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Blue Ring Spacecraft Platform Concept From Blue Origin
The Blue Ring is a spacecraft platform concept from aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company Blue Origins. Blue Ring is being designed to provide a foundation for diverse payloads, scientific missions, and even crewed flights.
(Blue Origin Unveils Spacecraft Platform Blue Ring)
One of the most significant features of Blue Ring is the level of customization it offers to clients. Space missions often have unique needs, and a one-size-fits-all approach can be limiting and uneconomical. Blue Ring’s modular design approach allows components to be swapped, upgraded, or reconfigured to meet the specific demands of each mission, increasing the platform’s lifespan and cost-effectiveness.While Blue Origin has not explicitly stated that Blue Ring will be used for crewed missions, the spacecraft platform’s adaptability suggests that it could easily be modified to carry astronauts. This possibility aligns with Blue Origin’s broader ambitions for human spaceflight and its ongoing development of the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets.
The phrase "space platform" was first used in a scary short story by E.B. White. The Morning of the Day They Did It was published in The New Yorker magazine in 1950.
We had arranged a radio hookup with the space platform, a gadget the Army had succeeded in establishing six hundred miles up, in the regions of the sky beyond the pull of gravity. The army, after many years of experimenting with rockets, had not only got the platform established but had sent two fellows there in a Spaceship, and also a liberal supply of the New Weapon.
(Read more about the space platform)
Here's another concept from about seventy years ago.
(A steel umbrella for Earth!)
This graphic came from an issue of Amazing Stories published in April of 1953, credited to artist Jack Coggins.
As long as we're working with science fiction (this is only a concept after all), let's go really big, like this lunar ring station from the 1997 film version of Starship Troopers:
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 12/9/2023)
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