III. Miscellaneous Applications The majority of effort in the ’Tin Can* use of the ET has been spent in the area of habitable structures as discussed above. There are additional concepts to mention which include the use of the ET with inflatables, the ET as reentry and landing modules, and wake shields. A. Inflatables One of the proposed type applications involves inflatable structures (25, 95). As mentioned in another section, it has a large potential in a space operation. It is attractive to use inflatables with the ET/ACC because an inflatable is typically a low mass, large volume item. These structures could be used in conjunction with an ET to provide the interior of an ET based space station. They could be used to provide an orbital farm or growing facility. If it proves feasable to grow food in space, the work could be traded off against the $2,000 per pound launch costs for resupply from earth. This serves as sort of an orbital truck farm (59). The last proposed inflatable is the flexible docking tunnel concept (25). If there is a flexible docking tunnel attached to the space facility, this would save payload bay space in the orbiter in each trip to the station. The orbiter could conduct the mission for the paying customers and visit the station last. There would not need to be payload bay volume or lift capability used in carrying the docking adapter. Overall savings are in volume and lift costs. These have been projected at $180 million over a ten year period (25). They may be far greater, especially if the additional volume can be used to support paying customers. B. Landing and Reentry modules There have been two papers proposing the ET in various configurations as a reentry module (39). The direct use of the ET as a reentry module is not structurally possible according to the manufacturer (48). There are however, vaiations in this concept which involve indirect ET use that may be possible. It may be possible to use the SOFI removed from the ET in structural processing as an ablative material (56). It may also be possible to form melted aluminium from the ET into an areodynamic shape, cover it with ablative materials, and recover the aluminium itself after reentry for salvage and
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