane being just one layer of aluminized kapton, the outer membrane needs to be a sandwich of a couple of layers, one of which is already a fabric. Or, there needs to be a third delivery of an internal skin of fabric and epoxy that gets inflated and bonded to the outer skin before the inner shell gets inflated.
Leave a Reply