In the beginning of the project, Matt, Hunter, and I had begun our research. Our top priority was to reduce the cost of spaceflight by a large margin. We discovered that it costs around $20,200 to put one kilogram of mass into orbit around Earth. That is obviously not very affordable for the average person. To put that into perspective, it would cost $3,030,000 to put a 150 kilogram person into space. And that is not including the cost o the rocket, launch pad, or fuel, each resulting in a grand total of $18 billion.
We learned many new interesting facts about space travel we hadn't known before such as the kinds of fuel used by various space programs; government and private, and the different materials the space programs use when developing their rockets. We think that we may have been able to devise a plan to reduce the overall cost of getting around in space. The plan we have will cost a lot of money and funding in the short term, but will eventually start to make us money and be more profitable in the long term. We plan to construct large fuel tanks in low-Earth orbit, then would have refueling trips from Earth to space, either when the tanks are running low, or some sort of set frequency. We would then construct relatively large spacecraft in orbit which would not be built to return to the Earth's surface, but could feature a kind of orbital rendezvous from the ground to the space craft for crew, cargo, or emergency fuel. The space craft could then launch off to other celestial bodies in the solar system such as the Moon, Mars, or Jupiter and its moons. We don't currently have a plan for funding but aim to potentially sell the idea to NASA or SpaceX for them to use. |
One thing I noticed that didn't go to well, was the complication of the issue we were attempting to get into, for example: Figuring out the cost of the fuel we needed for our main fuel tank that matched our preferred volume was a very difficult task. We eventually dropped that task due to it costing us too much valuable time.
One thing that went fairly well was the use of the game "Kerbal Space Program" to simulate how our system would function in a realistic environment using real physics and engineering laws. The demonstration was successful, but we couldn't use the exact dimensions we planned to implement due to it being just a game and not being able to get that complex within the game. A problem that we noticed was when our group was researching information for the project, our research wasn't very planned out out, so some of us started getting duplicate research, so we started to give each other specific topics to gather information. I noticed that this time, my leadership went up a great deal due to me taking more initiative and also having previous knowledge on the subject. Next time, I plan on improving my planning when it comes to research and design, there wasn't too much of that. It was a lot of thinking as we went. Of the 10 steps in the Engineering Design Cycle, we began with identifying our need. We decided on researching the possibility of making space exploration much easier and cheaper than it currently is. We did some fairly conclusive research on the subject as you can see above. Many of the websites we obtained our research from were mostly reliable websites like NASA's official website and other scientific research websites. We then got to developing some possible solutions like the one above, we weighed their pros and cons of our plan and found it to be pretty viable, not financially for us however. We built and tested a model of our design in the game Kerbal Space Program. We went through some redesign phases for our rocket model, then eventually settle on our latest version. |