Life Support
From OSR
- [#consumables Consumables]
- [#cess Closed Ecological Systems]
- [#hygiene Hygiene]
- [#freeze Suspended Animation]
- [#meteors Air]
CONSUMABLES
If you want more data on life support than you know what to do with, try reading this [CR-2004-208941.pdf NASA pdf document]. Otherwise, read on.
As a very rough rule of thumb: one human will need an amount of mass/volume equal to his berthing space for three months of consumables (water, air, food). This was figured with data from submarines, ISS, and Biosphere II. Of course this can be reduced a bit with hydroponics and a closed ecological system. This also makes an attractive option out of freezing one's passengers in cryogenic suspended animation.
Eric Rozier has an on-line calculator that will assist with calculating consumables.
Ken Burnsides and Eric Henry found the following information.
Assume that each person has a reserve of 10 liters of water, and somewhere between 0.1 and 0.25 liters of water per day to make up for reclamation losses. (Eric used 0.1, Ken used 0.25 mostly due to having worked in a sewage treatment plant)
There are two methods of cracking CO2 into C and O2: low energy and high energy.
Low energy requires prohibitive amounts of biomass in plants. Data from Biosphere II indicate roughly seven tons of plant life per person per day, with a need for roughly 4 days for a complete plant aspiration cycle, so call it 25 to 30 tons of plant per crewman. With an average density of 0.5, each ton of greenhouse takes up about 2 cubic meters (m3).
High energy methods take up much less space, but (as the name implies) requires inconveniently large amounts of energy. It also results in lots of messy by-products and waste heat. Practically, it is easier to flush the CO2 instead of cracking it, and instead bringing along an extra supply of water to crack for oxygen. Water is universally useful with a multitude of handy applications, and takes less energy to crack than CO2.
For future Mars missions, it has been suggested that the life support system should utilize the Sabatier Reaction. This takes in CO2 and hydrogen, and produces water and methane. The water can split by electrolysis into oxygen and hydrogen, with the oxygen used for breathing and the hydrogen used for another batch of CO2. Unfortunately the methane accumulates, and its production eventually uses up all the hydrogen. The reaction does require one atmosphere of pressure, a temperature of about 300°, and a catalyst of nickel or ruthenium on alumina.
According to NASA, each astronaut consumes approximately 0.8 kilograms (0.560 cubic meters) of oxygen per day. As a point of reference, a SCUBA tank is pressurized to about 250 bar i.e., 250 times atmospheric pressure. At that pressure, one person day of oxygen takes up about 0.00224 cubic meters.
Stored as liquid oxygen, 0.8 kilograms would take up about 0.0007 cubic meters. This requires extra mass for the cryogenic equipment to keep the oxygen liquid, but the volume savings are impressive.
So as far as pure oxygen goes, you take 0.8 kg for one person-day of oxygen, muliply it by the number of crewbeings on the ship, and then muliply it by the number of days in a standard mission (i.e., desired "endurance time" or time between supply stops) to discover the total oxygen mass requirement. Repeat with the volume figure for the total oxygen volume requirement. You'd be wise to add an additional reserve of about 25% to take account of pressurization of the hull, loss due to various mishaps, and general military paranoia.
However, this is just pure oxygen. This is insanely dangerous to use as the ship's atmosphere, the accident that killed the Apollo 1 crew proved that. In practice one uses a "breathing mix" of oxygen and another gas.
The Space Shuttle uses a 79% nitrogen/21% oxygen mix at atmospheric pressure (14.7 psi or 760 mm Hg). The shuttle space suits use 4.3 psi of pure oxygen, which means they have to prebreath pure oxygen while suiting up, or the bends will strike. Setting up the optimal breathable atmosphere is complicated.
For emergency use, it would be wise to pack away a few Oxygen Candles. These are composed of a compound of sodium chlorate and iron. When ignited, they smolder at about 600°C, producing iron oxide (rust), sodium chloride (salt), and approximately 6.5 man-hours of oxygen per kilogram of candle. Molecular Product's Chlorate Candle 33 masses 12.2 kilos, cylindrical can dimensions of 16 cm diameter x 29 height, burns for 50 minutes, and produces 3400 liters of oxygen.
For food, Eric and Ken ran numbers from the USS Wyoming.
150 man crew, 90 day cruise, 31,500 kg of food (9,000 kg frozen, 18,000 kg dry, 4,500 kg fresh). This is about 2.3 kg of food per man per day.
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Frozen meat has a density of about 0.35 and 0.4 (which Ken determined experimentally with a kilo of frozen meat in a 2 liter pitcher in his sink). Frozen veggies were less, so split the difference and use 0.375. 9,000 kg takes up 24,000 liters. Fresh foods have a density of roughly 0.25, due to air packed around the food by the packaging. 4,500 kg takes up 18,000 liters. Dry and canned goods range from densities of 0.25 for flour and bread and 1.0 for canned goods. Split the difference and use 0.5. 18,000 kilos takes up 36,000 liters. |
Total volume is 78,000 liters, or 78 cubic meters of food (1000 liters = 1 m3). Assume that we're off on our calculations and round up to 80 m3 as a reserve.
Storage, including refrigeration wastage is usually three times the space, but the Navy has a tradition of doing things in amazingly tight quarters. So we will merely double it, for 160 m3 to store our food.
Add about 1000 liters of water (water for 150 crew for 90 days, plus a reserve) which of course masses 1000 kg.
Add about 3,500 liters of compressed air (0.2 liters per person per day for 90 days, plus a reserve for general pressurization and a 20% safety margin) which masses 1050 kg.
Together air and water add about 5 m3.
There are alternate figures on life support in [102202_LifeSupportPart1.pdf this pdf document]. It specifies the daily requirements of consumables per person as: 0.83 kg Oxygen, 0.62 kg freeze dried food (which would increase to 2.48 kg when the water was added), 3.56 kg water for drinking and food preparation, and 26.0 kg water for hygiene, flushing, laundry, dishes, and related matters. Note that the value for hygiene water is somewhat dependent on technology - if you have sonic showers and the like the requirements may be less.
William Seney notes that the NC State document specify oxygen consumption figures differ considerably from Eric and Ken's estimate. If we assume their value should be 48L per HOUR instead of per DAY (1.38 kg / day) it is much closer.
When the body uses glucose the reaction is:
C6H12O6 + 6 O2 => 6 CO2 + 6 H2O
so a slight excess of water is produced. According to the NC State document this works out to about 0.39L per person per day, which may be enough to replace losses.
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For a real Spartan bare-minimum cruise, you can probably use a figure of one m3 per person per day. But this would not be recommended for a cruise of longer than 20 to 30 days. Morale will suffer. The bare-minimum of consumables mass looks like 0.98 kg water, 2.3 kg food, and 0.0576 kg air per person per day. About 3.3 kg total, round it up to 4. People actually need 2.72 kg of water, but since food is 75% water, it contains an additional 1.72 kgs. |
Our 90 day cruise now has about 165 m3 of bare essentials. Put in niceties like better cooking gear, spare clothing, toilet paper, video games, soda, luxury goods, and you are probably getting close to 240 m3. That will fit in a sphere 8 meters in diameter (about 25 feet).
A useful accounting device is the "man-day" or "person-day". If your ship has 30 person-days of food and oxygen, it can support: 30 persons for 1 day (30 / 30 = 1), 15 persons for 2 days (30 / 15 = 2), 3 persons for 10 days (30 / 3 = 10), or one person for 30 days (30 / 1 = 30). By the same math, a ship with 30 person-days of supplies facing a 10 day mission could support 3 persons (30 / 10 = 3).
So if the exploration ship [rocket3Notes.html#pioneers Arrow-Back] becomes marooned in the trackless wastes of unexplored space and is listed as having 20 person-weeks of life support, it makes it really easy for Mr. Selfish to do the arithmetic and figure that he will survive for twenty weeks instead of one if he murders the other 19 crew members. More democratically, if the rescue ship will arrive in 8 days (1.14 weeks), one can calculate that the supplies will stretch for an extra day with 17 crew members (20 / 1.14 = 17.5, round down to 17). The crew draws straws, and the unlucky two who get the short straws have the opportunity to heroically sacrifice themselves so that the rest of the crew may live.
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If the spacecraft has no artificial gravity, you'd better include lots of spices and hot sauce. As the body's internal fluids change their balance, crewmembers will get the equivalent of stuffy noses. This will decrease the sense of taste. Food will taste bland like it does when you have a head cold, and for the same reason. You'll need more space if you want to include hydroponics for fresh veggies. Roughly 800 liters of hydroponics per person per 'green meal' per week. This also helps CO2 scrubbing and crew moral. About 20 m3 per 25 men, or 120 m3 for our 150 man crew. 3 green meals per week takes about 600 m3 . |
CLOSED ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
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In THE MILLENNIAL PROJECT, Marshall Savage sings the praises of Spirulina algae. However, you'd best take the following with a grain of salt. There is often a long distance between the ideal and the real. |
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Anyway, Spirulina is apparently almost the perfect food, nutritional wise. A pity it tastes like green slime (though Savage maintains that genetic engineering can change the flavor). Spirulina is highly digestible since it contains no cellulose. It is 65% protein by weight and contains all eight essential amino acids in quantities equivalent to meat and milk. It also has almost all the vitamins, with the glaring exception of vitamin C (I guess rocketmen will become "limeys" again). It is also a little sparse on carbohydrates. Savage calculates that it will be possible to achieve production rates of 100 grams (dry weight) of algae per liter of water per day. It breaks down 6 liters of algae water per person, supplying both food and oxygen, while consuming sunlight (or grow-lights), CO2 and sewage. 6 liters of algae water will produce 600 grams of "food" (540 grams is 2500 calories, an average daily food requirement), 600 liters of oxygen, and consume 720 liters of CO2 and an unspecified amount of nutrient salts extracted from sewage. Since food is generally 75% water, 600 grams of dry food will convert into about 2.4 kg of moist food, which compares favorably with the 2.3 kg on the USS Wyoming.
Dr. John Schilling mentions a possible pitfall:
(Spirulina is) High in nucleic acid, which means you can only eat about fifty grams per day or you're at risk of gout. And it's going to be really, really, really embarassing if you have to list "gout" as the cause of failure for a space mission
There are other things you have to be mindful of when cultivating Spirulina. From the Swedish Medical Center:
Various forms of blue-green algae can be naturally contaminated with highly toxic substances called microcystins.
Some states, such as Oregon, require producers to strictly limit the concentration of microcystins in blue-green algae products, but the same protections cannot be assumed to have been applied to all products on the market. Furthermore, the maximum safe intake of microcystins is not clear, and it is possible that when blue-green algae is used for a long time, toxic effects might build up...
...Blue-green algae can also contain a different kind of highly toxic substance, called anatoxin (ed note: AKA "Very Fast Death Factor").
In addition, when spirulina is grown with the use of fermented animal waste fertilizers, contamination with dangerous bacteria could occur. There are also concerns that spirulina might concentrate radioactive ions found in its environment. Probably of most concern is spirulina's ability to absorb and concentrate heavy metals such as lead and mercury if they are present in its environment. One study of spirulinas grown in a number of locations found them to contain an unacceptably high content of these toxic metals. However, a second study on this topic claims that the first used an unreliable method of analyzing heavy metal content, and concludes that a person would have to eat more than 77 g daily of the most heavily contaminated spirulina to reach unsafe mercury and lead consumption levels.
These researchers, however, go on to suggest that it is not prudent to eat more than 50 g of spirulina daily. The reason they give is that the plant contains a high concentration of nucleic acids, substances related to DNA. When these are metabolized, they create uric acid, which could cause gout or kidney stones. This is of special concern to those who have already had uric acid stones or attacks of gout.
SF writers with an evil turn of mind will see some interesting plot possibilites in these facts. The ship's food supply could become contaminated by an incompetent repair of the algae system utilizing lead pipes, an algae culture supplier with poor quality control, or deliberate sabotage.
The advantage of algae is that it can theoretically form a closed ecological cycle. This means that 6 liters of algae water, one human, some equipment, and sunlight can keep the human supplied with food and oxygen forever. Theoretically, of course. 0.006 m3 per person compared to 90 m3 per person is a strong argument for lots of green slime dinners for enlisted Solar Guard rocketmen. (Astro once said "I've been eating those synthetic concentrates so long my stomach thinks I've been turned into a test tube") Of course the Biosphere II fiasco shows how far we are from actually achieving a closed ecological cycle. Don't forget the 0.25 liters of water per person per day to make up for reclamation losses.
William Seney points out that as a luxury, some of the algae can be diverted to feed fish such as carp, catfish or tilapia for an occasional treat.
And you'd better keep the algae tanks far from the atomic drive. The last thing you want is for the little green darlings to mutate into something you can't eat. Or worse: something that is really inefficient at producing oxygen.
Christopher Huff begs to differ:
Actually, the algae tanks would make pretty good radiation shielding. "Clean" cultures of the original strain of algae would be easy to carry along to replenish the main tanks if an inedible form did take hold...just stick some packets of dry spores in the radiation shelter. As for the last possibility, a strain that was poor at conversion of CO2 would quickly be out-bred by the better strains. With algae constantly being removed for food, it would quickly be eliminated from the system.
Also, in addition to fish, a small colony of shrimp or crabs could be fed off the algae, providing a bit more variety in the food supply. Clams could also have a place, providing a useful sink for calcium, carbon, and oxygen in their shells as well as helping to process water. A combination of fresh and salt water systems might work out best.
A cursory web search on "Spirulina" will reveal how popular the stuff is in health food circles.
How much does the equipment mass? Savage is a little sparse on details there. Waste products from the astronaut's septic tanks are run through a "Supercritical water oxidation" unit that burns everything into simple oxidized chemicals (like carbon dioxide, water, and nitrous oxide) and some mineral ash. The appropriate chemicals are fed to the Spirulina., which multiplies in meters of transparent tubes run under filtered sunlight. Filtered because raw sunlight in outer space is quite deadly to algae, and it isn't too healthy for humans either. Anyway I could find no figures on the mass of a SWO unit or the rest.
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How does the SWO unit work? Henry Spencer says: Water is pretty near the universal solvent at room temperature. Heat it to quite high temperatures, under fairly high pressure so that it doesn't boil, and it gets, uh, more so. Dissolve a bit of oxygen in it, and you have a fantastically corrosive witches' brew that will vigorously attack almost anything. Throw in just about any organic substance you care to name, and out comes water, CO2, nitrogen, and sterile ash (oxides of metals, mostly). One of the bigger practical problems, in fact, is making the equipment stand up to it. The other major problem is that it's pretty power-intensive, because of the high temperature and high pressure. It's pretty much the preferred way to recycle organic wastes -- kitchen garbage, human wastes, etc. -- in designs for advanced closed-cycle life-support systems. |
There is more information on SWO units here and here. The first reference describes a facility with a volume of just over 20 cubic metres that can process 7.5L per minute, more than enough for a crew of 300. (30L/person/day - 20 hours a day). Thanks to William Seney for these links.
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There were some figures in a report on a cruder life-support set up written in 1953. This used Chlorella algae, which isn't quite as good as Spirulina since it has an indigestible cellulose cell wall. The figures assume a Chlorella culture density of 55 grams per liter of water and a daily yield of 2.5 grams per liter. Savage's 100 grams per liter sounds a little optimistic, and 2.5 sounds a little pessimistic. The truth is probably somewhere in between. |
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At a yield of 2.5 g/l, to provide one rocketeer with 500 grams of food (instead of Savage's 600 grams) will require 200 liters of algae culture.
Urine is passed through an absorption tube to remove excess salt (which would kill the algae) but retaining urea and other nitrogen compounds the algae needs. Faeces are irradiated with ultraviolet to kill all bacteria and added to the urine. This is fed to the main algae tank along with pressurized carbon dioxide (previously removed from the air with calcium oxide). A pump sends a flow of algae culture to the growth trays under filtered sunlight. The culture then passes through a centrifugal separator on its way back to the main tank. The separator performs two functions: [1] removing excess gas to maintain a pressure equilibrium with the carbon dioxide injection and [2] periodically harvesting algae for food. Harvest will occur once a day, extracting 500 grams of algae from nine liters of culture per person. The pump will be controlled such that the algae on the average will experience two minutes of sunlight then three minutes in the darkness of the main tank before it starts the cycle anew.
A fresh batch of urine and faeces is added immediately after algae harvest, to give the algae twenty four hours to consume it. So by next harvest there is no human excretions contaminating the food (you hope).
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Now for the answer you've been waiting for. Dr. Bowman estimates that the equipment will mass approximately 50 kg, plus 200 kg per man for algae culture. Since the equipment is such a small fraction of the total, mass savings depend upon getting the algae yield higher than 2.5 g/l. Such as Savage's 100 g/l Spirulina with 6 kg per man of algae culture. Dr. Bowman points out that when one compares an algae system with merely stocking crates of food, the break-even point occurs at a mission of 145 days (about five months). Below this time it takes less mass to bring crates of food, as the mission duration rises above 145 days the algae tanks get more and more attractive. |
You can find more interesting reading on the topic of life support here.
Other SF novels have suggested vats of yeast or tissue cultures of meat ("carniculture") to supplement food supplies. But unless they can re-cycle wastes from the crew, it seems more efficient to just carry more boxed food. Currently scientist can only grow tissue cultures as a single sheet of cells, making them thicker will require figuring out how to make them grow blood vessels to nourish all the cells. But some technicians figure that they can grow lots of meat cell sheets, then laminate the sheet layers together to approximate a slab of meat.
If you are trying a closed cycle with tissue cultures, you will have to deal with the problem of the Food Chain. Typically each higher level of the pyramid has one-tenth the biomass of the one below, for reasons you can read about in the link. What this means is that you will have to feed ten meals worth of algae to the meat tissue culture in order to produce one meal worth of meat. Even on Terra, this is the reason why meat is more expensive than vegetables.
Obviously the food chain effect also applies to diverting some of the algae to fatten up some fish as a special meal.
In NASA jargon, a closed environment life support system based on algae is called a "yoghurt box", one based on hydroponic leafy plants is called a "salad machine", and one based on a fish farm is called a "sushi maker".
From ROCHEWORLD by Robert L. Forward. (1990)
"Chicken Little" is a chicken breast meat tissue culture.
Arielle went to bed, too, but first she stopped off at the sick bay to get patches for her cracked fingernails, then at the galley to get a bite to eat. She had a double helping of protocheese with real garlic from Nels's hydroponic gardens, two algae shakes with energy sticks mixed in for crunch, then, still hungry, she finished with a desert consisting of a half-pound of white-meat sticks from "Chicken Little" -- her real-meat ration for a week -- sliced into thin strips and hot-cooked with James's secret recipe of herbs and spices.
From Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Paul French (Isaac Asimov). (1954)
Lucky smiled and went on, "Venus is a fairly developed planet. I think there are about fifty cities on it and a total population of six million. Your exports are dried seaweed, which I am told is excellent fertilizer, and dehydrated yeast bricks for animal food."
"Still fairly good," said Morriss. "How was your dinner at the Green Room, gentlemen?"
Lucky paused at the sudden change of topic, then said, "Very good. Why do you ask?"
"You'll see in a moment. What did you have?"
Lucky said, "I couldn't say, exactly. It was the house meal. I should guess we had a kind of beef goulash with a rather interesting sauce and a vegetable I didn't recognize. There was a fruit salad, I believe, before that and a spicy variety of tomato soup."
Bigman broke in. "And jelly seeds for dessert."
Morriss laughed hootingly. "You're all wrong, you know," he said. "You had no beef, no fruit, no tomatoes. Not even coffee. You had only one thing to eat. Only one thing. Yeast!"
"What?" shrieked Bigman.
For a moment Lucky was startled also. His eyes narrowed and he said, "Are you serious?"
"Of course. It's the Green Room's specialty. They never speak of it, or Earthmen would refuse to eat it. Later on, though, you would have been questioned thoroughly as to how you liked this dish or that, how you thought it might have been improved, and so on. The Green Room is Venus's most valuable experimental station."
"I am guessing," said Lucky, "that yeast has some connection with the crime wave on Venus."
"Guessing, are you?" said Morriss, dryly. "Then you haven't read our official reports. I'm not surprised. Earth thinks we are exaggerating here. I assure you, however, we are not. And it isn't merely a crime wave. Yeast, Lucky, yeast! That is the nub and core of everything on this planet."
For a moment they sipped in silence; then Morriss said, "Venus, Lucky, is an expensive world to keep up. Our cities must make oxygen out of water, and that takes huge electrolytic stations. Each city requires tremendous power beams to help support the domes against billions of tons of water. The city of Aphrodite uses as much energy in a year as the entire continent of South America, yet it has only a thousandth the population.
"We've got to earn that energy, naturally. We've got to export to Earth in order to obtain power plants, specialized machinery, atomic fuel, and so on. Venus's only product is seaweed, inexhaustible quantities of it. Some we export as fertilizer, but that is scarcely the answer to the problem. Most of our seaweed, however, we use as culture media for yeast, ten thousand and one varieties of yeast."
Morriss looked soberly at the small Martian and said, "If you wish. Bigman is quite correct in his low opinion of yeast in general. Our most important strains are suitable only for animal food. But even so, it's highly useful. Yeast-fed pork is cheaper and better than any other kind. The yeast is high in calories, proteins, minerals, and vitamins.
"We have other strains of higher quality, which are used in cases where food must be stored over long periods and with little available space. On long space journeys, for instance, so-called Y-rations are frequently taken.
"Finally, we have our top-quality strains, extremely expensive and fragile growths that go into the menus of the Green Room and with which we can imitate or improve upon ordinary food. None of these are in quantity production, but they will be someday. I imagine you see the whole point of all this, Lucky."
"I think I do."
"I don't," said Bigman belligerently.
Morriss was quick to explain. "Venus will have a monopoly on these luxury strains. No other world will possess them. Without Venus's experience in zymoculture..."
"In what?" asked Bigman.
"In yeast culture. Without Venus's experience in that, no other world could develop such yeasts or maintain them once they did obtain them. So you see that Venus could build a tremendously profitable trade in yeast strains as luxury items with all the galaxy. That would be important not only to Venus, but to Earth as well- to the entire Solar Confederation. We are the most over-populated system in the Galaxy, being the oldest. If we could exchange a pound of yeast for a ton of grain, things would be well for us."
HYGIENE
This brings up the question of how to use a toilet in free fall. I'm not going to go into the distasteful details, suffice it to say that "there ain't no graceful way".
Bath and showers are very difficult in free fall. The crew will probably be reduced to sponge-baths or maybe a shower while zipped up in a bag. In Robert Silverberg's 1968 novel World's Fair 1992 he mentions "sonic showers" which use sound waves to remove dirt with no water required. And in Andre Norton's space novels, the bathing room is called the "fresher".
From THE ROLLING STONES by Robert Heinlein (1952)
For a longer period nothing more notable took place than the incident in which Roger Stone lost his breathing mask while taking a shower and almost drowned (so he claimed) before he could find the water cut-off valve. There are very few tasks easier to do in a gravity field than in free fall, but bathing is one of them.
From EXIT EARTH by Martin Caidin (1987). On a Soviet space station, Tanya freshens up.
Suspended nude in the air, she reached into her padded wall locker, braced a leg, opened the sliding panel and removed a plastic package from a box secured to an overhead shelf with velcro. She peeled away the wrapper, stuffing the plastic in the ever-ready disposal container, and opened a neatly folded, lightly scented towelette. Slowly and luxuriantly she removed the oily perspiration from her body. She smiled as the scent hovered about her. No Soviet quartermaster had ever issued these to the women cosmonauts who left the Earth behind! What she carried with her among her personal belongings were gifts from Susan Foster...
...Whatever their technical prowess, and Tanya knew it was most formidable, it was in the science of personal touch that the Americans were absolutely incredible. They were light years ahead of anything that emerged from Mother Russia. In the packages Susan gave her, concealed within a box supposedly filled with computer disks, were these sealed towels and their lightly scented fragrance, just enough to detect, and moist enough to clean and freshen her skin. It dried within seconds of its application and then you simply disposed of the towelette. She had hundreds of them. Some of the other women learned of her treasure and Tanya shared with them.
It made life infinitely more bearable after weeks and months in weightless orbit. It rendered personal hygiene a pleasure in a complicated, clanging, ear-stabbing vessel that reeked of oil, plastic, garlic and scallions and all manner of unpleasant body odors that soaked into the very "floors" and "walls" of station cubicles. The Americans, Tanya smiled, demanded their little luxuries wherever they went, and their woman cosmonauts were even more fiercely demanding than their men. Hooray for you, Tanya thought generously of the Americans. Long voyages into space with ships that stank left much to be desired, and if nothing else, the Americans were able to make of space adventure a mission that did not permanently wrinkle the nose...
...Susan slipped a personal package to Tanya...
..."How many are in here?"
"Four hundred."
"Tanya's eyes widened. "Four hundred?"
"We're the miracle workers of folded fragrance."
Ed note: NASA carefully screens all materials, sealants, foods, and everything else to ensure that they do not emit noticable odor in the pressurized habitat sections of spacecraft and space stations. Such odors can quickly become overpowering in such tight quarters.
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SUSPENDED ANIMATIONThe ability to put crew members to sleep for months at a time would be an awfully convenient thing to have. Such crew members would use air and food at a much reduced rate and would not be prey to interplanetary cabin fever or space cafard. Hibernation or "cold-sleep" would mimic what bears and squirrels do in the winter. The crewmember would sleep and breath slowly. Food would be administered by an intravenous pump or the body's internal fat could be used. The crew member still ages, abet at a slighly slower rate. Suspended animation, cryo-freeze, or cryogenic suspension is more extreme. The crewmember is frozen solid in liquid nitrogen. They do not breath, eat, nor age. Special techniques must be used to prevent the ice in the body's cells from freezing into tiny jagged knives shredding the organs. This is naturally more dangerous than mere hibernation. It is generally used for slower-than-light interstellar exploration, or to put a crewmember with an acute medical condition into stasis if the ship cannot arrive at a hospital for some months. |
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Hibernation was shown in the movies Alien, 2001, and 2010. In William Tedford's Silent Galaxy AKA Battlefields of Silence, interplanetary fighter pilots would sometimes find themselves out of fuel and on trajectories that would take years to return to a spot where they could be rescued. They would use hibernation to stretch their consumables and to sleep the time away. Poul Anderson noted that there is probably a limit to how long a human will remain viable in cryogenic suspension (in other words they have a self-life). Naturally occuring radioactive atoms in the body will cause damage. In a non-suspended person such damage is repaired, but in a suspended person it just accumulates. He's talking about this damage happening over suspensions lasting several hundred years, during interstellar trips. This may require one to periodically thaw out crew members and keep them awake for long enough to heal the damage before re-freezing them. Hibernation and suspension is often encountered in SF novels where large numbers of people have to be shipped, e.g., troop carriers, slave ships, and undesirable persons shipped off as involuntary colonists to some miserable planetary colony. Some passenger liners will have accomodations of First-class, Second-class, and Freeze-class (instead of Steerage). There is often a chance of mortality associated with hibernation and suspension. In some of the crasser passenger ships there will sometimes be a betting pool, placing bets on the number of freeze-class passengers who don't make it. |
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From CHILDHOODS END by Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
He took out the little syringe, already loaded with the carefully prepared solution. Narcosamine had been discovered during research into animal hibernation: it was not true to say -- as was popularly believed -- that it produced suspended animation. All it caused was a great slowing-down of the vital processes, though metabolism still continued at a reduced level. It was as if one had banked up the fires of life, so that they smoldered underground. But when, after weeks or months, the effect of the drug wore off, they would burst out again and the sleeper would revive. Narcosamine was perfectly safe. Nature had used it for a million years to protect many of her children from the foodless winter.
AIRMeteors are probably nothing to worry about. On average a spacecraft will have to wait for a couple of million years to be hit by a meteor larger than a grain of sand. But if you insist, there are a couple of precautions one can take. First one can sheath the ship in a thin shell with a few inches of separation from the hull. This "meteor bumper" (aka "Whipple shield") will vaporize the smaller guys. For larger ones, use radar. It is surprisingly simple. For complicated reasons that I'm sure you can figure out for yourself, a meteor on a collision course will maintain a constant bearing (it's a geometric matter of similar triangles). So if the radar sees an object whose bearing doesn't change, but whose range is decreasing, it knows that You Have A Problem. (This happens on Earth as well. If you are racing a freight train to cross an intersection, and the image of the front of the train stays on one spot on your windshield, you know that you and the engine will reach the intersection simultaneously. This example was from Heinlein's ROCKET SHIP GALILEO) |
(Ken Burnside used this concept in his starship combat game Attack Vector: Tactical. From the point-of-view of the target, the incoming missile will hit if it stays on one bearing and does not move laterally. So a game aid called a ShellStar is used to detect the presence of lateral motion. )
The solution is simple as well, burn the engine a second or two in any direction (That was from Heinlein's SPACE CADET). One can make an hard-wired link between the radar and the engines, but it might be a good idea to have it sound an alarm first. This will give the crew a second to grab a hand-hold. You did install hand-holds on all the walls, didn't you? And require the crew to strap themselves into their bunks while sleeping.
From ROCKET SHIP GALILEO by Robert Heinlein. 1947.
The moon, now visibly larger and almost painfully beautiful, hung in the same position in the sky, such that he had to let his gaze drop as he lay in the chair in order to return its stare. This bothered him for a moment -- how were they ever to reach the moon if the moon did not draw toward the point where they were aiming?
It would not have bothered Morrie, trained as he was in a pilot's knowledge of collision bearings, interception courses, and the like. But, since it appeared to run contrary to common sense, Art worried about it until he managed to visualize the situation somewhat thus: if a car is speeding for a railroad crossing and a train is approaching from the left, so that their combined speeds will bring about a wreck, then the bearing of the locomotive from the automobile will not change, right up to the moment of the collision.
It was a simple matter of similar triangles, easy to see with a diagram but hard to keep straight in the head. The moon was speeding to their meeting place at about 2000 miles an hour, yet she would never change direction; she would simply grow and grow and grow until she filled the whole sky.
From SPACE CADET by Robert Heinlein. 1948.
To guard against larger stuff Captain Yancey set up a meteor-watch much tighter than is usual in most parts of space. Eight radars scanned all space through a global 360°. The only condition necessary for collision is that the other object hold a steady bearing-no fancy calculation is involved. The only action necessary then to avoid collision is to change your own speed, any direction, any amount. This is perhaps the only case where theory of piloting is simple.
Commander Miller put the cadets and the sublieutenants on a continuous heel-and-toe watch, scanning the meteor-guard 'scopes. Even if the human being failed to note a steady bearing the radars would "see" it, for they were so rigged that, if a "blip" burned in at one spot on the screen, thereby showing a steady bearing, an alarm would sound- and the watch officer would cut in the jet, fast!...
..."That puts me in mind of something that happened to me when I was 'farmer' in the old Percival Lowell -- the one before the present one," Yancey went on. "We had touched at Venus South Pole and had managed somehow to get a virus infection, a sort of rust, into the 'farm' -- don't look so superior, Mr. Jensen; someday you'll come a cropper with a planet that is new to you!"
"Me, sir? I wasn't looking superior."
"No? Smiling at the pansies, no doubt?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hmmph! As I was saying, we got this rust infection about ten days out. I didn't have any more farm than an Eskimo. I cleaned the place out, sterilized, and reseeded. Same story. The infection was all through the ship and I couldn't chase it down. We finished that trip on preserved foods and short rations and I wasn't allowed to eat at the table the rest of the trip."
"Captain?"
"Yes, Dodson?"
"What did you do about air-conditioning?"
"Well. Mister, what would you have done?"
Matt studied it. "Well, sir, I would have jury-rigged something to take the Cee-Oh-Two out of the air."
"Precisely. I exhausted the air from an empty compartment, suited up, and drilled a couple of holes to the outside. Then I did a piping job to carry foul air out of the dark side of the ship in a fractional still arrangement -- freeze out the water first, then freeze out the carbon dioxide. Pesky thing was always freezing up solid and forcing me to tinker with it. But it worked well enough to get us home."
What if the meteor hits the ship and punctures the hull? An instrument called a Manometer will register a sudden loss of pressure and trigger an alarm. Life support will start high-pressure flood of oxygen, and release some bubbles. The bubbles will rush to the breach, pointing them out to the crew. The crew will grab an emergency hull patch (thoughtfully affixed near all external hull walls) and seal the breach. A more advanced alternative to bubbles are "plug-ups" or "tag-alongs". These are plastic bubbles full of helium and liquid sealing plastic. The helium is enough to give them neutral buoyancy, so they have no strong tendency to rise or sink. They fly to the breach, pop, and plug it with quick setting goo. Much to the relief of the crew caught in the same room with the breach when the automatic bulkheads slammed shut.
Now you have some breathing space to break out the arc welder and apply a proper patch.
The emergency hull patches are metal discs. They look like saucepan covers with a rubber flange around the edge. They will handle a breach up to six inches in diameter. Never slap them over the breach, place it on the hull next to the breach and slide it over. Once over the breach, air pressure will hold it in place until you can make more permanent repairs.
Assuming [rocket3Notes.html#terra Terra]-normal pressure and density inside, and zero pressure outside, the effective speed of the air whistling out the breach works out to a smidgen under 400 m/sec. Veteran rocketeers, vacationing on Terra, tend to have a momentary panic if they feel the wind. Their instincts tell them there is a hull breach.
∂m/∂t = A * sqrt( 2 * P * rho )
where
∂m/∂t = the rate (mass per unit time) at which air leaks into vacuum
A = Area of the hole it's leaking through
P = Pressure inside the room far from the hole
rho = density inside the room far from the hole
More simply, assuming Terra-normal pressure and density,
whooshTime = ( gaspFactor * vol) / holeArea
where
gaspFactor = 1.4 for 80% pressure, 4.3 for 50% pressure, 29 for 1% pressure.
whooshTime = time for cabin pressure to drop to specified fraction of initial value (seconds)
vol = volume of air in the cabin (yards3)
holeArea = area of the breach (inch2)
(equation from GURPS:Lensman)
So if a posh passenger cabin of 20 cubic yards has a one square inch hole blown in the bulkhead by a wayward meteor, the inhabitants have an entire 86 seconds (about a minute and a half) before the atmospheric pressure drops to one-half.
Somebody in a [rocket3m.html space suit] doesn't have that kind of time. The suit has a volume of approximately 0.03 cubic yards. A hole a quarter inch in diameter has a hole area of 0.05 square inches. As long as the suit's air tanks can keep up the loss the pressure won't drop. But once the tanks are empty, the pressure will drop by one-half in a mere 2.4 seconds.
So, will crewpeople in a combat spacecraft do their fighting in space suits? Probably not, for the same reason that crewpeople in combat submarines do not do their fighting while wearing scuba gear. The gear is bulky, confining, and tiring to wear. They will not wear it even though in both cases the vessel is surrounded by stuff you cannot breath.
Instead, the ship's pressurized inhabitable section will be divided into individual sections by bulkheads, and the connecting airtight hatches will be shut. The air pressure might be lowered a bit.
You can see why some spacecraft opt for an internal atmosphere with lower than Terra-normal pressure, increasing the percentage of oxygen to compensate. The lower the pressure, the slower the air will escape through a meteor hole. NASA uses Terra-normal pressure (14.7 psi) inside the Space Shuttle, but only 0.29 pressure (4.5 psi) with pure oxygen in the space suits. This means the astronauts have to prebreathe pure oxygen before putting on their suits or they will suffer from the bends (in case of emergency, where there is no time to prebreathe, NASA directs the astronauts to gulp asprin, so they can work in spite of the agonizing pain). A large enough hull breach could also drop the air pressure enough to inflict the bends on any unlucky crew members in the room. According to NASA, an astronaut wearing a Shuttle space suit can survive 22 minutes with a 1/8" hole.
This does raise a new problem. There is a chance that the high-oxygen atmosphere will allow a meteor to ignite a fire inside the suit. There isn't a lot of research on this, but NASA seems to think that the main hazard is a fire enlarging the diameter of the breach, not an astronaut-shaped ball of flame.
The increased fire risk is one reason why NASA isn't fond of low-pressure/high oxygen atmospheres in the spacecraft proper. There are other problems as well, the impossibility of air-cooling electronic components and the risk of long-term health problems being two. As a compromise, if the spacecraft pressure was 12 psi, the rocketeer can use an 8 psi space suit with no prebreathing required, and only half the prebreathe time required for a 4.5 psi suit. Setting up the optimal breathable atmosphere is complicated.
A more annoying than serious problem with low pressure atmospheres is the fact that they preclude hot beverages and soups. It is impossible to heat water to a temperature higher than the local boiling point. And the lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point. You may have seen references to this in the directions on certain packaged foods, the "high altitude" directions. The temperature can be increased if one uses a pressure cooker, but safety inspectors might ask if it is worth having a potentially explosive device onboard a spacecraft just so you can have hot coffee.
From FARMER IN THE SKY by Robert Heinlein. 1950.
Suddenly I heard the goldarnest noise I ever heard in my life. It sounded like a rifle going off right by my ear, it sounded like a steel door being slammed, and it sounded like a giant tearing yards and yards of cloth, all at once.
Then I couldn't hear anything but a ringing in my ears and I was dazed. I shook my head and looked down and I was staring at a raw hole in the ship, almost between my feet and nearly as big as my fist.
There was scorched insulation around it and in the middle of the hole I could see blackness - then a star whipped past and I realized that I was staring right out into space.
There was a hissing noise.
I don't remember thinking at all. I just wadded up my uniform, squatted down, and stuffed it in the hole. For a moment it seemed as if the suction would pull it on through the hole, then it jammed and stuck and didn't go any further. But we were still losing air. I think that was the point at which I first realized that we were losing air and that we might be suffocated in vacuum.
There was somebody yelling and screaming behind me that he was killed and alarm bells were going off all over the place. You couldn't hear yourself think. The air-tight door to our bunk room slid across automatically and settled into its gaskets and we were locked in.
That scared me to death.
I know it has to be done. I know that it is better to seal off one compartment and kill the people who are in it than to let a whole ship die - but, you see, I was in that compartment, personally. I guess I'm just not the hero type.
I could feel the pressure sucking away at the plug my uniform made. With one part of my mind I was recalling that it had been advertised as "tropical weave, self ventilating" and wishing that it had been a solid plastic rain coat instead. I was afraid to stuff it in any harder, for fear it would go all the way through and leave us sitting there, chewing vacuum. I would have passed up desserts for the next ten years for just one rubber patch, the size of my hand.
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A NASA technician said "If you treat vacuum as you would poison gas you won't go far wrong. And anybody who's seen 2001 A Space Odyssey knows that a human exposed to vacuum isn't going to pop like a balloon. Dr. Geoffrey Landis has an analysis here. Executive Summary: You would survive about a ninety seconds, you wouldn't explode, you would remain conscious for about ten seconds. So in an emergency a crew member can join the Vacuum Breather's Club, just like David Bowman. But be careful of sunburn. There are some more links on the topic of explosive decompression here |
From Babylon-5: "And Now For A Word". Dr. Franklin relates a tragic experience.
"You know what the folks back home don't understand, the ones who've never left Earth, is just how dangerous space can be. Aside from incidents like this, just the everyday reality of living your days and nights in a big tin can surrounded by a vacuum."
"I remember my first time on a transport, on the Moon-Mars run. I was just a kid, maybe seventeen. A buddy of mine was messing around, and zipping through the halls, and he hid in one of the airlocks. I don't know, I guess he was gonna try to scare us or something, I don't know... But just as I got close, he must have hit the wrong button because the air doors slammed shut, the space doors opened, and he... just flew out into space."
"And the one thing they never tell you is that you don't die instantly in vacuum. He just hung there against the black like a puppet with his strings all tangled up... or one of those old cartoons where you run off the edge of the cliff and your legs keep going."
"You could see that he was trying to breathe, but there was nothing. The one thing I remember when they pulled in his body... his eyes were frozen."
"A lot of people make jokes about spacing somebody, about shoving somebody out an airlock -- I don't think it's funny. Never will."
On a related note, forced ventilation in the spacecraft's lifesystem is not optional. In free fall, the warm exhaled carbon dioxide will not rise away from your face. It will just collect in a cloud around your head until you pass out or suffocate. In Arthur C. Clarke's ISLANDS IN THE SKY the apprentices play a practical joke on the main character using this fact and a common match. All of the atmospheric controls will be on the [rocket3p.html#lifesupport life support deck].
And yes, on Skylab, the area around the the air vent got pretty disgusting quite quickly, as all the floating food particles and assorted dirt from the entire space station got sucked in. In some SF novels the slang name for the air vents is "The Lost and Found Department."
From On the Trail of Space Pirates by Carey Rockwell (1953) a Tom Corbett Space Cadet book
The Avenger had long since disappeared and Tom was left alone in space in the tiny jet boat. To conserve his oxygen supply, the curly-haired cadet had set the controls of his boat on a steady orbit around one of the larger asteroids and lay down quietly on the deck. One of the first lessons he had learned at Space Academy was, during an emergency in space when oxygen was low, to lie down and breath as slowly as possible. And, if possible, to go to sleep. Sleep, under such conditions, served two purposes. While relaxed in sleep, the body used less oxygen and should help fail to arrive, the victim would slip into a suffocating unconsciousness, not knowing if and when death took the place of life.