Ultimate Steve

Ah, okay! I'd tend to go with ISS-like unless we have a large budget and a relatively inexpensive super heavy launch vehicle.

Sorry, I accidentally wrote an essay! Eccentric would be great as you get to see variations in how far away Earth is, but it brings a few issues up. Too eccentric, and Dragon 2 won't be able to reach it. Too eccentric, and you're in the Van Allen belts, and that's no good. An eccentric orbit will also lead to different heating cycles, especially over the course of a year, you'll spend a different percentage of your orbit in sunlight/darkness as your periapsis could be facing the sun, but 6 months later your apoapsis is facing the sun... It shouldn't be a huge problem, but it should be considered. With those things considered, you can only make it a little elliptical, and at that point, the views aren't that much better, so I'd probably go with circular. I'd stick with low Earth orbit, but maybe a bit higher than the ISS, giving an orbital period of 1.5-2 hours. If the Van Allen belts weren't a thing, and Dragon 2 was more capable, I'd suggest a higher, very elliptical orbit, but unfortunately we have constraints. I'm assuming this would be a tourism station, with maybe some science thrown in, but I might be wrong. If it's a tourism station, then I can't imagine people staying for much more than a few months. I watched a Mir documentary today, and it said that the cosmonauts mood got significantly worse after 3 months. Granted, this station will be much more modern than Mir. As far as scientific research goes, sticking with the 6 month system currently used by the ISS should work out fine. As a result of that, I'd give artificial gravity a no, especially since it hasn't really been tested. Plus, zero-g is a big part of the space tourist experience. Unless this is for a research station. Then, a partial gravity station would be alright. I'd love to see some Martian gravity experiments get done. Not sure what Cartesian/circular is asking. Power and heat are a few other things to consider. The simple answers are probably solar panels and radiators, but the specifics of that are pretty complicated. A list of other things to consider: Communications Life support. (Oxygen, backup oxygen, food and water storage, water reclamation, etc.) Which docking ports to bring? It would be unwise to rely on just Dragon 2. Number of docking ports. I'd suggest at least 3. Viewpoints. Ideally something 2-3x as good as the Cupola module. Airlocks. How many modules? Space management. Where's the kitchen? Spacing of bathrooms? How big are the bedrooms? Etc. Current standardized systems. I know the ISS uses standardized racks for experiments and such. I'd probably design the whole thing in metric unless there are widely accepted standardized systems or Dragon 2 systems that use American. S T O R A G E. The lack of storage space was a HUGE problem on Mir, and is still a problem on the ISS, although to a lesser extent. Computer systems. Hardware? Operating system? Accessibility of components for repair. Fire suppression systems. Environmental controls, like temperature, humidity, etc. I read somewhere once that the ISS has cold and warm spots based on distance to temperature control systems. Airflow. I might be wrong, but IIRC the ISS has a lot of little fans to keep air circulating, because in zero-g CO2 could pool up around people's faces and that's definitely not ideal. Control. Reaction wheels or RCS thrusters? Both? Gravity gradient stabilization to save on fuel? I don't think it would work with such a small spacecraft, though. Will it have a robotic arm to aid in assembly if there are multiple modules? Microbe control. A big problem on Mir. Odor control. Also a big problem on Mir. Foreign gas filtering/control. If something unexpectedly outgasses and the system is not equipped to deal with that gas, it's going to stay in the station until it naturally leaks out, which will take quite a while. Hatch design, especially on multi modular designs. How many people should the station support at once? How long should the station keep them supported for? Will it be continuously inhabited, or just when a spacecraft is visiting? What material should the main body of the station be made out of? Using inflatable modules would give more space and would be cool, but would probably mean buying from Bigelow. Exercise equipment. Propulsion for orbit boosting. Integrated, or only via visiting spacecraft? How are you getting the modules to the station? Designing a space tug? Integrated propulsion and control on every module? Inclination - I'd do about the same as the ISS so you can reach it from the same launch sites as the ISS. Russia, Florida, etc. Polar would mean most likely Vandenberg, which has never had a crewed launch and isn't set up for it. Wet workshop?!?!?!? Falcon 9 second stages are fairly large, but it's never been done before and brings its own host of problems, but that is a lot of extra volume. Two more big ones. Launch vehicle consideration. The biggest thing here is whether or not Starship becomes a thing. You design around Starship You design around something else Starship becomes a thing Yay! Your space station is small and expensive compared to just launching a group of people on a Starship. Starship doesn't become a thing You have oversized modules that can't be launched by anything and you can't recoup development costs. Yay! We can debate all day about whether Starship will work or not, but both are possibilities. I think it would be much more interesting to design around current rockets, however, especially as you are talking about Dragon 2, and there would probably be fewer unknowns. If we ignore Starship, our main options are: Falcon 9 - Low cost, smallish fairing. Proton - Larger fairing (I think), bigger payload, but they want to phase it out, it's a bit less reliable, etc. Atlas V - More expensive than F9, but about the same in capability once you factor in the capability lost for Falcon's reusability. Delta IV/Delta IV Heavy - Being phased out, really expensive, but can get a lot of stuff to orbit with a pretty big fairing, so probably no. H-II or H-III - Japanese launch vehicle. Capability similar to Falcon 9. H-II is more expensive, but H-III when it debuts, aims to be cheaper at about 50 million. Ariane 5/6 - More expensive, but similar capability to everything else. Soyuz - Price point probably similar to Falcon 9, less capability. There are a few other serviceable options like Antares, GSLV, Zenit, Vulcan, etc. But those are our main options. Most signs point to the Falcon 9, but it would probably be unwise to be reliant on one company for everything, so a contingency option would probably be a good thing to have. Another thing to think about is station end of life. Usually, stations are de-orbited, but I think it would be amazing if, at the end of this station's life, it was brought back to earth and placed in a museum. Granted, this relies upon a cheapish shuttle-like vehicle existing at the end of life date, like Starship or something. Things to consider when taking this approach are: The modules being able to be undocked, and redocked, being able to structurally handle re-entry when in a cargo bay, and probably a few other things. Given these things, I think we can narrow this down to a few general designs: Small-ish one module space station, extremely simple, launched on a Falcon 9 or similar. The size of a wider, larger school bus. Intermittently crewed by regularly launched Dragons. Might use Dragon's life support, even. Wait, that's probably a bad idea, scratch that. A place for tourists to stay, with large windows, to look down at Earth for a few days. It can be done in a reasonable timeframe on a reasonable budget, and might break even by the time Starship starts regularly operating. Pros: Low cost, simpler than other options, quickest to build option, most doable. But you have to pack everything into one module, including beds, windows, and all other systems. You wouldn't have to develop a space tug for docking, though. Medium sized multimodular station for tourism and research. Basically a modern, smaller version of the ISS with a few modules. Multiple craft can dock, you can stay there for months. You get NASA as a customer as you have space to do research. You might even get development money from them if you are lucky. You have way higher development and launch costs, however, and you need to develop a space tug to get the modules to the station. You also risk not breaking even if Starship becomes a thing. Go all-in on Starship. Design huge modules, build a huge thing, etc. Biggest risk, probably the biggest development cost (mitigated by the fact that you can have more design margin because of Starship's payload capacity), you have to wait for Starship to become a thing, if it does. Biggest payoff if it works. Potentially the lowest launch cost of all options. You also don't have to design a space tug if Starship is fitted with a robotic arm. Personally, option one sounds the most interesting right now, as I think two would be too much to think about and there are a lot of what ifs on three. Oof, that's a lot of stuff, so you probably won't have the time to comment on everything, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about some of it.

Speaking of propulsively landing space capsules, look what I found looking around today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_(spacecraft) I didn't know that the Russians ever considered something like this!

Just so you know, it's not like fueling issues on R-7 variants haven't happened before... I was browsing the Wikipedia article "list of R-7 launches" and I came across this: 15 April 1960, 15:06 Luna (8K72) I1-9 LC-1/5, Baikonur Failure Luna 1960A Third stage premature shutdown due to ground crews forgetting to fill the RP-1 tank completely.

While we're at it, can we get 0.625m SRBs as well?

How fast does it look to be moving? This stream is blocked at school for me.

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47120.220 More work is being done on the starhopper nose cone, and they have made a crawler out of two treads and some jacks. The bottom section of the hopper is being carried by the crawler to the launch pad they have set up.

If you're using stock KSP for simulations, Kerbin's radius is 600km. If you flew upwards to 1500km you are almost quadrupling the distance from the core. By my calculations, acceleration due to gravity is 0.8m/s2 at that altitude, 10x less than at the surface.

If you're using KSP or RSS, keep in mind that gravity does not remain constant.

Dominican Republic

Chapter 9

Have you tried a weighted blanket? I don't know much about them myself, but I've heard that they can help with insomnia.

Yup! It's at the end of the video.

Hopefully soon-ish, but that's what I said last time. I want to get back to writing, but there's stuff I have to do. Fortunately the huge project has been completed: But for the past month or two, all of my Saturdays/weekends have had something going on, most of the time Speech or Academic Decathlon. Luckily, the last (I think) occupied weekend will be this weekend. Weekdays are running low on time as well, but not as lacking, and I've been getting back into my long term KSP career. Spring break is 1.5 weeks from now, so I should have some time to do a chapter or two then, but don't count on it. I may have one before then, or it may be a month, but if I could choose one story to finish before college (1.5 years from now) it would definitely be this one. I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far, thank you for your kind words!

ISS (ZARYA) Fri, 08 Mar 2019 07:30:10 07:35:31 07:40:53 07:35:31 Shadow 76.8 11.4 No Maybe a re-entry trail? I don't know how long or bright they are, they probably wouldn't stretch all the way to Iowa. And it also might be cloudy.

How many are there at this point? Some are more real than others, but the smallsat scene has exploded. We've got: Rocket Lab Vector Virgin Orbit Launcher Arca Firefly Astra Landspace Ispace Expace Orbex PLD? RocketStar? Zero2Infinity?

@cubinator What does that map represent? I live in Eastern Iowa, so I may be able to glimpse it.

What would you gain from more than a few days on the ISS besides an assessment of micrometeoroid impacts, which are already known pretty well.

Not sure why that's relevant, Vostok, Voskhod, and Mercury didn't have docking ports and they are included in the count. I'm pretty sure Buran either had a docking port or was planned to.

By that logic should Buran count?

I think that's a piece of equipment that happened to be in the frame at the wrong time, and Dragon is far behind it.

Chapter 8

Chapter 7

Hopefully @CatastrophicFailure doesn't occur either!

Will the docking be streamed?