[FPSPACE] Tiangong feasability

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Jim - 

If the Laboratory were not feasable, China's General Designers would not have announced it.

I suppose that everyone here is beginning to do their reverse engineering estimates. In my opinion, the place to start is with the docking mechanisms' masses. If you remember, there was an international agreement on docking mechanisms reached last year, with public specs.

TG1 has two docks, one to connect  with TG2 and then maybe TG3 modules, and another to connect with the servicing SZs. The TG1 dock will have standard SZ mechanisms and design, but no crew. So one can work from there. 

(I myself can't anymore since my stroke. It's strange: parts of my brain are still there quite completely, while other functions are highly impaired to non-existant. I can outline an analysis, but actually performing it in all its aspects is quite another thing.)

Pressure vessel mass per square meter could give you some estimate of TG2 and TG3 size. Payloads for these module should most likely be coming from existing firms and institutions involved in the SZ  orbital modules.

My guess is that the airlock will be on the SZ servicing modules. And Charlie, TG1 would thus also provide some information for a Zond type lunar fly by. But I still think that's an expensive spectacle, and not on the main path, which leads to CAPS, except that such a flight would test life support, navigation, and re-entry systems, and with CZ5 that could be one launch, or perhaps 2, or perhaps 2 on the improved CZ2+ with the entirely new engines and fuels. 

In any case, that's after 2015, a long way off.

Back to the TG. Consumable masses are known generally, but what of Chinese work on regenerative systems? What are today's masses?

SpaceX may be looking for another destination for Dragon besides ISS or Bigelow, so perhaps one would want to check with them.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas - a damn fine book, if I do say so myself









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