And here’s the article by David Chato on Cryo Fluid Management flight testing:
http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2006/TM-2006-214261.pdf
http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2006/TM-2006-214262.pdf

Hope you find those interesting,

~Jon

Thanks for the links — great scans of the original Bonestell figures from von Braun’s articles!

Thanks for the comment.

” the ISS, is it really the best place to be doing propellant depot related research? ”

Perhaps not, but I’m not arguing that it is. I’m saying that there are exploration-related engineering research tasks that can be done on the ISS and station should be part of the effort to extend human reach beyond LEO. We have this superb instrument for microgravity research already in orbit; it should be used. And it can be useful.

The ISS currently has a lot of potentially hazardous materials and configurations (virtually all spacecraft do). I’m confident that procedures and protocols for safe handling of cryogenic liquids could be developed.

Please feel free to link to any studies and web pages you think are relevant.

~Jon

I’ve been involved with some of the people doing research in the field, and there are some other routes for testing orbital Cryo Fluid Management (CFM) stuff that are worth mentioning. The Centaur guys at United Launch Alliance have a concept they’ve developed a bit called the Centaur Test Bed, which they’ve written some AIAA papers on in the past. The idea is to have a secondary payload on the Centaur that takes unused propellants from the Centaur after the primary payload is delivered. They’ve also got some other interesting related approaches in the works.

There’s always the possibility of using suborbital RLVs to do shorter-duration experiments. There’s actually some history in the past of using suborbital vehicles to test out Cryogenic Fluid Management techniques. David Chato of NASA Glenn had a good paper on the topic. I’m biased on that last approach, since it’s one we’ve proposed in the past.

~Jonathan Goff