NASA SMD Has Already Given Up On Mars
NASA Will Not Fly Next Mars Rover Until 2020, Aviation Week
“But the fact remains that “the train has left the station,” as NASA Planetary Science Director Jim Green said when asked if more funding would allow NASA to resume joint Mars exploration work with the European Space Agency. ESA has shifted to partnering with Russia for Mars exploration after NASA’s bailout. [Orlando] Figueroa, heading the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) as it drafts a downscoped, go-it-alone Mars exploration program, told planetary scientists on the NASA Advisory Council May 8 the $700-800 million that will be available for robotic Mars exploration by 2018 under the new NASA budget request will not support a rover. “A stationary lander may be possible in 2018,” Figueroa says. “A mobile lander, a rover, doesn’t fit the budget we have available, so we need to jump one opportunity to generate enough funds to be able to do it.”
Keith’s note: Well, it sounds like the career NASA SMD bureaucrats have already made up their minds as to what they want NASA to do, what they want you think NASA cannot do, and who cares what anyone else thinks. So why bother going through the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) proceess? Let’s face it: people like Figueroa, Green et al are fresh out of ideas, focused simply on lowering expectations, and content upon doing routine Powerpoint presentations for meetings where nothing of importance is ever decided.
Poor NASA. It has already forgotten how to do low-cost, out-of-the-box Mars missions like Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity rovers. Very depressing. Is this any way to explore the solar system?
– NASA’s Out of Date Search for Life on Mars, earlier post
– NASA’s Mars Program Planning Group: Same Old Answers or Open To New Ideas?, earlier post
Poor NASA. It has already forgotten how to do low-cost, out-of-the-box Mars missions like Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity rovers.
But what would be the point of such missions? To find more rocks to scratch and sniff?
NASA needs to come up with one or two revolutionary missions that will show that there was or is life on Mars. The money and interest are drying up fast.
It’s not pretty, but them’s the breaks.
I have to agree with your points Gonzo. Scratch and Sniff is a non-starter. Mission potency is essential today.
I think the days of gluttony and having piles of excess billions to be cast out into the science crowd so they can roam the universe. I think those days will be fewer now.
I was looking at a $20B space program plan the other day. And it hit me that this wasn’t just magic money, but was all truly taxpayer funded money. And I got this visualization how a hard a group of regular Americans might have to work to make $20B dollars. And at $20/hr to mow an average yard, it would take one billion citizens mowing a billion yards for an hour to raise that $20B amount. Hell, there are only 300 million U.S. citizens. So I suppose every citizen in the U.S. today would have to mow lawns for over three hours to raise that $20 Billion.
Then I thought of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site. If you put a $20 Billion dollar program up on the site, do you really think you could raise $20B there for a program? Any program!? Or do you even think you could convince 300 million people to mow lawns for 3 hours so some group could zip off in to space on $20B worth of hardware? I don’t know. What do you think?
Or you could reserve 2 billion for a new heavy Rocket program, (one we all know won’t last) after paying off (hundreds of millions) almost all those same players to stop previous heavy program.
I am starting to think that the NASA budget is going to stay flat at 18-20 billion for a long, long, long- time- so long in fact, that 20 billion won’t buy anything- but power point slides and an occasional cycle up of a hypersonic wind tunnel for old times’ sake..
Godspeed Obi-Wan Elon… you’re our only hope.
“I am starting to think that the NASA budget is going to stay flat at 18-20 billion for a long, long, long- time“
Christopher,
I have to wonder if even your realistic outlook is too optimistic. I envision on-going budget reductions for NASA for many years yet — if not in terms of numbers, certainly in terms of real buying power. I think Congress is insidiously trying to make NASA redundant by finding ways to make it increasingly ineffective, and then they will eventually shut NASA down for not having successfully done anything significant for too long and then pat themselves on the back for money “saved” and “waste” eliminated.
I guess it’s possible that this trend could be turned around if NASA suddenly became a key element in a matter of national pride (a Sputnik event), but by the time that something like that happened there would be no one left at NASA who could do even what they’re doing now, let alone provide an Apollo-magnitude response.
I make this glum point only because I believe that “the people” facing this fact squarely and trying to head it off is the only hope we have of preventing it. As I see it, the only way to retain a national space program for America is to stop making it only about money, and instead present and argue it in terms of useful capabilities acquired, benefits derived, and hope. And, of course, there’s always the national pride trump card to play.
Steve
“I am starting to think that the NASA budget is going to stay flat at 18-20 billion for a long, long, long- time- so long in fact, that 20 billion won’t buy anything- “
I’ve said this a few times, and I think it needs to be drummed into the skulls of everyone at every NASA centre, every advocate, every politician. NASA’s available budget, corrected for buying power, will decline to almost nothing within our lifetimes.
Therefore, this year is, in effect, the largest budget that NASA will ever get for the rest of its existence. It will never get easier to fund missions than it is today.
Even more, you can take the current budget and multiply by your guestimate of the number of years before NASA is small enough to be cancelled (say 40 years), giving you around $800 billion total budget available for NASA until the US no longer has a government funded space program.
So if you want the US to have a role in space after that point, after the end of NASA, you need to look at how well that $800b can be used to establish a self-sustaining non-govt space industry. How much can you get done before it ends?
Think about it like a reverse debt-clock, or a countdown timer if you prefer; every year, every program, the remaining total gets smaller.
And say you decide to protect all the centres in all those states, you have to work out the cost of basic maintenance and staffing (keeping the lights on and the walls painted), multiplied by 40 years (and allow for rising costs), and remove that from the total budget because it’s already “spent”.
SLS development will remove about a tenth of the remaining budget, that’s before you fund any missions. If it merely continues, like the shuttle, just spending the same budget without adding capacity, it will consume 1/6th of the total remaining budget. Is it worth it?
CCDev at full budget currently costs about 4% (2.5% in the likely budget). Is that worth it?
ISS is costing 15% of the annual budget every year it exists. Or rather, the ops systems on the ground created around it are costing that, are those systems worth it? Is the whole station?
That’s correct. The success of Spirit and Opportunity was that they gave us a view of Mars that opened up new, larger questions. Ones that Spirit and Opportunity couldn’t answer. So out-of-box missions are going to lead to out-of-box science. I congratulate NASA for making the hard decision that we should expect more.
If roving and “looking around” is all that’s important, then by all means let’s launch lots of MERs. But if answering questions is what’s important, it will take some creativity and money.
Your negativity continues to baffle me. Are you aware of the fact that Spirit and Opportunity carry scientific instruments? Curiosity is simply a bigger version and it will also be “just looking around” – hopefully for as long as its smaller predecessors.
My negativity? Oh dear. I’m congratulating NASA for having the guts to make hard decisions about Mars science in the interest of doing higher quality work. It would seem to me that the negativity here is the presumption that NASA should concede to keep doing what it’s been doing for almost a decade.
Am I aware of the fact that S&O carry scientific instruments? You bet. Very well aware. Are you aware that the instruments that Curiosity has could never have even been been deployed on Spirit or Opportunity? Curiosity is simply a “bigger version” of those rovers you say? That, sir, is simply wrong. Flat out wrong. I’m quite surprised you weren’t aware of that. Curiosity will answer a raft of important scientific analysis questions that Spirit and Opportunity couldn’t touch, and rovers of that MER architecture couldn’t hope to even address. I hope the lander that someday follows Curiosity will build on the results of that one in the same way.
I guess the question is whether good science is built on doing more of the same, or reaching for entirely new perspectives. I choose the latter.
MSL is openly touted by NASA as being based on MER just as MER was based on Sojourner. INdeed they go out of their way to have them all pose for pictures together to reinforce the point that they are related but different in size and capability. Go argue with NASA. MSL is a larger version of MER with a different (larger) instrument suite. Oh yes, NASA openly states that MER is a logical follow-on to MER. Again, go complain to NASA if you disagree.
“I guess the question is whether good science is built on doing more of the same, or reaching for entirely new perspectives. I choose the latter.”
And this is why NASA can’t deliver on promises, or on budget.
Given the choice between incremental improvements and the big shiny thing, you always grab for the big shiny thing.
And do you have any suggestions for any way could definitively rule life in or out based on ONE mission, landing in ONE spot, or traversing one small area? It’s just not possible, since one could always argue (reasonably!) that evidence of long-extinct life might be there in a different location, including buried deeply somewhere.
So when the answer from your revolutionary missions comes back, “Not here”, what then? What more do we really know about Mars from that, and what does that lead to?
Far better to build a better scientific understanding first. I’d do a seismic network before a one shot, “hail ares” mission that hopes we land on top of a fossil.
Once we really have the geologic and climate history understood we’d be in a much better position to know where to go, with what instruments — just as we already have a better sense than we did for Viking.
I am sorry but your approach will take decades when it could be done in a vastly shorter period of time.
What do you mean by “it”?
The scientific study of Mars, including geology, climate, and possibly, if evidence is eventually found, biology?
Or “finding life”?
If it’s “finding life”, then what exactly have we learned if we plunk a probe down and it doesn’t find life, past or present? That we should plunk another probe down somewhere else and hope _that’s_ the magic spot? I really am curious how we get around this problem. How many attempts do we make before we decide there isn’t any, and we focus on other scientific questions on Mars instead?
I guess my bottom line is that if we only have a very few missions in the next decade or two, I’d rather spend the money on missions that have a 100% chance of giving us a large and broadly applicable dataset about the planet than on missions that _might_ be the discovery of the century or might just be a dry hole.
I, myself, am tired of Mars. We’ve got an active robot on the surface right now and we’ll have a steroid version on the surface(God Willing) in less than three months. Plus we have at least a couple of Mars orbiters last time I checked.
We need to go explore different places in the solar system. How about cryo-volcanoes on Enceladus or those nitrogen geyers on Triton? Now those would be bold missions.
I would have liked to see something like a MER mission on the moon, while the production environment was still fresh. Severe thermal cycling would shorten their lifespans, but closeness gives you near real-time control, greatly accelerating progress. Small program, quick results.
Likewise, MSL/Curiosity would make an ideal platform for exploring the moons of outer planets, and the polar regions of our moon, because it’s nuclear powered rather than solar powered. And the design and development stage is already paid off, building copies would be cheaper than starting from scratch with a whole new design.
Won’t happen. Never happens. God forbid you use what you have as the core for an incremental program. No, scrub everything and start from scratch.
$700-800 million probably buy two Arkyd Interceptors each with a Falcon IX launch to Mars to Phobos and Deimos. They’ll probably be on the shelf in time for a 2018 launch.
http://www.planetaryresourc…
So why bother going through the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) proceess? Good Question. Why would they be asking us, the community, to provide ideas for review and possible presentation, spend our money to go to the workshop in TX? I think you answered both questions in your next sentence.
The ultimate problem is that there’s no agreement on the purpose of space exploration. Pure science doesn’t pay the bills, so it takes playing the long game to get results, but nobody wants to wait 20 years for real results to trickle out of a project, especially when those results aren’t clearly connected to the project. Exploitation of extraplanetary resources doesn’t look like a good deal to anyone who isn’t invested in a company that would see a return on the project. People don’t like to spend public money to enrich private companies.
Personally, I think our end goal should be colonization, but that’s a hard sell, and a very long term goal.
“The ultimate problem is that there’s no agreement on the purpose of space exploration.“Ioldanach Dyfrgi,
Or even if “exploration” is the primary goal.
Like I said in another post nearby, we have to stop making it only about money. We also need to consider the other forms of cost, investment and return. And I think we also very much need to take that idea a step further and stop being so insistent on dividing things into separate categories. If we take exploration, exploitation, science, and profit vs. non-profit, and other similar labels and treat them more as mutually contributing aspects of a single pursuit, they become mutually supporting instead of competitors, and that “single pursuit” now has all of the benefits of all of its components. In large part it’s just a matter of changing the packaging and presentation in the proposal stages, but it might largely eliminate the competition for funding/investment.
It shouldn’t be too big a problem to plan programs around goals that are multi-category (I can’t think of a better, more explanatory term). So each program proposal hopefully becomes easier to sell by offering more gains/goals/returns than multiple single-category programs. It also means that, if staffed properly, each program would have a greater total experience and knowledge base to work from, increasing it’s chances for success and reducing it’s costs by shortening it’s learning curves. In NASA’s case, since people would be drawn from more than one directorate (and maybe more than one NASA center), the teams would tend to be much more project-oriented than with the way things are done now at NASA, thereby helping to reduce the current rampant diseases of feudal fiefdoms and empire building. This alone would be a major gain in the execution of aerospace programs, both with NASA/government and private companies. (For anyone who’s thinking it: no! I am absolutely not advocating matrix management and/or staffing.)
There’s another plus that I swear by (but others don’t) and that’s the development of people and teams who are more the in nature of generalists, rather than specialists. In my experience, having some cross-disciplinary generalists on your team (but not everybody) has always been a very good thing; the job gets done better, faster and cheaper (the exception to the rule) than with a team made up entirely of specialists, and the people on the team tend to get along a whole lot better than a room full of prima donna specialists.
All of the above is simply from my experience, of course. Others, with different experience, may not agree.
Steve
Folks:
Don’t worry too much about the lack of a coherent NASA Mars program. It’s covered.
From The New York Times:
Private Sector Edges Deeper in Space
Two pertinent quotes from Elon Musk in the article:
“I think humanity needs to get to Mars,
one way or another,” said Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of
SpaceX, who vows that his company will send people to Mars in as little
as 10 years — more likely 15 years, and certainly within 20. He said he
would do this with or without NASA: “I would prefer it would be with
NASA. If not, we have to find another path.”
“I’m not going to try to convince people I can do it,” he said. “I’m just going to do it.”
tinker
How you approach things affects what you do.
Tinker,
Good stuff. As Robert Browning said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? We’re just applying our own definition of heaven.
Steve
There is no such technology right now. Oh I suppose he could launch something and put it in orbit around Mars but to put a lander on Mars keeping its unit integrity intact, lifting off to orbit again and heading back to Earth? That takes US Congress and NASA.
At the risk of repeting myself from earlier post, this August 6, NASA through JPL, will attempt to land a one ton payload on Mars with something that will rival a Rube Goldberg contraption and keep its unit integrity. We’ll see. I’m leeping my fingers crossed.
Ralphy:
Don’t be fooled by that agency behind the curtain… ;).
The technology has existed to get cargo to Mars for decades, we’ve been doing it. Long duration spaceflights is also old technology. It’s simply a philosophical shift that needs to be overcome. Massive redundancy will be rule of the day for future human space endeavors. The first human mission to Mars will be a fleet of ships, both crewed and automated. Logistics supplies will probably be pre-possitioned in Mars orbit, on it’s moons and/or on the surface as well. It’s crew will be large and they’ll be going to stay, not just to plant flags (Well, maybe the flag of the Free Martian Republic).
So, lots of little ships, lots of folks, lots of gear. Remember, one Conestoga wagon headed west was probably toast but a bunch of ’em stood a chance.
tinker
I know I’m not going to convince you otherwise so I just want to say that our ability to successfully land probes and vehicles on Mars was developed over decades at the cost of significant failures. So far we are the only nation to have done so. To safely send humans to Mars will require a magnitude of increase in engineering and manufacturing capability that we don’t presently have. Not to say that we can’t do it, but we have to invest and develop it which could significantly change our entire industrial base here in America. I would also point out that at present we can’t even keep the ISS running with out continuous part supplies being sent to maintain the human environment. And I mean not even the darn toilet works all that great. And it’s in LEO not Mars!
The MER program was an $800M job ten years ago for two rovers. I’d certainly like to hear the explanation why $700-800M in today’s dollars couldn’t build at least a single MER-level rover for the 2018 window. Admittedly, a third MER-type rover landing at a different Martian site might not add any significant science return beyond what Spirit and Opportunity have already provided… but maybe it would, no?
Dave,
Unless we go, we ain’t gonna know.
Steve
We need to know if our science and engineering are up to task to send a lander to Mars and then have it lift off to Mars orbit, dock with a booster and come back to earth. We don’t need another rover right now. The mission objective would be to land near someplace interesting on Mars, grab a soil/rock sample right next to it and then take off back to earth. This would probably take more than one mission. If we can’t do it with robots first and establish the technology then there is no sense in risking human lives. But first somebody has to define the mission and sell it to congress. IMHO we don’t need anymore rovers; we need to get to the point and make progress.
“IMHO we don’t need anymore rovers;“
Ralphy,
I understand your feelings on this matter, but I don’t totally agree. May I propose an alteration to your statement?
“IMHO we don’t need any more single-purpose rovers, or rovers that redundantly repeat things that we’ve already done;“
Steve
The landing ellipse is kilometers wide — without mobility, you have low likelihood of landing anywhere interesting. Precision landing tech is a possibility, but that isn’t necessarily any cheaper, better, or faster.
I would also like to point out that without precision landing how is one going to land near the cluster of supplies that has been prepositioned for the proposed permanent residents (Iwould call them suicidal maniacs LOL) of the colony of Mars? Especially to refuel their craft, etc.? I guess we’ll have to order some Mac trucks to do the hauling, if there is any way to drive to it, in which case we might need a bulldozer too. Grin.
NASA SMD Has Already Given Up On Mars
Let me fix that for you, Keith:
NASA has … Given Up
There, much better.
Seriously, as an outside but informed observer, the whole feel I get from the admin on NASA is that they’ve really given up. They’ve decided that the politics of the NASA Human Spaceflight Gravy Train are unbeatable w/o using way more political capital than they want to spend. They’ve decided that, for the greater good, they need some poster boys for austerity and NASA science is an easy target. They feel, I think, that now isn’t the time to be excited and ambitious about anything.
So I think where the Obama Admin leadership stands is to say they had a few ideas, suggested some changes, but the politics were too hard and so now they are throwing up their hands and walking away.
Thank you JWST
And to all that managers that fell on the sword for JWST – at least you have jobs… and that is what its really all about in the end.
A Jobs Program.
Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… Am I the only one (not a rocket scientist) that thinks we should bring back the Scout classed mission I just referenced? NASA says they will only entertain a mission if it leads to technology development and sample return. Learning about how to fly on Mars is technology development AND I would think we need to know about the weak magnetic field if we want to launch a return vehicle off Mars.