With SpaceX and their heavy-lift plans in the back of my mind, watching the video made me cringe. When they constantly name-drop the manufacturer of various components it becomes all too obvious who the real audience is. And the message? 'Don't call your Senators, you're still on the gravy train.'
>Work is underway on the flight-qualified booster, getting ready for its big test next year at ATK in Utah. [Formerly Morton Thiokol, the company that Orrin Hatch axed the single-segment SRB design to protect. This design decision, and the famed management decision at MT to ignore engineer Roger Boisjoly's warnings on launch day, doomed the crew of STS-51-L.]
>The venerable RS-25 engine, built by Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne… will power the SLS core stage.
>In order to fuel these engines, NASA called on the expertise at the Boeing Company to build the SLS core stage…
…and on and on.
In this arena cost inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
A base at L2 is interesting. However, I have a fundamental problem with these plans: timeframe. JFK's moon speech was so memorable, and the policy it implemented so successful because it was aimed to be done while JFK was still in office (well, pretty close). Obama and NASA targeting a Mars landing by the time Obama is nearly dying of old age...well, it's not inspiring. It's also not likely to stay on track for so many decades. "By the decade is out" -> "When I'm 78 and elderly"
I am also nervous about the continued approach of establishing bases to "learn more about supporting humans in deep space". The ISS did this for not-deep space, and it trapped us in. It was so expensive that it prevented further exploration.
I would suggest that we should not establish small expensive bases to learn more. Unless the bases are intended to become permanent colonies, which I think would be an excellent move. I realize this starts to sound expensive, but start with a small but expandable design. Like scaling a web start up.
Its a little harder than simply setting a loftier goal and telling NASA to accomplish it in a shorter timeframe. I assume there was a certain amount of engineering due diligence done to come up with those dates. Have you ever had a manager (who doesn't understand the engineering issues) tell you to deliver 2x the product in 1/2 the time because that's what the customer wants? How does that typically turn out?
Now, you could argue that the current acquisition system that supports NASA is completely broken, and it could be possible to do this in a much better way (truly faster-better-cheaper). I think SpaceX is starting to prove that. And you could also argue that NASA needs to take more risks when it comes to manned missions, which would make things a lot cheaper and easier. But simply thinking that cutting the timeline in half will fix the problem is naive.
I'm with you on the ISS though. I love the thing, but can't help but think the money could have been better spent... especially since its so unclear exactly what we are learning up there.
Risk aversion seems to be the killer in terms of timeframe. Burt Rutan famously remarked a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough; the test pilots that made up the early core of NASA astronauts knew it was high-risk and were okay with it, which is why we got to the moon in less than a decade (and yes, people died along the way). Modern-era NASA is just so terrified of bad PR that they won't decide on a strategy for tying their own shoes without spending a decade ensuring that nobody will inadvertently strangle themselves with the laces.
It makes sense for NASA to avoid anything that would significantly decrease the public's opinion of them (as that would eventually lead to funding cuts). But I don't think their assumption that the death of astronauts/pilots would negatively affect their image.
Lets say Curiosity crashed into mars... that would be a HUGE problem for NASA (3 billion dollars wasted, people would say). But if a couple of astronauts died on the way to Mars... I think that would only strengthen the resolve of the American public. No politician would go on record saying their life was wasted. Instead, their death would be framed as heroic (rightfully so), and I think there would be a push to try again, and to try harder.
Given that logic, what NASA views as risk mitigation (send a robot to mars instead of a person, so we can get better at it before risking lives), is really is a very risky strategy from their organization's perspective.
There is probably data out there that backs/disproves my general logic here (sentiment of nasa after astronaut's deaths, vs after loss of robots). I'd love to see it.
Details are scant, but I don't think they're talking of a station at L2. Looks more like a plan to stick an Orion there for a little while. It links to http://www.space.com/14518-nasa-moon-deep-space-station-astr... which mentions an Orion mission to EML2.
The SLS might theoretically be able to put station components at EML2; an ISS or MIR major module is about 20,000kg, almost exactly the same as a full Orion stack.
The cost of supplying such a thing, however, would be horrendous if it is even possible. The payload of a given launcher to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) is usually about a third of that to low Earth orbit (LEO). Surprisingly, EML2 is actually easier to get to than GEO, but not by a lot. Anyway, you need a lot more rocket to get a given mass there than the ISS.
Looks to me that the Dragon wet mass is greater than or about the same as the Falcon 9 payload to GEO. So, no cargo, if it's even possible. Soyuz is probably in the same category, or worse. So all existing supply systems would be able to deliver almost nothing to an EML2 station, if they could get there at all. The (still largely theoretical) Orion + SLS would be your only (and very expensive) vehicle.
Of course, a Dragon on a (less theoretical, but still unflown) Falcon 9 Heavy would have about the same cargo to GEO as the regular Falcon 9 to LEO, so it would be an option; it would cost 2-3 times as much for launcher than to the ISS. Getting the Dragon back to Earth would require extra fuel, however, which would cut into its cargo capacity, but if you just leave it there you could increase capacity by leaving off all the re-entry stuff. But if you can get a Dragon there, what's the point of the Orion? So probably Dragon wouldn't be allowed. "Not rated for deep space" or something.
Anyway, you're still going to be sending Orions there regularly, on $1B SLS boosters. And there's basically nothing to do there that can't be done at the ISS other than pretend to go somewhere else beyond LEO--so you might as well stay in the Orion. Thus, no space station, and no need for one.
There are plenty of zero-gravity experiments that have been held in the ISS. I think at least the first base is worth it, just to learn more about the conditions of space. We still face one fundamental problem with space travel though, cosmic radiation.
Kennedy: Let's go to the Moon. We go to the Moon.
Nixon: Apollo canceled. Shuttle born.
Reagan: Space Station Freedom. The Ride Report proposes a lunar base by 2010.
Bush Sr: Space Exploration Initiative, or $500 billion for a lunar base by 2010 or 2020. Rejected.
Clinton: Space Station Freedom morphs into ISS.
Bush Jr: Constellation program and humans on the Moon by 2020.
Obama: Constellation canceled, SLS born. Moon by 2020. Or maybe an asteroid by 2025. Or maybe Mars (with friends). Or maybe somewhere else entirely...*
As another commenter pointed out, it's become rather cliche for NASA to make grandiose plans for 15-30 years out, only to change direction a few years later.
Solve cost-to-orbit, guys. Get it to $100/kilo and we can build a dozen manned stations for the amount of money the country spends on potato chips each year (around $10 Billion)
But enough with the grandiose long-range plans that only serve to allow contractors to bill for a few years until the next grandiose long-range plan.
This is because space programs are a great tool of presidential politics, which operates on 4-year cycles that are completely useless for long-term space policy.
Perhaps a solution is to have NASA administered by a board that's appointed for life similar to the Supreme Court -- its total budget will still be subject to the vagaries of political squabbling but at least its ability to allocate budget to programs will be unencumbered.
To an extent, this is an oddity of the US system, where a lot of the civil service is run by appointees. In most modern parliamentary democracies, the civil service is largely static and non-appointed, and while the government can in principle get rid of, say, a permanent secretary, it's highly visible and would rarely be done. This tends to give long-term projects more inertia; if the government wants to kill one without considerable controversy, it really has to make a case for doing so.
This is a very interesting proposal. There are a number of large-scale and long-term problems that require consistency of vision beyond election cycles. You should write up this idea in a formal way and see if you can get published as an op-ed somewhere.
Get it to $100/kilo and we can build a dozen manned stations for the amount of money the country spends on potato chips each year (around $10 Billion)
How about "space chips?" Send up a batch of chips to be fried on-orbit inside a parabolic solar deep fryer. (It would have to have a means of centrifugally pumping out the oil once done.) Then distribute the chips amongst bags of other potato chips, such that there's a 1 in 6 chance of getting a bag containing a potato chip cooked IN SPACE! Then use the proceeds to fund unmanned missions to the asteroids.
But enough with the grandiose long-range plans that only serve to allow contractors to bill for a few years until the next grandiose long-range plan.
That's a brilliant and succinct way of putting it!
This is not a solved problem. SpaceX is working on it, but they're currently around $6k per kilogram [1], with hopes to get to $1100 or less per kg [2].
Cost-to-orbit reduction is not a sexy or scientifically interesting problem to solve, but Nasa needs to put as a top priority. As the parent post stated $100 per kilo means all of their other plans go from being grandiose to realistic.
Jerry Pournelle has done a lot of writing on the value of offering prizes instead of having the government foot the bill. We've seen some of that with the funding SpaceX gets, but the scale needs to be increased.
Offer $1 billion to orbit an unmanned (man rated) capsule around the Moon. Then another billion to land same capsule. $5 billion to land a crew of two, and return them to Earth. Since each is incremental, the risk for the companies trying to compete will be lower.
EDIT: Yes I know the costs are far higher than the prizes I'm mentioning. It's the general concept I'm aiming at.
Google is sponsoring an X Prize to visit the moon before 2016. The first team to land a robot and drive 500 meters will win $20M. The second team wins $5M.
There is also a controversial "Apollo Heritage Bonus Prize" of $1M if a team's robot visits one of the Apollo landing sites.
I think the prize needs to be larger to mitigate the risks involved. $20m doesn't seem like enough for the costs involved in launching a droid to the moon.
Okay, WTF is up with Space.com's website? Takes forever to load on a new iPad, which is usually quite zippy, all the while the entire page appears as a columnar thumbnail sized in the left 1/4 of the screen and hangs out there, frozen, then the entire thing re-refreshes at least 3 times? What kind of amateur crap is this?
This article kept going back to this being some secret agreement between Obama and NASA, kept a secret in case Romney won?! Uh, what, why? I understand administrations have different goals, but this felt almost like a campaign piece of "Obama good, Romney bad!" and I for the life of me can't figure out why it matters.
I think the point was simply that they didn't want to announce it just before the election, in case Romney would become president and pull the plug on the whole thing. NASA would look rather bad if they had to call it off again in a month or so (despite the fact that it technically wouldn't be their fault).
But the existing space station in LEO took 10 years to build and cost 150 billion. Wouldn't a similar station in deep space be an order of magnitude more expensive?
Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?
> Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?
This idea comes up all the time on r/space. It can't be done. The ISS is not safe out there. It does not have enough radiation shielding nor is it sturdy enough, nor would you be able to accelerate it out there, etc. Making the modifications necessary to do so would cost much more than just building a new ship.
L2 sounds like a big boondoggle to me. It's like the ISS part two. A base on the lunar surface would be able to use lunar soil for radiation shielding. Put a linear accelerator out there to launch things into orbit, and you dramatically reduce the travel costs to get there and back. (Since you won't have to haul as much fuel for return up there.) In addition, O2 can be extracted from lunar soil, which would reduce the return fuel payload to almost nothing.
The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn.
Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much, and once there is a permanent mobile presence in near space, the fuel cost will really just be relegated to getting from the surface into orbit (which is most of the fuel cost anyway).
The reality (sad, unfortunate, or otherwise) is that getting into space is expensive, but it's ridiculously cheap compared to some of the other things the US wastes money on.
Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much
Fuel is just a small fraction of the cost anyhow. Also, you could build "cycler" craft using ion or plasma thrusters that could ferry crew modules from LEO to the moon and back.
The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn.
There's a lot of valuable payloads you wouldn't have to actually land. You could ship frozen water up there in a projectile designed to keep it in a super-cold, super-hard state using liquid nitrogen as a boil-off coolant, and also clad it in armor and partially shield it from impact. Then a rover could go and retrieve the frozen water capsules. Even better, have a few shipments consist of frozen, dampened potting soil, which can be supplemented with lunar soil (made into a slurry with water and sloshed around to wear down the super-jagged edges) and start growing your own food up there with redirected sunlight. (There are a number of plants that are workably tolerant of 2 week sunlight cycles, like peas, provided you keep them cold between sunny periods.)
>The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated, especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?) to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the broad side of a barn.
Less complicated sure, but much more expensive. You need a whole lot more delta-V to go to the moon (and land something with a hope of staying intact) than to LEO. It actually takes less fuel to send supplies to mars (because they can use aerobraking/parachutes to slow down) than to the moon.
>Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much, and once there is a permanent mobile presence in near space, the fuel cost will really just be relegated to getting from the surface into orbit (which is most of the fuel cost anyway).
Wouldn't it be better to work on that "permanent mobile presence in near space" first?
Low Earth orbit is a pretty good place to be; it's the easiest to get to from Earth, and it's on the way to just about anywhere.
Yeah the sanest option I've heard is throwing some construction robots up (obviously not easy but far from impossible) to dig us a nice hole to live in when people get there, set up a reactor, start finding water, etc.
Construction "waldoes" are well within our capability for a year out. The Japanese have already been experimenting with on-orbit teleoperation with a synthesized lag of one full second. It sucks to work that way, but human beans are amazing, and I think there's many a talented gamer who would love to work in space from the comfort of planet Earth.
Ok, well accelerate it very slowly. Don't have people onboard during transit, and instead park it in Earth-Sun L2 where most of the solar radiation would be blocked.
Earth-Sun L2 where most of the solar radiation would be blocked.
Only it wouldn't, because the Earth's shadow doesn't extend that far out. Earth-Sun L2 is a million miles from Earth; Earth's shadow tapers to a point well before that.
Angle subtended by Earth at a million miles: (8 thousand)/(1 million) = 0.008
Angle subtended by Sun at 94 million miles: (864 thousand)/(94 million) = 0.0092
Area of Sun covered by Earth: (0.008 squared)/(0.0092 squared) = 0.76
So about 76 percent of the Sun's visible area would be covered by the Earth. The Sun would be about 1/4 as bright from L2 as it is at noon on Earth. That's still very, very bright, but there is some effect due to the Earth.
Also, it's worth noting that the most dangerous radiation in interplanetary space (solar wind and cosmic rays) is not "shadowed" by the Earth in quite the same way visible light from the Sun is. The Earth's magnetosphere does have a "tail" that extends behind the Earth, but there is radiation inside it.
Probably not much. Solar flares inject plasma into the magnetosphere, and because of the magnetic fields involved the motion of the plasma particles is not directly away from the Sun; they curve into the space that would otherwise be "shadowed" by the Earth.
I don't foresee this project playing out at all like the ISS did, at least not with the way it's being billed thus far. Sounds like this is a very NASA-centric project, so therefore wouldn't require cooperation from various countries around the world to make it happen. Also, my guess is that it would be physically smaller.
Please help me understand why a nation with a fledgling economy that is trillions of dollars in debt spend billions of dollars on something that was done 50 years ago?
* Inspiration - the space program was a huge morale booster and directly responsible for a lot of people going into the science/engineering professions.
* Dual-use technologies - most of the problems you end up solving have other uses, from little things like velcro up to ICBM and other weapons tech. Or, you could think of it as giving an alternative to those who want to work on big explody things, but aren't comfortable with them being used to kill people.
* Economic stimulus - those billions of dollars aren't just disappearing. A large amount of the space industry is US based, and that money goes to them and their employees and creates/maintains both skilled and unskilled jobs.
* Scientific research - There are plenty of things we don't know that would benefit from modern sensing or analysis capabilities that weren't available in '72.
* Human progress - At the rate humanity is expanding, eventually we're probably need to gather resources off-planet, whether it's orbiting solar power satellites or asteroid mining, that tech needs to be developed. The longer term goal of actually colonising some place else is also pretty important if we consider progress & survival on a long enough scale.
All of these are I think good reasons why it should be done (again). That's not to say it should necessarily be done by the government, but it's certainly not money wasted in the way people often claim.
I guess I'm missing the Manned Moon Missions part. Something about an L2 base, the only thing about actual moon missions is something about "teleoperating rovers".
Why would we not want to? It's cheap entertainment if nothing else. As a taxpayer, if you're making $100k gross, your annual contribution for NASA's entire budget is about $100/year. I have no issues with spending $10-15 a year (it's not going to be NASA's entire budget) to see a mars mission in my lifetime.
That's a pretty terrible reason, especially when it is mandatory.
Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for "entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go towards cancer research?
Sorry, but the idea of "well, wouldn't it be cool??" I know fascinates many geeks, but I think it's a horrible waste of our money.
If you guys want to see another moon mission, I say pass the tip jar around. You can all contribute. I don't want my money going to this project, at this point in time for our country. I'm not always opposed to this type of endeavor, but this one, at this time? What a waste.
> Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for "entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go towards cancer research?
My answer would be the same. You might value those other things more highly but I do not.
I believe that nationally challenging engineering projects pay dividends for years to come in ways that are not immediately apparent when the projects are being funded.
I believe that our future as a country will depend on the number of scientists and engineers we ultimately produce. Manned space exploration is very capital inefficient in terms of science produced BUT it's deeply engaging. It's an entry point that many current STEM workers can cite even if they're not Aerospace Engineers or working in the field.
I believe we should spend money on things that might not work simply because I think it's valuable to have a concrete national dream for the future. It shouldn't be the main thing we spend money on, it shouldn't be a top priority but the money is not a waste unless it goes entirely to contractors and produces no entertainment value.
>Work is underway on the flight-qualified booster, getting ready for its big test next year at ATK in Utah. [Formerly Morton Thiokol, the company that Orrin Hatch axed the single-segment SRB design to protect. This design decision, and the famed management decision at MT to ignore engineer Roger Boisjoly's warnings on launch day, doomed the crew of STS-51-L.]
>The venerable RS-25 engine, built by Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne… will power the SLS core stage.
>In order to fuel these engines, NASA called on the expertise at the Boeing Company to build the SLS core stage…
…and on and on.
In this arena cost inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.