Vast/Launcher

[darthgently]

On 12/19/2024 at 11:35 AM, tater said:

 

At first I thought this was announcing launching Vast modules to dock with the station.  Looking forward to them getting to that point

[tater]

 

[AckSed]

Huh, is this going to be a pressure-test?

[darthgently]

 

[AckSed]

Article about the test with vid: https://www.vastspace.com/updates/vast-passes-critical-haven-1-test-milestone

Milled into a grid, bent, welded with automated welders, inspected and then sealed. It's a little involved but compared to days of old, 15 months from nothing is pretty fast. Making the flight module should take a bit less time. Though I think 2026 is optimistic.

Their leak test wasn't quite as impressively over-pressured as Sierra Space's, but it passed.

[StrandedonEarth]

6 hours ago, AckSed said:

Milled into a grid, bent, welded with automated welders,

Just like how ULA builds Atlas V and Vulcan…

[AckSed]

Full interview from NSF about Vast's space station plans (filmed the week before Christmas):

Transcript:

NASA didn't know who they were when they began planning Haven-1;

Haven-1 is minimum viable product to demonstrate they can do it, establish flight heritage to NASA before anyone else, designed for 3 years on orbit. Five times the living space of Dragon;

As they are depending on Dragon for life-support, and the CO2 scrubber cartridges on Dragon are swapped out daily, SpaceX is manufacturing 40 or so to pack in to Haven-1 to extend their span from 4-5 days to 10-14 days or so per mission;

Expect to have three additional missions after the first, with 6-9 months between them;

Will deorbit under its own propulsion end of 2028, and by that time they will have Haven-2: central hub module launched on Starship, modules launched on Falcon Heavy with stretched fairing;

Have a small vacuum chamber in-house for thermal testing of components;

Make the battery packs in-house, showed the pack for the Haven-Demo mission due to launch in April on a Transporter rideshare. Cells are individually tested, potted in epoxy and soldered together with machine;

Interior render based off the actual design. Good design and human comfort aids with the primary mission;

Showed off CMGs (reaction wheels) in testing, and said there will be six of them. (I also spotted some type of plumbing model fixed to a board);

Showed the wet rubbish bin. All rubbish will be stored on-board, but in vacuum to avoid smells;

Hatch built and tested in-house; demonstrated the hand-crank on the H-1 test article (filmed before it was installed). Built-in pin to indicate when it's closed/open;

Make and test their own valves, even winding their own electrical coils. Have a new mixing coolant design based on electric actuator to set cabin temp (a thermostat, in other words). Oxygen/nitrogen valves mounted to what looked like a removable plate;

Impulse [Space] making the COPVs. Have 12 of them for the nitrous oxide and ethane propellants and breathable nitrox, situated where H1 necks down and covered by MMOD protection;

By the time they fly H1, they will have invested a billion dollars, so the Haven-Demo satellite for testing propulsion, power and avionics is sorta important. Availability and affordability of rideshare missions makes this possible. It also tests the ground systems and the people as well;

Inside pathfinder/mock-up module with bare orthogrid with less than 40% of the total structure e.g. sawed-off drink can, looked the size of a caravan even at the 'airlock';

Dual-pathed out both stainless steel and aluminium 2219, stopped work on steel in February. Plasma-welded. Takes one day to machine out a panel and have six gantries, so can make six panels or a full-width ring a day, and made three spares for every panel on the test article, so they can make a ring or replace a panel if there's ever an issue. Common area in Haven-1 is 3.8m in diameter, much roomier than ISS;

Showed ductwork for LSS;

Showed flight panels for Haven-1 'neck' before forming, and 5-axis CNC machine in machine shop. Engineers are responsible for their parts; if you can outsource it to machine shops and not stress our internal department, do so. Small 3-axis, 5-axis machined parts are a few weeks. However for large parts it takes up to six months, compared to 3-4 days or even a day for internal machining;

Two shifts, 6AM-2AM, 6 days a week. All the machines were either being set up or in use;

Observation dome will have a pressure layer and then two outer layers for MMOD protection. Showed a test article screen for MMOD on dome, saying that two layers is enough. Whipple shield and composite interlayer on skin of station ensured a 6.4km/s projectile lightly dented but did not puncture the pressure vessel;

Haven-1's batteries and camera were being set up for vibration testing, and also saw their EM testing chamber;

Building was empty last year when they won a contract for CCSC 2, and now it's full and working. NASA comes every quarter to check, and they're impressed with their pace;

Every piece goes through quality control, checking conformity with specifications and establishing traceability for human spaceflight;

Came across Andrew J. Feustel, Shuttle Flight Engineer and their adviser on Haven. He helped design the 'vertical quilt' sleeping apparatus. It presses down gently on the entire body instead of strapping one part to the wall, which is pretty neat;

Design offices are above the factory floor;

Over to construction zone, second building was main assembly and training, second of three buildings still under construction, ready in March;

Took presenter into third building with control room, also under construction, ready end of Feb (so, now-ish), and future clean-room for Haven-1 that held the test article;

Orthogrid on outside of test article and flight article because it was a little better to have a smooth inside for thermal control;

Hope to have about 1000 people by the time they fly; still hiring;

In to rolling and forming area. More an art than science. The experience comes from building pressure vessels, not necessarily space stations, but they're proud to bring it back, as it was 20 years since the last Station part was built in the US;

Flight article will be shipped & tested vibrationally and thermally in Plum Brook AKA Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility, where Orion is tested;

The wet rubbish can will be vented at the end of each mission;

[AckSed]

Haven-1 is going to be the single largest-volume object flown on F9 to date. It's a 14-ton satellite that will carry almost all the consumables for its mission on board, and must fit the fairing;

For Haven-2 modules, it's going to be fairly trivial to add a second hatch at the other end, stretch it by 5m by adding two more rings. With the extended fairing and FH reusable mode, they have 28 tons to play with. The near-doubled volume extends the occupation time from 40 days to 160 days. The idea is to start off with a simple consumable life-support system - it won't be occupied all the time. It will be up by 2028 just to avoid the Shuttle problem [of a launch/space station gap], which will help work out any bugs, and any winner of the competition can improve towards a closed-loop LSS. Permanent occupation has never happened day one on any space station, despite the current procurement process asking for it;

With each module bringing up 160 days of consumables a 260-290 day mission should be possible, but each new module will, if they win, bring up new iterations of hardware that will extend it further;

By the time ISS is deorbited they will have had 2 years of working with the life-support, so they should have something;

Haven-2 modules will be free-flyers that can dock to each other, with roughly the same payload, berthing and LSS capabilities, and maybe if one is malfunctioning they can remove it without too much fuss. Customisation is possible depending on demand;

Haven-2 should be fully complete by 2032;

It needs to be better, it needs to be cheaper to the taxpayer - this is a fixed-price contract - and it should include more: EVA capability, more payload, more power, more volume, easier to maintain. That's the vision for Haven-2;

Don't believe Starship will be ready in time to launch 7-metre modules, they don't know what the payload area will be like and Starship will be preoccupied launching Starlink;

Hope that once they see NASA flying astronauts to their station and coming back safely, other people'll trust them with their money and they can build bigger.

[AckSed]

Man, this is really happening, isn't it?

Now I've seen New Shepard do its lunar gravity trick, I wonder if you could do the same in Haven-1? Spincalc says you'd need to rotate its 3.8 metre diameter at 8.78 rpm which is high, but if you don't have people on board it should be fine. I'd be worried about the solar panels, though.

Addendum: Now I know what the cylinders on the bottom of the test article are: mass simulators for the COPV mounts. The real ones are situated there to move the centre of gravity down towards the launch mount.