Orbiting fuel stations proposed for trips to the Moon, Mars, and beyond
By Vlad Savov 
posted August 5th 2009 1:51AM
posted August 5th 2009 1:51AM
posted August 5th 2009 1:51AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Why do they not build nuclear reactor in space and just use the produced petrol for supplying spacecrafts. Why? hee? Submarines works with the nuclear reactors. I know its space but they definitive know how to use power source like that.
well for one thing, space craft don't use petrol, they use liquid hydrogen and oxygen as a primary and solid rocket fuel as a secondary. The whole thing would be better if it ran off of an ion thruster, except that it would be extremely slow at accelerating, despite great potential for high speeds.
The supplied petrol? The only thing supplied is heat...becomes very useful when you're surrounded with water.
@Gonazar
If ion thrusters have sht acceleration then why not accelerate with chemical thrusters and then switch over ions?
Lot of interesting discussion here. Problem with comparing nuclear subs to spacecraft is submarines have a medium (water) that they exist in with which to impart motion. Space, being a vacuum, means that in order to move you have to kick something out in the opposite direction. Ion engines are very efficient at converting energy into movement as they would use the reactor's electrical energy to accelerate the propellant to near the speed of light. This mean with less fuel you get more total acceleration. Chemical rockets take huge volumes of fuel and blow it up, funneling the explosion backwards to move forward. It gives huge short term acceleration but since even the most powerful chemical explosion moves material at tiny velocities compared to the speed of light it's not even close to an Ion's efficiency. In the end you have to have something to throw out the other side to accelerate, and that's fuel.
I'm still pissed they cancelled JIMO. Manned or not Prometheus was going to be one crazy groundbreaking craft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter
heh, chances are that NASA will spend 15 years building it, then retire it in 5 or 10 years.... :P
Anyways, is way better to spend a billion in NASA rather to spend a Trillion in a group of wars around the globe.
Well didn't you read it? They say they build the station then have private companies fight it out who will sell the fuel, so exxon and shell and such will start to use polluting oil-powered plants (probably in the north pole region) to make liquid hydrogen and ship that in low-cost almost-safe tanker-spaceships to orbit constantly.
Well thought out plans, the backbone of NASA.
Fuel depots in space:
Terrorist Hackers Hijack and destabilize its orbit.
Huge firebomb crashing into the atmosphere.
If it burns up before touchdown, bye bye ozon layer and hi there big cloud of polution in the sky.
If it stays intact (or parts of it, like extra strengthened fuel containers) gigantic molotov coctails crashing into the earth burning parts of earth to sinder.
If Hydrogen fuel is used, pressure + heat could create a naturally ignited H bomb?
Man, so many scenario's for disaster.
Not to mention the thing going defect in space and creating a massive space faring fuel cloud crossing the paths of all those satelites and shit out there, possibly make space travel for human kind impossible for quite some time.
Only way to get rid of a cloud like that would be to ignite it in space.
"If Hydrogen fuel is used, pressure + heat could create a naturally ignited H bomb?" -- No. If fusion were that easy, we'd have fusion reactors already. It takes so much pressure that every H-bomb includes an A-bomb as a trigger.
Sigh, nice try but not even republicans could use your attempt at making this some terrorist threat.
Im not sure if they thought this through....
I mean, sure.. a shuttle can always refill its fuel. But what about the crew? Studies have shown symptoms of chronic dementia and claustrophobia once they spend a significant amount of time in space.
You definitely cannot refill that.. unless you send robots I guess....
Legalize marijuana in space!
nm it's already legal :D
This should make for some EPIC explosions! :D
Sadly no.
Unless you count the movies that'll inevitably use this concept, but that's Hollywood BS physics.
how the hell are you going to refill the stations once they are empty...? i dont really understand.. can some one explain please.
You wouldn't lift the station full of fuel, you'd build it in orbit. It wouldn't look like that picture, either - most likely it would be a framework with a number of tanks attached to it.
Regular launches would bring new fuel to refill the station and nothing else (or, probably, new tanks of fuel to clip to the frame). It means that rather than using enormous super-rockets to get to mars, you launch half a dozen cheaper, smaller, less complex and less engineeringly extreme rockets to fuel the station, then another to put a spaceship into orbit which will pick up the fuel tanks and head off to Mars in a much, much shorter time as it can start with a full fuel load instead of whatever is left over after it's clawed its way to orbit.
It's got technical issues as it wasn't designed for this, but as a concept, imagine launching a shuttle up to the ISS, strapping on a new full fuel tank, and then using that to get to, say, the moon. A lander could be stored in the shuttle's main cargo bay which would visit the moon, then return to the orbiter, which then heads home.
YESSSSSSSS. I dream of a day when our galaxy resembles the one of Cowboy Bebop. Cannot, f**king WAIT. I'll be dead long before it happens, sadly ... V___V
The Earth surrounded by scrap?
YES. I would be living on Mars or Ganymede, of course.
I see a distinct lack of hyperspace gates and intergalactic bounty hunters in this article.
So what happens when the fuel station gets hit by something; we get a blob of diesel in the path of earth and whatever.
We would be better building one on every other solid planet, that way we know theres little likelihood this thing will get hit by something and change orbit and end hitting something such as a planet or cause a chain reaction.
Diesel eh, OK you are disqualified.
I suspect it will be run like a NASCAR pit stop. There will be one Astronaut holding a gas can.
Thatll come to $49875693045098234750987623056789465907463 for the full oil change and tank fill up...... Remember us again when passing the moon........
It would seem they would actually have to use more fuel to get that up there. Simple physics, you have to carry more mass up there than you would and you would be launching all of the rockets to assemble and fill this fuel station. I think it's space elevator time, or we should just give up on that giant black space entirely because we're not going to get anywhere worthwhile.
I love the picture of the gas station, it makes this representation.
don't send people, send robots
I'd rather see them create a massive solar powered battery charger. The station would hold a huge cache of high capacity batteries which shuttles could trade with their depleted batteries so they could be charged.
Always seemed like solar or nuclear was the easy way to go in space.... fuel - for real??
Don't expect this anytime soon as in not before 2015. NASA is retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and not making any space exploration for the next 5 years while it figures out what direction it's going in.
Space is the place! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfXYsRpe5YE
Let me start by saying I'm a huge fan of the prospects of going back to the moon and eventually to Mars. However, I fail to understand why we need this boondoggle. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Ares-Orion Project already expected to launch the fuel and booster for moon missions on a separate Ares V from the Orion's Ares I? It seems storing the fuel in space would still involve the Ares V launch vehicle. So instead of storing for multiple missions that may never happen, why not just launch an Ares V filled with fuel when an actual mission launches?
Here come Deep Space Nine!!!
I was thinking more along the lines of "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Clark was one smart fellow, thinking of all this stuff over 40 years ago.
A docking station that recharges, doesn't apple have a patent on that?
This helpful turn-the-topic-to-apple post was made possible by a grant from the Foundation For Turtlenecks, a non-registered NPO.
I have to say, that actually made me lol. You get +1!