Space Island plans to build a circle-shaped space station in space that will be built from parts of existing spaceships.
Avi Blizovsky
in the picture
The tip of the station wheel could be built from external fuel tanks of shuttles, allowing the interior designers to run wild.
Space Island plans to build a circle-shaped space station in space that will be built from parts of existing spaceships.
Gene Mayer wants you in space
The president of the Space Island Group envisions a day when space flights will be commonplace, and huge space hotels as well as entertainment centers will orbit in low earth orbit. A week's stay in them will cost only 10,000 dollars, a price that today costs to launch a few kilograms of useful cargo into low orbit. And don't think that this is a future beyond your term in the world. Myers estimates that he will start receiving orders in 2007.
The idea of hotels in space and space flights for civilian passengers is not new. In the movie 2001 - A Space Odyssey, the protagonist Dr. Haywood Floyd flies to the space station aboard the Pan-Am spacecraft. The station is called "The Hilton on the route". It even has a Howard Johnson restaurant. The screenwriters, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clard saw the future of space tourism and estimated that the private initiative would play an important role in it.
How could the Space Islands Group place passengers there so quickly and so cheaply (at least in today's terms). The company says that the key technologies to carry out the plan already exist. "We take equipment that has been around for 20 years and improve it, add little things here and there and adapt it to the commercial space flight business." says Meyers. For example, imagine the shuttle's external fuel tank. These are the huge orange cylinders that bring the shuttle into orbit. These containers eventually detach from the shuttle and fall back into the atmosphere to burn up in it. Myers wants to leave them in space and make them habitable. "They are huge". He says. "Each such external tank includes 30 cubic meters of internal volume, which is double the volume of the International Space Station. “You could place the living quarters, laboratories and production facilities of two stations the size of the International Space Station inside each of these containers. And we intend to connect a dozen to twenty such containers in a huge ring, so that the whole program will contain 20 times the volume thanks to this connection."
Imagine a giant bicycle wheel floating in space with the containers connected end to end and forming the mode. Now you have an idea of what Myers is talking about. "The wheel-shaped space station will rotate about once per minute, which means that whoever is inside the wheel will feel a gravity of one-third of its force on Earth." According to Myers. "You can walk around, eat, use the shower and the toilet. These things will work thanks to partial gravity. But everything you do will look exotic because you will only weigh a third of your weight on Earth.”
For those who would like the perfect experience of weightlessness, special elevators will take him to additional containers that will form the center of the wheel. In this area there will be no artificial gravity at all to hold you down. This area will be the entertainment center for hotel guests, and one of them can be used as a zero gravity arena for sports activities in zero gravity, which can also be broadcast to Earth." says Meyers.
Of course, something has to be there for the citizens to want to travel and therefore the Space Islands group relies mainly on the existing technology. It plans to fly tourists into space on a redesigned shuttle. The second generation ferries will have a large luggage compartment that can accommodate 75 people. Once the shuttle reaches orbit, the passengers will be transferred to a smaller spacecraft to the space station.
The company's goal is to relaunch the ship every week. Since NASA takes months to prepare the shuttle for a new launch each time, how does Myers expect to speed up the process? In his opinion the current fleet was never designed for regular commercial use. "This is one of the elements we want to re-engineer in the program and take out those preparation times."
"Our goal," says Myers, is more than having vehicles that go up into space and come back, it's to have a vehicle that goes up and comes back in an economically viable, safer, and faster cycle than NASA has achieved."
All this should cost money. According to Myers' estimates, the project will cost 10 billion dollars in the first five years. In the first phase, the company will try to raise money with the help of sponsorships from commercial companies, such as the Olympics. Ultimately, it plans to entice companies to go into space while offering affordable rent of space for research and development and even manufacturing products in zero gravity.
And this is only part of the vision. Myers also sees in his vision special satellites for rescue missions, hospitals, laboratories and even factories rotating like giant wheels in the sky. And maybe, one day, you too will be there.
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