Bolden: NASA Does Not Have To Actually Go To An Asteroid
Bolden: Don’t Have to Travel Far to Asteroid to Meet President’s Goal, Space PolicyOnline
“Bolden said that when the President announced that an asteroid would be the next destination for NASA’s human spaceflight program, he did not say NASA had to fly all the way to an asteroid. What matters is the “ability to put humans with an asteroid,” Bolden said. An NRC report released earlier this month concluded that sending people to an asteroid has not won wide support in NASA or the nation. Bolden did not criticize that report directly, but said that NRC committee had only a short time to complete its study and it was done at a time of “relative silence” from NASA because of the election and did not have the benefit of the information he was presenting this morning. The only new material he presented this morning was this information about the asteroid mission and the news that NASA will soon stand up a Space Technology Mission Directorate.”
Keith’s note: Bolden also said “on our way to an asteroid or Mars we may find a way to get people to the Moon or a LaGrange point …. some reporter in the back of the room is going to write saying that we are going to a LaGrange Point. I did not say that”
NASA Really Doesn’t Want to Do That Whole Asteroid Thing, earlier post
I love Bolden. He is a genius of administration.
OK, this is getting farcical!
That sounds like Standard Bolden Ass-Covering. He’s been completely incompetent at masking the Obama Administration’s apathy to anything resembling a goal for the manned space program, and this is just the latest example of that.
I’ve also heard news that Obama might turf him out. That can’t come too soon.
In the interest of editorial accuracy, please note that the semi-stable gravitational potential locus points are called “Lagrange points”. They were named after the French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. “LaGrange” is a city in Georgia. Of course “La Grange” is a town in Texas where the infamous Chicken Ranch brothel was located.
So, is Jones’ idea to bolt a low thrust engine to a small rock that over several years is nudged into a resonance that brings it within the delta-V of a Dragon + Falcon 9 Heavy? So much for “mountains in the sky”, me thinks this is a mole-hill. But perhaps NASA can park a Bigelow module nearby, which would be about the same size.
I said from day there’s no way NASA is going to send humans to a stupid asteroid.
And NASA isn’t going to the Moon, Mars, or even Lagrange. And not even LEO again for the rest of this decade. And..well, you get my point.
“‘said from day there’s no way NASA is going to send humans to a stupid asteroid”
“the idea of NASA targeting an asteroid as the next venue for a human visit, is really the fault of President Obama.”
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It is quite easy to see why all the confusion is taking place:
Shifting NASA (err Congress) to focus on NASA’s priorities is no easy task!
1) First, most of NASA, for over a decade, has be directed to continue work on the Constellation architecture, now SLS/Orion, originally 2X year, 6-day lunar sorties, using hardware developed 30 years ago.
Now if your goal is the moon, please just say so and stop stating your are preparing for Mars. State that that you have given up, cannot accept any challenge in life, and state precisely what the tremendous economic benefits and science that will be accomplished on the surface of the moon….
So how to move past this “plan”……
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More background:
2) Several Mars missions have been scoped out over the years. The
most recent deleted all the technology, including things that would make
it cheaper, or even allow the mission to begin. It is just sad–there is nothing to protect the crew from radiation.
3) NASA cannot do anything that does not include shuttle stuff because of Congress. That includes asteroid missions–start with a bad architecture you get bad mission plans.
4) Uncrewed flights (google apollo unmanned flights) are very common to certify systems and save costs.
5) Despite claims to the contrary, the moon does not prepare humans
to travel to mars. One needs radiation protection, EP, boiloff
reduction, a closed ECLSS, landing heavy objects on Mars, to name a few…
6) The goal is Mars.
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So it is quite simple really.
Build a gateway at L2 to test radiation protection and extend the time the crew can spend in space. Continue R&D to reduce the weight. When the protection is adequate, send the crew to eventually stay at L2 for the length of time it takes to make a round trip to Mars.
Also head to an asteroid, as all the technologies needed to land on Mars can be demonstrated here just like an Apollo 8 flyby at substantially less cost and energy (well perhaps not an aerobrake…)
Developing the hardware to perform these missions puts in place efforts that are critical for exploration beyond the moon, while at the same time providing increased flight rates than ISS. Two stepping stones at less cost to demonstrate capability prior to sending crew.
It’s just beyond the imagination if the technologies come together to even propose landing crew on an asteroid or Mars. Most importantly, there are guaranteed spinoffs of these technologies back on earth, unlike the engine development and capsule programs today or heading to the moon.
The path is flexible. If you actually had the hardware in place to travel and land on an asteriod, then Mars is in the mission set as well. If something could be mined on the moon or an asteroid or ….. adjust the plan to be even more bold.
If it does not work out, then see 1) above and prepare the crew to live like moles on the lunar surface
Obama noted that he expects to still “be around” by the time US
astronauts land on the red planet. “We will actually reach space faster
and more often under this new plan, in ways that will help us improve
our technological capacity and lower our costs,”
Mistake? To challenge someone to accomplish something? To give someone a goal and let them figure out how to do it?
Moon first is not a strategy.
I think “flexible path” from the President and Congress really means “if there’s a political need to ramp up HST then will do it, otherwise we’re cutting the funding in half”.
The message is loud and clear, there just isn’t the political need or the political will to fly astronauts beyond LEO.
There is the political need and will for a “jobs program”.
MEAHWHILE at the former Apollo Astronaut’s Cave, John Young continues to get buried in a mountain of memos!
How come I’m more confused after reading Bolden’s statement than I was before? Is he doing the Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope strategy? I think I am going to go lay down now.
NASA probably does not have to have a destination now.They have been working on L2,Moon and asteroid.The first Orion flights leads to all.
I say that we should do baby steps first.Setting up a Moon base would be technically easy,but expensive.It would be safe.A radiation shelter first.Yes we have been there,but a permanent Moon base would be a first.Something like ISS on the Moon.Everyone would support that and a lot of other nations would join in.So it might be the cheapest yet.A trip to an asteroid is bold,but there are real people going there.Some are like Captain Archer,I side with the Vulcans.
Where can we sign up for four more years of this? Ohhh wait we already did. Danged!!!
It’s sad really.
Kind of like they don’t have to actually design, build or fly spacecraft but they can talk about it and that is almost as good?
Correction: They do do design…… Powerpoint design design that is, and are very proficient at it. Some of these space exploration architects have made a career of it, they have never seen one of their designs come to fruition but they keep plugging away
The USA isn’t broke. We’re still the richest country in the world. We just have to abandon some of our illusions that we can have everything without paying for it.
And the US civilian space program is still by far the richest in the world. NASA spends more money each year than every other civilian space program in the world combined. Even if we go over the fiscal cliff and get drastic cuts, NASA’s budget will still be far larger than that of any other civilian space agency in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
OK, since Keith is taking some time off, we can entertain ourselves!
And I’ll bite. When one looks dispassionately at our entire budget and expenditures, a single category stands out: so-called ‘defense’. And before anyone gives me grief about being a flaming liberal (which I am), let me point out that the cost of protecting the world and our own rapacious oil appetite–the base reason for two horribly expensive wars with no clear benefit to the country–our oil appetite is what is actually bankrupting the country. My friends and fellow countrymen on the right can agree on this.A sensible energy policy would eliminate interests in the middle east, and a sharp reassessment of the need to protect Europe and several other spots around the world would do the same. I recognize legitimate defense needs. But my own assessment finds at least $250 B a year that would build a lot of roads and schools and bridges in this great country.We are an incredibly rich country in every way but leadership. And we CAN have a vigorous space program, new airports, long-range rail systems, modern highways, and the other public improvements that are so necessary in a modern world– including universal health care. We can have all of these things with clear thinking about energy and defense.It’s not complicated, but as we watch the monkeys in Washington jousting for scraps it’s not likely to happen. And don’t tell me that the private sector can do it. Not even close. Nobody wants, for example, toll roads all over the country, as suggested by our Florida governor. And what private entity builds great airports?It’s the function and purpose of government to provide a safe environment and a level playing field for private enterprise to prosper. And to use the largess of common effort to common benefit.It’s infuriating.
I am a moderate former Marine (and republican) and I approve this message!
I agree the private sector cannot do it alone, but neither can government. Industry can be more than a contractor or greedy lobbyist, it can be a partner, identifying commercial goals, developing sustainable markets, providing initiative and expertise, and accepting risk, but government is needed to identify national priorities, support basic research, and to provide resources for R&D which industry cannot.
Even with the obvious cuts in the DOD budget, with our current debts we, the public, will have to pay taxes at reasonable levels, as we did during the Clinton administration, and also during the 50’s and 60’s, our longest periods of sustained economic growth.
vulture4,
Excellent post. The only thing I would add is that, if we can trust the surveys, private industry in the US and Canada is spending a lot less money theses days on R&D than in the past. This translates into reduced profits, reduced progress and increased risk. The offered justifications for reduced R&D spending are open to debate, but the consequences are not.
Although it’s much harder to quantify, I would have to suspect that government R&D, across the board, has been seriously reduced as well. This does not speak well for the US “retaining” its lead in technology, etc.
Steve
Talking about BEO destinations and capabilities. Will someone tell me why we have to have HLLV for a BEO program? I went through the augustine report 3 times already and they mention that we need to have HLV capability to do BEO, but they never explain why. I looked at a few other reports and documents about the need for HLV but they were focused on large scale construction in space not BEO exploration like the Augustine Commission.
The only credible reason I have heard from anyone so far is that we will eventually need to lift reactors large enough to run future propulsion systems such as VASMIR and current rockets will not be sufficient (including Falcon Heavy).
Michael,
My opinion on this, and it’s only an opinion, is that there were two groups within the Augustine Commission. The first, with all due respect, didn’t know enough about future technologies and likely programs to give an informed opinion, and therefore made an assumption that sustainable, which was agreed to be a requirement, translated into a growing space infrastructure, which would require (another assumption) heavy equipment for space construction, which, to them, meant HLLV. The second group, I think, were more pragmatic; they recognized that if the report did not include recommending HLLV, then Congress would dismiss it out of hand. There was no technical basis for this, at all.
I have to suspect that a large percentage of those outside of the Commission who gave lip service to HLLV did so for the same reason, to “agree” with Congress, again not a technical decision.
I’ve been in the same position as you. The only reasonable potential uses for HLLV that I have been given are lifting large reactors & cooling systems, and prefab space construction units, and I’m not 100% convinced on either of these. I have read/heard other suggestions, like lifting intact space stations into orbit, but none of these, in my opinion, are realistic. In the long run, the volume, shape and structural strength of a payload are the controlling factors, not simply mass.
In fact, the greater the thrust of a HLLV the more likely they are to have problems with things like vibration and pogo that a given payload may not be able to survive. It’s not enough for a LV to have lots of thrust; it must be able to provide a smooth lift, and the track record on Constellation in this respect was horrible. Can we expect SLS to be any better? We may well end up being forced to revert to the older concept of modular component assembly in space instead of HLLVs, which is something we’re going to have to learn to do anyhow for BEO, if only for reasons of restricted funding.
Steve
What is turning into sort of a programmatic fiasco, the idea of NASA targeting an asteroid as the next venue for a human visit, is really the fault of President Obama. His KSC speech two and a half years ago floated this idea, which Administrator Bolden immediately jumped all over. “I think this president gets it!” Bolden quickly said. But that idea, of going to an asteroid, was evidently done with a fairly thin amount of mission planning, and was interpreted by NASA as a flag that they were all supposed to line up behind. Lori Garver is positively wedded to it now, because it came across as a presidential directive. I have to suspect that Obama desperately didn’t want to think about human space flight, and latched onto the asteroid idea as a next step that sounded at least halfway credible. The idea was to expend the least amount of thought in raising a flag for an agency to line up behind.
Now, Obama certainly had a lot more important things to think about, but by raising this flag, he’s created a distraction that has prevented the agency from thinking hard about the “value proposition” for human space flight that the new NRC panel is starting to consider. Human space flight does not, at this time, have a widely accepted value proposition. To the extent that value proposition is about humanity reaching out to large distances (and I by no means am concluding that it is, but many people feel that it is), bringing an asteroid to where a visit is more convenient is like moving the goalposts.
Yes, it is the fault of President Obama. But ultimately he is not an engineer or a scientist. He relied on people advising him on the future manned prorgam, namely the Augustine Commission. In their report they advocated, based on their 12 criteria, that the flexible path had the most value. This path included manned asteroid exploration as one of the more plausible missions (at least initially), specifically because it didnt require entering and exiting the deeper gravity well of the moon. Furthermore they stated that an asteroid mission would test our ability to travel BEO (and cis lunar space) and be a testbed for the systems that a Mars mission would require in any case.
Ultimately the choice of going to an asteroid lies in the Augustine Commisions hands as the prime advisors to President Obama and their findings as a reflection of what NASA’s current BEO mission is. The problem more than anything is that they made all of these recommendations based on the need to increase NASA’s budget (at least initially) and this is something that has not happened and looks to not happen for quite some time.
That’s partly correct.
Certainly it isn’t up to any president to validate the technical or scientific worth of a human space flight strategy. But it is up to the president to ask some serious top-level questions about a human space flight strategy before setting it up as a presidential directive. I don’t believe Obama did. Of course, one could argue that maybe W didn’t do that with Constellation either, and we ended up spending hugely more money on that before we figured that we couldn’t afford it.
The Augustine committee was largely formed to assess the viability of Constellation, and they were asked to “identify and characterize a range of options that spans the reasonable possibilities for continuation of U.S. human space flight activities
beyond retirement of the Space Shuttle.” Going to a NEO may have looked “reasonable” in the context of flexible path, but that reasonableness doesn’t translate cleanly to a presidential directive. I’m just saying that it’s a pity that the White House didn’t give the matter more thought before committing its space agency to send humans to a NEO.
The Augustine Commission started with the assumption that BEO human spaceflight was a given, and that an expendable HLV based on Shuttle hardware was the right course. They failed to consider the critical need to substantially reduce cost for human spaceflight to be affordable, indeed they ignored the need for the value of a program to exceed its cost. They ignored the alternative strategy of developing new RLV technology to reduce the cost of access to LEO to a practical level, which was the goal we identified and began to work for 40 years ago, when Apollo was (correctly) cancelled because of its excessive cost.
“they ignored the need for the value of a program to exceed its cost“
vulture4,
While I agree with what I think you mean by this statement, we need to find a better way to say it. “Value” is a subjective assessment at best. In this or any other context, value is not a measurable quantity, like price and cost are. Value is entirely a matter of personal opinion — the value of any object, to you, is whatever you would be willing to pay for it. So, different people will assign the same object a different value, and they’ll all be correct.
What we need to do, what Augustine, I agree, failed to do, was address the nature of “return on investment,” and further, we have to realize that any such returns are not going to be simply a dollar value, but have to be expressed in terms of knowledge gained and other intangible assets gained, and how they relate to the goals that were set out for a program and/or the needs of the nation. This, again, becomes subjective, since different people will have different opinions about the worth of things like scientific knowledge. So we bang up against the value concept again, which can be argued for ever with no resolution.
There are some returns which can be converted to a (proposed) dollar value, such as creation of a new industry, or (possibly in the future) money saved on natural resources acquired and/or processed in space, but overall we need a standardized, generally accepted set of metrics for “measuring” the return on investment for both individual space programs and for national space activities as a whole. Until we have these metrics, w’ere merely talking, not communicating. At least, this is how I’ve always seen it.
Happy Holidays,
Steve
Brian,
Very succinct comment.
Hmmm….. so maybe NASA can do it all. If NASA can’t go to an asteroid then bring the asteroid to NASA at say…. L2
Fair enough.
State precisely the science benefits. If you include ISRU, provide rationale for making the business case close for travel to Mars vs EP.
State why the energy storage system can only be certified on the surface and why it is needed for travel to Mars.
State why the closed ECLSS system cannot be demonstrated at L2 cheaper than lunar surface.
BlingSlade:
– The focus on beyond the moon technology will provide guaranteed spinoffs creating a political or commercial need, however you define it–perhaps not in the same locations. Engines, capsules, and landers do not, especially off the shelf, decades old products. A decade of no funding has shown that moon first is not really a strategy (do not the poles contain more science than the equator?), but it does not preclude returning to step 1) above sometime in the future.