An arm of the Defense Department wants ideas for a future robotic space station. The Orbital Outpost would support the military’s fleet of space satellites, conduct experiments, and even someday expand to support humans. Don’t get too excited about the human aspect: the first iteration will have an internal volume smaller than a camping tent.

The Defense Innovation Unit is an arm of the Pentagon, growing companies with big, defense-related ideas. The DIU, which describes itself as “a fast-moving government entity that provides recurring revenue to companies to solve national security problems," has invested in companies both small and large in technologies such as internet security, robotics, communications, unmanned systems, computing, additive manufacturing, and space technologies.

The DIU’s next big idea is the Orbital Outpost. According to the DIU’s industry solicitation , the Orbital Outpost must be a self-contained facility “capable of supporting space assembly, microgravity experimentation, logistics and storage, manufacturing, training, test and evaluation, hosting payloads, and other functions."

The Pentagon wants the outpost to include a common berthing mechanism for orbital docking, the ability to assemble things in space using robotic arms, the ability to link up with other or similar outposts, the ability to be resupplied in space, and radiation hardening. Finally, as Breaking Defense pointed out , the outpost should be “human rated”—that is, capable of supporting human habitation.

Don’t get too excited about Orbital Outpost becoming a manned space station. The station will have an internal volume of just one cubic meter. That’s a little smaller than a 3x3x4-foot enclosure. So maybe a space station for David Blaine, but pretty much no one else.

The Orbital Outpost will also have a payload capacity of 80 kilograms (176 pounds), a one kilowatt power supply, and be pressurized to 0 to 1 atmospheres. The satellite would be capable of digital communications of at least 100 kilobits per second, or about 12k per second (by comparison, a three minute mp3 is about 3,000k.) That’s not a lot of throughput, but as a robotic outpost its bandwidth needs are small.

Breaking Defense points out that there is nothing in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to prohibit a military space station—manned or umanned—so it’s all systems go from a legal standpoint.

Source: Breaking Defense

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