Space is littered with dead missile stages. What if we turned them into habitats?

From Popular Mechanics

• Nanoracks, a space company specializing in sending commercial payloads to the ISS, plans to create the first space recycling program.
• The “Outpost” program will renew the upper stages already sold out in orbit space stations.
• The company plans to run his own first demonstration next May.

Just outside the upper reaches of our atmosphere, beyond the line that separates Earth from space, is an orbital landfill of debris. And that junk continues to accumulate with the growing commercialization of space, leaving many experts concerned about how the debris could impact astronauts, satellites and future deep space missions. But where some people see problems, others see opportunities.

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Nanoracks, a space company that previously helped bring commercial payloads to the International Space Station (ISS), aims to recycle abandoned upper stages of Earth-orbiting rockets in commercial space stations. The company program “Outpost, “He plans to turn the landfill in Earth’s orbit into a recycling center, where an army of robotic space drones will turn the upper stages of unwanted rockets into orbiting labs, greenhouses, fuel depots or perhaps habitats.

Rockets usually have multiple decoupled stages to reduce weight as they ascend into orbit. The lower stages fall back to Earth after burning all their fuel, pushing the higher stages into the upper atmosphere. The smaller and lighter upper stages give the final kick to place their payloads, and the upper stage itself, into orbit.

This puts rocket scientists at a crossroads: Do they leave enough fuel in the upper stage after orbital insertion so that it can spin around, reload its engines and deorbit to fall back to Earth? Or do they use every last drop of fuel to get the most out of their money, leaving the upper stage in orbit and adding to the already extensive list of space debris?

In its annual report on the space environment, the European Space Agency (ESA) has included missile bodies as one of the biggest threats to spacecraft:

“Since the start of the space age on October 4, 1957, there has been more space debris in orbit than operational satellites. Space debris represents a problem for the near-Earth environment on a global scale, to which all nations traveling in space have contributed and for which only a globally supported solution can be the answer. “

Earlier this month, an abandoned upper stage of a Chinese rocket narrowly missed collision with a deceased Soviet satellite. The two objects were within a maximum distance of 80 feet of each other, traveling at speeds close to 32,900 miles per hour. The impact would have created an untold number of space debris, with a combined mass of 6,170 pounds. Events like these have put even greater pressure to do something against the growing cloud of space junk surrounding Earth.

Nanoracks CEO Jeffrey Manber sees these abandoned upper stages as a gold mine waiting to be explored. Rocket stages already possess many of the qualities that engineers look for in a space station. The upper stages are designed to withstand the incredible stresses of a launch and maintain pressure in a vacuum, making them both very durable and safe (once the highly flammable and sometimes toxic fuel has been purged).

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For this reason, Nanoracks is not the first to propose the idea of ​​using the upper stages of rockets to create space stations. NASA originally planned its first space station, Skylab, to be built from the upper stage of the mighty Saturn V rocket.. Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun proposed to ventilate and refurbish the upper stage while in orbit to create a “wet laboratory” for astronauts to live and work in.

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