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Exploration

Trouble Ahead for NEEMO?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 10, 2012
Filed under , , , , ,

U.S. Budget Cuts Threaten to Sink Undersea Research Fleet, Science
“Last week, researchers began to plead their case, asking lawmakers to reject an Obama Administration plan to eliminate the $4 million National Undersea Research Program (NURP), which is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). … The program also funds investigators to work at NOAA’s Aquarius Reef Base, an underwater laboratory that sits in 18 meters of water 5.5 kilometers off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. … It is less clear what will happen to NURP-funded assets if the program is defunded, although NOAA officials say they plan to get rid of Aquarius Reef Base, the Pisces V submersible, and other vehicles by the end of fiscal year 2013.”
NASA Solicitation: NASA Extreme Environment Missions Operations (NEEMO) Support Vessel
“The ship must be on location for nine calendar days from June 11th, 2012 at 12:00 p.m. EST until June 19th, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. EST. The ship will need to mob/demob the Deep Worker submersibles at a nearby port the day before (on June 10, 2012) and the day after (June 20, 2012).”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

16 responses to “Trouble Ahead for NEEMO?”

  1. Monroe2020 says:
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    The sequel to Finding Nemo:  Funding Nemo – The Nasa Chronicles.

  2. Jerry_Browner says:
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     Given the recent discussion about pursuing undersea exploration versus space exploration (see http://nasawatch.com/archiv… ) I am surprised that NEEMO might not be supported.

    Personally I never knew exactly why or how NEEMO fit in with the NASA human space flight program, training or simulation. I never really thought about it as real simulation; it was more like something for astronauts to do while they were not flying, that allowed them to sort of look like explorers, though I never saw how the experience was very applicable for space flight. It served to spend a lot of space money to support the NEEMO NOAA program.

    • no one of consequence says:
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       … so the fact that for a thousandth of the money, you can gain related experience … that then reduces ACCIDENT/INCIDENT rates on orbit … doesn’t appeal?

      It’s just a fancy perk / vacation place??

      • Jerry_Browner says:
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        Maybe I am wrong.

        Show me how the use of scuba equipment to go down a few meters under the ocean surface for a couple of weeks is similar and an accurate simulation experience for the use of EVA equipment in a vacuum or for launch on a spacecraft to 200+ miles and 17500 miles per hour.

        Surely if this is valuable as a simulation or training experience someone must have written a paper doing a comparison or showing applicability.

        Just what is being simulated or trained? Similar processes, environments, equipment, documents, procedures, physiological constraints and ramifications, science?

        • Hallie Wright says:
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          I agree. NEEMO always seemed to be simply an opportunity for bored astronauts to pretend they were in space. The fact that it is a bit undersea, and in nice warm water, makes it more attractive as a place to hang out than it would otherwise.

          If you want to do psychological tests about being cooped up together, do it in a can on the Earth. If you want to work with breathing apparatus’ on your back, you sure don’t need to be underwater to do it. While the hypogravity environment is attractive for EVA tests, there is little that one can’t do in a neutral buoyancy tank. Just set up a rock yard at the bottom. Water as a fluid doesn’t come close to the behavior of vacuum for testing mobility strategies. Swim fins, anyone?

          I have to say that, as far as I know, their extensive telerobotics experiments, involving Earth-Moon time delays, were never even published.

          The fact that it is cheap compared to space doesn’t mean it is useful. There were lots of people involved in the undersea and support crew, and there were risks involved that weren’t worth the return. Does anyone happen to have a budget number for NASA’s part in NEEMO?

          • no one of consequence says:
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             You are practicing reductionism. Without a license I might add.

            If you’ve ever worked with patent law, the term of art “in the environment” has special meaning. For the processes of conducting research, doing surveys, or even doing an engineering refit of a outpost, the tasks contain a lot of similarity so much that you can judge work product/loads and determine ways to improve facilities and personnel utilization.

            If you turn this into a mock play in terms of bed rest at a facility, or simulated activity, there is a falloff in applicability, so you can’t get as good numbers.

            Just as you can make spacecraft from less quality materials, yes you can use worse numbers.

            But are we fooling ourselves into beleiving we are saving money … if it turns out we accidentally optimize out the numbers … we needed.

            Happens all the time in aerospace.

            But go ahead, you’re welcome to stick with ignorance.

        • no one of consequence says:
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          Skylab Neutral Bouyancy Simulator

          Suggest you troll through NTRS for more. There were some psychological studies that (I think IU did), possibly two other universities, that gave a lot of quantitative data. Such monographs are very dull reading but useful (or are supposed to be) to members of Congress.

          For me, when I met Jacques Cousteau in my earliest career at NASA, he was … overwhelming at the comparisons. I recommend his book “The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau: Outer and inner space”.

          I often wonder if he had lived long enough, what it would have been like to have him to have visited the ISS.

          add:
          Jerry,
          NEEMO is not a neutral buoyancy facility,
          If you read the document, it cites in many places the elements of why underwater environment is useful for space training.

          When you cite a paper on an NBL as rationale for NEEMO, it sounds like you are simply trying to obfuscate.
          I tried to meet your reasonable request, reasonablely expeditiously with what I had onhand. That sounds like good faith to me.

          Your inability to give my evidence any credence, nor take any effort to find documents to support your position as well, pluse your feeble attempt to impunge my motives strongly suggest you are the one acting in bad faith.

          Bad faith and inept opportunism are at the very heart of our problems in space, and with our country over all.

          We need fewer trolls, and more committed to a functional means of defending genuine good will and cooperation.

          • Jerry_Browner says:
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            NEEMO is not a neutral buoyancy facility, I do not believe it has ever been used as such-its an underwater habitat. We have a huge neutral buoyancy lab with all kinds of airlocks, pressure chambers, monitoring and safety capabilities, etc.,  and if we really needed people living underwater for some reason it would have made much more sense to put a habitat in the NBL, but I don’t think its ever been discussed because the point of an NBL is EVA practice. When you cite a paper on an NBL as rationale for NEEMO, it sounds like you are simply trying to obfuscate.

  3. no one of consequence says:
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    In a reductionist space program you don’t need it.

    All you need is a capsule and a BFR – eliminate NASA and run the rest as an arms program out of the AF.  The rest is waste.

    “See? We on the right can make the trains run on time.  And if they don’t, we’ll just take a few out and shoot them. The rest will move faster. Problem solved.”

    Not that undersea exploration … is cost effective training … for space exploration … Duh.

    Repeat after me. Mustn’t think. Mustn’t think . I’ll be deceived by intelligence …

  4. Jerry_Browner says:
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    Another example of our ops buddies gone wild using up scarce funding resources to create an artificial “mission environment” instead of putting it into real research and development? 

    • Hallie Wright says:
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      That’s what it sounds like to me. Except it isn’t even an artificial mission environment. Not by a long shot. Planetary geologists aid human space flight efforts by doing “analog” studies, where they go to representative landforms, and test EVA strategies using real suits and boots. That’s “in the environment”. Pretending to be in space by swimming underwater doesn’t come close. No similarity. Well, OK, things float, if you take the trouble to neutral balance them. Rocks don’t. Pretending to be in an on-orbit hab by being in a can underwater doesn’t either.

      For the money expended on NEEMO, maintaining a system in a harsh and fairly unforgiving (salt water) environment, where your existence depends crucially on a life support system that has zero relevance to a space habitat, and for which escape, if necessary is no simple task, I could design a far better, safer, and more system-faithful analog up on dry land. (I’d even let the inhabitants wear swim fins if they really wanted!)

      This isn’t about whether NEEMO can be spun as being environmentally similar to space travel. It’s about whether that similarity can be achieved at lower cost and risk elsewhere. If you can tell me what NEEMO provides that they couldn’t get more easily otherwise somewhere else, I’d consider myself illuminated. Show me the numbers.

      Hey, let’s send the astronauts to Disneyland, where they can go on rides that will simulate launch g-loads, and test their sense of balance. They could ride through dark haunted tunnels to exercise their night vision, and eat gobs of junk to stress their digestive systems. They’ll meet some odd life forms there as well. All in the name of space exploration!

      Are we challenging licenses now? My goodness.

      • no one of consequence says:
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         Two trolls joined at the hip.

        • Hallie Wright says:
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          I guess if one doesn’t have anything useful to say, flinging names sometimes is the only route to get satisfaction.

          But I have an open mind. I challenged anyone to tell me what we can do with NEEMO that we couldn’t do more safely, easily and cheaply in other ways. Is there really nothing written up on this? Or perhaps an impressively tiny budget number for NEEMO. I’m waiting.

          I think NEEMO is pretty cool, and certainly an adventure for those participating. I’m just not convinced it’s worth it.

          • no one of consequence says:
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             I find with people who have open minds, when you engage them, they are so surprised, that they go and do more research, and bring more to the table on the topic.

            The opposite happens with trolls – at best there’s indifference,  often they attempt petty pseudo legalistic games, and occasionally they attempt to “mob” together to shout down others. I find I have a short fuse for this kind of nonsense. On the hill, I’ve a fast reflex for shoving a sock in such pie holes, because otherwise it gets really bad, really fast.

            In a nutshell, NEEMO is pretty cheap for what it does. Steve Squyres had some very interesting comments about it I hope he makes public – he’s a pretty reliable, trustable source of wisdom these days – if you don’t trust anonymous commenter’s like me, check him out – perhaps engage him on the topic.

            All of my life I’ve been used to related research with regards to space. The astrobiology guys travel to arid deserts to find similar environments to other planets including Mars, and the geologists do same. Astrophysicists study earth aurora alongside similar planetary effects elsewhere on other planets – so to me its never been much of a stretch.

            In mathematical terms, we’d describe things as being “homomorphic”, or enough similar to be useful as a model to study.

      • Steve Pemberton says:
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        Keith had a fascinating interview with Steve Squyres back in November, you can read the interview at http://www.onorbit.com/node

        Shannon Walker’s logs give some good insight into how varied and complex the NEEMO activities are. 

        I have heard more than one ISS astronaut in interviews say that NEEMO is a good analog for an ISS mission.  Besides the semi-isolated environment underwater, and the neutrally buoyant EVA’s that are part of the missions, one of them said that the teamwork and planning required for a NEEMO mission and EVA’s are similar to those of an ISS expedition.

        Also some of the the EVA’s are actual oceanographic science missions which gives them experience doing real science in a setting similar to space.  Other EVA’s carry out tests of various techniques for exploring on another world.  In other words they aren’t just wandering around the ocean floor looking at the pretty fish.

        I understand your point about could this be done cheaper somewhere else (maybe) but this is doing good work, and it’s “only” costing millions.  After watching billions wasted elsewhere I’ve gotten to where I am actually happy to see things like NEEMO going on.

  5. Dr. Brian Chip Birge says:
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    LOL when this article is compared with the one just a paragraph below : Deciding Exploration Priorities – Mars can wait. Oceans can’t
    Yet again another clear indication that no one knows what the hell is going on and our ability to actually explore anything other than late night TV is in doubt. I hate how politicized every aspect of our research is becoming.