More on L2 Gateways
Gateway L-2 Mission: Opening Cislunar Space or Dead End?, Paul Spudis
“A recent report by the NASA human architecture team has given us a glimpse of the agency’s thinking about future missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). Interest is focused on sending human crews to a “Gateway” outpost stationed at the gravitationally stable Earth-Moon L-2 point. The facility, built with plans and parts derived from the construction of the International Space Station, would slowly circle the L-2 point in a halo orbit. From its “hovering” position over the lunar far side, it would be in direct communication with Earth.”
NASA Ready To Announce Deep Space Human Mission (Update), earlier post
Folks:
Paul nails it on this one point:
“An L-point outpost needs no special justification if it is part of a complete Earth-Moon cislunar transportation system.”
As a general purpose beachhead, the idea flies. Otherwise, just another waste of time. You don’t go buildin’ an outpost off in the boonies and then, foolishly, ship them all the feed for their horsies, do you?
tinker
Well, the Moon itself is off in the boonies. These Lagrange points are off in the same boonies.
From Paul’s perspective, it’s all about the Moon and getting there. So when Paul refers to “cis-lunar space” he’s really talking about putting people on the Moon. He’s talking “transportation” to the Moon (which happens to go through cis-lunar space).
In fact, to the extent an ultimate goal is a trip to Mars (perhaps just in orbit around Mars to start), such a habitat would teach us a lot more about what we need to know for the trip there than a lunar outpost would.
As I understand it, such a gateway would have value not only in eventually depoting for the Moon (both material for the Moon, and ISRU products from the Moon to be used in space), but also as a near term and affordable way to do stuff on the Moon with real-time human control. As such, it could be very much part of a responsible lunar development strategy.
Sure, putting people on the lunar surface might offer more opportunities, but it just ain’t gonna happen for a while unless we rob a bank. On the other hand, our vehicle to get humans to a lunar Lagrange point is funded and in active development, and we already have equipment originally destined for ISS that could be the basis for an economical habitat. So the “best” option is not only what gives us the most capability, but also the option that we actually have a hope of pulling off in the near future.
Paul makes some good points, but I think the answer isn’t as black-and white as it might seem to many.
but also as a near term and affordable way to do stuff on the Moon with real-time human control.
Real time control of systems on the Moon from the Earth has been proven time and time again. The Lunakhods did it 40 years ago.
whats the round trip speed of a radio signal?? 2, 3, seconds?
It has been conclusively proven in many tests that this is not an encumbrance for a trained operator.
To the contrary; it has been proven in many tests that latency (i.e., time delay) is a SIGNIFICANT encumbrance to a telerobotic operator. Lester and Thronson conclude that at 100 mS the delay in haptic interfaces becomes noticible, and delay over about 200 mS become an encumberance to operation– that’s a distance of about 60,000 km. Yes, turns out that there IS real value in having human beings in space.
Sorry, but the Lunakhods didn’t do very complicated science. They drove in a straight line– and even there, the reports from the operators was that driving them was “nerve-wracking”.Check out Lester and Thronson, “Human Space Exploration and Human Space Flight: Latency and the Cognitive Scale of the Universe,” Space Policy, Vol. 27 No. 2 (2012).
Wrong. It’s actually been proven in many terrestrial tests that several seconds of time delay (Earth-Moon time delay) is a serious handicap for an operator. Telerobotic mining (bulldozers, drills, etc.) assumes delays of less than a second. Telerobotic surgery is widely understood to be nearly impossible for delays larger than 500ms. Many articles in the literature establish that conclusively, I understand. Sure, if you want to just drive around, no problem. If you want to really DO STUFF, it’s quite significant.
Telerobotic driving on the Moon was indeed proven with Lunokhod. But with latencies of order ten seconds, the Lunokhod operations team was relieved every two hours to keep them from having a nervous breakdown. It was a huge, huge strain for them to do it well.
Having to put this up here, sorry
Telerobotic surgery is widely understood to be nearly impossible for delays larger than 500ms.
No one is talking about tele robotic surgery.
In the early days of the Internet there was a website dedicated to the operation of equipment with lunar type delays. There was no equipment operation that was precluded by the time delay. Also the time delay is not ten seconds in the modern world. They did not want to fail and get sent to Siberia, that was the source of their fear.
Again, I hate this nesting that makes this necessary.
and delay over about 200 mS become an encumberance to operation-
That is very interesting as we operated rovers in the Arizona desert at Desert RATS in 2010 and this was over this path.
1. hop to satellite and back to Earth = 250 milliseconds.
2. Internet hop to and from NASA Ames = ~100 milliseconds.
hop to satellite and back to the Earth = 250 milliseconds.
3. random processing delays = 50 milliseconds.
We had a total of 650 milliseconds of delay between our site and Ames and the NASA Center Director Pete Worden was able to drive an Ames rover just fine. So were several other people. This included pointing a camera and other tasks.
This was an actual test accomplished over a GEO comsat. No one died or went insane or had problems operating the rover.
We did similar tests with school kids in the early 1990’s with a programmed 3 and 5 second delay. After taking a bit of time to get used to it, it was not a problem.
Looks like it is time to repeat these actual tests for a new generation of naysayers.
“That is very interesting as we operated rovers in the Arizona desert at Desert RATS in 2010 and this was over this path.”
My goodness. You were “roving” with 650ms time delay. How impressive. You mean you pressed down on the accelerator and watched pebbles go past?
Hmmm.
Did you try to thread a screw? Did you try to pick up an irregular shaped rock? Did you try to run a drill? Did you try to fit a connector into a housing? Did you try to tie a knot? Did you try to put a brick on a pile?
Oh, guess not. Welcome to the real world, where actually doing things is more than driving.
“Looks like it is time to repeat these actual tests for a new generation of naysayers.”
Nobody is saying you can’t drive, Dennis. We’re saying it’s really hard, with significant time delays, to do the kind of challenging things that we really need to do. While we’re doing that stuff, please enjoy your drive!
It sounds like we need to develop tools that go entire seconds without being given a new order. Preferably 10s of seconds.
So we do not give orders like ‘turn screw driver by 90 degrees, turn 90 degrees, … turn 90 degrees, stop.’
but tell the robot ‘collect 2″ screw and screw it into the hole the mouse clicked on.’
Nobody is saying you can’t drive, Dennis. We’re saying it’s really hard, with significant time delays, to do the kind of challenging things that we really need to do. While we’re doing that stuff, please enjoy your drive!
Please provide a list of the ten top things that must be done. Hint, telepresence microsurgery is not one of them.
There is also the issue of supervised telepresence that is now possible that was not possible 20 years ago. This would not require a command for every single action, especially after repetitive actions are learned by the robots on the site.
I simply refuse to buy the premise that we must build a multibillion dollar platform at L2 in order to do telepresence on the Moon. It simply does not pass the engineering smell test.
“Please provide a list of the ten top things that must be done. Hint, telepresence microsurgery is not one of them.”
I gave you six. You’re a glutton for punishment. If you’re going to drive with time delay, you still need to keep your eyes open.
Telerobotic surgery is a terrific example of the kind of dexterity that one would need for doing detail work on a planetary surface. BTW, I’m not going to let anyone do surgery on me wearing EVA gloves! Not even Buzz.
Very true that lunar telerobotics doesn’t offer enormous advantages over Earth-based lunar telerobotics. Maybe only a factor of ten. But what it offers in spades is a chance to exercise the technology (including telerobot, comm, and control technology) and operations of surface telerobotics from orbit. That could be enormously and undeniably valuable at Mars and elsewhere. That’s actually hard to do with ISS, I believe, because of the constantly changing ground track. Smell better?
Very true that lunar telerobotics doesn’t offer enormous advantages over Earth-based lunar telerobotics. Maybe only a factor of ten. But what it offers in spades is a chance to exercise the technology (including telerobot, comm, and control technology) and operations of surface telerobotics from orbit. That could be enormously and undeniably valuable at Mars and elsewhere. That’s actually hard to do with ISS, I believe, because of the constantly changing ground track. Smell better?
You can do all of that today, here on the earth by adding a software time delay.
ISS has TDRSS for over 95% of its orbit and thus this is no impediment. The Germans operated a robot telerobotically in LEO over a GEO link as far back as the German Spacelab D2 mission. You can even do experiments operating the robotics of the SPDM and the Canadarm from the Earth via TDRSS using telepresence software originally designed for that same German Spacelab mission.
If you want to get fancy you can repeat an experiment that we did using a double GEO hop over two different internet over satellite systems (Hughesnet and iDirect) and push the real time out even further.
The point I am making is that all of this is possible today or has already been done. To claim this as any justification for an L2 station or a Mars orbital station is simply technically not correct.
Excuse me but many here are talking by each other.
Q:Is it possible to operate equipment on long delays?
A: Yes, but its undesirable. For safety reasons.
Q:Heavy mining equipment operation – can things go wrong in a split second?
A: Yes, often.
Such operators I’ve worked with like doing video games at home – they are very demanding on latency. They tell me that when the network is lagged it interferes with them. If you check into video gaming, 80-130ms is that threshold.
I know this because early on, a company called Enron (yes that one) asked me this question because they did a business case for a low latency network to sell to stock traders and video gamers. This was shortly before they screwed themselves and all bets were off.
In another capacity, NC mills/lathes also need under a tenth second latency to work. Telemedicine requirements are usually more approaching human perception limits (1/300th second for hearing, 1/20th second visual, 1/50th second hand stimulus/response). Often this means 50-60ms.
Often the argument here is used to feed an agenda. Laggy robots means want humans on site more quickly. Young guys with fast reflexes just see this as an old fart fetish.
Plus any number of large vehicles with long response times due to simple inertia. Where there’s several seconds before the vehicle noticeably responds to commands, such as mining vehicles. Or even minutes, such as large transport ships, or trains. You need special training to get used to it, but it’s cheaper to train operators that build an entire space station past the moon.
(I’m not particularly critical of the L2 station, but I do despise these pissy little excuses used to justify these major projects. “We need a space station because… umm… crystals!” “We need a lunar polar base because… 24hr telescopes!”)
Maybe Spudis should simply accept he is not going to be the next Harrison Schmitt and stop trying to screw up space policy.
Huh? An L1/2 station is no different in that regard.
Probe servicing at L2 might make sense, but so would servicing/fueling in LEO, the original concept behind the “Space Operations Center”, the ISS as it was proposed by Clark Covinton in the 70’s. Lunar ISRU will be tough to justify until we have a practical way to get off the planet in the first place.
On a Nova show about fuel (making stuff cleaner) they talked about using chicken feathers to store hydro in low pressure. Plus a guy designed a cheap flexible fuel solar cell when put in water and exposed to the sun, hydrogen bubbles off/ separates from the oxygen.
Imagine a little spaceship/space suit or space station like a Bigelow hab. that only needed water and sunlight to fuel its hydro oxy tanks.
Shouldn’t NASA be helping with this research and bringing it to the world for a possible hydro economy?
Isn’t this what we need to make fuel depots cheap.
Fill up your solar car or spacecraft with water and set it in the sun, for and blast or drive off.
L2 GEO LEO where ever.
CHEAPER SAFER BETTER SPACESHIPS!!!
THATS whatt NASA JOB SHOULD BE!!!!!
Paul
A Tick is a small spacecraft with a simple frame like a car frame. The skin is bigelow inflatable with water in walls to help protect the pilot/s maybe clear walls with leaf like cells that make hydro passively with the sun. Space has lots of sun light.
They are small and light and could make great cheap test platforms for all kinds of NACA type spaceship R and D.
Maybe NASA should be talking about what they should be doing. Not where they are going. Seems to me people just keep fighting about where to go while the clock goes tick tock.
Settle space! go up!!!!
How cheap can a robot get ice off the moon while a dragon robot orbits mars??
Unemployed future Tick pilots
the solar leaf hydro battery is near the end of this.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nov…
Predictions:
The SLS/L2 proposal is on a collision course with Mars Sample Return, because of the cost and complexity of each. What’s unique about this space-priority collision is that it will split the pro-Mars faction, since L2 is being advertised as manned-Mars-mission prep.
The two proposals will also focus the nation on the human vs robotics debate.
Can we really just do both? Is the answer that simple? I doubt it.
MSR would be the resonsibility of SMD. SLS/L2 will be the responsibility of HEOMD. Completely different pots of NASA money, with a big wall in between them.
Still a good question as to whether we can do either.
Humans versus robots? Nope. We’d be sending people to L2 to exercise their awareness and dexterity on the lunar surface. It’s all about people. People using tools. Got a problem with tools?
The robots vs human is regarding the proposed manned Mars mission which L2 is ultimately aimed at in the minds of many, and is a major part of the justification for L2. I don’t think very many people care about low-latency remote control, considering that we’ve blissfully accepted a latency of about forty years to do anything on the Moon’s surface.
MSR is based on the argument that you just ca’t get enough lab equipment to Mars. That would still be true if we send humans; they wouldn’t mitigate the problem with their dexterity because they would usurp so much of the possible science payload.
As for SMD.vs HEOMD, it’s ultimately a matter of public support, no matter how you slice it.
I don’t think very many people care about low-latency remote control,
considering that we’ve blissfully accepted a latency of about forty
years to do anything on the Moon’s surface.
The reason we’ve not done much with the moon is “been their, done that”. Which infuriates the “lunatics”s.
They cannot, will not, come to terms with it. They just mock it. In many ways they are their own worst enemies. And after they die off, perhaps the next generation, which is not so hidebound, might get a chance to get it right.
Lets say you do anything “lunar”. What’s your return? Well – you didn’t do enough – that’s what you get back.
Its like judging a circus act – we have the lunar ring, and the Mars ring, and another in the 3 ring circus.
Look at whats happening with the Mars entertainment – they do an amazing act and it gets applause (or MRO/MPL and they get no end of misery).
You can’t even get that far with the lunar ring? Why? Because they are fixated at doing “Apollo on Steriods”, just like the Bush administration wanted to redo the Vietnam war by marching into Iraq, so as to redo history, and undo Johnson’s “Great Society” as well. So how did all that work out?
Badly. And that’s why its gotta die, all of them … before a rational approach to exploring the Moon will ever be taken.
Look at it like a businessman – how much do you want to spend on the three ring circus? What’s your likelyhood of ROI if you slug a small increment of money (not risking the whole!) on each.
The reason we’ve not done much with the moon is “been their, done that”. Which infuriates the “lunatics”s.
You know sometimes I wonder if someone else does not hijack your login name. You know better than this.
You simply cannot do Mars, without 10x cost, unless you utilize the resources of the Moon.
If we did not have a Moon, we would have to invent it.
You miss my point.
I agree about getting resources from the moon. And its much better than a 10x improvement.
But when attempts at high levels are made to develop a lunar program, unless it corresponds to the priorities and profiles of certain old “lunatics”, all it does is begin a bunch of carping about not doing said profiles /priorities … and act as if the gesture to start such is meaningless.
The beginnings of this idiocy was with Harrison Schmitt and his efforts to crater Stiedel to supposedly “accelerate” lunar.
Look, everytime I’ve attempted to reinsert more lunar into the chain of things, its routinely been hijacked. By many of the same – to the point that it undercuts the broader political base to support HSF lunar.
Its as if everytime you get a good act for the lunar “ring”, its not considered worthy by that crowd.
Which is why I’m steamed about the mentioned article.
Because I don’t believe that in my lifetime I’ll see any rational framework to organize HSF exploration.
Primary ingredients are EML 1/2 (for access to BEO targets and early habitation) and lunar ISRU (bootstrapped robotically).
The old lunatics sabotage both. To do a “sit down strike” to do a mediocre Apollo redux.
The gen Y space – they have a hunger for the entire solar system. Including the moon, but not being suckered into a pathetically under financed, under justified, poor mobility, single site on the moon that sucks. Everything.
add:
Dennis – more my fault in not clearly communicating. Just frustrated at watching CF’s reccur. You’re dead on about FLO and Griffin. I think economic expansion via commercial will be a ISRU play off lunar, as long as habitation isn’t kept “off limits” for “national security” reasons – more likely with Gateway.
Martjin,
My worry for private RLV to feed depots is that it will get sidelined by HLV forces as being “insignificant”, e.g. a little guy game they can wreck.
The key is adding more players to the mix … like with SpaceX. But in cislunar space.
The propulsion precursors make sense, and some of that is part of the motivation behind the ATV Orion SM derivative (or like). But that only started to happen with L2 Gateway getting some traction. Its a very European approach, but I’m not sure of the politics/funding given member states.
Primary ingredients are EML 1/2 (for access to BEO targets and early habitation) and lunar ISRU (bootstrapped robotically).
I’d say the primary ingredients are EML1/2 and a large and fiercely competitive propellant launch market that will lead to radically cheaper space launch through private development of RLVs. This is the strategic breakthrough that will break the dependence of spaceflight on government funding.
While ISRU is very important, it cannot break this dependence. What it will do is to allow a much greater scale of both government and commercial activity on the moon and beyond. Still very important, but cheap lift (or at least the propellant market) has to come first.
Incidentally, this is why I believe the propulsion component of a gateway station should come first, not the hab, because the propulsion unit can usefully consume large quantities of propellant while the hab can’t. Let’s develop a series of unmanned precursors first, starting with the Orion SM and avionics, and use them for all kinds of science missions.
In fairness to the hab option, or as a fallback in case it is chosen: launching large quantities of radiation shielding to the gateway station could be an alternative to large quantities of propellant, though only for a relatively short time since there is only so much shielding you can use. Using a LEO cryogenic depot to refuel upper stages carrying a capsule to the gateway station would also be good, it it would lead to long delays because we’d need to develop depots and depot technology first. And cheap lift is the one thing we haved delayed for far too long. If we continue on this path neither of us will see a man backon the moon in our lifetimes.
The old lunatics sabotage both. To do a “sit down strike” to do a mediocre Apollo redux.
Thanks for that clarification, I was starting to worry about you. With that clarification I wholeheartedly agree with you. I know about the battle between Harrison and the rest of the community, that because of his stature, even though he lost the battle, he actually won.
Take the Altair for example, I spend quite a lot of time perusing the NASA Technical Reports Server and you know my historical cast of mind. I can tell you with very high confidence, that before Mike Griffin became administrator, it was extremely difficult to find information about his final DRM from the SEI era, the “First Lunar Outpost”. After the ESAS architecture came out, all of a sudden all of this FLO documentation started appearing.
What was interesting is that the design for the Altair lander is eerily similar to the FLO lander in many respects. It is my strong opinion that the Altair lander and its size is the thing, as much as anything else that derailed Constellation. Altair is a sortie class lander that was baselined before the decision for an outpost was ever made. A very backwards way to do a design.
Constellation was, as you say, the last gasp of the old lunatics. They sold their souls for their style of lunar mission for the price of the Ares launcher system that everyone damn well knew was built for Mars and not the Moon.
Yes I do agree with you on this one.
“As for SMD.vs HEOMD, it’s ultimately a matter of public support, no matter how you slice it.”
Wouldn’t we like to believe that? But the way Congress slices it is that it’s about what they want to do, and the public tells them very little about what the public supports in this matter. Industry and industry donations tell them a lot more about what they want to do. I can’t think of a single large NASA mission that NASA and Congress decided to do (or not to do) because of “public support”.
Ah, let’s have a ballot measure about SLS versus MSR!
There is a firewall between these accounts for good reason. If there weren’t, the space science community and human space flight community would be at each others throats.
Re public support:
I have the distinct impression that both the lunar landing redux and the asteroid mission have been dropped because of lack of public interest, but SLS and L2 are being advertised as stepping stones to Mars. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604…
Note the sub heading “…with the Ultimate Goal of Mars in mind”.
SLS does not exist in a vacuum. It was always connected to the public’s Mars intrigue, which now survives “Apollo on steroids”.
The Mars Sample Return probe can return to the EML spacestation and finish the journey back to Earth as cargo on the human transportation system.
“The Mars Sample Return probe can return to the EML spacestation and finish the journey back to Earth as cargo on the human transportation system.”
That would arbitrarily join the two projects but without definite justification, in fact:
1. MSR would need to wait for EM-L2 completion.
2. EM-L2 is an added a step in the return.
3. Wouldn’t the lunar cycles and human L2 staffing schedules complicate MSR return launch windowing?
4. If MSR and EM-L2 are as mutually autonomous as Helen Simpson says, then the MSR people can just say “Thanks but no thanks” to the added complication.
The MSR people have already spent money on testing ‘Sticky Arm’ to catch a returning sample at EML-2. They hope to save mass on the probe.
If EML-1/2 are unmanned they could launch something like a Dragonlab to catch the sample.
“The MSR people have already spent money on testing ‘Sticky Arm’ to catch a returning sample at EML-2. They hope to save mass on the probe.”
That would justify a Sticky Armed Dragon at the EM-L2 astronomical position. It does not justify the SLS launched L2 Gateway.
There’s also the issue of quarantining the Mars samples, perhaps permanently. That could mean a dedicated lab on ISS. In time it may be viewed as simpler (and eliminates a SPOF) to use a VASIMR slowdown from Mars to Earth orbit, and then transfer to ISS (or to an X37-B/C if we forego the off-earth quarantine).
The blur in the human vs robotics debate is elsewhere.
It is in robotic craft proving the way for crewed craft. Dragon proving DragonRider. EFT-1 robotic Orion proving manned Orion. And at Gateway, flying prototype human carrying landers to the moon a decade ahead of traditional development as a robotic precursor. Because you get the flight history faster.
Und so weiter.
MSR is very different. It is able creating a sampling capability of the smallest samples that can be harvested and returned to Earth. Its an interesting exercise apart from financing it.
I think you’re too focused on the expense angle. I consider it much like financing SIRTF/Spitzer, in that a cleaver design may make the mission doable, where finance fails.
Ideally, you’d want sampling rovers that can find qualified samples and encapsulate them into payloads for launch, some kind of Mars surface LV that orbits them (many), and some kind of orbital SC that acquires them (sweeps them up), which injects to Earth return. All of this is on an eventual not immediate timescale.
The last part we’ve done with Stardust mission sans rendezvous – likely the easiest. The other parts can easily be overbuilt and are where international involvement to fund gets offset by overly ambitious/complicated approaches to the problem. Even with the wise approach of breaking it up into multiple independent missions.
My favorite is what one of my students suggested – a sample collection rover with a bunch of solid fueled LV’s that barely make orbit.
Single launch mission with a cruise stage that becomes an orbiter, detaching earlier than MSR, reuses hypergolic departure stage for entry (along with aerobraking/sheild).
Skycrane delivery to deal with weight issues, MSR derived bus/rover not unlike MAXC. Caches sample payloads in cylinder inserts in multiple LVs. Robot arm sets up three stage solid vehicle and reuses ground assets in rover for remote control/tracking/guidance using HGA for all stages to enter 80-100km LMO.
This is very low – won’t last for long. So you coordinate launch and orbiter, which uses the same departure stage to take its 300-500Km orbit and enter a elliptical orbit so as to intersect, brake, acquire, and ascend/circularize. Makes the LV’s small and dumb. Plus you have many tries at bat, and before you fly this profile you fly flight profiles with the hardware against ground HGA tracking, such that you have baseline trajectory and capture. Call it “sky diver” !
It might be possible to go as low as 50km depending on atmospheric conditions – we’ll learn more with MAVEN about this.
The orbital cruise bus, after many sample recoveries over as long as a year or two, then departs Mars for direct Earth return, with a Stardust like RV on a parachute snagged by a copter.
Notice the enormous amount of reuse of components – the cruise stage and departure stage are reused more than a dozen times alone. A very mass efficient mission, which relies on the ability for the DSN and the rovers HGA to coordinate a highly accurate series of manuevers – as ballsey a thing as EDL!
Now if I could only talk JPL into daring it.
Pauls this a old ideas i wrote for you but misplaced on flash drive.
I guess these could be tools to use to go and use L2
Paul
Another kooky space suit idea.
The other day I checked my blood pressure. It is running a little high lol. I’m an old scuba diver here. You say that Space suits joints get stiff if you are working at normal earth sea level pressure when you are in the vacuum of space.
What if you had a space suit that was hard around the chest/lungs and helmet but at the waist and under the arm pits you had a plastic material just like the blood pressure machine. You get in your suit at normal space station pressure. Your leggings and arms are stiff. You give your suit the voice limb de-compress command. You feel your belt and arm pits tighten and the little air pumps suck the air out of your suits arms and legs till your suit arms fingers, legs are flexible. Does a person have to re-breath if only part of their body is at low pressure? And for how long? Maybe a Space walker could do this for an hour and then they have to equalize pressure for 15 minutes or something. A human can scuba dive all day at above 33 feet of water and I don’t think the difference between sea level air pressure and Space vacuum is greater than that??? But I don’t know?
What pressure is the space station kept at anyway??? And if we were doing work in space couldn’t we have space walkers that live in the lower pressure, all the time, just like we do with divers.
Other idea
I’m sure today it would be very easy to make space suit arms where your hand is in a hard volume were mini radar sensors or video create a 3D data of your arm to send info to a robotic hand that is mounted on your suit just beyond your fingers. How many cell phone cameras do you need to do that and a few lights in your arm volume lol
Again my point we can and should make safe space suits and it’s not that hard??
The dragon beam space construction team Tick and pod pilots live at low air pressure all the time. What’s the big deal? They only have to compress (opposite of decompress lol) if they are planning vacation or weekends at stations or earth. That’s why Dragon dock/beam has its own Bigelow station and the seven of us live here with our life boat dragon.
The Tick Pilot
Ps. You said, why Ticks? The name or the kind of vehicle?
The name because ticks all use inflatable shells built by Bigelow(safer for micro meteors). So they are like Ticks.
There are on two size chassis a small one and a big one. I may name the suit with snail shell the SNAIL . lol Your idea.
Thanks for your interest in this Parallel time and place Paul
Parallel lines
I think there should be a family of suit sizes and small vehicles that all share the same basic bus. And Spacex, Boeing or one of the companies that maybe didn’t win the down select should build them. And they don’t need to be fancy or too expensive.
Paul, I don’t buy the fact that to make a mini space vehicle or a fleet of them has to cost a half a billion. One of these new companies should be able to make them for cheap in the new up and coming commercial space age. I don’t think that mini vehicles should be an expensive NASA R and D project either. NACA should just be there to help.
The old partial pressure suits provided lower pressure around the hands. But it isn’t the best solution; after an extended period the areas of the body under lower pressure will swell and be pretty uncomfortable.
Thanks
Brian:
It actually takes less fuel to get to L1/L2 from Earth then to get to lunar orbit. It also takes more fuel to stay in lunar orbit because large areas where high mass meteorites, like nickle/iron ones, make lunar orbit ‘bumpy’. These are called ‘masscons’ for mass concentrations. NASA has a couple of probes in lunar orbit plotting such masscons right now.
It only takes a small amount of extra fuel to go from the lunar surface to L1/L2 but it takes a lot less fuel to go from L1/L2 to the lunar surface. A possible scenario for good In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) would be for a lander to refuel on the Moon with enough to make a return trip to L1/L2 making that leg ‘sustainable’. Payloads could be split between crew & cargo (up & down) and fuel (up) & volatiles like ammonia & nitrogen (down). Having dedicated SSTL (Single Stage To Lagrange) fuel tankers would help make the L1/L2 to LEO leg sustainable too.
tinker
From its “hovering” position over the lunar far side, it would be in direct communication with Earth.”It would? An L1 station would be in direct LOS communication with Earth, but an L2 station would have to have either a VERY large diameter halo orbit or a relay of some sort on, or in orbit around, the moon, would it not? Would a halo of that diameter be practical?
It would indeed have a very large halo orbit. That’s the plan. Artemis proved those orbits clearly. It works. In fact, the larger orbits, I believe, are propulsively easier to do stationkeeping in than the small orbits.
In fact, the larger orbits, I believe, are propulsively easier to do stationkeeping in than the small orbits.
Confirmed.
The smaller the orbit the less the angular momentum in the plane of the point. The more the angular momentum, the less fluctuations matter. Of course, over time one has to add momentum to the system to maintain this, but …
Thanks for clearing that up, Helen.
The L2 “halo” orbit is by design slightly larger than the diameter of the moon, so that the station is always just outside the disk of the moon as seen from Earth. This gives it the appearance of circling the moon in the sky as viewed from earth, though of course it is farther away than the moon. There are a few satelites in Earth-Sun halo orbits (SOHO, WMAP).
As for teleoperation, it is quite true there is a significant impact due to the time lag, but the cost of dealing with a three-second communication lag is not on a par with the cost of dealing with supporting a human crew at that location.
I think this is a great idea. I just don’t think its a great idea _now_, when it would cost $1B per launch; the money could be better used to accelerate the development of both near and intermediate term reusable launch systems.
Thanks, Vulture.
Re teleoperation, you refer to Earth-Moon, right?
The delay from a halo orbit should be less than three seconds.
Yes, after all we teleoperate vehicles on Mars. There is always more than one way to skin the cat. We are still trying to find a mission of infinite value to justify the nearly infinite cost of human spaceflight. If we could put a person on the moon for $10M, it would be worth it just to let him/her drive the rover. But at $1B it is much cheaper to design an autonomous vehicle that can operate with occasional cues. Much simpler than the [existing] self-driving car, and usable on Mars as well.
This mission sounds like yet another attempt to find some mission to justify Orion/SLS without paying for a lander, as Congress has demanded. What we should do is recognize that the value of human spaceflight is considerable, but not infinite, and we have to lower its cost until it is less than its value.
I can’t tell if we’re talking about sun-earth L2 or Earth-moon L2. The illustration isn’t matching with the article, perhaps?
The proposal is for Earth-moon L2; that is, a halo-oribit around a point that is behind the moon (when viewed from Earth).
(The fact that it’s a halo oribit around Earth-moon L2, not directly at L2, means it’s always visible from the Earth.)
Why didn’t they propose a facility in a halo orbit above one of the moon’s poles where they might be able to tele-robotically extract the ice that’s supposed to be there? It would seem to satisfy their beyond LEO yearnings and also work on determining if this lunar ISRU idea really has any merit.
A lot of people push the get resources from the moon idea but no one has ever convinced me that we can design and operate equipment in a permanently shadowed lunar environment. I want to see if it can be done and not just hear a bunch of dreamers’ opinions about how it absolutely could be done if Uncle Sugar would just put up the cash.
There’s no such thing as a halo orbit above one of the moon’s poles. You can’t have an orbit that’s always either above or below the plane of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. The Moon is tidally locked, so the plane of its rotation is the same as the plane of its orbit around the Earth.
If we can’t have lunar surface stations on the lunar high
ground for awhile then stations around EM L1 & L2 would at least give us a
higher ground to monitor any other surface activity. Space is 4 the US and we need to be able to
protect our security and economic interests. The recent DOS attacks clearly
demonstrate that our space interests are at risk.
What an awful thing to read. Spudis’s snarks about Gateway brings to mind how things went awry with Apollo Applications, as well as the events that led to the loss of Skylab.
But it makes no sense to post anything on his blog, because he’s way too closed minded. Suffice to say, Gateway is the only chance in my mind for any lunar work whatsoever for the next 40 years. It doesn’t surprise me that the “moon done my way” lunar settlement crowd would shoot themselves in the foot as before, which reminds me again of why Bob Zubrin dislikes any involvement with the lunar guys (and Gateway because its too “lunar” in like kind), because in effect they are such “losers” to put it bluntly.
And the double irony of how I’ve myself used some of his work to argue for robotically bootstrapped ISRU for first gateway resupply and secondly propellant, as in building the case for Gateway and Gateway commercial ventures to allow commercialization of the moon.
My students, who are gen-Y’s, see the Gateway as their platform to conquer a solar system, and are very tired of the old “arsenal space” guys who screw up lunar ambitions since they are so narrow minded. They’ve come to despise Spudis as a result. To be honest, they find the Mars Society oldsters also too annoying – they walked out on “industry day”, the middle day because of the same reason.
Anyone who’s young appears to get this. Most of the old are stuck in denial about it.
I think the big thing here is the residues of the JFK decision to go to the moon in 10 years and not leave anything as a permanent fixture to hang a continuing involvement on – a concious decision to abandon all. As was done.
We didn’t do Von Braun’s stations, orbital assembly, and gradual, perpetual conquest of space. We did a sprint with single use hardware, won the race, then tossed the rest.
My beilef is that Von Braun would desire Gateway most at this point, in the same way the gen-Y’s see it – as a beginning of ambitions.
Perhaps thats why the oldsters dislike both so much – because if they get Gateway, they’ll succeed inspite of the oldsters obselete views.
Build water fueled spaceships first!!! To be ready to mine the moon.
Mr. C
I’m confused lol
I don’t think I understand the whole L2 fuel moon thing.
I do understand the idea of going to the moon to mine water to make fuel to run spaceships I think.
A while ago some in congress were suggesting that we should be making depots in space to store and process fuel.
These depots were big and expensive. Steve and mmeijeri had a big discussion about it which I only half understood.
Then Paul suggests that NASA should lead each step of the way in building the railroad and commercial boot straps right behind. Public space must skip steps or it would take forever! You don’t have slow pokes lead a race!
Well as I said before I watched that NOVA show which made it very clear to me, that if NASA/congress wanted to, they could start building a spaceship tomorrow that ran on ice or water. You don’t have to build depots that separate hydrogen from water. Then worry about boil off and all that expensive storage crap.
That should be the job of your spaceships skin right???
Just as Elon is building a recoverable rocket NOW, someone maybe NASA should be building a spaceship NOW, however large or small that you just fill with water and sit it in the sun a while to fill its hydro and oxygen tanks and take off.
You all talk about getting fuel from the moon.
Well how about from earth FIRST. We have tons of water!
Yes Yes I know the expensive gravity well and all that. But what if in the next few years (not in decades from now) we could have a recoverable falcon 9 or heavy hauling water to a spaceship that ran on water. Build or test them at ISS, Use ISS as a construction test platform!
Wouldn’t this be better cheaper, faster than going through the whole hydrazine generation of ships, tugs and landers?
Wouldn’t this make fuel depots cheaper and simpler?
Doesn’t this solve all the boil off issues??? Only make your hydro and oxygen hours/ days/ weeks before you need it? Can’t water ice be stored forever?
What if your little spaceship could eat chunks of ICE. Couldn’t your fuel depot just be a wall that shades water turning it to ice, or it could be a simple can/tank/Bigelow hab filled with water.
Shouldn’t we be building spaceships that live off the land now?
Look at the solar cell separate that hydro!!!!!
And couldn’t rocket hydro tanks have that feather fiber in them too??? Where is that leo chicken farm lolol
Sure seems to me that solar cell hydro batteries could fast track the inner solar system railroad development.
Who will build the railroads engine or the space cars of the future and when?
A spaceship/vehicle needs to be like a green tree or leaf. You just add a little water.
Lolol no wonder Y gens are fed up with NASA congress and old Space!!!!!
Lolol clean sheet, lets start over, lose these geezers!!!!
It doesn’t take a rocket scientistt!!!
Let’s build a BIG F ROCKET BOYS WE GOT A MISSION NOW!!! SHAME THE KIDS THAT WATCHED THE MOON LANDINGS WILL NEVER SEE IT. THEY’LL BE DEAD!!!!
SEEMS TO ME NASA THINKS OLD FASHION!!
NO NO you don’t understand NASA has this SLS and Orion capsule they need a mission for. We have to justify pissing all this money down the toilet.
Sorry Steve I’m not political, just fed up!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nov…
WATCHING THAT SOLAR LEAF PASSIVELY MAKING ROCKET FUEL AND DREAMING!!!!!
Dreaming of what could be and should be but isn’t!
Quote from the Nova making stuff cleaner show
“That’s what Nate Lewis is doing.
He’s got a major grant from the United States Department of Energy to convert sunlight into chemical fuel. It’s what he calls artificial photosynthesis, and he claims he can do it better than my plant.
NATE LEWIS (California Institute of Technology): We have systems already in the lab that do show that we can capture, convert and store the Sun’s energy into chemical fuel, more than ten times more efficiently than the best plant on our planet.
DAVID POGUE: The power of the Sun is no secret.
More energy from the Sun hits the Earth in one hour than all the energy consumed on our planet in an entire year. We already have solar panels that convert sunlight to electricity, but they’re fragile and expensive, because the silicon they’re made of has to be very pure.
But Nate’s got a cheaper, more durable way to make solar cells, modeled on the leaves of the Aspen tree.
His silicon is shaped like veins of a leaf, embedded in a conductive plastic film. The shape allows electrons to flow through the veins, even if the silicon has impurities. And Nate’s silicon leaves are cheap to grow and flexible enough to be rolled out like a solar blanket.
All right, so this is the big moment. As I understand it, that is Nate’s magic microwire: rollable, cheap, solar panel material.
NATE LEWIS: So this is making electricity just like the panels would make on your roof. There’s no current when there’s not much light, and then it sees the nice California sun, then we get more current.
DAVID POGUE: Now here’s the artificial photosynthesis piece of the puzzle, the energy storage.
NATE LEWIS: The best way to store energy is in chemical bonds. That’s what nature does in photosynthesis. That’s why we call this artificial photosynthesis.
DAVID POGUE: Nate puts his silicon leaves into regular old water. The electric charge generated by these tiny solar panels splits the H20 into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen.
NATE LEWIS: You can see, if you just flip the switch, and then we will see the bubbles coming off of that as it does that chemical process. So, be my guest.
DAVID POGUE: I’m going to turn on the Sun?
NATE LEWIS: Turn on the Sun.
DAVID POGUE: This always happens, people say, “Here comes David Pogue. It’s like the Sun coming out.” Okay.
Whoa! So, those are bubbles of?
NATE LEWIS: Hydrogen gas.
DAVID POGUE: By converting sunlight into storable energy, Nate has figured out how to imitate what plants have been doing for billions of years: photosynthesis.
If this scales up, the hydrogen produced could be useful in fuel cells to power our cars, homes and factories.”
AND SPACESHIPS!
Ever set up a ranch or a farm from scratch? What do you do first and why? Thats why things don’t add up for you. Puzzle pieces fit many ways. All good.
Issues – getting raw resource(s) in volume reliably, separating wheat from chaff w/o loss, lofting resultant to where it can be consumed.
You can process it many places into many forms. You won’t know whats best to do where until you solve the above issues and can assay “what goes in” “what comes out” “what gets used”. Then you tweak your answers to the issues above, process what/where/when/how/why, and begin the business cycle which eventually changes usage patterns.
Look at SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 – this is the first example of a change due to COTS success. In advance of usage pattern. Orbital”s taking risks with Antares because they are falling too far behind. ULA’s IVF program attempts to steal “SpaceX innovation spotlight” for a few months. Ariane 6 design in a free fall cause they can’t guess where things are heading. Russian’s routinely having SpaceX fits – note that PPTS now resembles Dragon! Even China’s having anxiety over if its plans are incompetent.
Thanks
Deleted by user.
Hit dumb question limit 🙂
Some items – a useful reading list for you self answering related questions.
… work with this guy, Nate Lewis
Fund basic research through NSF – this is another guy, who like “Big Bird” on PBS, doesn’t have something revenue producing. In a political climate of “reductionism” as expressed last presidential debate, this guy and his ilk is dead.
Reductionist NASA only does heritage technology -e.g. fuel cells and solar cells. They can’t even stand ULA’s IVF, that’s where the “SpaceX skepticism” comes from.
So your question is more about taking more risk/waste to maybe get a “gain”. What if it’s just seen as “waste”?
That is how same research got killed in the 70’s.
… run on water hydrogen systems?
Same reason we don’t have hydrogen cars – too much works other ways. Why many want to standardize on hypergols is that they work now and you can build/prove/deploy/explore with them no arguments. Korolev, Chelomei, Von Braun (many more) knew you could do lunar and solar system exploration just with these, even if they are worse for other reasons.
… mining the moon a chicken egg problem?
The Shuttle was a chicken and egg problem that by political fiat failed. E.g. RLV economics bootstrapping.
Close. It’s a business development project. Old space boomers tend to conflate this with “arsenal space”, and totally screw things up.
Think instead of supporting space operations through special tax incentives for space entrepreneurship. However runs afoul of both the left (non space) and right (they want to channel money back into arsenal space – example ATK’s Liberty “head fake” CCiCAP – meant to shake down taxpayer as wolf in sheeps clothing).
little hydro thrusters
Look at ULA’s IVF
Is there a tech.problem with a water hydro system that I’m missing over hydrozine?
Gaseous or liquid hydrogen is hard to manage – peculiar properties esp in space.
You can make many other kinds of propellants – combinations of fuel/oxidizers, easier to store that hydrogen. In effect a different way to store/combust hydrogen.
Couldn’t NASA make a little test craft like DEEP SPACE 1, tested ion
tech to test water hydro tech and maybe fly it around asteriod belt?
Not the issue. The issue is getting off Earth resources, not out of gravity well.
Lets say you plop down a lander in a polar crater with ideal water/regolith, you recover a useful, plentiful, “slurry flow”/ “seam stream” delivered to assay/production. Then alter/optimize processing stages/components to yield best resultant products (least cost for most effective resultant).
Now that you know what comes out of the end of the stream (and what it takes to get/maintain it – “full burdened cost”) – then you plan transport, consumption/use, and possibly depot. As a system.
Design tradeoffs – you might have suboptimal components for props or life support/other, but as a whole works best.
You can get water/oxygen out of certain hypergols BTW.
Hard part here is getting the raw material stream, so that you know what to do with it.
If you got that, and had a supply contract for 10years FFP, a “new space” company could likely get financed for building a Gateway “gas station”.
We are more close to that than an “arsenal space” lunar settlement of any kind.
Thanks left question to tinker before seeing this
We are more close to that than an “arsenal space” lunar settlement of any kind.
lol kinda of smelled that one. I have forgotten what year it was when I thought Robert was wrong to count on “arsenal space” but it was like 10 years back. easy to beat something or one that stands still or goes backwards lol
To be fair to the lunics, Zubrin is just as monomaniacal about his plan for Mars. (No variation may be entered into because his plan is best plan.)
FYI, more NASA detail:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604…
Other analysis, and some NASA reaction:
http://www.universetoday.co…