This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Exploration

Selecting Landing Sites For NASA's Journey To Nowhere

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 27, 2015
Filed under ,
Selecting Landing Sites For NASA's Journey To Nowhere

First NASA Landing Site/Exploration Zone Workshop for Human Missions to the Surface of Mars
“NASA’s first Landing Sites/Exploration Zones Workshop for Human Missions to the Surface of Mars will be held Oct. 27-30 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The agency is hosting the workshop to collect proposals for locations on Mars that would be of high scientific research value while also providing natural resources to enable human explorers to land, live and work safely on the Red Planet.”
NASA Begins Its Journey To Nowhere, earlier post
“No one with even a shred of fiscal accumen will tell you that a multi-decade program to send humans to Mars – as is typically done by NASA (delays, overruns, and PR hype) – is going to be done “within current budget levels, with modest increases aligned to economic growth.”
Yet Another NASA Mars “Plan” Without A Plan – or a Budget, earlier post
“There is no “plan” in this “plan”. Its a description of a bunch of things what NASA says it needs to do but there is no budget, firm timeline, architecture, or overarching mission goals. This is just another PDF file with pretty pictures and a unorganized shopping list of ideas.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

10 responses to “Selecting Landing Sites For NASA's Journey To Nowhere”

  1. TheBrett says:
    0
    0

    It sounds like they saved some money on it, though, considering that Jeff Foust said on Twitter that they were asking for donations to buy coffee between meetings.

    None of this matters. It’s too soon to even come up with a plan, and will be too soon until after 2025 at the earliest. When that comes around, we can come up with some landing sites – especially since the hardware necessary to land on Mars will hopefully start its development around then (or in a few years).

    I understand the whole “ride off the Martian” idea, but otherwise why is NASA doing this instead of boosting outreach on their robotic programs and ISS experiments? It’s not like they’ll be able to parlay it into anything in terms of greater support any time soon.

  2. Neal Aldin says:
    0
    0

    I keep hearing from top level NASA folks that they have no money for education. They’ve been seriously cut back, 25% or some such number. Why don’t they produce something to get into the schools? Maybe they ought to focus on their current ‘real’ program, ISS, which seems to get zero focus from NASA Education. Orion is ten years out-that might be an asteroid mission although I suspect it will be cancelled in another 2 years. This Mars thing is just nonsense. No one is going to Mars for two or three decades, and that is wishful thinking. It makes about as much sense as the Apollo landing sites chosen in the mid-60s.

  3. fcrary says:
    0
    0

    I can actually imagine people who think this might be a good time for site selection. Specifically, the sort of engineers who insist on hard engineering requirements which flow down logically from mission goals goals and level 1 requirements. This design philosophy holds that you shouldn’t design the landing system before you have those requirements, and you can’t design the rest of the mission until you know what the payload will be like.

    Unfortunately that can produce unrealistic requirements which drive development costs and schedules. I personally prefer an approach which involves some back-and-forth iteration between goals, requirements and engineering realities. That, however, is not the way many people feel.

  4. numbers_guy101 says:
    0
    0

    This work serves many uses. Mostly, it keeps people busy who have focused on this a long while. You can’t move these people over to something else for an assortment of reasons. Skill sets mismatch for one. But that’s fine – because supporting these groups and their activities means NASA can keep up the advertising pretense that we’re getting ready to go to Mars.

    Lastly, there’s very little real money in the agency that’s not already spoken for – and those projects actually don’t want more cooks in the kitchen. With very little real money these kind of Mars analyze this/that (fill in the blank) groups keep a lot of people out of other people’s hair.

  5. jamesmuncy says:
    0
    0

    Keith,

    I understand and somewhat agree with the skepticism of your other commenters, but I want to draw attention to this line of the statement:

    ***while also providing >>>natural resources<<< to enable human explorers to land, live and work safely on the Red Planet***

    Even if this activity is only movie-tie in “window dressing” to keep Orion and SLS funded, it’s a good thing that NASA believes they should talk in terms of using the resources available on the surface of Mars to extend/deepen a human presence, instead of just planting flags and footprints. We already know the latter is not sustainable… we ran the experiment in 1969-1972.

    • kcowing says:
      0
      0

      NASA has been talking about ISRU for decades.

      • jamesmuncy says:
        0
        0

        Yes, they have. They’ve even funded a lot of R&D on it.

        But I want to give them credit for paying lip service to planning for ISRU from the first landing on Mars.

        And if we have them planning for long-term presence from the beginning… that will ultimately give us the grounds to further improve their strategy so that we do eventually get there.

  6. Todd Martin says:
    0
    0

    Site selection should precede lander design. There’s a substantial difference in Delta-V between an equatorial target and a polar one. No need to go through the exercise until they are ready to design the lander. That said, I expect NASA to choose a flat equatorial spot well away from any possible sources of water. I would disagree with fcrary. If you leave the landing spot up in the air, then the lander has to handle a broader range of requirements which will necessarily add to cost and complexity. Look at the Apollo landing sites and the Apollo lander, that’s what we’ll end up with.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      That’s not really what happened with Apollo, or what I was suggesting for a Mars mission. The lander design came first, because the goal was a landing, not landing at a specific site (Kennedy just said land.) At least for Apollo 11 and 12, site selection was based on where the lander could put down. For a Mars mission, I was suggesting some iteration between the design and the science goals. You shouldn’t just ask, without considering what is easy or hard, what the optimal site is. If you do, the engineers might easily go off and spend a decade and a few billion trying to design something that can do the impossible.