While waiting for the two 1600 mm “heat shields” being delivered to our facility I am still trying to work the overall geometry for space capsule Tycho Deep Space II. It’s a giant puzzle containing all subsystems such as parachutes, life support, electronics, reaction control, seating and hatch.
Especially the seat and hatch has been giving me headaches, but I believe I have found a solution providing better overall internal space, better room for hatch operation and optimized view to the outside world from the seat.
The 1600 mm diameter capsule provides enough room for an astronaut to lie down on his back in a kazbek seat like configuration (seat used in Soyuz capsules). In preliminary sketches the astronauts head was placed towards the hatch to ensure a correct upright sitting position after splashdown, with a hatch facing the sky, and for optimized acceleration countermeasure on the body.
Having the head towards the hatch also gave the astronaut a change for a poor glimpse of the outside world, when looking up. But the view is far from good and there was little room for operating the inwards opening hatch without seat/head collision.
The last couple of days I have been playing with seat orientation and angles while having acceleration impact, on the human body, in mind. Since we have low launch acceleration (1,7 g), slightly higher re-entry acceleration (estimated 5 g) you do not need to be completely on your bag. The splash down impact acceleration may be higher (5-10 g).
In a movement of rage I flipped and turned the seat in my Solidworks CAD model and suddenly I realized that most troubles regarding bad outlook, hatch/head collision was gone with the configuration sketched below.
Basically, I rotated the seat 180 degree and raised it app 45 degrees creating a direct view toward the hatch window and more space for hatch operation. The volume behind the seat can be used for various subsystems with the intention of having a slightly shifted center of mass forcing the capsule to roll towards the heavy side thus providing a hatch facing towards the sky combined with a good body orientation.
The various acceleration impacts, during the entire flight, still seems to be well within the tolerances of a human being when looking into the data.
So far, I will continue working with this sitting-up configuration and its time to perform a more detailed FEM analysis of the pressure hull leading towards laser cutting of all the part for construction.
The hatch will soon be undergoing a more detailed design process and I am still looking into the many suggestions, on this matter, from Wired readers around the world. Thanks a lot!
Tonight Copenhagen Suborbitals will hold our annual general meeting also voting "yes" or "no" about purchasing a SAR boat for supporting our operations at sea. I do hope for a yes. Some nights ago I had a bit of fun sketching the ship while pimping with Copenhagen Suborbitals colors. Fingers crossed.
Ad Astra
Kristian von Bengtson
