Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 07:34 UTC

Re: Optimal station distance  

Spawnslilhope

I feel like Earth-Moon L1 would be the best option for our station. This lagrange point can serve as a halfway point between Earth and the Moon, allowing not only us but others to possible colonize the moon and make easier supply runs. Not to mention that people who want to "visit" a moon colony would almost "have" to stop at our base 1st, serving as a possible area of revenue (docking fees, refueling fees, cargo fees).

I agree. For what concerns shielding if we concentrate on mining the construction materials from NEOs instead of sending them from Earth we would cut the costs a lot and have much less problems (sending stuff in orbit rather than gathering it directly from space is crazy in my opinion)

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 07:55 UTC

I say about 500-2000Km would be great. We can the space debris and junk as parts to build the space station that way it cleans up the mess and reusing the metals instead of wasting then away. It's sounds great but I don't have the idea how it can work but we learn as we move forward

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 19:24 UTC

When it comes to building a long term habitation station, building one is incredibly reckless. It represents a single point of failure. That's only clever if you intend on failing. At the sort of distances you're talking in placing it any assistance required is likely to be too long to get there to be useful, in an emergency. However, a collection of stations at about the the same orbital height would be able to offer refuge in the case of critical failures and otherwise be on hand for other eventualities, enough positioned correctly could provide a response time of less than an hour. That's still quite a long time, but there's rural locations on Earth with longer.

Harvesting the resources required to achieve this from the solar system via a network of seed factories would have exponential growth, so wouldn't add a great deal onto the time required to collect the additional mass for the construction of multiple large stations. It also means there's no requirement for compromise on things like raditation sheilding - after a few dozen asteroids have been stripped to nothing, a few tonnes of sillicon dioxide sitting between the pressure hull and the outer hull will be trivial to provide.

  Updated  on Dec 23, 16 / Cap 22, 00 00:23 UTC, Total number of edits: 1 time
Reason: typo

Dec 23, 16 / Cap 22, 00 11:24 UTC

The Van Allen's belts are placed from ~1000km to ~6000km (inner belt) and from ~13000km to ~60000km (external belt), so if we want to be protected from them we have to put the station (or the stations) into an orbit between the Earth and the inner belt or between the inner and the external belt, as we can't place anything right into the middle of the belts (too radiation caused by the magnetic and electric fields).

At this point, I think that the preferable place for our station(s) is at an altitude near the 1000km, where the isn't too atmosphere drag and where we are protected from solar wind and cosmic radiation but where the danger from space debris is still considerable.

Dec 26, 16 / Cap 25, 00 08:18 UTC

i believe one of the primary functions of Asgardia having a presence in orbit around Earth is to actively do away with as much of this space junk as possible in a timely manner...

so we can put a hardened structure in the most crowded area as possible being operated by drones to have a maximum effect while controlling such operation remotely from a more unconventional location that is not so prone to random orbital debris. maybe put the control center for this operation at a Lagrangian point and a type of hardened drone carrier in LEO?

Jan 10, 17 / Aqu 10, 01 09:00 UTC

Please remember that, while KSP is a great public introduction to orbital mechanics, it does not take into account many practical issues. An orbit at 100km will require frequent boost burns, while a station at any Lagrange point would be outside the Van Allen belts, and living with that amount of radiation is almost entirely untested. We would want an orbit somewhere between 350km and 900km. Precise details can not be determined until mission parameters are clearly outlined. Big showstoppers when using KSP comparisons: 1) The radius of the Earth is 6370km. The radius of Kerbin is 600km. 2) The atmosphere does not end at 70km. In fact, atmospheric drag remains significant above 300km. 3) Radiation outside the atmosphere is a big concern. As of 2017, that we are still several decades off from any viable long term habitats above 1000km, where we enter the inner Van Allen belt. 4) We can not design our own launch vehicles. We almost certainly have to constrain ourselves to current lift vehicles, possibly near future ones like Falcon Heavy. This greatly limits the height we can deliver significant payload to. As a side note, are there any aerospace engineers here?