Charlie Bolden Did Not Bang His Shoe Loud Enough
Exploring a possible mission to Mars, Washington post
“The Obama administration’s 2010 “National Space Policy of the United States of America” requires the NASA administrator to set “far-reaching exploration milestones,” including: “By 2025, begin crewed missions beyond the moon, including sending humans to an asteroid. By the mid-2030s, send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth.” So, taken literally, the policy does not call for NASA to put astronauts on the surface of the fourth rock from the sun. They’d go to Mars, take a close look from orbit, perhaps rendezvous with one of the small Martian moons, and come zooming home.”
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 Charlie Bolden’s Shoe Pounding Moment Approaching? (Update)
“There is no mention of an Administration committment to a human mission to Mars in the NASA FY 2014 Budget. Either Charlie Bolden never pounded his shoe at the White House – or (more likely) they were not listening when he did.”
Bang your shoe for Phobos & Deimos, Charlie – give that darn SLS a mission worthy of the expense!! Even though it could be done with Falcon Heavy & Delta IV-Heavy ‘teamed up’, SLS would halve the number of launches needed for a relatively tight Mars launch window. The EML-2 deep space station concept that has been around the last few months? Send a craft like that to Mars with a crew of 4, an Orion and a pair of SEVs – use a big SEP & some LOX/LH2 stages to get that big craft to Phobos. One pair of Astronauts use SEV-1 to explore Phobos for a week or so while the other 2 crew on the ‘Mothership’ scoop up a quartet (approx) of Sample Return Probes. After the probes and SEV are collected, the Mothership uses the SEP to spiral on up to Deimos to explore that with SEV-2 for another week or so. At Deimos there should be a large pre-deployed storable propellant stage (and supplies) that in conjunction with the SEP will send the craft back toward Earth.
Mothership parks at EML-2 and crew returns to Earth via the Orion. The above mission avoids the years and many billions developing manned Martian Descent, Surface Hab and Ascent vehicles, yes. But a heck of a lot of science would get done, operational experience gained and with a proper competition among Private Industry vendors, a multi-purpose vehicle could be developed at ‘minimal cost’ that ensures that the NEXT crew that heads to Mars actually LANDS there…
While I like some of your mission plan, I think you’re making an incorrect assumption about SLS — I still firmly believe it will never fly a mission, not one. I’m not even sure it’ll do any test flights.
Despite the iron boot of Congress, when I look (and read) around lately, I see little signs of sanity popping up where none have been for a long time. I think it’s just a matter of time before the various elements of the government realize that the commercial space accomplishments are going to outperform, and seriously underbid, anything involving SLS, despite Congress’ attempts to slow them down and obstruct their progress.
At some point they will no longer be able to justify the huge manufacturing and operations costs of SLS when there are obvious alternatives available and the situation can be easily explained in two sentences to anybody over the age of 12. Other than those whose jobs/companies will be affected by cancelling SLS, I think the public will start asking tough questions once the media (who love controversy) eggs them on.
The silly part is that those jobs needn’t be endangered (past, present or future) because there are lots of things that the same work force can be designing and building that will be necessary to fly missions, things which are being totally ignored now because of SLS.
I think the only real casualty in cancelling SLS would be if Boeing in response cancelled CST-100. But the creation of a scenario involving actual missions will hopefully encourage Boeing to carry on.
I think the end of the Crazy Years may be almost in sight, and it will be wasted dollars more than anything else that will bring them to an end. Money speaks louder than banged shoes.
So, if we’re proposing any NASA missions, I’d strongly suggest designing them either without SLS or with two variations — with and without SLS. I thinks its days are numbered.
I’m assuming nothing about SLS, Steve – I don’t WANT it to get cancelled, but it certainly might be. Its why I mentioned Falcon Heavy & Delta IV-Heavy in the same posting. A bulk buy of both those rockets would certainly undercut SLS pricing. If Boeing were disappointed to lose SLS, maybe they could swallow that hurt by offering to upgrade Delta IV-H instead at a negotiated rate to lift about 50 tons and match Falcon Heavy. With two launchpads for each at KSC – maybe alter Pads 39A & B to launch these boosters as well in addition to their existing KSC pads; a Mars mission could be assembled relatively quickly by a ‘Salvo’ launch campaign at Kennedy. By launching 2x FH, 2x D4H and an Atlas V-552, followed by a ‘Rinse-Pad-and-Repeat’ of the above, enough mass could be got up there for each Mars launch window. Not as sexy as a quartet of SLS launches, sure but you’d save a lot of capital by using existing and (slightly) modified EELV boosters. Heck; you could even add to that mission mass by getting Russia & ESA to launch an Angara and Ariane V each as well.
But much is made of the cost of SLS – even casual ‘space fans’ know that a rocket of that capability may never be cheap. And tough economic times or not (it’s not my tax dollar, being a foreigner and all) SLS will mainly be unaffordable because U.S. Lawmakers, NASA and the U.S. taxpayer decided it was not a top priority to pay for it. If there were consensus that it was necessary, then money would be found for it.
I, too, am a foreigner, so it’s not my tax dollars either, but I’ve been following NASA for so long that I often get emotionally involved.
The major issue with SLS to me is not the design cost, but rather the build and operational costs that would be repeated for every single launch. That coupled with their using components with limited quantities and no further production capability means those costs will only go up, and “gaps” would be inevitable in the future as they scramble with new programs to attempt replacing major components that they’ve run out of and can’t reorder.
I agree with your “Salvo launch campaign,” although I don’t think it will necessarily be done with only the biggest available LVs. Some things, like people and certain equipment, will require more gentle launching, and different things, of different sizes, will probably be launched and injected trans-Mars at different times so that everything is not in the same stage of tracking and control at once (overload), and so that support infrastructure gets there first. I’m assuming an EOR approach with separate vehicles flying to Mars, the von Braun approach, and then the separate vehicles landing separately on Mars and getting tractored together on the surface.
Given the landing constraints on Mars, I have never seen a real need for lifting huge payloads from Earth for a Mars mission. What is gained if you loft a huge piece of equipment to LEO, fly it to Mars, and then have to break it into pieces and provide each piece with it’s own landing systems in order to get it on the surface without destroying it? If anyone actually did all of the mass calculations for a sensible Mars mission, I strongly suspect that there isn’t anything at all that requires a super-heavy LV, and it all could be done with existing medium-lift EELVs.
This is the part that has frustrated me for so long — the one and only Mars mission requirement that we have already met, the LVs, are being ignored and replaced with something unnecessary, and taking all of the money away from everything else that we still need to develop. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. There are things that require HLV, but they are for “local” and orbital stuff (like satellites, orbiters and telescopes), not interplanetary landing missions.
I think a large part of the problem stems from the fact that after all these years we still don’t have a Mars Reference Mission Plan that makes any sense. I think there are two main reasons for this: 1) everybody wants to include their pet projects, even when they add nothing to the mission; and 2) almost all effort has been towards getting to Mars with little effort given to what happens once we’re there, which should be the very first thing to be worked out in detail, since this defines the actual mission requirements. (Some people have turned up their noses at the Inspiration Mars flight being just a fly-by. How is a Mars landing mission with no on-surface plan any better?)
Sorry, I’ve gone on too long, again, but I think this is a very timely topic that is not getting the attention it need sin certain circles. Clearly the US Congress doesn’t want NASA thinking in terms of a manned Mars or lunar mission any time soon, so nothing is likely to change for a long while, but now is the time for working out all of the things that we will need when the time comes — like solar radiation protection — that have been almost totally ignored so far.
It’s the SLS’s VERY low launch rate that for me is a credibility killer for its existence – why spend tens of billions developing a launcher if you’re only going to launch the bloody thing once a year, or thereabouts?! Unless it could be launched 4 or 5 times a year like Shuttle, all that capability will NOT be utilized in full and ameliorated where it should be.
Every Exploration architecture study – mainly post-Columbia ones from Boeing, LockMart, Northrop Grumman etc – that I’ve read in recent years seem to strongly imply that launchers in the 40-t0-50 metric tons class seem to be the most efficient in terms of cost, risk, availability and launch rate for large campaigns of hardware buildup for Exploration architectures. Although sending up ‘dry’ vehicles and propulsion modules on smaller EELVs and then filling them up later is a viable idea, somewhere the ‘Sweet Spot’ has to be found – one extreme is a Mars DRM using 5x $2 billion-SLS per launch window or TWENTY-FOUR medium EELV’s per window?! Which I think is a psychedelic roll-of-the-dice, not to mention an enormous time-crunching strain on launch teams and facilities.
With 10x, 50-ton launchers (or less) per Mars mission you get a much more plausible rate for any given launch window and a quantity of boosters ‘in the air’ consistent with the now contemporary and yearly worldwide launch rate. Falcon Heavy and the Angara family are almost here, Delta IV-H upgraded could be here with relatively minor expense. Put some big payload fairings on these things and let ‘us’ just get ON with it!! 🙂 😉
Matt,
My response to that is we’re still looking at this thing backwards. How much actual mass do we need to send, how is it physically packaged, what needs to go at what times, what is the maximum time period for getting everything there, etc.? In other words, what are we actually going to do on Mars, or wherever, for how long, and what are the detailed requirements for making that happen?
It’s the requirements at the after-landing end of the program that will determine everything else, including the launch vehicles and methods. This has always been true, yet everyone is concentrating on LVs first, and that’s backwards.
Congress is guilty of the same thing. They specified SLS, including lift capacity, and then asked Bolden publicly, OK what is NASA going to use it for? I’d sum that up as, Let’s blow all our money on a BFR that’ll take years and years to finish and then we’ll think about what it might be used for. That’s just nuts.
There area lot of hardware items that can be properly specified and designed independent of specific missions requirements, but launch vehicles are simply not in that category.
As for the LV studies by the aerospace companies, I think we have to take them with a grain of salt since they’re always going to slant things in favor of what they think they can actually deliver and what what they would prefer, for their own reasons, to deliver. This is standard practice and accepted in many design and manufacturing industries.
Steve
Perhaps Charlie has no Budget for Shoe-Banging?