In <CvE5wt.…@brunel.ac.uk> cs91…@brunel.ac.uk (Erik Bussink) writes:
>I know that the 2 small booster of the shuttle fall in the sea and are reused,
>but what happens to the big one ? does it burn on re-entry ? And at what
>altitude does the shuttle separets itself from it ?
>I wanted to know if, you increased the powert hat booster gives, and the
>shuttle takes it in LEO, maybe these boosters could be stocked in LEO and
>reused as storage tanks for a space station, or could then be transformed
>for crew sleeping quarters… just an idea… 😉
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>Erik Bussink Comp Science year 4 |o———o| Summer 1994 placement at
>Brunel University (West London) UK |o Brunel o| ESAG informatik & cons.
>Email Internet: cs91…@brunel.ac.uk |o Film o| Fasanenstrasse 121
> |o Society o| CH-4058 Basel, Switzerland
Some years ago I did a painting on the use of the ET as raw material. After some
weeks of study of the think-tank reports on the possibility of carrying the ET
into stable orbit and the direct use of the tank in various configurations, I
arrived at a design for a solar powered cold-to-cold recycling facility that turns
the ET’s thousands of pounds of aluminum directly into structural components for
large scale assemblies in orbit. The problem of coralling the tanks had to be worked
out so a “Tank Farm” was devised to hold them in one place near the work site and
provide living facilities during construction.
The painting is titled “The New Colonists” after the recycling station’s following in
the footsteps of the colonial’s apple peeler. It was published in Discover Magazine
and later picked up by AT&T Science & Technology Week on CNN. Rather than melt an
entire tank all at once, as some of the studies suggested, the station rotates the
tank under a focused beam of sunlight from a large deployable reflector, peeling off
a 2″ ribbon of aluminum that is fed into the extrusion jaws of a composite beam
builder, creating a low mass structural beam from the tank’s 2″+ thick skin.
It was an interesting project and I hope to see some variant of it come to fruition.
There are quite a few really exciting ideas that are imperative we pursue if we can
only catch the fire again and not let it become extinguished by apathy. There is
more at stake than can be justified by mere $ .
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