Providing safety fo space stations

There is a very small chance that an inadvertently ignition of the Space Shuttle's steering jets put a force on the structure of the ISS that increses the stresses on it to an amount that is too large. So the structure may break and all astronauts coiuld be killed.

The structure seems to be consisting of inflexible connections and links. Would it be possible to provide flexible connections? All cabins and chambers could be kept inflexible of their own - but the tunnels connecting one cabin to another could be flexible.

Is that possible? And would that reduce the danger?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

only way to solve this problem is to augment the lift capacity of orbital launchers,so stronger materials can be used to build spacehsips and space stations.
The factors of safety of current space structures are probably less than 1

One more reason for HLLV. Build rugged--build to last.

In the initial post I asked for flexible structures - itmay be sufficient if such flexible structure are used only for a gangway from a vehicle to another vehicle or to a space station - concrete ISS. Simply to avoid the dangers reported.

An additional concept could be a docking mechanism that takes over the control over the engines of the vehicle and makes sure that no dangerous engines can be fired or ignited.

Both these thoughts could be combined.

Considerations about all this are relevant for private personal spaceflight actually - think of the ASP and Bigelow's Nautilus.

What more thoughts can be listed?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

In that case, let's hire Ford!

SpaceX seems to have a concrete idea how to assist the docking of a vehicle to a space station and thus improve safety during the docking process:

The article "SpaceX Building Reusable Crew Capsule" ( www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_060306.html ) says:



Musk is speaking here about SpaceX's Dragon.

This method might be applied to more objects, stations etc. via a similar robotic arm that is specialized for the process and task of docking - even if the docking is used to assemble a vehicle or something else (which refers to the spacedock-thread and another similar thread.)



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Oh no, not FORD - Fix Or Repair Daily - that's what we've already got.

What about using some sensors scanning a vehicle for unexpected ac tivities causing the firing of engines? Then they coud cause an emergency undocking to kepp space stations safe.



What about it?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)