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The Nanoracks team targets these higher stages of development because they already have many of the qualities needed for a space station. A rocket’s fuel tanks are designed to maintain pressure and are made of an incredibly durable material to withstand the rigors of launch. They are also spacious. The top floor of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is 12 feet in diameter and around 30 feet tall, which is enough space to make a resident of an apartment in New York jealous.
But these tanks need a bit of refreshing before they can accommodate experiments or astronauts. The first step is to drain any remaining fuel to prevent an explosion. Then the robots take over. These PLCs will attach necessary components like solar panels, surface mounted connectors or small propulsion units. Nate Bishop, the Outpost project manager at Nanoracks, says the company will be doing several small demos in space before attempting to convert an entire upper stage into a functioning space station. “Right now we’re not really changing anything,” Bishop says. “We aim to show that we can control the upper floor with props. But in the future, imagine a bunch of little robots going up and down the stage to add more connectors and stuff like that.
There’s only one problem: no one has ever demonstrated the metalworking and fabrication techniques required to convert a space station into orbit before. Next May, Nanoracks will change that during its first Outpost demo mission. The company has developed a small chamber that will be deployed along with several other payloads as part of a SpaceX carpooling mission. Inside the chamber, a small robotic arm fitted with a fast-rotating drill bit will cut three small pieces of metal made from the same materials used in rocket fuel tanks. If the experiment goes well, the tool should be able to make an accurate cut without generating debris. It will be the first time that metal has been cut in the vacuum of space.
The fundamental challenge of converting rockets into orbit is understanding how materials react to the space environment. For example, the temperature of a material can differ by several hundred degrees if one side is facing the sun and the other side is facing out. Without going into space to try it out, it can be difficult to predict how this material will react to standard manufacturing techniques like cutting or welding. Other techniques, such as making thin-film materials for solar panels, require an ultra-pure environment to avoid imperfections. Although space is a vacuum, it still contains a significant amount of dust and radiation that could interfere with conventional manufacturing processes exported from Earth.
“It’s remarkable how little we still know about manufacturing in space after 70 years,” says Manber. “We have to learn a lot of things if you really get into the reuse of space hardware. This stuff seems trivial, but we just have to do it step by step. “
Mission extension programs like Outpost are new to the space industry. Since Sputnik, the material put into orbit has either been intentionally desorbed or abandoned and dropped back to Earth. There simply wasn’t the technology to move a satellite once it ran out of fuel or to requisition an abandoned rocket hull. And that meant there was no regulation on how to do it safely – nor a consensus on whether it was legal to do it at all.
But things are starting to change. Last year, a Northrop Grumman satellite successfully locked onto another satellite that had exhausted its fuel reserves and moved it to a new orbit. This maneuver will extend the life of the satellite by at least five years and officially usher in the era of extended space missions. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress this year, Joseph Anderson, vice president of Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary, Space Logistics, described how the company had to work with several different US agencies to change licensing requirements. in order to be able to launch the historical mission. “It just didn’t fit the licensing structure established by the US government,” Anderson said. “Ultimately, we found a solution where the FCC is our primary monitoring agency.” (It’s the Federal Communications Commission, which also regulates things like radio, television, and broadband systems.)
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