Hawaii plays a very important role in NASA's space exploration. Mr. Rodrigo Romo, who is the Program Director of Pacific International Space Center for Exploration System (PISCES) in Hawaii, researching in-situ utilization of space materials. He was also a member of Biosphere 2 for space colonization.
We are thrilled having Mr. Romo on September 26, 2018, giving us a skype Q&A section.
He addressed that since 1969 we sent human to moon, we’ve already had the technology to send people onto a space object. The problem is we don’t have the technology to keep people living on the space object. How to build the habitats, how to solve the water and food problem.
Mr. Romo also talks about the Space Debris problem. There is the micro-satellite can bring the space junk back to earth. Some of the company use the expand Net might be solar fiber or carbon fiber. All the material should be light-weighted, radioactivity-resistance, wide-temperature range.
Mr. Romo also worked on the landing pad design. Since the Mars has a very thin atmosphere, the velocity of objects travel on Mars is faster than on earth. The Mars has sandy dust covering the sphere surface. When he design the landing pad, his first try to make a launch pad did not work, because the uneven layers of basalt(lava rock) were not even, and the hot gases from the exhaust to the mock spaceship streamed under the paving, and as the gas expanded, it ripped the pad apart. After further analysis and experiment, he found out using the thicker and heavier basalt to edge together will solve the problem.
Mr. Romo talks about the energy system in space travel. Energy system can be divided into two main problems. One is that create energy. Another is how to store energy. We mostly solve the first problem. The solutions as follows: First is solid/liquid fuel cell which is the chemical energy. Second, solar cell which uses photon particles which propelled the spacecraft. The second problem we still work on that. For example, using fuel cell to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and when we need energy, we burn the gas to get the energy. Another example, we make the huge rock to spinning around to store the kinetic energy.
By Shining