Planetary Science Community Split Over Asteroid Retrieval
NASA’s Plan to Visit an Asteroid Faces a Rocky Start, Scientific American
“What the critics don’t seem to understand is that if we don’t send humans to an asteroid that is moved closer to Earth, we will send humans nowhere for the foreseeable future, which means the next decade or two,” Friedman says. “If we drop this mission, our planned rockets and crew modules can go out as far as the moon but we won’t be able to land without investments that are frankly unrealistic right now.” ARM’s harshest critics, asteroid scientists such as [Mark] Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute and M.I.T. professor Richard Binzel, remain unconvinced. “It’s an empty threat to say if you don’t take this thing that came from nowhere you’ll get nothing and that will be the end of everything,” Sykes says. “Well, you know, okay, fine–pull the trigger, guys. Maybe some people don’t get the toy that they want but there are other options our leaders can pursue.”
Earlier posts
It would be nice to see the official design reference mission so that it could be analyzed…
Step 1. Attempt to divert Science directorate funds.
Step 2. If successful, fund the robotic probe to fetch smallest possible asteroid that’s soonest.
(If not, keep up the story anyway till the 20-20’s by funding studies)
Step 3. Assure secondary, tertiary, etc targets (for if delays).
Step 4: Generate nice art. Further avoid discussion of dates.
Step 5 (year 20-20-something): Place on manifest after initial SLS/Orion flights.
Step 6: Procure 2 customized ICPS’s.
Step 7: Wait.
Step 8: (year 20-30-something) Launch SLS/Orion, rendezvous w. object, etc. return.
Here is the latest, that I could find anyway…
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/756…
This “mission” is a guaranteed one-off … another one-and-done for NASA. The public will have minimum interest (not surprisingly) and will ask why is NASA wasting our $$$. This is the worst thing that could happen to NASA.
Who were the GENIUSES that thought this thing up? Let’s go lasso a rock in space and Velcro an astronaut to it. Brilliant! And now we’re told it’s this or nothing?
This administration couldn’t have done a better job at ending NASA had they tried. Or maybe they are trying?
“This administration”, or any other, cannot conjure funding out of thin air. They are dependent upon Congress, which votes, ceteris paribus, for that which will win the most votes. In this case, jobs=votes, so it matters not what is being done, so long as it generates a steady supply of votes for a couple of elections cycles. Anything else is gravy.
Name a manned mission that is NOT a guaranteed one-off.
Establishing a permanent presence on the Moon.
I don’t think they’re trying anything. To them and most other Presidents, NASA’s just another program with a built-in constituency and a legacy, so they’ve got to come up with something for it to do that doesn’t cost too much. I’m skeptical that even the asteroid mission’s pushers think it will actually happen – more likely is that the next President cancels the effort under review.
Is it me, or does it appear Sykes does not quite get it? The writer comes awful close though. Sykes says “ARM will never be funded. It will never happen. It’s a waste of money. It doesn’t advance anything…” But the reason ARM came about is precisely because of lack of foreseen additional funding, of the new items or additional kind, meaning this answer, ARM, to a future mission question was the answer to the question of “what could be done with existing items in the existing budget”. Maybe. With many assumptions. Like being able to divert some science/planetary directorate money over to the human spaceflight’s directorate (the part about the asteroid retrieval). As for the rest of the funds, the launch, the SLS, Orion, etc. -that’s going to be spent ANYWAY, a given. It just gets book-kept to ARM sometimes (hence those estimates).
Everyone see the problem? An SLS and more that consumes all the funding and then some in just transportation, leaving nothing for exploration, and no prospects of making access to space more affordable or sustainable over time.
This has always been the case with the SLS system. I was just interviewed for a documentary last week and the interviewers said that they had interviewed many of the players, including the leading supporters of the SLS in congress.
There are three insane and seemingly unsolvable problems.
1. Budget
In the NASA runout budget, there is only enough funding for one SLS mission every four years. Thus the ARM is the only thing that can be flown. NASA EOMD head Bill Gerstinmier has stated that in order to fly safely, the SLS system must fly at least once per year.
2. Industrial Base
The industrial base for the SLS system can only support (as it is currently being implemented) the manufacture of two SLS systems per year.
3. DRM for Mars.
NONE of the Design Reference Missions (DRM’s) for Mars has fewer than six SLS launches in one year to assemble the fleet needed to get to Mars and back. Thus Mars is out of the question unless there is a big budget increase, which is not likely to happen.
All of these problems could be solved with a large budget increase, probably much more than the $3 billion per year put out there by Augustine, more like $5-7 billion. Is that going to happen? Not with the current status quo as neither the administration or congress has indicated a willingness to increase the budget.
An interesting statement was made, in that with the current situation, we can go no farther than the Moon…. However, the powers that be claim that we cannot go to the Moon with the current budget. Well that is true if you want to build and fly the Altair class lander. However, there are other ways to do this…
In chaos there is opportunity….
“…there are other ways to do this…”
I agree, but that may mean considering other means than SLS.
SLS was never viable for anything other than a jobs program for Alabama since the start, and many people knew that. The money just isn’t there, and never will be. Something *like* what Jeff Greason proposed a few years ago at ISDC looks more and more enticing, IMO.
I think it would be an excellent idea to commercially develop a lunar lander using fixed price contracts. That way we leverage the capabilities that are coming online and put them to their best use.
Only one SLS mission every four years? Talk about a useless program.
It’s a little surprising that so few are making the connection between ARM and asteroid deflection. While we might be able to live without the former, we might certainly die as a species without the latter, and the tools developed for ARM could easily be re-engineered for deflection.
Asteroid deflection is first and foremost an unmanned mission. The vast majority of the cost for the ARM is the crewed mission portion, which is not relevant to asteroid defleciton. There was a prior proposal developed in some detail to retrieve an asteroid and return it to the ISS where it could be studied for years by personnel who are already in space at a small fraction of the cost of a week or two of study with the ARM. The ARM in its current form was developed to respond to congressional demands for a mission for the SLS/Orion.
Moreover as the SciAm piece points out despite the money spent on SLS/Orion we have allocated insufficient resources to thoroughly survey the near Earth asteroids, without which we don’t know if something might be heading our way.
Funny how SLS/Orion funding is always spun as wasteful while ISS/Commercial crew funding is considered sacred. (I do support ISS and CC. Just making a point)
We’re at least generating continuous science and engineering results from continuous occupation and operation of ISS.
But, when you put SLS/Orion under the microscope, if the budget is not *significantly* increased, we will only be able to afford one SLS/Orion mission every four years. There is no way that system will ever be made safe to fly at that extremely low flight rate, let alone perform meaningful missions.
So, it’s clear to me why one appears to be a sacred cow and the other pure pork.
What connection with planetary defense? I have been working on planetary defense for 25 years and no one has suggested using a crewed mission (except for Hollywood). What we must have for defense us a comprehensive asteroid survey. Rick Binzel elligantly makes the case that a survey is the essential requirement for defense and space resources and to find targets for human missions as stepping stones to Mars. It is beyond my understanding how this first step is overlooked. Do the survey first and do it now!
Since I already think we won’t send humans anywhere beyond LEO until the ISS burns up and the funding space opens sometime in the 2020s, I’m not really put out by the claim that we’ll go nowhere if we don’t do an underfunded asteroid retrieval mission around the Moon. We probably have go there anyways.
The NASA (and DoD) budget problems are not about waiting for better
times, it’s that you have to run just to stay in place, and to get ahead
you have to run much faster!
See, I wouldn’t be too sure about that end-of-ISS-frees-up-boku-money scenario. (Is good long term financial planning about waiting for Granny to die and leave that inheritance? That says something right there about the ability to pull off ANY long term goals.)
From here to there, aerospace inflation could far exceed any small, occasional budget increases. Time passing -compound negative interest- is the killer. As the Defense establishment is also under budget pressures for the foreseeable future, driven by demographic phenomenon among other things, an industrial base also used by NASA, especially primes, will react by inflating and defending existing programs at the expense of the ability to undertake new capability.
Barring change of a fundamental sort in NASA, about ways of doing business, attitudes, or major shifts in power toward players who understand having to get “running”, no amount of freed up ISS money in the year 20-something will help the situation here.
It is my strong opinion that the ONLY way we will do actual BEO exploration is through staging the missions at the ISS.
You have said this many times, Dennis, and each time I wonder exactly how the ISS could benefit BEO missions.
Are you envisioning a sort of ‘depot’ arrangement? Where fuel and other consumables could be stored (requiring more construction, probably).
Or are you seeing a place where actual fabrication can happen- as for example assembling together pieces that are too large for any launcher to carry? In that case some sort of a platform would be needed, one supposes, Ideally pressurized; how’s that for pie-in-the-sky?
Or is there another way the ISS could be used as you envision?
My own sense is that we must learn to live in space and that the ISS, paltry as it is, offers at least an opportunity to learn in the way that the old rocket sleds, too, taught us much.
We can’t live in space without spin gravity, but the ISS is a small start. Or perhaps I’m reading your thoughts incorrectly?
The relatively high orbital inclination of ISS makes it undesirable for assembly of a craft that intends to travel to the moon or beyond.
ISS is a great facility, and having a facility on orbit, even at 51.6 degrees inclination is far more desirable than a non existent one at a lower inclination.
I continue to be boggled that a small (6.3%) decrease in payload from the Earth has any serious meaning.
In terms of total delta V, it is about 100 meters per second LESS to get to a lunar polar orbit than from 28.5 degrees inclination. That is a TLI burn which translates into a fair bit of payload gained so the aggregate is less than the 6.3%.
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…In that case some sort of a platform would be needed, one supposes, Ideally pressurized;…
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We did not need a platform from which to assemble the station other than the Shuttle robotic arm. We have an amazing set of robotics up there now, and installing more is no big deal.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. There is absolutely no reason that we need a pressurized assembly area, none whatsoever. We already have attach points, these can be the existing docking ports or we can use some of the various attach points on the station (The Express logistics carriers and the FRAMs).
Solar electric propulsion systems are ideally suited for ISS. In contrast to 28.5 degrees inclination, the station goes full sun ever ~200 days. Thus a SEP can climb out under full sun and it is amazing how much that influences the total performance of a SEP vs 28.5 degrees.
Aggregating payloads is also a great thing for the station, especially if we go the logical route of all ISRU on the Moon. A heavy ISRU on the Moon fundamentally changes the payloads shipped up from the Earth. Instead of large integrated payloads launched on heavy lifters, we can launch parts. Motors, computers, advanced parts that cannot be made on the Moon to put on locally constructed vehicles.
These are not pipe dreams. Every day that goes by 3D printing blows past another barrier and everything from tooling to large structures can be built in that manner.
In that system ISS is an ideal transshipment point and return point (via aerobraking) for a reusable cislunar human transport).
This is just the beginning.
I agree that a pressurized assembly area is not essential, nevertheless it would speed up assembly and was seriously proposed back in the late 70’s as part of the Space Operations Center concept.
Or we could suck it up and pay for a lunar lander to go with the otherwise useless Orion capsule, rather than looking for ridiculous harebrained schemes to try to give Orion something to do.
When they scrapped Constellation (sort of) they could’ve/should’ve kept the mission. That was the BEST part!
The lander from Constellation was horribly overpriced and over capable. A much simpler one would have done just fine.
NASA should have learned from the failures of the Space Station Freedom program, but clearly did not. NASA burned through billions of dollars early in the SSF program by throwing every bit of bleeding edge technology they could find into the initial design despite the inability to actually build and fly a single piece of the station. Somehow, on big manned space programs, NASA management always seems to take the tack of putting everything including the kitchen sink into the initial design, realizes that they’re horribly over budget and behind schedule, then scales everything back to a “minimum” configuration.
Ares I plus Ares V is yet another example of this. Ares I was never needed at all. It was there only to blaze the trail to Ares V. But now the small crewed launcher is gone with a lot of money burned on air starting SSMEs to the J-2X with neither “needed” for SLS anymore. All the while the RL-10 continued to be the upper stage engine of choice for the EELVs. In the case of upper stage engines, a bird in the hand was truly worth two in the bush.
The Ares 1 was the training program for the Ares V.
I have to question whether training in assembling SRBs in the VAB is relevant to any meaningful future.
Ares I was training in what not to do, especially how to run a large development program.
A spiral development program focusing on two or more design iterations for one launcher would have been better suited to the problem at hand.
The Morpheus Lander takes off and lands. It will need space-rating and a cabin designing. Cabins can be tested on Earth and beside the ISS.
Morpheus is making progress, but it was not headquarters or Congressionally approved. It was initiated by a NASA engineer using discretionary funds. Because of the sponge-like effects of SLS/Orion on money, there is very little in the way of discretionary funding available for any useful developments.
Wow. You want to stop manned space flight because you are upset that your favorite architecture wasn’t picked? That is just silly. We are never going to live in a perfect world and to suggest that we have to wait for a perfect space program is ludicrous.
I’d personally just kill SLS, not stop all manned spaceflight. As for SLS, we’ve been down this road before with large, segmented, solid rocket boosters mated to a completely expendable core and it didn’t turn out very well in the long run for cost or reliability/safety.
I am a fan of SLS/Orion but I am no fan of ARM. They just cooked up a mission to try to keep the President’s promise to land on an asteroid. SLS/Orion can be put to good use elsewhere especially if the current administration’s policy on the moon is reversed.
I think the long-term goal has basically been “the space station”, as I pointed out in my post. We spent a big chunk of the manned space program funding on the ISS, we kept the Space Shuttle program active in part to help build and service the ISS, and the “build a space station” advocates back in the 1980s and 1990s won out against possible alternative major goals for the manned program’s funding (like a return to the Moon or a trip to Mars).
That’s why I don’t think it’s really fair to claim that NASA has no long term goals. It does – it’s just that “keep the space station operational” isn’t a popular one among a lot of space fans who would like to see NASA do something grander.
We are still trying to get the life support systems to work for a month. It is only when that has succeeded can we increase to the two years needed for Mars’s moons.
I like that idea. It would be a good addition to a Mars orbital manned mission.
Truly stopping means you get rid of the tooling for rockets and lay off the engineers, and then have to rebuild all that later on when you restart the program because you’ve lost all your institutional knowledge of how to do manned spaceflight. That’s not a good idea.
That said, we shouldn’t let the money we’ve already spent on a program influence whether or not we should continue it.
With Shelby in charge, the commercial space cash will look plenty tempting for SLS and any mission using it.
Where’s the split? The scientific community sees no value in it and calls it out correctly as a political diversion and pork justification. The promoters are in a very distinct minority along with the 1 dentist out of 5 that doesn’t recommend sugarless gum and the Teach the Controversy gang.
Brain said: “Perhaps it IS time to stop manned space flight. Stop until COHERENT, logical, and consistent long term visions and goals are developed while making some decisions on what the return on investment is going to be.”
How was my response, “reading into” what you said? You said you wanted to stop manned space flight until what you considered a “coherent” vision was established. I am not arguing that NASA is pursuing a coherent vision. I just very much disagree with the idea that we have shut everything down in order to come up with a vision.
As for the “Rules for Radicals” reference I am about as anti-Saul Alinsky as you can get.
Many years ago I took a NASA Management and Leadership Course. One of the speakers spoke of the “Abilene Paradox”.
In short, the paradox is explained as follows: a bunch of people all
have serious reservations about taking a trip to Abilene. Individually
they don’t want to go. All have very well grounded concerns about going. In the end they all go. No one wanted to take the trip.
Senior NASA leadership was trying to drive home the point to speak up when ‘things don’t make sense’, and don’t be afraid to rock the boat. ..or get off the bus to Abilene. The Abilene paradox theory is used to illustrate that groups not only have problems managing disagreements, but that agreements may also be a problem in a poorly functioning group. (Read more about the Abilene Paradox on Wiki)
The entire NASA Humans Space Flight Program: SLS, Orion MPV, ARM, all of it, sounds very much like a trip to Abilene. Most non advocates, independent reviewer types, and even people inside NASA see the future as not working out due to budget, flight rate, no money for new hardware systems. Real, well grounded concerns.
Yet here goes NASA, on a bus to Abilene anyway.
What is it about NASA Leadership, the whole of NASA environment that continues to repeat that which doesn’t work? That does NOT learn from its history – despite saying it ‘wants’ to. What is it about NASA leadership and evironment that it teaches its employees about the Abilene Paradox, then executes it perfectly anyway.
Wow.
Since Congress is the one insisting that Orion/SLS continue down this obvious dead end path, I am not sure what NASA management could realistically do about it. No one wants to tell the Emperor that he has no clothes.
Bolden tried to do it a couple times in congressional hearings and got slammed for his trouble,so he gave up and drank the Kool-aid.
In terms of budget, it’s been “spinning down” a couple of decades longer than that. The budget cutting began towards the end of Apollo/Saturn development, which meant that the cuts started even before the success of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
And Ronald Reagan doubled NASA’s budget in less than 8 years.
And part of that was reaction to the Challenger disaster. It was finally recognized that running a program that cannibalizes spare parts from orbiters practically right after they land to get the next orbiter ready to fly is insanity. In other words, it was an acknowledgement that the shuttle program fixed and operational costs were higher than “projected”.
It was under the Reagan Administration that the shuttle was barred from launching “commercial” satellites and the Air Force pulled out of the program as well.
So yes, the budget was increased, but part of that increase pointed to failures in the shuttle program to live up to the promises it made to be the national Space Transportation System (STS).
The other part of the increase to manned spaceflight was Space Station Freedom. Don’t even get me started on how that program burned through billions of dollars, countless redesigns, and lack of key US components to be fully developed (e.g. assured crew return vehicle, ultra high freequency electrical distribution system, solar thermal power, …).
That budget increase was damning with very faint praise.
Reagan increased the budget from 5.5 to 7/4 billion BEFORE Challenger. After it went from $7.4 to 11.06 billion in FY-89 Reagan’s last budget. It further increased from $11.06 to $13.74 in FY 1993, Bush I’s last budget.
NASA’s budget in FY 2000 was STILL below the last Bush budget. It was only in FY-2001, Clinton’s last budget that NASA increased to a hair over $14 billion. Space was just not a priority for the democrats in the 1990’s.
Reagan increased the budget from 5.5 to 7/4 billion BEFORE Challenger. After it went from $7.4 to 11.06 billion in FY-89 Reagan’s last budget. It further increased from $11.06 to $13.74 in FY 1993, Bush I’s last budget.
NASA’s budget in FY 2000 was STILL below the last Bush budget. It was only in FY-2001, Clinton’s last budget that NASA increased to a hair over $14 billion. Space was just not a priority for the democrats in the 1990’s.
From Bush’s first budget (FY 2002) through FY 2009, NASA increased from $14.09 to $19.68 billion per year. Since then the budget under Obama has decreased to $17.9 billion.
These are the facts of the budget.
The Obama administration has consistently requested more than Congress has appropriated, even when the discretionary budget was shrinking because of the recession that began under Bush. A large part of the problem was the decision of the Bush administration to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond without adding anything to the budget. With billions going into SLS/Orion, everything else is declining.