KSC Is Planning A Mission To Mine The Moon
Payload Avonics Systems and Avionics Elements for Lunar Surface Resource Prospecting Mission, NASA KSC
“NASA Kennedy Space Center is hereby issuing a Request for Information (RFI) for the purpose of seeking sources and soliciting information from private industry on Payload Avionics Systems and Avionics Elements to be used in a short duration lunar surface resource prospecting mission. This document is for information and planning purposes and to allow industry the opportunity to verify reasonableness and feasibility of the requirement, as well as promote competition.”
NASA Invites Media to Robotics Mining Competition at KSC Visitor Complex
“Teams of undergraduate and graduate students from around the country will demonstrate their excavator robots May 19-23 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.”
Wouldn’t mining an asteroid be cheaper and yield the same results?
no.
I had the same thought: less gravity but further away, one supposes, with (?) no easy return?
It is much easier to do ISRU on the Moon than on an asteroid, especially from the operations perspective.
An asteroid is a micro-gravity environment. You cannot use rovers and ordinary drills.
Is there any information on when the landing is going to be and how big a lander?
Why is an Operations field center planning a mission?
Why not? JSC is building Morpheus. JPL builds and operates spacecraft. So do GSFC and ARC. Shouldn’t NASA centers have multiple skills?
I think AMES is actually the flight manager for resolve and JSC is providing the oven for the lander unless things have changed since I left the isru team.
For diversity of thought 🙂
What mission is this attached to? When are they going to launch? When was a Lunar mission funded by Congress?
This is just a silly exercise that is not contributing to the Grand Plan (whatever that is today) and shows that some people have far too much free time.
My comment is NOT some curmudgeonly “follow orders or else” statement, it just reflects the fact that the US pays for all sorts of Decadal Surveys, NSF forecasts of needed projects, NASA studies of priorities, etc etc etc.
I just hope that the Centers understand the NASA priorities and spend money on those. Perhaps KSC should prioritize money on facilities maintenance, or booster impact studies, or whatever NASA has on the books. I am pretty sure that KSC is not independently duplicating other organization’s work but it is a faiir question to ask how it relates to the approved budget.
Its probably this mission :
http://www.parabolicarc.com…
More recent here ( post concept review ) :
http://www.hou.usra.edu/mee…
Planning overview from 2013 LEAG meeting:
http://www.hou.usra.edu/mee…
CharlesHouston’s statement is a good one. It epitomizes much of what is wrong with NASA today. His queestions:
“what mission is this attached to? When are they going to launch? …
was a lunar mission funded by Congress?
This is just a silly exercise that is not contributing to the Grand Plan”
Come back to the idea that all funding has to go through missions and be mission related. This is an Human Space Flight operations perspective that developed during the Shuttle era. This is not how the human space flight program was originally established.
Originally there were directorates that were responsible for systems; systems research; systems development; systems operations. There were facilities established that could be used for these purposes. The operations organizations could not see the value of this overhead which was called a space center. Beginning with ISS and then transferring back into Shuttle the Headquarters Directorate Associate Administrator, who was an astronaut who came form the flight operations organization, and the program managers who had been flight directors and astronauts out of the mission operations and flight operations organizations could not see the value of this overhead.They wanted control of ALL the money. They wanted to use the money as the programs saw fit. They wanted to direct more money to their contractors because their buddies, also flight directors and astronauts, wanted money; afterall that is what contractors are looking for-as much money as possible.
By the 1990s they were killing many of the research facilities. Numbers of operations people went up as DDT&E people went down. Pretty soon any time a new space vehicle design project was ready to start up they needed to call in their operations buddies because the numbers of engineers with a diversified portfolio in development no longer existed. This is why you had people with no DDT&E experience being placed as top level program managers. That is one reason why Constellation and Orion got so screwed up so quickly.
There ought to be far more of these kinds of DDT&E efforts, like the lunar avionics, going on routinely. Then maybe when a real program comes along and requires avionics for a lunar mission, NASA might have some understanding of how to do the job.
The current situation which is biased towards programs deciding how to fund DDT&E, including research, is ass backwards.Whats funny is that the programs put people into top management positions, people who often have no relevant education or experience, who, because they own the budget, are empowered to decide what thesystems expertise in the field center is responsible for. This explains much of the malfeasance ongoing now and for many years in the programs and why NASA no longer has the capability to design, develop or build anything, which is something Orion is showing daily.
You misunderstand my comment – this is not the right forum to conduct a detailed analysis of their project. I did use “mission” as an example but the question is larger.
I agree that the US needs more R&D, but there are many US funded studies that tell us what our priorities are. I hope we are all following those.
No, I did not misunderstand.
You said NASA should not be doing R&D unless its tied to an “approved” program. Which program is approved today? Moon? Mars? Asteroids? All any have gotten is lip service.
Used to be that the centers had R&D groups that worked on different projects in order to develop new techniques, new knowledge, keep people current in their fields, maintain their expertise…The same organizations and people were often involved in advanced development of new kinds of hardware or new techniques as well hardware for flight and the same people were called in to work operational issues during flight.
When, during the Apollo 13 mission, they needed to call in a team in order to figure out how to put a round LiOH cartridge in a square hole, those were people who had been instrumental in ECLS system R&D. They knew how and why it worked. Unfortunately there were two separate teams working two separate vehicles. When, during the Columbia mission, there was no TPS expert with an understanding of the characteristics of the RCC on the engineering organization had their people cut back to where NASA no longer had an expert in this critical system. The ops team was well aware of the function the system was supposed to perform but they did not know the characteristics of the material. When the Orion was being designed, they forgot to include the habitability and human/machine interface technical organizations. Program managers who had no expertise didn’t realize expertise might be important. They went with a flight ops astronaut who guessed what might be needed. They guessed wrong.
People don’t work on what ever they want but they do work on systems in which they develop some expertise in order to further science and capabilities and the state of the art.
Or, alternatively, they become the NASA of today in which no expertise is required because nothing new is being done.
Lowell James – you are not supporting your position.
Hopefully some of the Apollo 13 team is still reading these and can add first hand detail. However, when they were trying to build an air routing system for the LIOH canisters, what was needed was a team that understood the various parts available. An R&D researcher that understood just how to extract various gasses would not have been the person that we turned to. They did not need to improve extraction efficiency, they needed to put an airtight system together.
It certainly does seem, from reading the Challenger and Columbia accident reports, that too many ops people were in the highest management positions but the engineering and safety folks were in the discussions and did not speak up. NASA certainly had a “silent safety organization” as the reports pointed out.
But should we look at various mistakes made and decide that we should let various organizations work on whatever they want to, whenever they want to? I don’t think so.
Research should be directly tied to research objectives as decided by various NRC panels, etc etc etc. If we are gonna pay for them why are we not listening to them??
I think I am supporting my position.
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle and the beginning of ISS was done by a matrix NASA organization in which the program controlled budget and schedule and in which the field centers provided systems technical expertise. The technical experts defined the design requirements. The program office managed the source board. Contractors bid on and built what was requested through the RFP. A separate operations organization came in later to fly the missions.
Then, changes were made to send virtually all funding to the program offices and to make the center technical organizations subservient. R&D in the centers now needed to be justified as supporting the funded programs, just as you suggested in your initial remarks.
If nobody at NASA is allowed to work on anything that isn’t directly related to an existing funded mission, than there won’t be any new missions.
If people in any organization are free to spend their money on whatever they want, regardless of the approved budget, that organization has lost control of its members.
If government organizations can spend money on any project they want, regardless of the Congressionally-approved budget, they risk ignoring the legal uses for the money.
They are an R&D plus science organisation. Providing they are spending their money on R&D plus science the details are probably outside your need to know.
So what if they decide to do R&D on deep ocean drilling? How about R&D on producing ethanol from seaweed? Are details like that outside “your need to know”?
I don’t know the detail budget for NASA but I would be surprised if they didn’t have a line item for “future missions”. Otherwise, you could never get started on anything new.
A friend of mine was the directory of the local town library and he needed to expand the library. It turned out to be quite difficult to get started. The board of selectman couldn’t authorize any money without detailed cost estimates and he couldn’t provide any cost estimates without hiring an architect and he couldn’t do that without money. There has to be money in the budget just for this kind of situation. Sometimes, “The Friends of the Library” has to kick in the seed money to get things started.
If you read the RFI description, you can see that this “mission” is in the earliest feasibility stages. They are trying to answer the question, “Would this be a worthwhile thing to do?”
You have to start somewhere.