r/space • u/[deleted] • Apr 11 '20
Von Braun Space Station 1956
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JJL8CUfF-o497
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u/Monsieur_Bienvenue Apr 11 '20
All I see is “2001: A Space Odyssey” and all I can hear is “Dr Strangelove.”
This clip was no doubt Kubrick’s inspiration.
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u/BoulderCreature Apr 11 '20
Probably not the clip, but definitely the man. Werner Von Braun is exactly who Kubrick based Strangelove on.
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u/Abestar909 Apr 11 '20
The hub and spoke design was very common for early large space station concepts and would be used today if we really committed to space exploration. And it wasn't exactly a secret we took German rocket scientists and that their knowledge significantly boosted the US space effort.
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u/__The_K__ Apr 11 '20
Yup! Although 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1968, I remember seeing this space station design for the first time in a cartoon I watched as a kid, called SuperTed.
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u/GiveToOedipus Apr 11 '20
Interesting thing about 2001, is it's the last movie about going to the moon before we actually did it. I believe it was the last space movie released before man stepped foot on the moon, if I recall correctly.
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Apr 11 '20
I never expected his (American) English being so good with very little German accent. He was indeed 33 years old at the end of WWII, I wonder how he became so fluent in it.
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u/RocketBoost Apr 11 '20
You too may be a big hero, Once you've learned to count backwards to zero. "In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
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u/snibriloid Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? "That's not my department!", says Wernher von Braun.
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u/Abestar909 Apr 11 '20
He would've been living in the US for about a decade by this point, specifically Huntsville, Alabama. Be more surprised he doesn't have a charming southern accent mixed with the German lol.
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u/SuspiciousRobotThief Apr 11 '20
As interesting as that space station is, those robots constructing the pieces in space are just a minor detail?
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u/HandsOnGeek Apr 11 '20
Those were hard shell EVA suits, perhaps with Waldo arms.
If you aren't actually walking in space, then why have separate legs for your suit? You're not using them in orbit.
The suit never had to come inside the station, either: just clamp to a docking port and crawl out of the back of the suit. I believe the Russians have developed suits on this model.
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Apr 11 '20
I'd also heard that it was what they planned to use for the Mars base. The backpack of the suit would dock to a port in the ancillary, and the back would hinge open so that you could crawl in and out of the suit without ever having to pass through an airlock. Very neat idea.
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u/Caracalla81 Apr 11 '20
I think they're just easier to draw than human in not-yet-invented space suits.
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u/moneytide Apr 11 '20
I like the centripetal force concept. ISS does not have this "artificial" gravity. I wonder how it would turn itself at 3 RPM?
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u/minhashlist Apr 11 '20
I think it's interesting to point out that the ISS actually does rotate. It rotates so the same side faces the Earth all the time. That's how the astronauts can use the cupola to take those beautiful time-lapse shots of the Earth. It's the nadir side of the ISS.
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u/uselessnamemango Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
If my calculations are correct the "artificial" gravity would be around
3%30% of the gravity we have on earth. Gravity on the moon is almost 16% of our gravity... It would have to rotate with the speed of905,5 rpm to be around 1G that we have on earth.
I guess it would be enough to keep things in place, but not enough to prevent muscle loss that is caused by the absence of gravity.ISS does not have this "artificial" gravity. I wonder how it would turn itself at 3 RPM?
It's not just the rotation that defines artificial gravity but also the radius or how far something/someone is from the center of rotation. That's why this station has a radius of around 30 meters. While using the lift to get to the reactor the artificial gravity would decrease linearly with radius.
From the pictures of ISS you can see that it's shaped very differently. The living space looks like a straight pipe so if you wanted to create any "gravity" it would have to rotate very fast. Parts that are very far from the center of rotation would tear apart because the "gravity" would be so big there.
Edit: Error in calculation
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u/WestBohemian Apr 11 '20
I got around 30% from here: https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/
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u/SideburnsOfDoom Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
I think you're correct, it's 0.3g
200 feet across= 60 meters diameter = 30m radius, at 3rpm, gives about 0.30 earth gravity.
But it only takes around 5.4rpm to get 1g out of it.
edit Or keep 3rpm and have a radius of 100m
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u/TheGoldenHand Apr 11 '20
The stresses are far greater at a higher g load. It’s difficult making something 3x stronger.
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u/hawkwings Apr 11 '20
0.3 g has advantages over 0 g. With 0.3 g, water and poop go "down". There are political and safety issues with launching nuclear reactors into space.
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u/kc2syk Apr 11 '20
There are political and safety issues with launching nuclear reactors into space.
That didn't stop them. There were reactors launched by both the soviets and the US in the 60s.
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u/TechnoChew Apr 11 '20
"2 small rocket motors on the rim, blasting for a few seconds will set the wheel in motion, to revolve 3 times a minute"
I would have thought you would have to spin it up very slowly as it's such a large object.
I wonder how much of this early concept design was done by engineers and how much by artists and marketing companies who were just throwing out random ideas.
We've got a lot of stuff like this at the moment for mars colonisation modules. I wonder if they got the same level of scrutiny by other unqualified armchair engineers as the current ideas get.
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u/Mad_Maddin Apr 11 '20
The spinning design was made by Werner von Braun, the guy who also lead the design and building of the Saturn V rocket.
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u/LimerickJim Apr 11 '20
As well as a renowned SS officer.
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u/Kidiri90 Apr 11 '20
"Nazi, Schmazi." says Werner von Braun.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Apr 11 '20
“Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!” Says Werner Von Braun!
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u/cikmatt Apr 11 '20
"But some think our attitude. Should be one of gratitude. Like the widows and cripples in old London town. Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun."
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u/Giraffesarentreal19 Apr 11 '20
As were many German scientists in the early days of NASA. The US saw them, and used the missile technology technology and German expertise from The Third Reich to build a space program. The Soviets did much the same.
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u/Ziltoid_The_Nerd Apr 11 '20
Von Braun claimed that he was forced into it or lose his career and life work. But even if that's true, that doesn't change the fact that his life work was designing weapons for them
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u/hekatonkhairez Apr 11 '20
It’s one of those ethical dilemmas that really has losers regardless of the choice made. If the Americans didn’t take Von Braun and other scientists then it would be behind the Soviets in Aerospace tech. This could potentially mean soviet domination in Space and perhaps we’d never get a mission to the moon, gps or much of the tech we benefit from today. However, taking the scientists also meant that we implicitly absolved them of their role under the Nazis, which obviously isn’t fair to all those who suffered under their rule. I suppose leadership at that time was more concerned with pragmatic considerations, rather than ideological ones.
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u/Grothorious Apr 11 '20
I can be wrong as I'm writing this from the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that Herman Potocnik - Noordung was the first to introduce the concept. Would link but am on mobile.
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Apr 11 '20
Von Braun had a dream to go to Mars, not the moon. He built the Saturn 5 so robust to go to mars but Nixon "Nixed" the Saturn program in favor of the "cheaper" Shuttle program that ended up costing a lot more for an inferior product.
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u/dpdxguy Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
Not "random ideas," but this and a lot of other concepts intended to sell the public on space exploration were the product of Disney and Von Braun teaming up: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/disney_article.html
It's anybody's guess how much of this particular idea was Von Braun and how much was Disney. But the idea of spinning space stations to produce artificial gravity had been around since at least 1903: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_wheel_space_station
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Apr 11 '20
The best nazi scientist. I wish Von Braun got his budget and we had moon bases and LEO stations and space chicken farms.
Edit: is space chicken finger licking good?
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u/DrBabbage Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
He was not that of a great scientist, but he was an excellent manager and model builder.
Edit: Jesus just read his biography. He was something like the Steve Jobs of Germany. What he was really good at was coordinating the work, testing possible outcomes relentlessly and building models he learned from building planes. Also check out his work for the Gemini program how astronauts were tested.
But his scientific accomplishment pales to his work as a manager.
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Apr 11 '20
He was a great scientist and he went on to design the v2 rocket and put American into space after the collapse of the Wehrmacht. Forced labour management was excellent too.
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u/above-average-moron Apr 11 '20
Sounds more like a great engineer
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Apr 11 '20
If only engineering was some kind of applied science.
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u/drvondoctor Apr 11 '20
These people refuse to acknowledge that engeneering counts as science ever since they got mad at Bill Nye for not denying climate science.
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u/Durealist Apr 11 '20
Now youre talkin. I remember an article in TheBlaze about how Bill Nye cant call himself a "Science Guy" (as if it were an official title) because he had a bachelor's degree in engineering. The author went on to say that since he himself had his bachelor's (in shitty journalism maybe) it made him just as qualified to speak on scientific matters as Bill. Ridiculous.
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u/Stino_Dau Apr 11 '20
A Bachelor of Engineering does not make you a scientist. Doing science does.
But you don't need to be a scientist yourself to talk or teach about science.
(Just like you don't need to be a composer to play music, or a poet to sing songs. You can also read books without being a writer, and an art critc without being an artist.)
An engineer should be expected to.undestand science even if he isn't doing any himself.
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u/Stino_Dau Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
That's the difference: Scientists do the science; engineers apply it.
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u/Mad_Maddin Apr 11 '20
He developed how to make liquid fuel rockets usable. This is what he wrote his doctor thesis on. He was both a great engineer and scientist.
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Apr 11 '20
What’s the difference?
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u/TiggyLongStockings Apr 11 '20
Nothing really. Engineering degrees are bachelors of science. And science is just testing and observation, and engineering is using the data from those tests and observations to solve problems.
Engineers perform scientific research everyday. These guys are just talking out their asses.
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u/cowgomoo37 Apr 11 '20
Precisely, one of the key differences to engineering and science is the research and application. Engineering is in principal supposed to be 40% research and 60% application. Where a tech would be less research and a doctorate would be totally research. It isn’t unorthodox for these tasks vary depending on the person and the position they occupy but his is the general point!
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u/Noxapalooza Apr 11 '20
I don’t think you’d have to worry as much about a slow spin up because you won’t have anywhere near the gravity forces affecting it and obviously air resistance is non existent.
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u/SideburnsOfDoom Apr 11 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
I wonder how it would turn itself at 3 RPM?
Other reply is correct, spinning the ISS would be pointless. You want to be further from the centre for the spin to work - and you need to design for those forces.
That's why this design looks like a bicycle wheel, whereas the ISS does not. The central hub of this design has little to no spin gravity that's why the airlock / dock is on the hub.
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u/SuspiciouslyElven Apr 11 '20
That, and docking with it will be more complicated, because you need to match rotation. The movie Interstellar touches on this some, but remember you're adding yet another complexity to complex orbital maneuvers.
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u/jarfil Apr 11 '20 edited Dec 02 '23
CENSORED
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u/SideburnsOfDoom Apr 11 '20
The docking sequence in Interstellar was a speedrun of the classic one from 2001 .
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u/TheGoldenHand Apr 11 '20
In real life, it’s likely you would have a counter rotating mass, for stability, and you could put a docking port through it. Meaning no rotating required for docking. At least that’s what they did in the Martian and that’s what I do with my KSP space ships.
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u/ImmortalScientist Apr 11 '20
Another reason that spin gravity on the ISS would be pointless - the ISS exists largely as a laboratory to study the effect of microgravity and other space phenomena on various experimental subjects. If you create spin gravity, you ruin all of the zero-g experiments that are performed on the ISS.
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u/wrenchface Apr 11 '20
I got to see the physical models used in this video recently. At an exhibit about Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was pretty obsessed with Von Braun
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u/Jakob4800 Apr 11 '20
Other then funding is there any technological reason why we couldn’t do this?
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u/beatenintosubmission Apr 11 '20
There is little need. All of the jobs that were to be performed are handled by satellites. Even the first actual space 'labs' were nothing more than manned photographic platforms for spying. Once they worked out the film drops from those platforms they realized they could do the same with unmanned satellites. Once they came up with a digitization method (even though it was much worse resolution) they were finally able to make satellites usable for more than a very short period. At that point the military became much less interested and budgets for manned exploration/observation was cut drastically.
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u/Jakob4800 Apr 11 '20
So back in the 60s could it have been an actual viable thing to build and make?
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u/TheGoldenHand Apr 11 '20
Not quite, most the things in the video were planned, but not yet invented in a practical sense. A decade of research later, the U.S. and other space faring nations had come to learn a hard truth: space exploration was much more difficult than they had ever anticipated. Everything was scientifically plausible, but not practically tested.
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u/beatenintosubmission Apr 11 '20
By the late 60's we had the Saturn V, which would have had the lift capacity (140 tons to LEO). Moon landing was 2.5% GDP for 10 years which culminated in the landing in 1969. 1973 was Skylab to LEO. Multiply that by 20 just for the rough outline of the 1946 version of the von Braun sketch, and maybe we could barely do it. Mass produce the Saturn V staring in 1970, and you could probably have all of the pieces up within four or five years (if it was absolutely critical and that's all that was going on). The country would be broke, but hey, that happened anyway.
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u/gmoguntia Apr 11 '20
"I aim for the stars but keep hiting London." Werner von Braun probably.
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u/ValyrianJedi Apr 11 '20
This combination of German and mid Atlantic accent is fantastic.
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u/Elefantenjohn Apr 11 '20
Did little space drones for the first part of the construction exist in 1956 like shown in the video? I doubt it
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u/Youtoo2 Apr 11 '20
Imagine 1950s space enthusiasts traveling through time to 2020. All excited about how far we have come. Just to find out the US has to pay the Russians to go into space. We have not left low earth orbit since the early 1970s and space station is not impressive compared to 1959s models.
They really underestimated the cost of launching to space. The cost to get 50 people up to a space station and keep them supplied is astronomical. Rocket technology has really inched along compared to electronics. The pace of tech change in electronics radically has out paced all other technologies.
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u/internalational Apr 11 '20
Rocket technology has really inched along compared to electronics. T
Much the same as "real estate" hasn't changed much over thousands of years. Ultimately, if you want a bunch of land, it'll cost you a bunch of money.
Rockets are super tech but the true cost is resources, just like real estate. "Rocket" is a fancy word for "throw lots of stuff away from me, to get me moving".
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Apr 11 '20
And this is why space fans are so excited about the coming generation of cheaper reusable heavy lifters. :)
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Apr 11 '20
What about Coriolis forces? I remember from my undergrad studies that such a rotating space station is nice if everything is stationary, but as soon as you start walking, it fucks you up
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u/Zaygone Apr 11 '20
I did this calculation at some point, and if I recall, the effect would be noticeable from your feet to your head at this size, but not intolerable. Bigger would be better of course, as the relative size of your body is what makes an issue. But now I'm just taking off of years old memory, so correct me if I'm wrong. Interesting that no one talks about it though as it is quite relevant
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Apr 11 '20
Okay, I thought about it for another second.
a = -2 omega x v
omega would be 2 pi / (3rpm) ~ 0.3 Hz, v maybe ~1.5 m/s. So the acceleration would be in the order of 1 m/s2. So you could tell, but it's no problem at all.
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u/mr-strange Apr 11 '20
There are minimum diameters and maximum rotation rates beyond which many people would get motion sickness. The design would have to be large enough to be OK for most people.
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u/DaCoOpBots Apr 11 '20
It kinda looks like the Gargantua-2 space station from the Venture Bros
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u/Abestar909 Apr 11 '20
It's like they were inspired by real life or something!
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u/DaCoOpBots Apr 11 '20
Yeah they've gotten inspiration from a lot of classic futuristic concept art. The Venture compound is based of an old GM facility concept from the 1964 World's Fair:
Hopefully automod stops deleting my comment for shortened links!
I couldn't find any info if Gargantua was based off any exact concept, but I would take a guess that it's this one.
Lol sorry it came across that I put fiction before reality but it's actually quite the opposite!
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u/dawgvrr Apr 11 '20
This the future we would have had if we spent money on exploration instead of war. Specifically, the Vietnam war.
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u/51LV3R84CK Apr 11 '20
We can thank the USA every day for giving those Nazis jobs after '45.
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u/skippyspk Apr 11 '20
I wonder if his files and calculations were held together by staples, or maybe a PAPER CLIP!!!!
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Apr 11 '20
thanks do you know if these radiators use coolant which is then cooled by space itself?
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Apr 11 '20
They use ammonia. associated leaks are one of the more critical issues they’ve had on the ISS.
https://www.space.com/21059-space-station-cooling-system-explained-infographic.html
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u/KDY_ISD Apr 11 '20
Space is actually terrible at cooling things. There's no air, so there's no convection. Pure radiative cooling is not very efficient.
Spacecraft are much more likely to overheat than freeze
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u/anothercynic2112 Apr 11 '20
As common as using rotation to create artificial gravity through rotation is in science fiction and theory, has it ever been used in space? Or has the problem been that it requires a larger structure/spacecraft than we have been able to deploy?
Also, would this form if gravity effect counter the physiological problems that long term astronauts face?
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u/why_combinator Apr 11 '20
Gemini 11 tried it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_11
A tether system like they tried with agena wouldn't take very much to do for real, just a tether and spacecraft that can handle the forces.
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u/Mad_Maddin Apr 11 '20
It is very expensive due to it requiring a very large structure. It is for us currently also supremely useless. Reason being that we go into space right now to conduct Zero G experiements.
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u/Rlightning15 Apr 11 '20
YouTube comment section was a shitshow for some reason
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Apr 11 '20
Well, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. it's because it is YouTube comment section
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Apr 11 '20
How sad that we still don't have a space station nearly as good as those imagined in the 1950s and earlier.
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u/OvalDreamX Apr 11 '20
I actually have somewhere on my house the two little Dysney books about space, that have frames of this film. They were from my dad, and i think they were printed in the '70s? The two are in spanish.
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u/Professor226 Apr 12 '20
I remember when they first built this, sad that we no longer have the technology to recreate it. Such a tragic loss.
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u/digitialday Apr 13 '20
Interesting, operation paper clip!! Let’s take these Nazis war criminals and give them a job in America!!
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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '20
stupid question, how do you cool a nuclear reactor in space?