Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), by Ezzy Pearson, translated by Ye Shaohong, edited by Zhao Jiaming

In the first batch of major project guides issued by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the giant space station created by computer animation in ▲ 's science fiction works has a project of "Dynamics and Control of Space Assembly of very large Space structures" with a size of more than 1000 meters.

What is the concept of a kilometer large super spacecraft?

At present, the largest spacecraft built by mankind is the International Space Station, which is only 110 meters long and 88 meters wide, roughly the size of two football fields, with a total mass of more than 400 tons.

The total length of the US supercarrier Ford is about 330 meters, which means that the super-large spacecraft that China plans to build in the future is as long as 10 International Space stations or 3 aircraft carriers.

In recent years, space missions are increasingly developing in the direction of large-scale, long-distance and high complexity.

Hope, Celestial one, and perseverance rushed to Mars one after another; Voyager 1 became the first man-made vehicle to break out of the solar system; and Hayabusa II completed the asteroid sampling and return.

At the same time, China's space station is steadily advancing, and SpaceX starships are gradually taking shape. With it, the demand for function, performance and environmental adaptability of in-orbit spacecraft is higher and higher, and the demand for large-scale solar panels, heat dissipation panels and antennas is increasing.

For example, the caliber of the Skyterra-1 satellite antenna launched in 2010 reached 22m. The solar panel of the "Shiji 20" satellite launched in 2020 is more than 40m long.

However, due to the limitation of rocket launch envelope, the folding and on-orbit deployment technology of large-scale spacecraft components has attracted more and more attention and development of space agencies.

In August 2022, NASA had planned to complete the first launch of Artemis in preparation for a future lunar landing mission. However, due to malfunction, the launch was repeatedly postponed.

Over the next 10 years, NASA will form an international cooperation team to build the Lunar Portal Space Station (Lunar Gateway), a lunar space station that will serve as a transit station for landing on the moon and even Mars.

The "Moon Portal" space station, like the International Space Station (ISS) and the China Space Station, is composed of multiple modules, each of which is transported by a rocket to a fixed orbit. But bigger spaceships are needed to achieve interstellar travel.

In the zero gravity environment, long-term space flight will lead to muscle atrophy, cardiac dysfunction, osteoporosis, vision degradation, immunity decline and other health problems.

To solve these problems, it is necessary to build spacecraft that can rotate and produce artificial gravity (as depicted in sci-fi movies such as Star Trek and 2001 Space Odyssey).

But the problem is that in order for astronauts to rotate with the spacecraft without making them sick and vomiting, there must be a spacecraft with a total length of at least one kilometer plus cabins.

The construction of such a spacecraft requires dozens of high-cost launch missions to be completed. But Zac Manchester, a robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, has come up with a new plan that may require only one launch.

"our goal is to design a structure that can be carried in the fairing of a single rocket. The challenge with this scheme is that the fairing is only a few meters wide, but the length of a large spacecraft needs to reach 1,000 meters after deployment, "Manchester said." however, this spacecraft only needs to operate in space, and in space, the force acting on the spacecraft is very weak, so it does not have to be very strong. It's just that during the launch phase, you have to bear a lot of force, so the spacecraft just needs to be strong enough in a folded state. "

Manchester has been studying a structure made up of shear connecting rods that is complex in shape and can expand to 150 times its original size.

Such a structure requires thousands of moving parts, but in spacecraft, such a design is usually inappropriate, because if something goes wrong with these parts, more than one mechanic may need to be sent to deal with them.

"this is one of the most difficult challenges, and we are also very concerned about the mechanical blockage of the spacecraft during deployment," Manchester said. "We are working on ways to make the structure of the spacecraft flexible through engineering means. to reduce the risk of blockage." Manchester's current work is mainly to improve the design to minimize the risk of structural errors.

Perhaps the super-large spacecraft will soon move from the design stage to the verification stage and fly over the Earth's low-Earth orbit to other planets in the near future.

The original article is published in Science focus 2022.10.

References for some of the contents:

Zhang Yuanxun, Xu Liping, Chen Guohui, et al. Analysis and application of folding and unfolding principle of large-scale components of spacecraft [J]. China Space Science and Technology, 2022, 42 (4): 129,145.

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