Morning Star Class Interplanetary Transporter by tommy99osullivan

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This was my design for a realistic near term multirole spacecraft capable of fulfilling multiple mission parameters. The original necessities were to make a spacecraft that could fulfil all the original goals of the ISS (laboratory, observatory etc.) while at the same time mitigating bone density deterioration by creating artificial gravity for the crew, the ship also had to be deep space enabled and more affordable and lighter than the ISS.

The ship utilises inflatable modules from Bigelow aerospace called BA330s. These modules use over 35 layers of different fabrics, like kevlar that have improved ballistic protection from micrometeorites and also radiation over the traditional aluminium protection in the ISS. This is partially due to the fact that aluminium protection causes secondary radiation to be formed. An analogy to this would be to imagine that someone has thrown a bowling ball at you, so to protect yourself from the bowling ball, you decide to erect a wall of needles. Yes, you will stop the ball (or at least get rid of most of the bowling ball’s momentum) but now you have the needles to deal with. So imagine that the gamma radiation were to hit the aluminium atoms, the gamma ray may be stopped but now the crew are being blasted by secondary radiation, this is not the case to the same extent in the BA330.

For further radiation mitigation, the BA330s it will be using, will be lined with a further layer of water sealed into kevlar packs. Water has been proven as an effective radiation shield, particularly against small particle radiation and secondary radiation. The water will also be available for consumption. A number of tanks will be designated to holding the crew’s treated excrement, excrement is a valuable resource for water reclamation and also plant fertiliser.

It also has numerous other benefits, for example, the BA330 weighs in at between 20 and 25 tonnes, it has a pressurised volume of 330m3 (compare this to the ISS’s destiny module which weighs 15 tonnes and has an internal volume of around 106m3). These BA330s could be launched to space on a Falcon 9 and two could easily be launched on the proposed Falcon heavy.

Structural components of the ship such as the trusses are made of lightweight, yet very strong, materials like carbon fibre or titanium (to be replaced with lighter and stronger materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes when technological advancements are made). Inside the trusses, there is an inflatable cylindrical corridor that crew members can traverse to access the areas with artificial gravity from the central spin hub and central BA330.

Power is supplied to the ship by a SoLTeC (Solar Laser Transducer Craft) which flies alongside the ship and beams power over. I could upload the model for the SoLTeC at a later date.

The VASIMR engine is used on powered burns ranging from mere kilowatts all the way up to a megawatt thanks to the nearby SoLTeC satellite beaming over power. At first, the VASIMR is just used for station keeping and slow travel in cislunar space as the VASIMR technology is still in it’s infancy for the first few missions. Chemical rockets will be used to propel the ship around while it is on interplanetary missions or traveling to Lagrange or asteroidal destinations. Thanks to the ship’s modular configuration, the engines, habitation (hab) modules or other components can be removed if they are damaged or need to be upgraded. The engine would be the main component that would require constant upgrades as newer, more efficient and faster engines come into being.

On board the Morning Star however, the entire ship rotates (at 11 r.p.m.) so that the furthest outward point is travelling at a velocity of about 17.2m/s. This generates an acceleration of 9.8m/s2 (acceleration due to gravity on Earth). This force would be experienced while the ships crew were in the furthest out BA 330s. In these modules, the crew would sleep, eat and live while subjected to this Earth like acceleration. This acceleration, removes many problems associated with space travel that is experienced on the ISS. This includes bone density deterioration, which on some occasions proves so severe that astronauts are unable to walk when they return to Earth from space.

The model is quite large so I might upload some of the individual components in the future if there's enough interest.