I remember when many folks were getting used to the idea that space travel wasn’t just science fiction. Some apparently still haven’t gotten the memo, but others have been developing new technologies. Like inflatable space stations.
I’ll be talking about that, and how I see getting back on the road to the stars.
- Building Better Habitats: Basket-Weave, and Now: Isotensoids?
- Perceived Impossibilities and Being Human
Building Better Habitats: Basket-Weave, and Now: Isotensoids?
Space habitats like Salyut, Almaz, Skylab, and the ISS, aren’t new.
As an idea, inflatable habitats go back at least to 1961. That’s when Goodyear designed and built a prototype concept station. It looked like an inner tube, and was never flown into orbit.
Fast-forward to 2016. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module was docked to the ISS for a two-year test. It’s still up there, currently being used for storage.
Fast-forward again, and a startup called Max Space has what they think is a better, safer, and less expensive design for inflatable space habitats.
I haven’t found much about Max Space, apart from what’s in a TechCrunch article. No surprises there. Max Space is a very new company, run by folks who have been pretty much off the radar.
I did, however, finally learn what “MARS” in “the prestigious Amazon MARS 2024 event” (probably) stands for: “Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Space”.
I’m not sure why MARS is so low-profile. Maybe it’s the sort of thing only tech nerds find interesting, maybe it’s the Amazon connection.1 I don’t know.
At any rate, that’s what got me started this week. That, and an 18th century mathematician who did some of the science behind airplanes and rocket engines.
“…strong, simple, and safe….”
Instead of ferreting out background on Max Space and their new habitat tech, I’ll let Aaron Kemmer and Maxim de Jong do the talking.
“Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026”
“Super-strong and ‘stupidly simple'”
Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch (July 27, 2024)“…[Maxim de] Jong, through his company Thin Red Line Aerospace, worked successfully with Bigelow Aerospace to develop and launch this basket-weave structure, but he had his doubts from the start about the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps, and interactions. A tiny irregularity could lead to a cascading failure even well below safety thresholds.
“‘I looked at all these straps, and as a field guy I was thinking, this is a cluster. As soon as you’re over or under pressure, you don’t know what percentage of the load is going to be transferred in one direction or another,’ he said. ‘I never found a solution for it.’
“He was quick to add that the people working on basket-weave designs today (primarily at Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin) are extremely competent and have clearly advanced the tech far beyond what it was in the early 2000s, when Bigelow’s pioneering expandable habitats were built and launched. (Genesis I and II are still in orbit today after 17 years, and the BEAM habitat has been attached to the ISS since 2016.)
“But mitigation isn’t a solution. Although basket-weave, with its flight heritage and extensive testing, has remained unchallenged as the method of choice for expandables, the presence of a suboptimal design somewhere in the world haunted De Jong, in the way such things always haunt engineers. Surely there was a way to do this that was strong, simple, and safe….”
I’m not convinced that Aaron Kemmer was the best lead narrator for this video. Particularly not in combination with the topic-appropriate background music.
On the other hand, he’s a Max Space founder and someone with expertise in this field. Plus, I was born during the Truman administration, so my idea of ‘best narrative voice’ may be outdated.
Next, the TechCrunch article’s introduction to these two engineering entrepreneurs; then a (very) quick look inflatable habitats in general and the Max Space prototype in particular.
Expandable Habitats and Max Space
“…The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxim de Jong, an engineer who has studiously avoided the limelight despite being the co-creator of expandable habitats like the one currently attached to the International Space Station.
“They believe that the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure is due to arrive any year now. By positioning themselves as a successor to — and fundamental improvement on — the decades-old designs being pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market….”
“Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026” “Super-strong and ‘stupidly simple'” , Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch (July 27, 2024)
I found a fair number of references to Aaron Kemmer online, but they were mostly podcasts, social media accounts, and the like. Since I’m not sure how to evaluate resources like that, I’m moving on.
New Technology Built on Old Ideas
Inflatable habitats look good for orbital, lunar and other uses. That’s because they’ll squeeze into comparatively small packages for launch, and that means less aerodynamic stress on the way up.
One of these days I may talk about how inflatables like now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 — I’ve put links in the footnotes — are more than just expensive balloons.
But not today. It’s been one of those weeks, and I’m keeping this (fairly) short.
Basically, if folks are going to live and work in a habitat — inflatable or otherwise — it must keep their air in, radiation out, and give some protection from meteorites and debris.
And that brings me to what Maxim de Jong said about “basket-weave” design for inflatable habitats and transferring load/stress. Which puzzled me.
I’d gathered that an advantage of designs that spread stress along a structure’s surface — predictably or not — was that they spread stress along the surface.
And that an advantage of shapes like geodesic domes is that stress at one point gets shared out to a larger part of the structure fast, lowering the odds that something will break.2
I see how a habitat where stress spreads along one axis is lighter than one with a more complex design. But: well, I’m no engineer.
Maybe stress that doesn’t run along the tension lines doesn’t matter, when we’re looking at stress resulting from differing pressures.
Maxim de Jong got his idea from looking at Mylar ‘get well’ balloons — his son was in the hospital, I don’t know more it than was in that TechCrunch article.
Being an engineer, he saw that all of the stress was along one axis. Then, when he dug into literature on the idea, de Jong found an 18th century mathematician’s research.
Perceived Impossibilities and Being Human
The TechCrunch article mentions isotensoids in that diagram’s caption:
“A figure from Bernoulli’s 1694 ‘Curvatura Laminae Elasticae’ showing the isotensoid in principle (De Jong tells me).”
“Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026” “Super-strong and ‘stupidly simple'” , Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch (July 27, 2024)
I didn’t find Bernoulli’s “Curvatura Laminae Elasticae” online. But I did find his diagram used, as Figure 5 in Raph Levien’s “The elastica: a mathematical history”.3
My quest for a simple explanation for what “isotensoid” means finally led me to this:
“…The isotensoid is a spheroidal shape that carries stress only in one direction under uniform internal pressure….”
(“Structural mechanics of lobed inflatable structures” ; Andrew Lennon, Sergio Pellegrino; Proceedings of the European Conference on Spacecraft Structures, Materials and Mechanical Testing (2015) via NASA/ADS/Harvard)
Which I could have gotten from the TechCrunch article’s discussion, but I like to verify what I read.
That habit sometimes pays off. Or at least sends me down interesting rabbit holes.
The TechCrunch article said that Bernoulli was a French mathematician, which may be accurate; although I gather that the Bernoulli family started in Belgium, unless they’re part of a Dutch family of Italian ancestry.
Actually, that part of Belgium was part of the Spanish Netherlands, and the family moved to Frankfurt am Main/Frankfurt for their health. I’ve talked about religion-themed propaganda during Europe’s turf wars before.
These Bernoullis ended up in Switzerland and were mainly famous for being math whizzes.
French? Well, they spent a fair amount of time near France, I’d settle for “European”, and that’s another topic or three.
I’d known about Daniel Bernoulli because of Bernoulli’s principle, an idea in fluid dynamics that the faster a fluid flows, the lower its pressure. That’s sort of related to the Venturi effect,4 and the reason many rocket engines look a little like Coke bottles.
New Ideas, Old Reactions
Last year I talked about a very earnest op-ed piece entitled “Human Beings Will Never Permanently Colonize Mars or Even the Moon” , with an equally-earnest subtitle: “Billionaires are destroying Earth for a childish fantasy”.5
I’ll agree that we don’t, right now, have the equivalent of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station or McMurdo Station on Earth’s moon. But permanent settlements in Antarctica are a recent development.
Until the 19th century, we didn’t have the tech and interests needed to see living and working in Antarctica as a good idea. Folks have been born and have died there since then, but nobody’s been born and died in Antarctica. Yet. I figure it’s just a matter of time before our “bases” become “towns”.6
It wasn’t until the 1960s that we could send people to the Moon at all. And it’s only recently that we’ve made definite plans for going back: setting up a long-term presence this time.
Saying that human beings will “never” live and work on the Moon or Mars sounds like “if God had wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings” — an ‘old saying’ I ran into it quite a bit in my youth.
Back then, it was given as an example of how newfangled ideas upset some folks.
I tried tracking down the ‘God would have given him wings’ saying this week, and learned that it’s been mentioned in news articles off and on, at least recently.
What a Bishop Didn’t Say, and the Wright Brothers’ Mother
The story goes that the Wright brother’s father said “if God had wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings” in a sermon, after reading about Otto Lilienthal’s fatal crash.
It’s a good story, with the drama of a distraught father striving to save his sons from impending doom. And it fits neatly into my culture’s assumptions about Christians, science, and new ideas.
There’s just one problem. There’s apparently no evidence backing it up.
“…Bishop Milton Wright was the first official professor of theology in that church, as well as a missionary to Oregon, a pastor in Indiana and an editor, according to [the Rev. Dr. John H.] Ness [Jr]. He was elected a bishop in 1877 and again in 1885, but led in a split of the church in 1889 and became the first bishop and publishing agent of the United Brethren (Old Constitution). The split was largely over the issue of churchmen as members of secret organizations, which Wright opposed.
“Dr. Ness said he could find no evidence anywhere that Bishop Wright had said, as has often been reported, that ‘if God had wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings.’ Instead, he said, the bishop’s pride in his sons’ accomplishments shows up strongly in his journals. However, he added, Orville and Wilbur apparently got most of their skills and advice from their mother, who knew both how to draw and to use mechanical tools….”
(Full text of “North Carolina Christian advocate [serial].” Vol. 114, No. 27 (July 10, 1969) Duke University Library; Greensboro, North Carolina; Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014) [emphasis mine]
What that North Carolina Christian Advocate story said about the Wright brothers’ mother reminded me of this household. My wife’s the one with a degree in computer science, many of the tools our son uses came from her, and that’s yet another topic.
Maybe it was some other bishop who added the “if God had wanted man to fly” saying to our folklore.
Given what I’ve noticed about human nature, I’d be surprised if someone, somewhere, hadn’t said something along the lines of “…would have given him wings”.
Here’s another example of the ‘it is new, therefore it is impossible’ attitude:
“…His Plan Is Not Original
That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools….”
(“A Severe Strain on Credulity”, The New York Times; page 12, column 5 (January 13, 1920) via Wikisource)
I was going somewhere with this. Let me think. Space habitats. New ideas. An 18th century mathematician, the Wright brothers, and Goddard’s rocket experiments. Right.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
I don’t miss the Sixties. For one thing, I sincerely don’t want to be a teenager again: once was quite enough.
But I wouldn’t mind if more of us remembered how folks around the world watched humanity’s “one small step”.
A thousand years from now, I strongly suspect that our first Moon landing will be remembered. Maybe not remembered well: but remembered more than the Dominican Civil War, Congo Crisis, or even the Beatles.
The Space Race was arguably part of the Cold War.7
But I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t the geopolitical ramifications of America’s human spaceflight program that got the attention of so many people.
I think many were getting excited about the Apollo 11 landing because they recognized a unique historical event when they saw it.
I know I was excited.
Partly because I’m an American, and it’s nice when my country’s government gets something right.
But mostly because I realized that before the Eagle landed, nobody from Earth had ever walked on another world. That made the event unique.
A half-century later, I’m glad that humanity has finally gotten around to planning a return to the Moon: and that my country has a significant share in that effort.
What’s Next?
A question that’s implicit in statements like “if God had wanted man to fly” and “Billionaires are destroying Earth for a childish fantasy” is — should we try building airplanes or spaceships?
It’s not a silly question.
From some viewpoints, serious-minded folks should spend their days brooding on the futility of it all and humanity’s utter depravity — while striving to make everyone drop what they’re doing and join in the high-minded misery.
In my youth, I didn’t see the point of a rabidly-religious version of that viewpoint. I’m no great fan of the secular equivalent that’s become fashionable.
There’s a (very) little truth behind the attitude.
Scientific research and how we use technology have ethical angles. We’ve got brains and should think about what we do. Whether we decide to help or harm each other matters. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, , 1723, 1730-1738, 2292-2296, 2493-2499)
Good grief. I talked about this a couple months back:
“…Truth matters, both in science and in faith. (Catechism, 31, 159, and more)
“God is the source of all truth. (Catechism, 2465)
Since all truth points toward God, both studying God’s creation and taking God seriously isn’t a problem. (Catechism, 27, 31-35, 41, 74, 282-289, 293-294, 341, 1723, 2294, 2500)…”
(“Science, Religion, and Saying Goodbye to the 19th Century” > Thinking is Not a Sin (May 25, 2024)
Okay. A few more points, and I’m done for this week.
We’re pretty hot stuff: “little less than a god”, as it says in Psalms. But God is large and in charge; and that’s not going to change, no matter how much we learn, or how far we go.
“Indeed, before you the whole universe is like a grain from a balance,
or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.
“But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things;
and you overlook sins for the sake of repentance.”
(Wisdom 11:22–23)“When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
“Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.
“You have given him rule over the works of your hands,
put all things at his feet:”
(Psalms 8:4–7)
If it was a question of either acting like our neighbors matter, or getting back on the road to the stars,8 I’d say the universe can wait until we solve all of humanity’s problems.
But I think we can both work on humanity’s massive backlog of unresolved issues and start living on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
God’s universe is calling us. If this generation doesn’t answer, another will.
More of my take on life, the universe, and being human:
- “Starliner, Dream Chaser, and Beyond: The Sky is Not the Limit”
(June 8, 2024) - “Commercial Space Services and Changing Times”
(April 29, 2023) - “Snow Cruiser, Moon Buggies, Mars Tractors”
(March 4, 2023) - “The Mars Mission That Hasn’t Happened Yet: 1954”
(October 15, 2022) - “‘One Small Step’ in a Long Journey”
(July 20, 2019)
1 Research, technology, and business:
- Wikipedia
- Amazon (company)
- Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (AKA BEAM: Bigelow Expandable Activity Module)
- Jeff Bezos
- Inflatable space habitat
- Space station
- “Entrepreneur Spotlight: Revolute Robotics’ Historic Achievement at Amazon MARS 2024”
Entrepreneur Spotlight, Startup Tucson (July 15, 2024) - “Max Space Utilizes ALUULA Material for Space Habitat Construction”
From ALUULA Composites, Reviewed by Lexie Corner, AZO Materials (April 26, 2024) - “Where’s my jetpack? Check Amazon’s MARS meeting”
Alan Boyle, Cosmic Log (March 31, 2022) - Max Space “Sets the Standard
for Inflatable Space Habitats”
2 Space stations and engineering:
- Wikipedia
- B330 (cancelled)
- Bigelow Aerospace (“This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia’s layout guidelines….) (founded 1998, defunct 2020)
- Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (AKA BEAM: Bigelow Expandable Activity Module)
- Genesis I (Bigelow Aerospace, launched 2016)
- Inflatable space habitat
- TransHab
- NASA
- “Integration of Advanced Structures and Materials Technologies for a Robust Lunar Habitat” ; Lauren Bowling, NASA NIFS Intern; Bryce Horvath, Aerospace Engineer; Christopher Wohl, Senior Research Materials Engineer; NASA Langley Research Center (2020)
- “Review of Habitable Softgoods Inflatable Design, Analysis, Testing, and Potential Space Applications” ; Gerard Valle, Doug Litteken, Thomas C. Jones; NASA Langley Research Center (2019)
- “Inflatable technology: using flexible materials to make large structures” , Douglas A. Litteken, NASA Johnson Space Center (2019) (Manned Spacecraft Center, renamed Johnson Space Center in 1973 [Wikipedia]; reamed Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo in 2024 [“NASA marks moon landing anniversary by dedicating building to ‘women of Apollo’” , Robert Z. Pearlman, MSN (July 2024)] )
- “Structural Certification of Human-Rated Inflatable Space Structures” , Thomas C. Jones, NASA Langley Research Center (2018)
- “Steel ribbed dome structural performance with different node connections and bracing system”
Katarzyna Jeleniewicz, Jacek Jaworski, Mariusz Żółtowski, Izabela Uziębło, Anna Stefańska, Saurav Dixit; Scientific Reports – Nature (2024) via PMC PubMed Central
3 Recent discussion of old research:
- “The elastica: a mathematical history”
©Raph Levien, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley, Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2008-103 (August 23, 2008)
4 Mathematicians, miscellania, and me:
- Wikipedia
- Antwerp
- Basel
- Bernoulli family
- Bernoulli’s principle
- Daniel Bernoulli (the “Mathematical work” section “…needs additional citations for verification….”)
- de Laval nozzle
- Elastica theory
- Fluid mechanics
- Frankfurt
- Spanish Netherlands
- Venturi effect (“This article’s lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points….” That happens a lot with science stuff)
- Reasons I like being Catholic, and do not miss the ‘good old days’:
5 Tech changes; some attitudes don’t:
- “Snow Cruiser, Moon Buggies, Mars Tractors” (March 4, 2023)
6 Living and working in Antarctica:
- Wikipedia
- As I see it, humanity’s first landing on another world was and is a big deal:
- “Apollo 11, 50 Years Later” (July 16, 2019)
8 One of many intriguing ideas:
- Wikipedia
- NASA
- “Mach Effects for In-Space Propulsion: Interstellar Mission“, Final Report — NIAC Phase II (August 20, 2020)
- “Mach Effect for In Space Propulsion: Interstellar Mission” (March 30, 2018)
- Woodward Effect (AKA a Mach effect)
handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:Woodward_effect, via Scholarly Community Encyclopedia
