OrbHab: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The OrbHab website is not intended to advocate for space exploration or settlement. Its function is solely to collect information on the design considerations for an Orbital Habitat. There will be no information on OrbHab.com intended to convince the reader that space settlement is a good idea or how such Orbital Habitats might be funded.

The Body of Knowledge (BoK) is the collection of Orbital Habitat related information contributed by the users of this website. Think of it as a moderated wiki on topics related to Orbital Habitats. The BoK works much like Wikipedia in that anyone can contribute, create new Entries and build upon the work of others.

The BoK Entries are not intended for the general public.

A BoK Entry should be written at a level reasonably understandable to a 3rd or 4th year undergraduate university level student of that particular field. It need not include sections attempting to explain the topic under discussion to readers from other disciplines or to the general public. For example, a BoK Entry on Ecosystem Closure need not explain the basics of the Nitrogen cycle. It can be assumed the reader either knows this or can look it up if they do not.

Think of each BoK Entry as a scientific paper targeting intelligent senior undergraduate students knowledgeable in the field and fully capable of digging around to clarify parts they do not recognise.

The information in the BoK is structured according to numerical classification codes. Think of it as a sort of Dewey Decimal system for Orbital Habitat information. Alternately, one could view it as a numerical Linnaean system analogous to the seven levels used to define biological entities (Kingdom, Phylum, Class etc).

The BoK has three broad level 0 categories (The Technosphere, The Biosphere and The Noosphere) and each Level 0 has sub-entries for more specific content. At the current time it is only possible to create BoK Entries 4 levels deep. This could be adjusted higher if the need should arise.

The BoK is set up to differentiate between an entry which defines a category and that which defines data item for that category. A BoK Category Entry can have either zero or more Sub-Categories or zero or more Data Entries but not both. Data Entries cannot have either sub-Categories or sub-Data Entries. In other words, a BoK Category can contain a list of Sub-Categories or it can contain a list of Data Entries but not both. A BoK Data Entry is the leaf at the end of the branch and cannot have either sub-Categories or sub-Data Entries.

The BoK Category or Data Entry mechanism was design decision to encourage a hierarchical system in which BoK Categories define the areas of the problems in an increasingly specific way. The BoK Data Entries define the information known about that problem.

Since the BoK information is sorted into a hierarchical list of ever more specific categories it is not much trouble to give each Level a number. This permits each BoK Entry to be specified by a dotted integer digit classification number known as a BCStr. The BCStr uniquely defines a BoK Entry.

BoK Category Entries, due to their explicit hierarchical nature, have a simple dotted digit BCStr such as 1.2.3 . In the previous example, a BCStr of 1.2.3 leads through a chain of Entry 1 on BoK Level 0 to its sub-Category 2 on Level 1 and then to sub-Category 3 at Level 2.

BoK Category Entries can have Data Entries below them instead of further Sub-Categories. In this case each Data Entry is given a three digit number (with leading zeros as necessary). Thus the third Data Entry belonging to the BoK Category of 1.2.3 would have a number of 003 and would be referenced by a BCStr of 1.2.3-003. Note if a BCStr of 1.2.3-003 exists then a BCStr of 1.2.3.4 is not possible since a BoK Category with sub-Data Entries cannot also have sub-Categories.

BCStr stands for Bread Crumb String. Bread Crumbs are a common name for the hierarchical data paths ones sometime sees on computer systems. A name like BoKStr would probably have been a better idea. The BCStr name is a bit of a hangover from earlier BoK designs and has stuck around in a way that is major surgery to change – so BCStr it is.

For brevity. It just seems much more useful to refer to BoK Entry 1.2.3-003 than Technosphere.Atmosphere.Regeneration-Lithium_percolate_Solid_Fuel_Oxygen_Generation_(SFOG)_canisters. Long names are prone to typing errors and any abbreviation of the longer human readable text just renders it unusable and so one might as well just use 1.2.3-003. The BCStr is also a lot easier to type and reference in links. For example, one can type the URL OrbHab.com/bok/1.2.3-003 and be taken directly to the correct page.

It should also be noted that the titles of the BoK Entries are editable and subject to change so it is possible that a title will be revised and a text based format would break. This is not to say that a BCStr of an entry cannot change – if BoK Entries are moved to new locations the BCStr will change. The website has mechanisms in place to update any internal links to the new BCStr if an entry is moved.

It is all well and good to talk about Categories, Data Entries and BCStrs and how they are set up but why is the BoK structured the way it is? After all there are many ways one could organize Orbital Habitat information.

The BoK design is intended to make it possible for technically minded interested people to contribute their knowledge and expertise by creating new Category and Data Entries and editing existing ones. These features, backed up with the ability to review changes, revert, split and comment directly on specific issues, should enable a community of motivated people to develop a useful knowledge base.

Orbital Habitat design is extremely cross disciplinary. For example, the Oxygen regeneration mechanism in a large Orbital Habitat will almost certainly involve biological and technical components. So, should such information be placed under the Biosphere category or the Technosphere category? The answer is to use your best judgement! If the information is about the oxygen output of plants during photosynthesis then it should be placed in the Biosphere category if it is about hydrolysis of water to produce O2 and H2 then it should be placed in the Technosphere. In either case the BoK System makes it easy to place links from one BoK Entry to another. In this way a complex interwoven topic across multiple disciplines topic can be brought together to form a coherent whole.

The editable nature of the BoK means that if information is perceived to be miscategorised it can be moved between parent entries or split into multiple other entries.

This is expected and is to be encouraged. Simply listing the questions to be addressed would be useful to designers of Orbital Habitats. They will have their own resources to decide how to solve particular problems.

If some future Orbital Habitat designer reviews the information here and say “Oh right, of course we need to think about that”, then the BoK will have done its job. If the BoK Entry also contains a list of resources and a technical to-and-fro discussion on the various aspects of the problem - then so much the better.

Human nature being what it is, it is expected that BoK Entries which are simply questions will soon collect opinions and possible solutions and the BoK will document these and build them into a useful body of knowledge on the subject.

It probably will contain some errors - this must be accepted. The intended readership is technical people who are fully capable of deciding for themselves whether a specific solution is viable or not.

However, ask yourself which is more useful, a fixed body of information written and maintained by experts which is updated relatively infrequently or an open (but moderated) body of knowledge updated by numerous participants who check for errors and whose opinions and discussions are publically available.

Each mechanism has its advantages. However, the Open Source software community has certainly demonstrated that complex projects can be delivered as long as the contribution and feedback mechanism is open. Information websites like Wikipedia have demonstrated that user edited collections can successfully compile and present extremely detailed information.

It changes because the current structure may not be the most effective way of defining the information. To our knowledge, nobody has previously attempted to categorise the area of Orbital Habitat design so there is little previous work to reference.

The license is simple. Everything posted to the OrbHab website, either in the BoK or the Forums, immediately enters the Public Domain without copyright. This information can be used for any purpose public or private (including for commercial gain) with or without attribution. The only thing that cannot be done with this information is to prevent others from using it.

Sorry, no. The maintainers of this website are under no obligation to remove any content. This is true even if your account is banned or rendered invalid. Public Domain means Public Domain.

Yes, there is provision for this. However any such links must be reasonable and appropriate to the BoK Entry (or Forum Post) in which they are contained. If you enter out of context links for the purpose of promoting an external site you will find they are edited out quite quickly. Persisting in such actions will get your account banned.

The maintainers of the OrbHab website respect intellectual property and will remove any inappropriate content. This may also result in your account getting banned. Avoid copy and paste from other sources or close paraphrasing. Instead, summarize the intent of the source text in your own words and add your own contributions to it.

Well if it is a BoK Entry you can just edit the entry to remove the problematic content and replace it with something that does not violate copyright. In addition, all BoK Entries, Posts and Paper Entries contain a Flag mechanism. Simply flag the problematic content, explaining the problem and a moderator will pick up on the Flag and take action.

Opinions vary and they are usually strongly held. This question will not be addressed on this website.

Opinions vary and they are usually strongly held. This question will not be addressed on this website.

Well it is going to need one. However we absolutely will not talk about that issue on this website. There is nothing more likely to change a website from a quiet exchange of technical opinions and viewpoints into a continuous raging flame war than a political discussion. Such a conversation will distract from the primary purpose of the website and users indulging in this sort of discussion will find their account restricted.

The intention is that the BoK will be printed out monthly in pdf format and made available as a free download. This functionality is not yet present in the OrbHab website – however the intention is to have it available by the time the content of the BoK grows to a point where a pdf soft copy makes sense.

The intention is that a yearly copy of the BoK will be made available via a self-publishing tool such as Amazon’s KDP. The hard copy will be available at modest cost and will contain exactly the same content as that months free pdf download. If you wish to have a hard copy for your bookshelf you can simply purchase one.

For a long time public conversations related to Orbital Habitats were contained in the (now discontinued) Spacesettlers and SSI-List Yahoo groups. These groups were effectively little more than the online record of a mailing list in which the user replied to threads which were differentiated by a Subject line. There was no internal structure within the threads and yet the mechanism worked well. The threaded format of the OrbHab forums is a homage to those lists and so replies are made to the thread in general rather to a specific post in the thread.

Django, Bootstrap 4, JQuery and Sqlite. There were also numerous other add-on open source django modules used. These are credited on the About page.

In keeping with the Open Source theme of this website, the source code will be made available on GitHub for general download (and possibly improvement) by any interested parties.

Sorry, no, we cannot do this. We respect copyright and will not make papers available via this website. Where online full copies exist the detail page for each Paper will contain a link.

The three root level categories (Technosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere) are a recognition of the work of V. Vernadsky who pioneered much of what we know today as the study of the earths biosphere.

In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This systemic and geological analysis of living systems complements Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which looks at each individual species, rather than at its relationship to a subsuming principle. Wikipedia

So, although Vernadsky's categories were Geosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere and were related to terrestrial environments he was a pioneer in the field. It seems reasonable to acknowledge his insights by adapting his concepts for Orbital Habitats.

Markdown enables the information in a BoK post to be formatted in a way that is both safe and reproducible. The BoK Entries use Internet standard markdown codes with a few enhancements. A complete list of all markdown codes can be found on the help page of every BoK entry when it is being edited. A complete list can also be found on this page.