02-16-2019, 12:03 AM
|
 |
Master Modeler
|
|
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
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  |
I too support the "Gateway Station" (even though it may not be an ideal in-space infrastructure link for follow-on efforts to the Moon's surface and beyond) for the same reason. Also, being a substantial investment of NASA's time, money, engineering effort, and program planning (other missions that will involve it are being planned around it, and they too are "capital investments" for NASA), I don't think NASA would be likely to just abandon it--especially once it's in place--anytime soon, just as the ISS (and even MIR, which NASA was involved in) were operated/are being planned to operate for some time beyond their initially-planned "sunset dates." Also, speaking of putting our space journeys to date into (scale) perspective:
This “taped-out” and “driven-out” (out of his home state!) video (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk ) does a great job of illustrating both the distances between—*and* the relative sizes of—the Sun, Venus, Earth, our Moon, Jupiter, Pluto, Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B (including the stellar sizes and distances within that system), Sirius, and Betelgeuse (he even gave the scale velocity, and what the stars’ scale brightnesses would be). On his scale, the Sun was the size of a pea (which he also used to demonstrate occulting the solar disc, and how difficult and exacting direct imaging of extrasolar planets is, using that method). |