Space company Orbital Assembly has presented a project for the Voyager station. It is expected that it will become the first orbital station with artificial gravity.
What is Voyager?
Voyager is a huge ring, 200 meters in diameter, that constantly rotates rapidly to create an artificial force of gravity comparable to that of the moon.
You may have seen similar projects in science fiction films. For example, in Interstellar. This is not surprising: this concept of ships was invented by Wernher von Braun, a famous scientist, the founder of modern rocketry. He is also called the father of the American space program.
Voyager will consist of 24 habitable modules, the size of which will be 20 × 12 meters. The station will accommodate up to 400 people. Thus, Voyager should become the largest artificial structure in orbit. It will be located at an altitude of 500-550 km.
What is there now?
At the moment, Orbital Assembly has only problems. For example, the cost of delivering cargo into orbit. The Falcon 9 spacecraft has reduced the cost of lifting 1 kg to $2,000. With the estimated mass of the Voyager Station at 2,418 tons, Orbital Assembly will need nothing more than about $5 billion just to lift all the materials needed for construction.
Of course, the SpaceX Starship will reduce the cost of 1 kg to several hundred dollars, but the amount will still be large. And you still need money for development and maintenance of the station. And I did not mention that Voyager should have a prototype. It will be similar to Voyager in the shape of a ring, but its diameter will be 61 meters.
In January, the company began raising money by issuing 4 million shares at an early stage of investment at a price of 25 cents apiece. They were sold on Netcapital . It is not hard to guess that they raised $1 million from this sale. Considering that Netcapital took some money for renting the site, the amount becomes less. So the math does not add up yet.
The lack of even a rough estimate of how much money is needed to launch Voyager adds to the problem: the goal of “building a station” sounds good, but you need to understand what needs to be done financially to achieve this.
And I haven’t even started asking questions about self-sufficiency! I haven’t even started asking why Orbital Assembly hasn’t been covered in any major media outlets, and why its Twitter followers don’t include a single verified account with any connection to the space industry – there’s only one follower with a check mark: TV series actor Timothy V. Murphy.
That is, Orbital Assembly has problems with mathematics and problems with the media field.
Plans
The ring, which is supposed to be a prototype, will be assembled in orbit in just three days, but before that, two to three years will be spent on its creation. And, apparently, the development is already underway, since it has been announced that Voyager itself will begin to be built as early as 2025.
And after Voyager, the plans are even more ambitious – Gateway Station, which can become a transit point for long-distance space travel, a repair station, and so on. It should already accommodate 1,400 people:
Will this ever be implemented? With the advent of Starship, it is possible. But in general, it is very hard to believe in the implementation of this project. Orbital Assembly looks like another space startup, behind which there are only renders. This reminds me of the Mars One project, which I wrote about a year ago:
Such space startups play on the feelings of people who dream of space: for more than 50 years, flights beyond the Earth have been carried out, but they are available only to a select group of people. The average person will not see space. And there is no particular hope that flights will become something affordable. Currently, tickets for ships of real space startups, behind which are billionaires Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), cost about 200-250 thousand dollars.