Timeline for What would be required for a completely self sufficient 1 man habitat?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 28, 2014 at 9:31 | comment | added | Black | @Self And I still got sucked in... facepalm | |
| Oct 28, 2014 at 9:30 | comment | added | Black | @CalebHines LOL, I actually started responding to that until I saw what you did. | |
| Oct 28, 2014 at 3:57 | comment | added | Caleb Hines | Hello @Black, we were discussing you, not me. Please tell me more about "spill our guts". Do you like them? | |
| Oct 27, 2014 at 0:09 | comment | added | Black | This is an excellent answer. As far as keeping our pilot sane you could also have him talk to a chat bot. Those were proven in the early days of AI research to be great buddies that we love to spill our guts to. Maybe give him tvtropes.org and wikipedia.org along with a movie collection. | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 23:39 | comment | added | Dronz | If you don't need life-support at the destination, you might be able to detach your life-support and/or waste before decelerating. | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 23:00 | comment | added | DeveloperInDevelopment | If you recycle then you have less food and/or waste by a factor on the order of your recycling cycle length divided into your journey time, so you will have much less of it to use as reaction mass - maybe 10,000 times less. You will still have a whole recycling system to decelerate. With a nuclear thermal rocket almost anything that can be vaporised and blasted out of a rocket nozzle is "fuel", but a bulky recycling system probably doesn't fit into that category. But, if you have an inner environmentalist that absolutely must recycle then that's cool. (ps. if you like the answer... upvote?) | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 20:56 | comment | added | user2417 | Your paragraph about reaction mass also gave me an idea - perhaps stockpiles of each common element (carbon, nitrogen, etc) can be kept in the spacecraft, which would be used as feedstock for bacteria. The effective mass of this stockpile would never decrease as all biological outputs of the astronaut would be carefully recycled. At the end of the journey, the feedstock can be converted into various gases by bacteria, and then used as reaction mass with the nuclear thermal rocket! | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 20:53 | comment | added | user2417 | Such an excellent response! I think the real difference between your scenario and mine is how much value we place on the human astronaut in question. In my mind, I imagine the astronaut to be strapped into a coffin like structure, with electric vibrators to prevent muscle wastage and various tubes for the excavation of waste and insertion of nutrient - effectively a biological component of the spacecraft that must be kept alive. | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 20:17 | history | answered | DeveloperInDevelopment | CC BY-SA 3.0 |