NASA Releases Strategic Space Technology Investment Plan
NASA Releases Strategic Space Technology Investment Plan, SpaceRef Business
“NASA today released its strategic space technology investment plan. The plan, outlined in a 92 page document, is meant to be a comprehensive strategic plan prioritizing technologies for NASA to achieve its mission.”
“Technology enables discovery and advancement,” NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck said. “We look forward to working with our stakeholders to grow our technological base and take the journey to expand scientific understanding, explore the universe, and make a positive impact on the lives of all.”
From the plan: “Space radiation mitigation was rated the highest priority technology for human spaceflight in the NRC report. Human missions beyond LEO will require new countermeasures and shielding technologies for space radiation, and developing those technologies requires more specific knowledge and understanding about space radiation and its effects on humans. For the next four years, NASA will invest in technologies such as improved radiation risk assessment models to better understand and predict the effects of radiation, which will influence NASA’s concurrent investments in advanced radiation shielding and biological countermeasures.“
So, during the next four years NASA is going to address a major scientific and technical issue that has been on it’s To Do List since 1958. However, they are going to try to better understand and predict the radiation issue AT THE SAME TIME as they are investing in “advanced radiation shielding and biological countermeasures” (it clearly says “concurrent”).
Is it just me, or is this nuts? How can you invest in solutions to “mitigate” the problem while you’re still researching to characterize the problem? Whether you look at it from the science/engineering standpoint or the program management requirements, you can’t simply wish away the interdependencies! The cart comes before the horse. You can’t design and build hardware to fix a problem that is still being defined.
The title says “Strategic Space Technology Investment Plan,” but it has some serious “Strategic” shortcomings. I hate to be negative, but this thing has too many holes in it. From page 27: “space missions in the next few decades will likely carry only four to six crew members.” That rules out both Mars (or anything farther away) and any kind of permanent base, anywhere, for the “next few decades.” (Even the ISS has six people on board, after completion.) There, my friends, is the true cost of SLS and Orion! There’s a lot of real pretty sentences in this document, but what they’re saying includes a ton of wishful thinking. Nice cover, though.
I think this document was created by, once again, taking all of the inadequate available capabilities and imposed limitations that NASA has inherited and trying to fit them together into a game plan, like a jigsaw puzzle. Yet again, a bastardization of basic design principles.
I wonder where NASA sits in the Guinness Book of World Records with respect to greatest number of pointless documents.
“Human missions beyond LEO will require new countermeasures and shielding technologies for space radiation”
This statement by the plan is nonsense. It just goes to show how NASA focuses on all the wrong things.
First of all, the Apollo program went beyond LEO without “new countermeasures and shielding technologies for space radiation”. So it’s clearly not “required” for beyond LEO.
And even if what they really mean is “multi-month missions far beyond cis-lunar space”, “new countermeasures and shielding technologies for space radiation” are still not needed. There have been plenty of designs for Mars missions, including NASAs own reference mission designs, that don’t involve any new radiation shielding technologies.
It’s generally agreed that if you provide a small storm shelter that is heavily shielded where astronauts can hang out for a few days in the case of a bad solar storm, that’s enough. We don’t know all the effects for certain, but the evidence we do have strongly suggests that even spending a couple of years in the space environment outside Earth’s magnetic cocoon isn’t enough to cause more than a small increased risk of cancer.
The space radiation people are worried about isn’t completely absent on Earth, there’s just much less of it. Crews of airliners that spend a lot of time at 40,000 feet get significantly more of it than people at the surface do. On the surface, we average about 2.4 mSv a year. On the ISS, they average 150 mSv a year. An unshielded interplanetary mission would average 400-900 mSv a year. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements guidelines say 1,000-4,000 mSv lifetime exposure is a good safety limit.
This small health risk from space radiation is dwarfed by the risks of all the other things that can go wrong on a deep-space mission. It’s crazy to worry about that when the astronauts are far more likely to die because their launch vehicle blows up, or their air recycler dies far from Earth, or a propulsion loss makes it impossible for them to return, or a micro-meteor punctures their pressure hull, or any one of 100 other things.
By all means we should continue research on the effects of space radiation on humans, and we should continue to explore advanced technologies for radiation shielding, along with a broad portfolio of other long-term research. Just don’t exaggerate and claim a Mars mission is impossible without it, or that it’s more important than a lot of other technologies that would improve mission safety.
You have mistakenly confused SPE verus GCR (galactic cosmic radiation) mitigation strategies. Storm shelters with passive absorbers protect against SPE, not GCR.
You have mistakenly confused airline travel and LEO orbits protected by the Earth’s magnetic field with BLEO where no magnetic field exists to protect from GCR.
Studies have shown that it can take up to 300 tons of passive shielding to travel to mars to protect against GCR. Yikes! And this mass is *not* in any architecture to date.
If you limit exposure to less than 30 days, then crew can travel BLEO to the moon like the Apollo days–not enough time for a trip to mars and back. Moon technology has nothing to do with Mars, another myth.
You also need to further investigate the exposure limits sited as you are trying to compare exposure to “apples” versus exposure to “oranges”.
GCR mitigation is the number one mass driver today for a trip to Mars.
The good news is that active shielding weights an order of magnitude less than passive absorbers for the same level of exposure. Even better is that with R&D the mass of the active shielding likely can be reduced by another order of magnitude, with no such hope for passive absorbers. Perhaps a medicine, the lightest solution, will also be developed.
Moon technology has nothing to do with Mars, another myth.
It is not a myth just because you say it is. There is about 80% overlap in operations, vehicles, and software between the Moon and Mars. We are working the issue now and there is a lot of natural overlap between operations on any surface with significant gravity.
GCR mitigation is the number one mass driver today for a trip to Mars.
There are many methods of shielding but so far the vast majority of the aerospace industry is stuck using a 1960’s milspec methodology that is unworkable.
Do not believe the general statement without the details. So a *few* myth busters…..
Landing heavy object on Mars and return to earth has nothing to do with lunar…its all aeronautics or *tons* of added mass for prop.
Protecting against GCR with regolith or asteroid rocks has nothing to do with the long trip to mars mitigation strategy.
No one is traveling to Mars in a capsule or habitat solely surrounded by plastic or hydrogen.
Using ISRU for propellant to travel to Mars while using propellant for GCR protection will not work. You need power for the cryocoolers and active sheilding, and with the extra mass, likely EP not chemical.
To afford Mars one needs a depot architecture, which needs a cryocooler, also needed in the active shielding which can be demonstrated cheaper, better, faster in LEO and L2 than the lunar surface.
1/6th g is not the micro to millig environment needed for Mars travel (6 mo to a year). 1/6th g is close to staying on the 1/3g mars planet, for what 6 days?
Abort operations from a lunar trip vary quite a bit from a Mars abort.
80% would be fantastic, the ops groups say its likely half that, but you
need some technology before you can operate it.
Per shielding. Because of the mass, only ~1500 kg of plastic was added to the Constellation architecture/Orion. this is great for SPE, but not for GCR–hence 6 day sorties and crew career ends!
A debate can and will continue on the appropriate levels of exposure and duration, but the reality is that 1500 kg of plastic is *NOT* going to be adequate.
Landing heavy object on Mars and return to earth has nothing to do with lunar…its all aeronautics or *tons* of added mass for prop.
Aerobraking at Mars is not likely to be used for human landing missions, other than a few percent of the delta v, thus a propulsive landing is the order of the day.
The type of system used for the landing is in the extreme dependent on the architecture used. A limited architecture based on a heavy lift vehicle forces you into some very bad compromises in terms of the systems used due to the cost of lifting everything from the Earth.
A realistic and sustainable architecture that is more than flags and footprints will use a staging orbit. For the Moon that is LLO or a libration point, for Mars it will be a libration point or one of the Moons, probably Phobos.
For a really sustainable system you will have a transit vehicle that gets the crew from Earth Orbit (it would be best to do it from EML-2) to Mars orbit. You then transfer into a lander at the staging orbit which then gets you to a surface facility that was prepared prior to the arrival of a crew. THAT facility is about 90% common with a lunar facility.
More and more as time goes on here the new generation can go back and realize what Von Braun and Stuhlinger realized in 1972, which is that a spam in a can mission using chemical rockets is doomed to failure.
It’s interesting how the “topic” mutates from one post to the next within a thread. My original comment was that this new plan has NASA trying to solve the radiation mitigation challenge at the same time as they are trying to further study and quantify it. The plan actually says “concurrently.”
As for whether the radiation problem is major or minor, and which of its components are the main concerns, I don’t think you can use Apollo as a meaningful reference. They were basically mad dashes at a time when much less was actually known about the issue, and it was a situation where America couldn’t afford to not do it without losing face big time. There is also a major cultural difference between then and now. In the 60’s, the Right Stuff attitude prevailed and astronauts chose to accept a level of personal danger (and unknowns) that would never be permitted in today’s society. Having lost more people since then, we are all much more safety conscious than during Apollo. Whether this is justified or not is mostly irrelevant; it is a factor that affects the issue.
My contention, and I stick by it, is that we don’t know near as much as we should about the BEO radiation danger. We’ve spent billions to look very far away, but we’ve done very little study of the radiation characteristics within the solar system itself. Theory and experience in other environments may provide some useful information, but we need to deal with the facts, and fact number one is that we haven’t quantified the BEO HSF radiation risk. It’s all theory at best and assumptions for the most part. Are we prepared to spend billions and endanger multiple lives by using hardware spec’d on guesswork?
We could have (should have) sent out instrumented unmanned probes to cruise BEO space and collect hard data at any time since the 70’s, but we haven’t. Lack of foresight and long-term commitment are still the biggest drag on progress.
We can’t afford to treat conjecture and science fiction as facts. We need hard data from the actual environment under actual circumstances. We know how to do that, but it hasn’t been done, and inventing justifications for not doing it is unacceptable. It’s long past time we got the lead out.
GCR mitigation mass is the cost driver for a trip to mars. Passive absorber estimates by MSFC are around 300 tons, but they are not included in any of the architecture studies. Nuts.
—
The good news is that active shielding for a L2 gateway would be an order of magnitude less, and with R&D likely could be reduced another order of magnitude–no such hope for the passive absorbers. Perhaps the lightest solution of medicine will be developed some day (?).
At least this need is being acknowledged.
—
Back to “nuts”.
The first problem is adequate funding for the priority technologies, it DNE. Authorized and not appropriated.
The second problem is reducing the cost of exploration with tech development, it DNE either.
Depots will save $60B over HLV/SLS. Search for the word “depot” in the document. Nothing.
“Storing cryogenic propellants such as liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in space for long periods of time with minimal boil-off is also critical for deep space human exploration.”
Yet, only “Investments over the next four years in cryogenic propellant storage and transfer can be used to enable the efficient in-space use of cryogens.” Nothing on cryocoolers or depots.
Depots for LH2/LOX and GCR active shielding require lightweight cryocoolers.
Balanced portfolio……Nuts.
Steve, why are these folks worried about the GCR levels in BEO? What is the risk they are obsessing about? So you take a hit from a few billion gammas. So what?
npng,
All seriousness aside, I think it’s time to sent for Nikola Tesla.
Actually, I see on NASA Watch the same trend as elsewhere — we each tend to stress the issues that we personally either know the most about or know the least about. The issues in between we don’t obsess over because they haven’t bitten us yet.
Hopefully, if we list everybody’s worries in one place we’ll have the complete list of problems to be solved — but I wouldn’t bet on it. We must never forget Murphy.
I wonder if the new radiation hard computer for cubesats can be used by other equipment? Its usefulness will also depend on how much each one costs.
The title reflected a great idea; then things went downhill.
All other issues aside, this reads as if it were written by a committee whose members never met or coordinated. Many holes, many internal contradictions. NASA even seems to be losing its lead in PowerPoint and PDF.
It sounds like the President is issuing more stimulus money. I wonder what NASA will spend it on?
As much as it is good to see some of the technical content included in the NASA Strategic Space Technology Investment Plan, it is disappointing to see that the authors and contributors, collectively all of the reviewers, have not been able to mature their strategic tools sets and advance beyond the use of archaic TRL levels to calibrate their activities and measure progress to achieve their goals.
Don’t get me wrong. TRL level tools are an excellent means of framing and staging technology pursuits. But they are a subset of a larger equation. Clearly all of the authors and contributors were content in ignoring this or were simply oblivious to it. And while fragments of the plan may be technically rich, in the greater scheme of business, the plan is profoundly deficient.
npng,
I wonder how much of that simply comes down the fact that these people are not, or are no longer, designers. TRLs are a convenient metric for program planning, but, in my opinion, have almost no value in design activities.
The challenge in a proper “Strategic” plan is that it crosses over, encompassing to some extent both planning and design elements, each of which has its own “language” and thought processes.
What I see in this latest strategic plan I think is typical of NASA — it gathers together all of the (known) task elements of the program, but gives little or no useful thought to the implementation, the executing of those tasks. Therefore the interdependencies between tasks are not taken into account, and you end up with a lot of “magic happens here” tasks. When that happens, when it’s time to actually do a task, the first 50% of the allocated time is lost in trying to figure out what to do. Then, of course, those charged with doing the actual work are behind schedule on day one and will inevitably end up over budget, as well as delaying, day for day, everybody on the downstream tasks.
You’d think that after a while NASA would see the patterns and learn from past programs, instead of repeating the same ineffective ways. The problem I see is that many NASA programs are too big, too unwieldy, and they can’t see the trees for the forest. When all of them are taken together, as in an agency strategic plan, it is completely unmanageable.
The other part of the problem I didn’t see until I took a step back. This is a “Technology Investment” plan, as opposed to a strategic plan. It is, by definition, then, only a part of the picture — it’s basically only a To Do List, not a “strategy.” Once I realized that, even the title didn’t make sense: “NASA Strategic Space Technology Investment Plan” — a “Technology Investment Plan” for “NASA Strategic Space.” What is “NASA Strategic Space”?
I go back to my original comment in this thread: this is a pointless document.