ssf redesign constellation ssf is up for redesign again let s do it right this time let s step back and consider the functionality we want microgravity vacuum process research life sciences research adaptation to space spacecraft maintenence the old nasa approach explified by shuttle and ssf so far was to centralize functionality these projects failed to meet their targets by a wide margin the military and commercial users took most of their payloads off shuttle after wasting much effort to tie their payloads to it and ssf has crumbled into disorganization and miscommunication over billion has been spent on these two projects with no reduction in launch costs and littel improvement in commercial space industrialization meanwhile military and commercial users have come up with a superior strategy for space development the constellation firstly different functions are broken down into different constellations placed in the optimal orbit for each function thus we have the gps navstar constellation in hour orbits comsats in clarke and molniya orbits etc secondly the task is distributed amongst several spacecraft in a constellation providing for redundancy and full coverage where needed ssf s main functions require quite different environments and are also prime candidates for constellization we have the makings of a microgravity constellation now comet and mir for long duration flights shuttle spacelab for short duration flights the best strategy for this area is inexpensive incremental improvement installation of u s facilities on mir shuttle mir linkup and transition from shuttle spacelab to a much less expensive ssto spacehab comet or ssto sif comet we might also expand the research program to take advantage of interesting space environments eg the high radiation van allen belt or gas plasma gradients in comet tails the comet system can be much more easily retrofitted for these tasks where a station is too large to affordably launch beyond leo we need to study life sciences not just in microgravity but also in lunar and martian gravities and in the radiation environments of deep space instead of the protected shelter of leo this is a very long term low priority project since astronauts will have little practical use in the space program until costs come down orders of magnitude furthermore using astronauts severely restricts the scope of the investigation and the sample size so i propose labratsat a constellation tether bolo satellites that test out various levels of gravity in super van allen belt orbits that are representative of the radiation environment encountered on earth moon earth mars earth asteroid etc trips the miniaturized life support machinery might be operated real time from earth thru a vr interface after several orbital missions have been flown follow ons can act as ldefs on the lunar and martian surface testing out the actual environment at low cost before billions are spent on astronauts by far the largest market for spacecraft servicing is in clarke orbit i propose a fleet of small teleoperated robots and small test satellites on which ground engineers can practice their skills once in place robots can pry stuck solar arrays and antennas attach solar battery power packs inject fuel etc once the fleet is working it can be spun off to commercial company s who can work with the comsat companies to develop comsat replaceable module standards by applying the successful constellation strategy and getting rid of the failed centralized strategy of sts and old ssf we have radically improved the capability of the program while greatly cutting its cost for a fraction of ssf s pricetag we can fix satellites where the satellites are we can study life s adaptation to a much large more representative variety of space environments and we can do microgravity and vacuum research inexpensively and if needed in special purpose orbits n b we can apply the constellation strategy to space exploration as well greatly cutting its cost and increasing its functionality mars network and artemis are two good examples of this more ambitiously we can set up a network of native propellant plants on mars that can be used to fuel planet wide rover ballistic hopper prospecting and sample return the descendants of labratsat s technology can be used as a mars surface ldef and to test out closed ecology greenhouses on mars at low cost nick szabo szabo techboook com
