Planetary Society's Mars Mission Takes Longer To Do Less
Keith’s note: The result of the closed door Humans Orbiting Mars report has been released. According to this report missions to Mars only orbit the planet by 2033. Crews would control robots on the surface. If there’s enough money then the report suggests a landing in 2039 but they’d only stay on the surface for 24 days. Long duration missions on the surface of Mars would not start until 2043 a decade after NASA’s current (but unfunded) plans. All of the missions in this report require hardware that has not been designed or budgeted for (just like NASA). NASA will be required to walk away from ISS in 2024 so as to free up money for Mars – and the report assumes that human spaceflight budgets will be flat with growth for inflation for several decades. This plan puts humans on Mars a quarter of a century away.
NASA is already challenged to mount a program that takes 20 years – Planetary Society wants to stretch that even further – indeed, in their plan serious surface expeditions would have to wait nearly 30 years. Of course there’s always the magic unicorn of foreign partners, commercial donations, or other sources of money (not spelled out) which might pop up and make things happen earlier – or maybe not. Oh yes: this plan makes no mention of the two year slip in launching the first crewed Orion mission which should push everything to the right by a year or two.
In summary the Planetary Society has taken NASA’s various plans, thrown them up in the air, rearranged the pieces and tried to do things on the cheap. The net result is an unrealistic delay in getting humans to the surface based on hardware that is not even budgeted for by NASA. I am trying to picture how Congress is going to fund a program for 20 years that almost puts humans on Mars.
Yesterday the Planetary Society posted an article on the Mars water news which included this gem: “This is one of many reasons I’m glad that The Planetary Society is advocating an orbit-first approach to human exploration. If we keep our filthy meatbag bodies in space and tele-operate sterile robots on the surface, we’ll avoid irreversible contamination of Mars — and obfuscation of the answer to the question of whether we’re alone in the solar system — for a little while longer. Maybe just long enough for robots to taste Martian water or discover Martian life.”
It is quite obvious that the Planetary Society would be quite happy if it took longer to put humans on Mars than NASA and others would like it to take since “Filthy meatbag bodies” don’t belong on Mars – if at all possible.
Destination Phobos: ‘Humans Orbiting Mars’ report goes public, Geekwire
“Critics, including NASA Watch’s Keith Cowing, say the Planetary Society’s “orbit-first” blueprint is too timid and relies on hardware that NASA has not yet budgeted for. “I am trying to picture how Congress is going to fund a program for 20 years that almost puts humans on Mars,” Cowing wrote on Tuesday. [Planetary Society’s Casey] Dreier, however, was doubtful that a more accelerated schedule would draw enough political support. “It’d be great if we could do it in 10 years,” he said. “But that will take a lot of money over not a lot of years, and I don’t see any pathway to making that happen.”
– Planetary Society Does Not Want Humans on Mars, earlier post
– Not Everyone Wants To Be The Martian, earlier post
“Filthy meatbag bodies,” huh? Speak for yourself, lady!
More seriously, if this is representative of space exploration enthusiasts’ views of humanity, I wonder if they recognize the profound conflict of interest going on in their ranks.
Hand in your geek card. It’s a pop-culture SF reference.
I consider myself pretty well versed in SF film, television, and literature – but “filthy meatbag bodies” is not ringing any bells.
Will you enlighten me?
http://www.terrybisson.com/…
Sorry to start this way.
But what would justify the $100’s of billions to teleoperate rovers and landers from Mars orbit, when the same spacecraft can be teleoperated from Pasadena, Denver, Greenbelt, or Laurel (or for that matter, Darmstadt, Tsukuba, or Moscow)? You will say its latency. OK, but what operations done on the surface of Mars REQUIRES the lower latency? Has that operation been identified? I don’t know what it is.
Yes, its better to have the lower latency, but is it worth the money? I don’t know, but I do ask the question. The question needs to be answered to justify the expense. That is what engineers are suppose to do!
They point out in the report that it takes a lot of preparation and work just to give the rovers a sequence of move commands each day, which would be drastically reduced if they could be ordered in real-time to move one step at a time.
It’s true, but you gotta ask how valuable that is compared to simply sending more rovers and landers, plus a mars sample return mission.
If there is no life to find on Mars Isn’t this a waste of money. If you are not going to try to live on Mars, Who cares? This sounds like just an excuse to justify money spent on cushy SLS Orion Jobs
We’re probably not going to live on Saturn or any of its moons. Does that mean it’s not worthwhile to explore and learn about it?
OTOH, manned missions carry an even larger standing army. And, if anything, by increasing the work rate of the rovers, you’ll need an even bigger science team to deal with the data in addition to the huge HSF ops side.
Once you have the data, though, you can take your time in analyzing what the crew sees and sends back. Just look at Kepler, where they’re still digging through the mountain of transit data it had during its primary mission.
I mean the “data” which decides the route of the rover, which rocks to sample, etc. Not the data that comes from the rocks being sampled. Think of all the decisions that must have been made over MSL’s mission so far, and imagine that compressed into a couple of days.
Even with the 8-20min delay, the guys in orbit around Mars will essentially be “robots” for the ops people back on Earth, they aren’t going to be making important decisions. In the same way that an army of people on the ground direct every aspect of an EVA from ISS. (And most internal activities, too.)
You’ll need a larger science team to deal with the increased rate of movement, sampling, etc. And you’ll need a rover ops teams to turn that into future direction. And you’ll need the (inevitably huge) HSF ops team.
You aren’t saving anything by having humans in Mars orbit, you are just drastically increasing the cost.
If HSF development (late shuttle, and ISS) had been focused on increasing crew autonomy and self-reliance, eliminating the massive ops side on Earth, then yes, you might have improved things. But sadly, that’s never been a priority, quite the opposite.
I assume they’ll pretty much have to defer a lot to the decisions made by the scientists on the crew, if they ever do a Mars Orbital or Mars Landing mission. Hell, the crew may insist on having some of their own time for research between investigating interesting areas determined by the folks back home.
It’s just the nature of the beast. With an 8-20 min time lag, NASA can’t micro-manage the crew as effectively from back on Earth.
Not really, any scientists on the crew will be “translators” for the scientists back home, able to speak the same language and turn that into commands for the robot. “Approach the main transverse occlusion from the north and do a cross-wise series of 4mm drill samples.”
I just don’t see them being able to make scientific decisions on their own. NASA just doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction, and it feels like there is a lot of internal resistance to ever moving in that direction.
The lag might prevent “turn left, bit more, bit more, there!” level of control, but the Mars crew will have a strict list of operations.
[Aside: In SF, writers and film-makers tend to draw on the maritime traditions, they rarely communicate with ground control, they make their own decisions about maintenance, EVAs, research, etc.
I think that has influenced our assumptions about how a Mars mission (orbital or surface) will work. But those maritime traditions come from an era where there was no continuous communication. You are, by necessity, independent; barring the occasional message once wireless was invented. You are given your port of destination by the vessel owner, but the decisions on how to get there, and how to maintain the ship, are left to the Captain. Even now, with instant satellite comms, you don’t see the kind of monitoring and control you see with spaceflight. Even with commercial aircraft, the flight-crews seem to have a surprising amount of discretionary power. Space exploration has never been like that.]
[Aside 2: Oddly, the Soviets seemed to give more control to their cosmonauts. This was due to the limits of their space communication networks.]
The communications lag remains a common rationale not only for robots teleoperated from Mars orbit but for actual human landing on Mars. I feel we are on thin ice with this. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities of autonomous wheeled vehicles are already advancing by leaps and bounds (so to speak). The same technology that already permits cars and trucks to operate without drivers has been applied to off-road vehicles. Even the Curiosity, which has all the intelligence of a smart phone, can be programmed for considerable autonomous mobility.
NASA is the only agency that routinely operates robotic vehicles beyond the distance at which direct teleoperation is feasible. NASA should be a leader in advancing AI for autonomous exploration and in providing rovers with the computing power to accomplish complex tasks. If humans are going along, it should be because we have the technology to send them at a reasonable cost, not because we lack the technology for robots to explore without humans controlling their every move.
The big caveat with self-driving vehicles here on Earth is that they do usually require an extremely detailed map of the area they’re driven through beforehand, something that you wouldn’t have on Mars unless you’re driving a rover in the path of a previous rover. You’d need your self-driving rover to be able to navigate obstacles between remotely set checkpoints on terrain we’ve never seen from ground level before.
Still might be possible, especially by the early 2030s. And if it’s close to being possible in the late 2020s, you can be that will be used as ammo against an Orbital-Only mission – they’ll ask why we’re spending billions of dollars when the robots “can drive themselves”.
Mars has been mapped from orbit already, and it can be done at higher resolution for long-range navigation. Robotic vehicles have been tested that can do the short range navigation by real-time video analysis.
That might be tricky. The rough surface which did some damage to the treads on Curiosity would not be obvious from orbit. Unless you did some real fancy mapping (meter resolution thermal IR at multiple times of day might do it.) Rocks are easily mapped from orbit, but there are other navigation hazards.
However, an advantage of teleoperation versus autonomy is science. I don’t think you could program a rover to notice interesting things along the way. So, while navigating several km per day, it might pass something worth stoping and looking at, without ever noticing.
That’s definitely a perk of the mission. The orbital crew could move the rover in a “stop-go” way, stopping to look at interesting stuff every few minutes – or even drive it in real-time video viewing if the power supply and data rate of the rover are high enough to do that.
It’s an unstated cost in the Planetary Society proposal, though – getting the rovers there. You’d need to do additional launches to put rovers capable of making the best use out of the orbital crew’s valuable time.
The “filthy meatbag” quote reminded me of this guy.:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I wonder if Mr. Red Volcano is the actual head of the Planetary Society.
None of the mars exploration architectures are worth the paper they are written on at present, while fundamental missing technologies do not exist and are not being invested on.
Its all fantasy that has not passed a ‘critical, non-advocate review’. Where is Donald Rapp when you need him ?
Is it difficult to identify whether an organism originates on Mars versus brought there by an Earth human and/or robot?
Yes and no. If it shares a lot of commonality with Earth organisms, it’s probably Earthly in origin. Only if it’s unlike anything known on this planet does a Martian origin become more probable.
Basically, this is an asymmetric question, in that only one answer tells you much of anything.
Actually, the tough part would be finding life which resembled terrestrial life. There is enough discussion of transport by impact ejecta/meteorites that this would be an ambiguous result. I suppose some level of genetic analysis could clear that up (e.g. related to terrestrial life, but not extant species and most like long-extinct ones.)
We haven’t documented bacteria on Earth enough to be able to tell.
Not my field, but I’ve been told by microbiologists that most terrestrial microbes can’t be cultured in the lab….
We’d have to find Martian life first to know that.
http://accordingtohoyt.com/…
Interesting take on the feasibility of a manned Mars expedition. To this uneducated eye, his summaries on techical, scheduling, and funding issues seem on the mark.
It would be worthwhile for someone knowledgable about this to comment.
Handwaving a lot. His technical checklist fails 80%. Nuclear thermal rockets ? Mars capable ECLSS that will last years ? Landers capable of tons to surface ? Lets ignore the fact that landing ellipses are still in tens of miles ..
Does not pass cursory check.
You’re nitpicking. He says right upfront that he’s making informed estimates, which is an operational definition of handwaving. And that criticism misses his main point anyway.
His big takeaway message is that manned Mars flight appears technically feasible on a two-or-three decade timescale — but the societal will to do it just isn’t there. And absent something to create that social will, the missing technical pieces aren’t going to get invented or built.
When people want to do something badly enough, it usually gets done. But this is such a specialized task that the necessary Mars mission ingredients are unlikely to come into being through events and forces unrelated to a Mars project.
(Clicked Up-arrow by mistake, so I Down-arrowed to cancel!)
Why provide a ‘technical checklist’ and check boxes if its based on fantasy ?
Yeah everything can be done with time, money and will, we could fly to Alpha Centauri too
At present time, taking people to Mars and back is not technically feasible, and there are large technical gaps that are not being invested in. At least in US.
The good thing is that if they do somehow get the ball rolling, they’ll at least have hardware in orbit around Mars by 2033 – 9 years after the cancellation of ISS. Drier’s been making an argument that multi-decade programs are viable with the right constituency, but the case examples he uses (ISS, the Space Shuttle) all had hardware in space around ten years after the program was seriously begun, even if they weren’t complete.
Their crewed Mars orbital mission, though, seems less and less like a good idea the more I think about. The time-frame – 2033 – means you’re going to have send over a whole new set of rovers anyways in advance for the crew to drive, hopefully good ones so that you don’t move so slow as to render the real-time control nearly worthless. The crew is going to be in microgravity for more than 900 days (I e-mailed them about this, and Drier told me that it was no big deal because of physical training and osteoporosis medicine). And of course, you’re going to have to do four heavy-lift launches on top of the launches to land new rovers and the solar-electric tugs they’re sending to Mars.
What’s the point? I guarantee you that for the cost of just one of these missions, you could send a ton of rovers, a dedicated Phobos Sample Return mission, and a Mars sample return mission that would get you around the same amount of science. That’s not even mentioning the possibility of making the rovers better at driving between now and then, something that should seriously be considered in light of the rise of self-driving vehicles back on Earth.
As long as you send rovers capable of higher data rates and relay satellites for it, which they didn’t mention in the pdf of the plan (nor do I think they mentioned the rovers in the hardware list for the mission).
Agreed. ISS could be testing this right now, remotely driving rover duplicates in the desert to see how well it works.
Uh, its doing exactly that. Again, people talking about ISS dont have the faintest clue about whats actually being done there
Oh yeah, just looked that up. Good for them that they’re finally doing it.
FWIW, “filthy meatbag bodies” is a ref to the cartoon show Futurama, where Bender the free-will robot (due to circuit damage from his first appearance on the show) routinely calls humans “meatbags”.
I can’t say for sure that this ref is intended in the same comic vein, but even if it was, given the scope for misinterpretation I’d have to say that it was ill-advised.
I’m fervent Futurama fan and I didn’t read “filthy, meatbag bodies” as a Bender homage.
Yep. Exactly the sort of in-group joke or reference that gets space advocates labeled by ordinary people as “wacko cranks who belong to a different species than humans.”
And remember, nothing you post on the interwebz remains solely among the cognoscenti. And it never goes away. Ever. (Just a public service reminder.)
Actually, it seems to only be the self-appointed space cognoscenti who are getting prissy over the comment.
Emily’s broader appeal, IMO, is that she uses interwebz slang and pop references. The whole geek-grrl pride thing that seems to play well with the younglings.
Piloted orbital missions employing Low Latency Telerobotics (LLT) should not be viewed as an end goal. These missions would be a prelude to human surface missions a decade or two later. Many fail to appreciate the significant investment required to develop ascent/descent and surface infrastructure to support human surface missions. LLT missions allow us to place humans in the vicinity of Mars earlier prior to development of the surface systems. The focus would be on the in-space transportation systems and infrastructure.
Why? Other than “I want humans on Mars”, why do you need humans on Mars.
We can all agree the Planetary Society is biased to a rather selfish goal however, their means and methods as published do them little progress. Assuredly, they have membership that find complementary needs for both manned and remote science but as of late their press suggests differently. Is it a level of desperation in the society that robotic missions are retiring and the next wave are rather far in the distance? Remember we now have Kepler and the upcoming Webb
telescopes but planetary surface robotics of current are waning. With all that said, it comes down to dollars and the quest to garner a mission or missions that beget compound interest. That interest comes with the
media and public interest; the manned quest historically provides the compound interest. We can say that the first US manned launches post STS will have more attention than Cassini or even MRO; that is simply a fact of human nature. With an agency racked with a bureaucracy of mismanagement and as a result congress needing to become deeply involved in oversight, NASA needs the positive attention and the mission to drive public and media interest. Sorry, Planetary Society but a more proficient approach would better serve.