02-15-2019, 06:24 PM
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BAR
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Needville and Shiner, TX
Posts: 6,134
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by blackshire
(Snip- for brevity)...
Such manned planetary flyby missions, which have been referred to as "space station missions that actually go somewhere," are still timely and relevant today. No one has ever flown anywhere near so far from Earth, and missions of this kind would help to break down a big psychological barrier. (This is based on not-entirely-unwarranted concerns about long-term life-support system reliability in deep space [despite even longer-duration ISS experience], cosmic and solar radiation exposure outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, and even isolation--with the Earth becoming just a bright star.) SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and BFR could loft such spaceships, which--due to their soft materials' superior radiation-blocking properties--could utilize Bigelow Aerospace's expandable modules for their habitation modules (with a docked or attached Dragon capsule for Earth return).
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This is true... Why I like the "Gateway Station" idea... at least it gets us out of LEO.
It's good to remember just how little we've traveled beyond Earth... if we used a typical 12 inch schoolroom globe for the Earth, and basically a softball-sized Moon would be about 30 feet away. This is the farthest man has ever traveled from Earth. The space shuttle, which basically was maxed out at 360 miles, could never go more than about ONE HALF INCH above the surface of a typical 12 inch schoolroom globe! (This is the "Hubble orbit"). At this same scale, Venus would be 3,221 feet away at CLOSEST APPROACH (0.61 miles) and Mars would be 6,125 feet away (1.16 miles) at CLOSEST APPROACH. This is as close as the planets ever get to Earth, in this scale. Of course the trajectories and travel times between them make elliptical orbits a necessity, meaning basically extremely long eccentric orbits around the sun with the perihelion at Venus and aphelion at Earth (for a Venus flyby) or the perihelion at Earth and aphelion at Mars (for a Mars flyby) or the perihelion at Venus and aphelion at Mars (for a flyby of both planets).
Either way, it's a LONG trip!!!
Later! OL J R 
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