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Exploration

Charlie Bolden's Meandering Strategic Plans

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 31, 2012
Filed under , , , , ,

Nasa plan to ‘lasso’ asteroid the size of two buses and turn it into a ‘space station’ to orbit the moon, Daiy Mail
“Nasa scientists are planning to capture a 500 ton asteroid, relocate it and turn it into a space station for astronauts on their way to Mars. The White House’s Office of Science and technology will consider the 1.6bn plan in the coming weeks as it prepares to set its space exploration agenda for the next decade. Nasa declined to comment on the project because it said it was in negotiations with the White House, but it is believed that technology would make it possible within 10-12 years.”
Bolden: NASA Does Not Have To Actually Go To An Asteroid
“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”
Charlie Bolden Intends To Press President Obama on Mars Mission Mandate for NASA, earlier post
“At one point, Bolden teared up and said that “Mars is the Goal”. Bolden claimed that he was intent upon going to the White House, “pounding his shoe on the table”, and demanding a commitment from President Obama to direct NASA to send humans to Mars. Bolden said that he needs that commitment to allow him to decide what to do (not do) with regard to extending the ISS.”
Is It Time For Charlie Bolden To Pound His Shoe?, earlier post
“When NASA gets its FY 2013 budget passback from OMB they will see that in addition to not approving the L2 station, there is none of the additional, strong Mars commitment that Charlie Bolden declared must be in the budget (other than what the President has already said, that is). No word yet as to whether Bolden has requested a meeting at the White House for his shoe pounding event.”
Keith’s note: The President directs NASA to send a human mission to an asteroid and prepare for a trip to Mars in the 2030s. NASA responds with plans to build a space station at L2 and Charlie Bolden says he’ll bang his shoe on the table if the President does not give NASA a mandate to go to Mars and says that a mission to an asteroid doesn’t need to actually go to an asteroid. Now NASA wants to bring an asteroid back to Earth. You can get whiplash if you follow Charlie Bolden’s strategic planning too closely. When it comes to having a coherent, consistent, strategic plan, NASA doesn’t have one. Instead, it spins around in 10 directions at once – as if it has institutionalized Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Someone needs to hit the reset button.

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

48 responses to “Charlie Bolden's Meandering Strategic Plans”

  1. dougmohney says:
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    And you can always count on Keith to bring the “Bah Humbug” to the party.

  2. Alvaro says:
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    I really like this idea. Bringging an asteroid to moon orbit requires c…nes and it is better than planting a flag and claiming “being there; done it,” so people can use that reason to no comeback again. An asteroid in a moon orbit, or a lagragian, is a great invitation card for corporations to visit the place ans check it for mining conditions.

    Even better, after the asteroid, we may want to think about “lassoing” (is that a verb?) a comet, obviously a more difficult task do to the higher delta-v’s required but also rewarding because the ice. And if you follow my drift, we learn to deal with this threads and turn them into opportunities.

    a2c2

  3. Helen Simpson says:
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    There isn’t anything fundamentally inconsistent about a human trip to Mars with a space station at L2, or even a human trip to an asteroid. The latter two can be argued to be stepping stones to get to the former. The stepping stone strategy is also justified by the different time scales of those efforts. We won’t go to Mars for at best until the 2030s. We could put a habitat at L2 in less than a decade, and probably could ship astronauts to a NEO on that time scale as well.

    The issue here is confusion of message. Obama wants NASA human space flight to aim for Mars, and the agency starts making dramatic plans for L2 and NEOs while sort of winking at Mars. In fact, Obama even mentioned a NEO as a nice place to go, in an offhand kind of way. Although putting humans at L2 and at a NEO are sorta handy, we’re told, for a voyage to Mars, NASA has hardly argued that they’re in the critical path for Mars.

    If humans on Mars is the ultimate goal, and we’ve hardly been told by leadership that it is, then convincing arguments should be made about the steps required to get there. As it is, L2 and NEOs are now being sold largely as the next places we can see ourselves going, as opposed to being on the critical path to Mars. Where can we manage to go next outside of LEO isn’t a question that has any self-evident rationale associated with it. We should go there because we can get there? What L2 and NEOs are now in the critical path for is going somewhere (anywhere!) outside of LEO.

    • 2004MN4 says:
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      I really like the idea of using asteroid regolith as radiation shielding.  You could harvest regolith from an asteroid in lunar orbit and then sinter it to make bricks you fit around a habitat…  effectively building a spaceship in Lunar orbit.   Then you can use a SEP system like the one used to lasso the asteroid and boost this spaceship onto an Earth-Mars cycler.    That way you can set up a sustainable infrastructure for reaching Mars.   I don’t know of any other credible plan for Mars missions that addresses the radiation problem. 

      • Fred says:
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         That is a Strange plan. But along the same line of thought as  you propose for “harvesting regolith”, if radiation is the main problem why not just develop warp drive and beat the particles before they contact the spacecraft? This seems as credible, wouldn’t you agree?

        • 2004MN4 says:
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          Some have proposed using advanced propulsion to get to Mars in a few months, but this either involves developing brand new propulsion tech (ala warp drive) or developing very high power space reactors (> 200 MW) to power advanced electric propulsion systems.   I’m afraid if we wait for these technologies to be ready, there won’t be a Mars mission in even my kid’s lifetimes.  I think we should make it a goal to land people on Mars in time for some of the Apollo astronauts to see it.

          • 2004MN4 says:
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            Oops.. I forgot to mention.  The reason going fast deals with the radiation problem is that the crew spends less time in the radiation environment so they build up less total dose.   

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        Nathan,

        I see this as ambitious, but not unrealistic.  Two things, though, 1) you’d want to do a pilot plant test project first, the results of which you are not dependent on for any other program, and 2) you’d have to be able to pick out an asteroid with favorable orbital parameters, and (big and) be able to identify the surface makeup of the asteroid accurately before deciding which one to go for.  If you “lasso” one that has a solid surface (no free regolith) then you’re stuck with grinding it up or starting over.  I’d have to say that the grinding approach, although it is something we’ll need in the future, is too big a step for today or the near future.  I like the fact that you’re thinking outside the box and practical at the same time.

        Steve

        • 2004MN4 says:
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          I think it would be exciting to do part of your pilot plant test project in lunar orbit 🙂  Once we get an asteroid back to lunar orbit then we can send manned missions to experiment with the asteroid material and learn how to process it.   Doing this with crew could be way faster than the decades it would take to learn the same information with robotic probes.  We could use the robotic probes (ala the KISS study last year) to bring back a couple of different kinds of small asteroids to figure out what useful material we can get from the different types of asteroids.  The goal should be to develop processes that can get good stuff from common S-type rocks and great stuff (water) from rarer C and B type rocks.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            Nathan,

            I agree about working in lunar orbit.  It can then be a work site for other projects as well.

            The robotic approach may well come first (based on safety and lower initial investment), but I would like to see both approaches happening together — the human to oversee and tweak the robotic, and the robotic because, in the long run, that ‘s how the work will be done.

            We can do a lot with spectroscopic analysis to determine an asteroid’s overall makeup at a distance, but determining surface structure still requires an impact or laser hit to get the data, as far as I know.  Still, we should be able to check and choose an appropriate rock before it has come and gone again, I would think.

            I would be tempted to go after a C type rock first because the volatiles argument seems to be  more readily accepted than metal and rock processing at this point in time.  So why not lead off with a seller.  Initially you wouldn’t even have to capture your “product”; just show that it can be liberated.

            Steve

  4. jski says:
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    A dozen ill-defined missions is equivalent to no mission.  NASA is rudderless on a voyage to nowhere with this administration.

    At least Constellation had a goal.

    —John

    • Paul451 says:
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      “At least Constellation had a goal.”

      [laughs]

      • jski says:
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        Such a pithy response. 

        What can I say but twaddle to your “[laughs]”.

        • Steve Whitfield says:
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          jski,

          I think the point is that an unrealistic, unobtainable goal is equivalent to no goal (no laugh).

          Steve

          • jski says:
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            Establishing a permanent Lunar presence is not an “unrealistic, unobtainable goal”.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            jski,

            Paul and I mean that Constellation was an “unrealistic, unobtainable goal.”  Aside from all the other issues, the lack of funding from day one made it an “unrealistic, unobtainable goal.”

            Steve

          • Paul451 says:
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            When I pulled apart my toaster, the plan was to fix it. The reality was I bought a new toaster.

    • Helen Simpson says:
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      The Vision for Space Exploration was indeed a top-level view of future human space accomplishment, introduced cogently by the Administration. But visions that are implemented with unexecutable plans (like Constellation) are kind of trite. I can come up with a truckload of awesome visions for space exploration that are totally unaffordable. At least this administration is trying to stick to things it can pay for (ISS, tech development, commercial space, international partnership), though those things don’t have as much excitement as we might like.

      • jski says:
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        I would disagree with “unexecutable plans”.  Perhaps it would be better to say: politically unrealistic? 

        However, the most important piece of Constellation wasn’t Ares I or V or Orion, it was the goal: a permanent human presence on the Moon (not unlike a permanent presence in Antarctica).  It would provide us with a toe-hold to the solar system.  A means to begin to work out the huge systems engineering problems that are inherent to extending human presence to Mars and beyond.

        —John

        • Helen Simpson says:
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          We’re not talking “technically unexecutable”, but rather “fiscally unexecutable”, which I suppose is related to “politically unrealistic”. That’s exactly what the Augustine Committee concluded about Constellation. 

          Indeed, a top level goal is very important to have, and we don’t have one now. But again, goals that are unexecutable don’t count for that much.

          So the most important piece of VSE (let’s talk about that, rather than Constellation) could be said to be an example of what a top level goal might look like. By the way, many would say that Constellation was an implementation plan that was not designed to properly serve the needs of VSE. The goal of Constellation was singularly a lunar outpost. That wasn’t the singular goal of VSE.

  5. Todd_Martin says:
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    Politically, the “Flexible Path” architecture allows for some hardware development (Orion & SLS) without committing to larger concrete plans.  A lunar base or a complete human mission to Mars would be controversial (remember the public response to Newt Gingrich’s fine Florida speech).  Once major costs (such as a HLV) are completed, I expect it will be easier to sell the big projects.  In the meantime, various trade studies comparing costs and benefits for various approaches (prop depots, asteroid ISRU, L2 gateway stations, liquid vs solid boosters, etc) are useful.

    One downside to Flexible Path is the lack of a payload for SLS.  You can’t develop a lunar lander, for example, if you’re not willing or able to commit.  A second downside is how Flexible Path has affected the design of Orion.  Without a firm mission, the spacecraft’s requirements have flopped around so much that the cost and time to build exploded.  We’re left with a large, heavy, water landing 1 time use, 4 person capsule which seems (IMHO) to be inferior in every way to a crewed version of Dragon (DragonRider will be lighter, cheaper, land on land, be reusable, carries 7 and still has a heat-shield to handle BEO missions).

    I’ll agree that Charlie Bolden does a poor job of communicating to the public; Lori Garver is much better at it.  But the incoherence noted in long-term mission planning is part and parcel of the “Flexible Path” approach.

     

    • porkfight says:
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      Orion is actually reusable. The EFT-1 Mission vehicle will be reused for the air abort test launch mission.  Orion is also capable of landing on land, but water landings are baselined for safety because the vehicle can lose a main chute and still land the crew in water. A NASA study team looked at using dragon instead of orion for beo missions, but they found that by the time it was modified to meet their basic set of requirements, it would be like starting over and designing Orion again.  Some of the big differences are the high powered rad hard avionics, and sufficient radiation shielding to protect the crew from x-class SPEs. Comparing the unpressurized volume of Orion to dragon, Orion can carry at least 12 crew members if you don’t fill it with things like a toilet, weeks worth of supplies, shielding, and EVA gear. Even with all of that and 4 crew, it has more volume per person than the shuttle did with 7.

      • Anonymous says:
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        Orion can carry at least 12 crew members if you don’t fill it with things like a toilet, weeks worth of supplies, shielding, and EVA gear. Even with all of that and 4 crew, it has more volume per person than the shuttle did with 7.

        Which is about 6 crewmen too many.  It is too big by far for its intended purpose.

      • Andrew_M_Swallow says:
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        … Orion can carry at least 12 crew members if you don’t fill it with
        things like a toilet, weeks worth of supplies, shielding, and EVA
        gear. Even with all of that and 4 crew, it has more volume per person
        than the shuttle did with 7.

        A mock up Orion with 12 seats inside and 3 days food may make a good photo opportunity.  It will also show a reason for the Orion.

        With 8 people inside an Orion could dock with a living module and the assembly fly to the asteroid or Mars.

    • Littrow says:
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      I’m not sure where you are getting your information but it is not accurate.

      “Flexible Path has affected the design of Orion.  Without a firm mission, 
      -the spacecraft’s requirements have flopped around so much that the cost and time to build exploded.  
      -We’re left with a large, heavy, water landing 1 time use, 4 person capsule which seems (IMHO) to be inferior in every way to a crewed version of Dragon (DragonRider will be lighter, cheaper, land on land, be reusable, carries 7 and still has a heat-shield to handle BEO missions).”

      The poorly defined requirements behind Orion, its size and its mass, and the fact it caries only four, must land in the ocean and cannot be reused have nothing at all to do with flexible path. All of these tings were brought on by the original designers of Orion designing it for its original lunar (or Mars) mission purpose. 

      First: requirements were never well defined. Part of this was the Constellation mission requirements, but much of the problem was the lack of habitability design requirements for the entire mission and for the capsule. In earlier programs large organizations with specialists in anthropometrics, human factors, etc, were behind the spacecraft cockpit design. In the case of Constellation the  managers either forgot to bring in those specialists or maybe they figured they were not needed. So they forgot to establish bonafide requirements for the vehicle. 

      Second: the managers actually wanted to build Orion even bigger and heavier. Orion was downsized twice, long before anyone ever heard of flexible path. 

      Third: the managers got the mass of Orion wrong in their estimates. They did not use common aerospace estimates for system’s masses based on technology. They made a guess based on erroneous assumptions about technology improvements and were way off. A good example was the heatshield which they assumed was going to be something new and different but which turned out to be the same as for Apollo-no new technology-and weighed much more. 

      Fourth: the managers forgot that one of the prime purposed of the ‘capsule’ approach was emergency escape off the pad. They made it far heavier and more difficult to effect an emergency abort, and less safe, than it should have been. Requirements should have been more carefully considered and balanced, and they weren’t. 

      Fifth: they made inaccurate estimates about parachute size (volume) requirements. Their parachutes compartments are too small and this limited the size of parachutes. 

      Sixth: the too small parachutes together with the higher than estimated mass meant the heat shield could not be dropped which exacerbated the landing problem. This meant they had to reduce crew size to four.

      Seventh: they have been spending at a fairly ridiculous rate right from the start and yet we have seen very little from the huge cash outlays.

      porkfight says that Orion is actually reusable and gives evidence of the EFT1 mission plan for reuse on a subsequent abort test. The EFT and the abort test are not fully-up genuine flight ready manned spacecraft. In the Apollo era they would have been identified as mock-ups or boilerplates, built up just enough to get the required systems to function. 

      There was also discussion here about Constellation having a defined goal. This is also inaccurate. I was on the architecture panel and though we started thinking we were going to the moon long-term to develop systems for maintaining an outpost, by the time Constellation finished 
      they were no longer sure what we were doing on the moon-apparently just repeating Apollo, staying longer, going to more places at greater distances, maybe no outpost at all-the outpost was something that might happen in some future phase.

      Any way you look at it, the program has been poorly thought out, requirements not vetted, designs flubbed, spending wasted…no one held accountable. That was under Griffin and it has not improved.

  6. ed2291 says:
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    Keith says, “When it comes to having a coherent, consistent, strategic plan, NASA
    doesn’t have one. Instead, it spins around in 10 directions at once – as
    if it has institutionalized Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
    Someone needs to hit the reset button.” 

    That certainly is what it looks like. I would only add that it has been this way since Nixon was President. There are dozens of exciting ways to go – including bypassing Mars completely. A problem is no plan lasts an administration (and sometimes not even that!) and real work is always left to the future. That plus an insane refusal to fully cooperate in a meaningful way with other countries  means we will keep spinning around accomplishing little. 

  7. Paul451 says:
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    It’s all perfectly consistent. An automated mission to snag a small(ish) asteroid and tow it to L2, where it is used as the basis of an L2 station, with the L2 station used to practice/prepare for a long duration trip to Mars, in similar conditions, but without the risk of a crewed mission to a NEO before we’re ready.

    It’s the most affordable and intelligent plan NASA has had for decades.

    …Of course, I used to watch Star Trek, so retconning the script-writers’ painful inconsistencies into a single meta-story becomes kind of a habit.

  8. Steve Pemberton says:
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    To add a point #6 to your list,  a major complication that rarely gets mentioned for some reason is the limited launch windows to Mars, approximately two-three month windows approximately every two years depending on which transfer method is used.  Think of all of the schedule slippage that occurred during the Shuttle years, now imagine trying to do long term planning for Mars missions with very little wiggle room in the schedule.  Also individual Shuttle missions often slipped several months for various reasons, sometimes Shuttle related, sometimes payload related.  If that happened to a Mars mission then they have to stand down for two years, and I guess pay everyone to sit around while waiting for the next window.  Otherwise how would they be able to reassemble the team two years later?

    The same limitation is true for returning from Mars, exacerbating the emergency egress problem that you brought up in your third point.

    Of course unmanned missions to Mars have had to deal with window limitations, but it just seems the problem will be even worse with manned missions.

  9. Paul451 says:
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    “this industrial base has eroded and been lost since the end of the development of the Space Shuttle.”
    [my emphasis]

    Too few people include that emphasised part. Or understand why it’s important.

  10. Ralphy999 says:
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    May I ask a question? Most asteroids tumble. How do you propose to stop the tumbling?

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Ralphy,

      RF-controlled pulsed JATOs with bottled air sources coupled to the JATO inlets perhaps.  Fuel and air sources can be larger than used for aircraft, since the extra mass is trivial compared to the asteroid. The difference between JATO thrust and asteroid momentum means it would be a slow process, but I think you’d want to do it slowly anyhow, so you don’t end up over-correcting.

      Of course, NASA will want to design something with a different acronym because they’ll be used in vacuum.

      I suspect that, conceptually, this will work, although you’d have to do it three times to null all three axes. The hard part, I think, will be positioning and attaching the modified JATOs well enough.

      Steve

  11. William Ogilvie says:
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    It’s an ambitious plan that may have unforeseen consequences.   Everyone assumes asteroids are solid chunks of rock.   What happens if the asteroid breaks apart and becomes a ring around the moon?   Would that be useful?   I think it would be cool and would sell a whole lot of telescopes.

    • Paul451 says:
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      “Everyone assumes asteroids are solid chunks of rock.

      “Everyone” doesn’t assume asteroids are solid. The actual proposal referred to by the “Daily Fail” article is not “lassoing” an asteroid, but enclosing a small asteroid in a bag. If the asteroid breaks up it, the bits will remain in the bag.

      becomes a ring around the moon? […] I think it would be cool and would sell a whole lot of telescopes

      The size of the asteroid being talked about is minuscule compared to the minimum amount of material you’d need for a visible ring. (That’s ignoring that a ring wouldn’t be stable around the moon.)

    • Helen Simpson says:
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      There is an interesting point buried in this somewhat clueless post. To the extent that volatile ices are buried in such an asteroid (in fact, an asteroid rich in volatiles would be thought to be of great value) outgassing from such an asteroid, because of unusual insolation, might be a nasty surprise, re stationkeeping. Why would that happen? Well, once the rotation of that asteroid is stopped, one side would get heated a lot more than the other, for a significant period of time. To the extent that asteroid doesn’t stay shielded in the glove/bag used to capture it, that could easily happen. Having a large chunk of material in cis-lunar space basically taking off under its own power in an anti-Sun direction could be pretty annoying and even scary.

      So I guess before one grabs such an asteroid, one would like some assurance about the internal structure of it and, in particular, whether that asteroid has any ice close to the surface. Or else it makes some sense to cover the asteroid with a high reflectivity thin foil shield that you just push aside wherever you’re doing mining operations. That might be easier than a one-sided fixed radiation shield. Perhaps other strategies that would provide some reassurance.

  12. MalPeterson says:
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    It seems there is a collective memory lapse going around.  The current NASA thinking is “spot on” consistent with the Flexible Path to Mars exploration strategy. In 2009, the report “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation” [AKA the “Augustine Report], discussed various strategies.  As you know, the Flexible Path option was selected by the Administration for its baseline strategy for NASA.  Quoting from the report (pp. 94-95):

     “The Flexible Path would explore near-Earth objects, and also demonstrate the ability to service science observatories at the Lagrange points…In contrast [to Constellation’s plan], exploration on the Flexible Path could begin with just the capsule and launcher, and then slowly develop much less costly in-space propulsion stages and habitats…”

  13. Paul451 says:
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    They could start by landing anything on the moon.

    And since bio-contamination isn’t an issue, it would be a good venue for a COTS style multi-vendor fixed-price program to put useful rovers on the moon. Like GLXP for larger players. The aim wouldn’t be any science instruments on those first ones but to demonstrate hardware that can survive the long day/night cycle plus the normal problems of dust and terrain, and show high-bandwidth comms, teleop, etc.

    [edit: Hell, GLXP is only $30m. NASA can’t match that?]

  14. Brian_M2525 says:
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    Mal Peterson: “The current NASA thinking is “spot on” consistent with the Flexible Path to Mars exploration strategy.”
    The mistake is in thinking that the final or primary destination is an asteroid or that the goal is to plant flags and footprints on an asteroid or to return samples of an asteroid. (I don’t think it is part of the Flexible Path to Mars plan to bring an asteroid back to cis-lunar space.)

    The real issue that I see is the idea that we are going to do an Apollo style mission to anywhere in which we’ll take off in a space capsule like an Orion, throw our rocket away during launch, cruise for X months, ‘land’ on or rendezvous with an asteroid, then travel home for X months, and then throw our spacecraft away upon landing. This is not supportable for the long term and proves very little.

    The plan ought to be to develop a spacecraft, based in large measure on ISS elements and systems, that can cruise to greater distances including to GEO, L2 or other points, including lunar orbit, including asteroid rendezvous or planetary fly-bys. After each mission the spacecraft comes back to earth orbit for refurbishment, logistics resupply, and launch on a new mission, all the while putting in place and trying out new system technologies, and not throwing away the spacecraft after every mission. Do you need an Orion for this purpose? I think the spacecraft looks more like some cylindrical ISS-style modules linked together. If you carry an ’emergency escape pod’, which has limited use for 99.9% of these missions, it would be as small and as light as possible and have only very specific limited uses. That way you get away from the idea of building a single use spacecraft for a single type of mission that gets thrown away every mission.

    Mr Musk has already announced plans to send spacecraft to Mars within the next quarter century and some pictures show that Dragon is the basis of the lander, though any answer is going to require new technologies. They still need the mother craft that caries the crew over the long planetary distance and that stays in orbit. It sounds like a match. Maybe the government competes the Mars lander to be done by 
    commercial interests. The mother ship, kind of like the first generation Enterprise (think Star Trek) makes perfect sense for NASA, Boeing and the Internationals to develop based on existing ISS elements and systems.

    • Littrow says:
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      The goals become technology development and proof of improvement by going on ever more challenging missions. The goal is NOT a single destination or a single mission. 

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Brian,

      One alternative to a “mother craft” is multiple Dragons/trunks executing Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct mission.  You could even tether two of them and spin for mock gravity during cruise.  Of course, it doesn’t matter what scheme you use to go to Mars using near term tech, because the radiation danger is going to be the same for all of them.  Personally, until we can give Mars travelers a ship with enough elbow room that they don’t end up crazy, or worse, from prolonged close confinement, I consider none of the schemes for Mars to be acceptable, not even close.

      Steve

    • Michael Reynolds says:
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      You mean this:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

      • Brian_M2525 says:
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        Nautilus-X is certainly something to strive towards; its an interim goal for sometime in the future. But I think we can start out much less expensively using many of the elements and systems that have already been developed for ISS and that already exist-a Hab module that might not be certified any longer and which has never been outfitted and completed, a cupola structural test article that is not complete yet but which sits on a floor in a NASA hanger, etc. You could start out with a small vehicle that departs from the ISS and moves into nearby orbits to service spacecraft. Eventually it gets more propulsion…more extended life support. 

        The tendency especially with the beginning of Constellation was to equate new technology and new development with throwing away what we have and starting over with something new and different. We did that with Apollo – it was a mistake. We’ve done that with Shuttle – it was repeating the same mistake. Now many would like to do the same thing with ISS – repeating the same mistake yet again. You keep doing the same thing over and expect different results? Lets make some small incremental step-by-step expansion of the envelope; lets extend the capabilities we have today.     

  15. Eco_Turbo says:
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    We should lasso Titan and bring it to Earth orbit. Surely enough hydrocarbons to last until we come up with a viable alternative energy source.

  16. DTARS says:
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    E