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Exploration

NAC Doesn't Think NASA Has Tech Or Plans For #JourneyToMars

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 2, 2015
Filed under , ,
https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2015/nac.cartoon.l2.jpg

Red Planet red flags? NASA council has doubts about Mars mission, CNet
“A NASA Advisory Council meeting is typically about as exciting as it sounds, but the three-day meeting of the NAC now underway at the Johnson Space Center in Houston included a bit of a bombshell from council member Bill Ballhaus. He chairs a committee tasked with looking into NASA’s plans to address risks and challenges of the journey to Mars and reported that the committee did not get the plan from NASA it was expecting. “This is not the outcome we wanted. We wanted a plan that argued for urgency but we did not find that,” Ballhaus said. “We might as well face up to it.”

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

54 responses to “NAC Doesn't Think NASA Has Tech Or Plans For #JourneyToMars”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    They have plans. The plan is to get SLS in good working order and human-tested, then when funding space opens up after the end of the ISS mission to start paying for and building the Mars hardware.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      And do what with SLS in the meantime? Missions cost money. Any money spent on SLS missions means less money for Mars hardware development. Plus, if they don’t fly SLS enough, how do they maintain proficiency of the workforce?

      This is the space shuttle before ISS all over again. We’re going to spend billions every single year on a transportation system with nowhere to go. Ugh, just ugh.

      • TheBrett says:
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        They could keep on doing lunar flyby missions, and let them control robots on the surface while they’re in orbit. That would be within the 21 day capability of Orion, and also not require any specific new hardware while they’re making the stuff for Mars. It would also be good practice for when they finish developing the Deep Space Hab module, since they’ll likely be testing it in lunar orbit after initial tests in Low Earth Orbit.

        It’s not my preferred option (I’d much prefer to see if Musk could develop a super-heavy-lift vehicle for a fraction of SLS’s costs), but it has strong congressional support making it more sustainable.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Meh. SLS truly is the “launcher to nowhere”. Development money will keep pouring into SLS over the years, because the initial version “isn’t big enough” according to NASA. So, I don’t expect its budget to be cut down to “operational levels” after it starts flying.

        • Paul451 says:
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          They could keep on doing lunar flyby missions, and let them control robots on the surface while they’re in orbit.

          Teleoperation from orbit doesn’t have the same advantage on the Moon as it does on Mars.

          The round-trip lag between Earth and the Moon is less than three seconds. You cut that in orbit, but then spend most of your mission over-the-horizon anyway.

          The round-trip lag between Earth and Mars is more than ten minutes. Completely different situation.

          If there was any support for such missions, they’d have been done already. There hasn’t been a US rover/lander on the Moon since Apollo.

          It would also be good practice for when they finish developing the Deep Space Hab module

          There’s no funding for a DSH. They’d need additional funding for NASA (which doesn’t happen) or to kill of someone else’s program. If you are willing to accept that, why not accept killing SLS/Orion first?

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I don’t believe the 10-20 minute lag between Earth and Mars shuld be a problem when we have the technology for fully autonomous off-road vehicles.

          • fcrary says:
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            Yes, but the technology you are thinking of is not class A hardware. An autonomous, off-road.vehicle in the Mojave is one thing, since no one cares if it gets stuck or damages itself. (Well, not much and.you can always go out and correct.the situation.) For the Moon or Mars, you’d be expected to have only a.few percent risk of a problem over the course of the whole mission. Autonomous technology for that doesn’t exist. I’d be all for 80% reliability and using the reduced.costs to land.several, but that isn’t NASA’s approach to risk.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Nevertheless even if several rovers are needed, with current technology robotics could accomplish the mission faster and less expensively. If and when human flight is less expensive that could change.

        • savuporo says:
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          Look, Lunokhod 1 did teleoperated rovers on Moon, from earth, 45 years ago. Fourty five years ! That was at the time where we could cram a few dozen transistors on a chip, let me remind you.
          Teleoperating lunar robots – or more accurately, telerobots – from space makes very, very little sense.

      • Arthur Hamilton says:
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        Maybe NASA will piggyback off of Elon Musk’s plans to get to Mars.

    • numbers_guy101 says:
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      Thats not a plan. Thats like saying I have a plan for my vacation to Disney. The first step is for me to spend all that comes in on my weekly check on a sports car I plan to drive down to Florida. It’s only 92 monthly payments. I’ll need something more practical for when I’m there, an SUV, but I’ll worry about that when the day comes. The maintenance on the sports car will kill my budget even after I pay it off. Oh well, I’ll worry about that – after I get to that point. My next step is to hope, uhhh wait, no that’s not a good word either, pray, uhhh…ok, just “analyze” say, what I will do when Uncle Bob leaves me some inheritance. Uncles Bob is 70. And he has two kids of his own.

      I guess congress and NASA now have financial planning for that Disney trip after all by this way of defining a “plan”.

  2. Robert Rice says:
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    Starfleet is in deep doo doo if they can’t make it to Mars

    Maybe they should ask the Vulcans for help

    • Neville Chamberlain says:
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      Oh, wait, the Vulcans won’t show up until the first warp drive is initiated by Earthlings! At that point getting to Mars is easy as is Jupiter, Saturn , etc. Just a few minutes or hours away!

  3. Littrow says:
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    As Gerstenmaier said, there is no architecture and there is no plan.

    They are setting themselves up for a throwaway minimal flags and footprints mission but they won’t begin the development of the real elements until sometime in the 2030s after ISS is ditched, and based on the ISS and Orion track records, that means they will not be ready for a Mars landing until around 2050 at the earliest.

    Maybe they will do some shakedown cis-lunar cruises for a year or so to check out systems between the mid 2030s and the landing, 15 or 20 years later. I guess they have not thought too much about the crew in a small 10foot x 10foot x 10foot room, with nothing to see, and besides cleaning their own scum off the walls, nothing to do for a year or longer.

    Not a lot of common sense has gone into their ideas. This also means that the people just now joining NASA probably will not be the generation of engineers to see it through. Those people will join NASA in about another five to ten years, so maybe some are in middle school or high school today.

    • numbers_guy101 says:
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      A pretty good overall assessment.

    • muomega0 says:
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      NASA kept sending men to the moon long after the public lost interest. Decades later, a group with parochial interests recreated the incredibly expendable Apollo redux architecture In spite of dozens of cost, performance, and schedule limitations, including a flawed docking risk that justified the need for a HLV. Flexible path was the logical choice, somehow the Abilene Express thinking prevailed.

      Have the courage to try which is how the greatest things have happened. If we become afraid to take these big risks, we stop inspiring. Moonshot Thinking.

      Both NASA and the NAC told the world that “NASA should promptly start the development of a new EXPENDABLE engine program with sufficient power to support 130mT or greater LV capability”, repeating the transformation of the SSME/RS-25 into the RS-68 ‘again’, with no commonality with the soon to be retired Delta. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/580

      Let them just work on a resuseable engine instead? If they fail,would they then be out of work, since there is no reward for failure?

      They coin misleading phrases “have doubts about Mars”, “the moon prepares NASA for Mars”, ‘no urgency to XXX” (but insert ‘Mars’?), “distributed launch”, “DSH-gateway to a lunar program”, “We do have a plan for Mars”, “8 flights down to 1 flight /yr is all that’s ‘required'” Lets celebrate success. http://dilbert.com/strip/19

      So when will the NAC going to start telling NASA to stop buying things they do not need? Oops…A panel member not knowing about alternative architectures (why not?) pretty much says it all. Picking the team picks the winners. To infinity and beyond, or is infinity the time scale?

  4. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Maybe they will give up on Mars now and do what is doable and return to the Moon. Mars is nice, but the will never be the budget to do it the NASA way.

    • TheBrett says:
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      It’s only worth it to me if they can get international commitment on it so that there’s at least a decent Moon base. Otherwise it’s as likely to die off as anything else, simply because there’s no real need to land people on the Moon again – remotely controlled robots can do it fine. Even the lunar orbital missions I suggested below were just to keep the flight rate up, with the telepresence being stuff for the astronauts to do on a mission they’d already be going on anyways.

    • Arthur Hamilton says:
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      Mars is way down the road in the 2030’s-2040’s maybe even the 2050’s for the government. No one is going to pass up the moon for a testing and proving ground. It’s like the Allies invading France, on June 6, 1944, without ever having to practice or train for the invasion.

  5. Gonzo_Skeptic says:
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    There is no political will in the US to send humans to Mars. Without that, the funding will never show up. People need to get used to this reality and stop planning for something that can never happen.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I wonder about ‘political will’ when a $150 billion dollar asset is thrown into the Pacific. This is likely to excite people and the press.

      • John Campbell says:
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        Don’t forget that there will be jockeying to provide Pay Per View video of the ISS re-entry, both from ground level as well as various cameras on the structure itself. There is far too much media money available to cover destruction rather than construction.

      • P.K. Sink says:
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        I can’t recall the last time people got excited about government wasting money.

    • P.K. Sink says:
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      Never say never.

  6. Michael Spencer says:
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    Go get ’em, Keith. Maybe someone will actually listen to NAC. Or not. But not for lack of trying.

  7. numbers_guy101 says:
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    It is a shame that only have stakeholders on the fringe are talking about how poorly positioned NASA is to carry out space exploration. The stakeholders in leadership, I can say first hand, starting with Gerstenmaier, believe that showing how SLS/Orion driven Mars plans do not add up, and probably never will, is not constructive. The rest of the leadership is following his queue.

    I am still trying to figure out how we got in this fix, if only to avoid these mistakes in the future, or to see how to get out of it. I do think a first step is for NASA leadership to assess the situation as honestly as possible and to communicate the bad news. Frankly. Frankly, like Morgan Freeman saying how it is when the last attempt to destroy the asteroid failed.

    The old ways of NASA and industry doing business are bankrupt, dead, or on their deathbed. For many reasons and incentives, denial is strong among most. Certain members in Congress enforce that denial. A little bargaining is happening here and there; perhaps some have even gone as far as anger, or depression, but only a handful that I know. Being honest about the dire situation would be constructive, a sign of reaching acceptance, after which we can move on, perhaps setting the stage for an inkling of progress, a shift that gets looked back on as the day things started changing for the better.

    • P.K. Sink says:
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      ‘I am still trying to figure out how we got in this fix’

      We got into this fix because Obama told NASA to go to Mars, and the Senate told NASA to go there with an unaffordable rocket and capsule.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        I believe the Obama Administration initially directed NASA to discontinue the Constellation program and transfer the funding to commercial spaceflight and technology development. Congress then directed NASA to instead build the SLS and Orion, and to provide a plan for their use. No additional funds required for actual lunar lander and base development were provided. Ultimately NASA responded by adopting the “flexible path” option, which did not require an immediate path to a lunar or Mars landing.

        A possible alternative would have been to completely discontinue the ISS program and commercial spaceflight and transfer all the funds from these programs to a Lunar landing program as originally planned for Constellation. However neither the Administration nor Congress supported this strategy and instead the ISS program was extended.

        The question remains as to what direction we should take now. I remain convinced that we need to demonstrate practical value for humans in LEO before we can expect public support for sending humans further.

        • P.K. Sink says:
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          “Obama Aims to Send Astronauts to an Asteroid, Then to Mars
          http://www.space.com/8222-obama-ai...…
          Space.comApr 15, 2010 – – President Barack Obama unveiled a sweeping new space vision for NASA and the United States Thursday, one that aims to send astronauts to a nearbyasteroid and ultimately on to Mars in the mid-2030s.”

          Yep, you got your history right. Above is the rest of the story. What to do now? I believe if NASA can see Commercial Crew through to completion, we’ll get a Bigelow hab to orbit, and the Market will take it from there.

          • Arthur Hamilton says:
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            Yep… baby steps first. Invest in the commercial/private companies to develop crew/cargo transportation to LEO. While building the capability to spend up to two weeks in cislunar space.
            Next, evolve these capabilities to support permanently human commercial/private/government exploitation in LEO and BEO(moon, Mars, asteroids, outer solar system, etc…).

          • P.K. Sink says:
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            That sounds like the best plan to me, considering what NASA has been tasked to do. It’s amazing how many people DO NOT want to hear that. It will be interesting to see what the next president decides to do.

          • Arthur Hamilton says:
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            That’s what is in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. It stated that the SLS would enable missions to the moon, Mars, an asteroid and beyond. But first NASA has to enable commercial/private & international participation in such an endeavor. Hence, the CC, CCP and other programs. Granted that some of the private companies’ programs are more expensive than others. Yes it will be interesting what the next President decides to do. Whatever it is, the next President will have to compromise with the Congress.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          Daniel:

          I’ve been thinking about the issue of leadership (discussed in several other threads). Your first graf I think answers one of the questions I’ve had about the subject, which is to seek an explanation for the apparent paucity of bold direction-setting in the nature of our political climate.

          I just wonder what others think about the idea that lack of direction is the direct result of congressional meddling? Or, put another way, of presidential meddling?

          This thread is too old to get more opinions I imagine.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I agree completely. Congressional instructions to NASA are often arbitrary and counterproductive, extending to such trivia as requiring Congressional permision for Chinese scientists to attend NASA conferences, and threats to slash the NASA budget if Congressional orders are not followed. When Congressional direction is simply not consistent with what is feasible or desirable, i.e. sending humans to Mars using a vehicle designed for a different purpose, the agency has a real problem. If Mr. Bolden tells Congressmen they are wrong, they will accuse him of violating Congressional direction.

            Mr. Obama in contrast has been pretty hands-off, which I think is a good thing for a technical R&D organization. I know some of us blame lack of progress on lack of presidential leadership, but in the current hostile environment he cannot force Congress to increase resources.

    • Littrow says:
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      I think we got into this problem with a short sighted Orion “Apollo redux” command module. Careful architectural considerations would have shown such a module would never be required-particularly so when two redudant capsules, Dragon and CST100 Starliner came along. But even before those, we could have simply given a little cash to the Russians for Soyuz-already designed for lunar returns. Instead we have so far spent a decade,.and now fixing to spend for another decade to re-design, re-build a capsule; we would have been far better off to design some other aspect of the cis-lunar vehicle like the hab module or like a moon lander. Orion keeps us stuck flying in circles. They might be big circles going out to lunar distances, but circles nevertheless.

  8. Daniel Woodard says:
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    If there is no reason for humans to live, work, or vacation in LEO, then there is certainly no reason to do it on the Moon or Mars, where the cost is far greater. If bars of solid gold were lying on the Moon, it would not be worth the cost, with current technology, to bring them back.
    However if the cost of sending a person to LEO can be reduced to $1M or less, the market will expand considerably. LEO is indeed useful as a sight for telescopes IF they can be easily upgraded, modified, or replaced, which would be possible if they were located on or in close proximity to the ISS. The ISS can and should be equipped with hundreds of Earth-sensing devices, which could have modular interfaces allowing replacement without the need for a spacecraft or launch. The ISS would permit simultaneous observations of the Earth from a single point with hundreds of instruments, something that is not possible with satellites. And the ISS can serve as a destination port for every reusable spacecraft industry can develop. It should certainly be able to accomodate vacationers from the US as well as Russia. And it can provide an opportunity for the US and China to collaborate, rather than compete.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Earth observations seems like a stretch to me given the orbit of ISS.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        I feel the ISS orbit is relatively good for Earth observation as it includes over 98% of the Earth’s population and all continents except the Antarctic. The ability to simultaneously examine a single region with a hundred different sensors can be as useful as seeing the entire globe with one or two sensors. We need to know about innumerable places on the Earth, not just the Earth itself.

        As to astronomical observation, we haven’t even characterized ISS capabilities. The external environment has been characterized and is a lot cleaner than it was with MIR. We can’t afford another Webb, and there are a lot of objects to study. It’s time to stop making assumptions and start trying out ideas.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          Since it’s not sun synchronous though the data is all over the map, taken at countless times of day.

  9. Michael Spencer says:
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    The money is in the resources found further out, beyond Mars. The money is in developing in situ mineral extraction and value-added industrial processes in space. Only then will ‘living in space’ become something we can manage to afford (absent an alien invasion that causes all of mankind to sing Kumbayha and build a big ‘ole rocket ship, that is).

    We are at least a hundred years from living in space. Current technology will not support gravity-well living with replenishment from Earth. Period.

    Besides. Mars sucks.

    • P.K. Sink says:
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      “Miller: Now, did Jefferson, or Lewis and Clark, or the three of them together, have discussions about how this untracked wilderness was going to be peopled? Here we are, before the steamboat…

      Ambrose: Jefferson thought it would take 100 generations.”

      From a Stephen Ambrose interview about the Louisiana Purchase. You’re in good company with Thomas Jefferson. But he, you, and Mike Shupp are way underestimating the power of human minds working together in free societies. I believe people will be living and working in space (probably part time in the beginning until we’ve solved the artificial gravity problem) much sooner than 100 years.

  10. Alfredo Menendez says:
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    Good comment. Agree totally.

  11. chuckc192000 says:
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    I think space tourism, ala “2001: A Space Odyssey”, would make a lot of money. Imagine a Hilton and a Starbucks on a space station with artificial gravity!

  12. P.K. Sink says:
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    Naw, when we get a few commercial habs in LEO, people are gonna find all kinds of reasons to go there. And there will be government bucks to pay for a lot of that activity. Governments from all over the world. And LEO is just the first step.

  13. Daniel Woodard says:
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    The tradeoff between robotics and human presence is primarily one of cost. We can see that with undersea exploration. Down to about 100 meters almost everything is done by divers. Below that almost everything is done by robots. If we can put a human in orbit for $1M he/she can do many tasks faster and less expensively than a robot. If it costs $60M per human then robotics are more practical.

  14. P.K. Sink says:
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    “I’d rather see something sooner and more ambitious.”

    Works for me. What do you have in mind?

  15. P.K. Sink says:
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    Good vision, but you’re right, it’s gonna take awhile. And, like all frontiers, there’ll be a lot of dead bodies marking those trails. I choose to get excited about the near term, because at my age that’s all I’ve got. Commercial Cargo to ISS, 3-D Printer to ISS, Beam to ISS, and hopefully Commercial Crew to ISS. That’s what I’m talking about. And Falcon Heavy outta really open up deep space possibilities.

  16. P.K. Sink says:
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    Funny! Maybe it was worth it.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.c

  17. Michael Spencer says:
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    Mike:

    You’ve made a serious point here one that I have made but not as well: that there’s really nothing in space worth the effort of HSF.

    It’s true but my heart feels otherwise.

  18. Michael Spencer says:
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    I’ve seen that argument frequently. It’s like saying that the history of the world scant centuries ago wasn’t written by a little island nation called Great Britain, and before that by Spain/Portugal, and before that tiny Belgium.

    I guess the point is that those who want to lead will lead.