Habitat 2 | Zand Space

Orbital Habitat
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Based on the famous Stanford Torus. The original Stanford Torus was designed to accommodate approximately 10,000 people. As with the original concept, the idea is for this to be a permanent colony in space. It is home to the people who would build and maintain an array of solar-power-satellites.

Sunlight and the Mirror Systems
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Other similarities with the Stanford Torus are the mirror systems used to direct sunlight into the colony. The primary sun-mirror is a disc approximately 2km in diameter composed of aluminium coated mylar film, or similar material. The mirror directs sunlight to the secondary “conical” mirror array. The conical mirrors are composed of panels that can be tilted to direct light away or towards the inner surface of the colony, in order to simulate the night-day cycle. By varying the day length, seasons can be simulated as well.

Radiation Shielding
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One major design factor is radiation shielding. For that reason the colony is positioned edge-on to the sun, to place as much mass between solar-radiation/cosmic-particles and the inhabitants as possible. The original Stanford Torus calls for a non-rotating ring of shield material (lunar/asteroid rock and slag) encompassing the rotating habitat ring. The necessary shield amount for
that design was in the order of 10 megatons which made it too massive to rotate at the correct rate. It would fly apart due to structural stresses produced by rotation. Therefore the shield would need to be rotated slower, or not at all.

This design would need somewhat more shielding since it is larger, probably approaching 30 megatons or more. I chose not to illustrate the shield-ring, for “artistic” purposes. If enough people want it visualised, I’ll add it 🙂

CREDITS
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MUSIC TRACK
Synergy/Orbital – Generated by Cyberlink Smartsound (PowerDirector4)
Licensed under the SmartSound Royalty Free Music License
http://www.smartsound.com/support/licenseinfo/

Rights Granted
You are authorized to:
* Monetize any SmartSound music, validly purchased by you, in any video displayed on the Internet, including video-sharing websites. Monetize is hereby defined as the sharing of advertising revenues by the video-sharing website with persons or entities that post videos on the video-sharing website.

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3d Software – Imagine for Windows by Impulse (http://www.imagine3d.org/)
Video Editing- Cyberlink Powerdirector, VirtualDub

References
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Colonies In Space by
T. A. Heppenheimer- http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html

Space Settlements- http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/

Textures
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http://www.cgtextures.com/

July 2009

*CENTRIPETAL is the correct term for the force, as opposed to CENTRIFUGAL which is often mistakenly used to describe the ‘force’ at work here.

Space is exciting