NASA: We're on a #JourneyToMars – But Don't Ask Us How
NASA Gets Big Boost in Final FY2016 Appropriations Bill, Space Policy Online
“The Orion spacecraft will receive $1.270 billion, $174 million more than the request and $76 million more than FY2014. Within Advanced Exploration Systems funding, Congress also directs NASA to spend no less than $55 million on a habitation module, which will be needed to augment living space for astronauts on lengthy trips beyond low Earth orbit. Congress wants a prototype habitation module no later than 2018.”
Congress Pushes NASA To Build Deep Space Habitat For Mars Mission By 2018, HuffPost
“For now, though, very little is known about the habitat, including its requirements and how it will be built. “It’s much too early for that,” Sam Scimemi, International Space Station director at NASA Headquarters, told SpaceNews. “As soon as I put a picture up there, somebody is going to assume what the configuration is.”
Keith’s note: Of course Sam Scimemi has no idea. No one does at NASA – even though the agency has played with innumerable Mars vehicles over the past 50 years. But ask them what the requirements are/were for those designs and they suddenly go silent. NASA creates this problem by virtue of not saying what they mean – or meaning what they say. When they want you to think that they are serious they show you all the pretty pictures. But when you try and nail them on specifics – well, their favorite word “notional” suddenly ends up in every sentence.
You can see lots of pictures of NASA’s previous Mars mission concepts online here at NASA.
If NASA operates as it always does, the agency will not deliver the required report to Congress within 180 days of the signing of this bill into law. If/when they do deliver it to Congress it will be totally lacking in detail, will punt on the important issues, and will make sure that Congress knows that whatever NASA does it will cost a lot of extra money. Eventually Congress will get mad and ask the National Academy of Sciences to do yet another report. Then there will be an election and everything will get reset to zero again. But wait – we’re on a #JourneyToMars – because @NASA says so on Twitter.
That’s definitely an interesting requirement – a Deep Space Hab by 2018. If NASA was pressed to the wall, no bullshit, constricted funding . . . how much do you think they could build the prototype for?
Irrespective of the actual budget, at least 2x to 5x the budgeted amount.
How much ya got?
And I can actually imagine that being considered good management. If you don’t spend all the available money you are intentionally building a lower quality product. If the money is available, of course you should spend it on improvements. I don’t agree, but I’ve heard that logic used to explain why underspending is poor management.
Money isn’t the only issue. I’m not sure if three years is enough time for NASA to go from a blank sheet of paper to a prototype. It can be done, but it would take skipping quite a few steps in the usual development process. (Which could be a good thing, or could result in a prototype for hardware that doesn’t do the right job.)
NASA will spend the next year or so doing long, complicated Powerpoint charts chock full of unattainable promises and wishful ideas, knowing full well that November will bring a new direction and mission. If the prototypes get any more advanced than “hot-glued foam core board” cut-outs, I will be impressed and surprised.
I’m sure. It’s not.
They don’t have to start from a “blank sheet of paper”. Bigelow Aerospace has been investing in the development of an inflatable habitat module for many years (since they bought the initial tech from NASA used on the Transhab ground test articles). NASA also has a lot of systems for a HAB “up and running” right now on ISS!
Outfit a Bigelow Aerospace module with the appropriate systems pulled from the ISS designs and you’ve got yourself a HAB module ready for testing in space.
NASA, if it follows its own rules, does have to start with a clean piece of paper. For class A hardware, which includes everything involving astronauts, NASA has formal rules about how it is designed and developed. That mandates developing requirements and a formal review of those requirements. If rushed, that might be possible in six months. Only then does the process allow people to start talking about what sort of hardware will satisfy the requirements. That’s when they could start saying a BA inflatable looks good (or not, if the requirements raise some issues.) What you suggest could, but only if NASA violated or decided to waive their own rules.
While true, NASA has often written requirements such that only a single contractor can reasonably fulfill them.
Notional, preliminary, introductory, exploratory, initial, prefatory, precursor, early…
I’ll believe when I see it.
If there is one thing the current set of NASA human space fight managers have demonstrated, its that they have no idea how to design or build anything. That is what you get with managers who came out of “operations”.
Their best bet would be to offer it to a commercial competition in which NASA stays out of it. Of course that leaves one wondering what is NASA’s role. NASA doesn’t seem to do R&D. They don’t seem to do DDT&E. They really don’t do much operations anymore.
Since my experience is with planetary (unmanned) missions, I’m not sure about this objection to operations. If you want to fund exploration and discovery, you want to spend the money on going somewhere and doing something, not build the ship. That means a focus on operations, not development. If you want to push the state of the art and develop technology, you want to build and test new hardware. You don’t need to go anywhere special for that, or do anything special when you get there. That means an emphasis on development not operations. Someone is needs to do both, and NASA is expected to do both. But the focus and approach are so different that, perhaps, it would be better to have two different organizations.
There once were two separate organizations, one for engineering and one for operations. But because of the political pull of the flight directors and astronauts, especially once Shuttle entered the operations phase in the early 80s, engineering was largely sidelined.
It was one of the reasons why Shuttle was never improved upon, never fixed, never made more affordable-the ops folks were thrilled to have such a big and expensive operation to manage. Station also started with an engineering focus, but by the time the operations people took over-long before development was complete, the ops folks were just too happy to give the leeway to the contractor to do as they wished, which BTW was the reason why budgets were ridiculously high and development took so long.
Until the operations takeover, there was some continuity of experience so engineering expertise in designing and building manned spacecraft was advancing. The operations takeover left the US with essentially no one with any engineering experience managing the program. That includes the current incarnation of management: Bolden (flight ops), Gerstenmauer (mission ops) and the managers over Constellation and Orion and ISS.
NASA human space flight has not done any serious R&D on manned spacecraft in generations. I think the managers in charge are afraid of it because they’ve never done it.
In the earlier programs they would have come to a point on the design of the individual systems to decide on the mission design, architecture and vehicle requirements, They lost their way with the beginning of Constellation, failed to define a functional architecture or even programmatic goals, and instead started designing a spaceship that, if you’ll recall, was going to be simple safe and soon. Well its now a decade later. They have no spaceship. They’ve hired out through barter many of the complex systems to ESA. They have not defined mission requirements or architecture. They really haven’t a clue of where they are going or what they are trying to do.
At one time, after Apollo and through the early years of Shuttle and Station, NASA human space flight had serious engineering experience and ability. Now they would do just as well to simply turn the job over to a commercial competition, but they would still first have to decide what they were trying to do-that is step 1-they have not done it yet for moon or Mars. NASA does not offer much added value any longer.
Is the failure of ‘simple, safe and soon’ the function of operations emphasis, on lack on in-house engineering, or just another ‘pick two out of three’?
Why did simple, safe and soon fail?
I’d rack it up to several factors all competing to make it fail.
First, you had a set of managers, starting out with the Administrator at the time, Dr. Griffin, and continuing through to present NASA leadership, none of whom had pertinent experience or demonstrated ability. As a direct result they failed to define the requirements, and this resulted in a capsule that probably was never needed, and which was over-sized to start. They kept trying to downsize the
capsule, and could not get it right because they had a booster with similarly undefined requirements and capabilities.
They also had no strategy for what they were trying to accomplish. There was a loud cry that the Shuttle confined humans to low earth orbit and to dull mission scenarios. So the great emphasis became getting out of LEO. This was operations driven. The leadership out of “operations” decided they needed to go somewhere to do something. They never figured out where they would go or what they would do once they got there. And they never considered that Apollo, despite the activities well beyond earth that excited many of us, never gained the interest or support of the taxpayers.
These same forces and the focus on operations failed to consider NASA’s proper role. NASA has done well when there was research and development of new capabilities and new systems. Forcing new technologies that enabled new capabilities was the success of Apollo-also of Shuttle. Operations was important to carrying out the missions but incidental to enabling the technology.
Safe, simple and soon tried to buy haste at the cost of new technology. But what this meant was that there was little reason for the new
capsule, certainly not one based almost in whole on Apollo. If they’d really wanted haste, they would have been better off to start with an actual Apollo capsule and upgrade specific systems as they could afford them. This way they might have learned how Apollo was accomplished. Starting over with a new vehicle, and at the same time restricting the workforce to only those who had never worked
the old systems, resulted from a lack of a basic
understanding of what it takes to do system development-again resulting from the lack of the proper engineering experience.
So there was no program, no strategy, no plan, little applicable engineering experience, which brings you back to the question-what was the
capsule to be used for? If you were going to start with a clean slate then it might have been better to start with a totally new design. Was it wise to start with neophyte management and engineers? While the Apollo working level workforce was mainly in their mid to late 20s, the managers of Apollo almost all had
considerable experience in NACA R&D and in military missile programs.
And one other aspect significant to the failure of safe, simple and soon, is your statement: “how much [money] have you got”. I am quite convinced that with the absence of capable
leadership-the lack of a smart buyer-the contractor takes full advantage and
extends out the schedule to the maximum possible extent and runs up their own
earnings and cost to the government. They are, in effect, always asking “how
much have you got and how much more can I get”, how much more can we take from
the taxpayer? NASA had no real goal or plan and the contractor’s goal was to
maximize their shareholder’s earnings.
I think I see where I disagree with you. When you say “the focus on operations failed to consider NASA’s proper role”, you are assuming that NACA-style research and development is NASA’s proper role. By implication, you’re also saying exploration is _not_ NASA’s proper role. I think someone needs to be doing both. If not NASA, then some other organization.
NASA’s R&D enables exploration of new environments, mission regimes, new worlds, etc.
Constellation and Orion opted for no significant new R&D; they were happy to do some sort of exploration never well defined, using old technology (Apollo redux).
Likewise for Shuttle. Shuttle was remarkable new technology for its time, 1975-1981 and enabled great new capabilities. Improving on it, making it safer and more cost effective, required investment in R&D. The Ops management was happy with no new R&D; all they kept doing was flying missions. When there were problems identified as there almost always are with new technologies, they opted to not even explore significant configuration changes, materials changes, etc. The program got more expensive but all the money went into a larger less efficient operations organization.
For ISS, the technology being used is not that sophisticated. New technologies and new knowledge was needed in some areas, like artificial G and partial G. That was needed to potentially enable long duration planetary missions. Management opted to cancel that research and that centrifuge module for exploring partial G, in favor of an inefficient management and operations organization. Likewise for scientific research on ISS, the ISS management was happy to cancel research budgets. Even the sophisticated multinational AMS, ISS and HSF management was happy to throw it ‘under the bus’, and in that case not even for the cost of AMS, which NASA did not pay for, but just for the Shuttle transportation cost, in order to preserve their own inefficient management and operations organization. Fortunately there were enough screams from across the science, technology, and outside of NASA worlds, that they turned that decision around.
So I agree with you that NASAs job is exploration. But when the management all comes out of operations, those guys think the job is to fly missions…whether they ever actually accomplish anything new is secondary. Its a peculiar attitude that comes from management which has never been exposed to science, R&D, technology development.
During Apollo, management was smart enough that they thought, once we have the capability to land men on the moon, we better show we can do useful scientific research and so they convened lunar and planetary scientists and designed an ALSEP.
During Skylab, the management was smart enough to think that once they had this orbiting workshop which was to demonstrate the usefulness of humans working in LEO, we better have life science, earth science, solar science and planetary science that actually makes use of the capability we are building.
The current management, from operations, felt that it was not NASAs job to do or pay for the scientific research. They thought or hoped someone else would pick up that cost. They cancelled many of the science grants in the years leading up to ISS operations. Then, once ISS was operational, the same managers wondered aloud why there was so little utilization on ISS.
I guess the robotic exploration side of NASA gives me a very different impression. Three, hypothetical Mars missions, come to mind as examples.
Mars Pathfinder was originally intended to be, as the name suggests, a pathfinder. It was proposed to test the airbag landing system which could subsequently be used to set down half a dozen metrology stations around the planet. The R&D, technology demonstration mission happened, with an expanded science scope and a mini-rover. The met stations, which would have been pure operations but excellent science, never happened.
I’ve said before that I’d like to see more MER (Spirit and Opportunity) rovers. Mars is a diverse enough place that doing the same thing again at a dozen different locations is, arguably, as valuable as one MSL/Curiosity/2020 rover, and would cost about the same. But that’s pure operations and isn’t doing something new. Except exploring a different part of the planet.
Finally, there is some excellent Mars science which could be simply accomplished with existing technology. A real study of the climate and atmospheric dynamics of Mars would require fairy simple instruments, on a simple spacecraft, sitting on orbit, doing the same measurements again and again, continually, for several Martian years. I doubt that’s going to happen for a long while, because it’s all about dull, routine operations and data collection.
“Operations” has a different meaning on the science side. I suspect you are taking offence at something not aimed at you.
{laughs} This is one of my biggest bugs with NASA’s MO. The failure to take advantage of existing knowledge, and to incrementally develop missions, to thus grow capabilities organically. Rather than spasm from program to program, reinventing the wheel (sometime literally.)
And it’s amazing how often I’ve been told that the research scientists are the ones who don’t want to “repeat” missions. (Usually in patronising tones, the adult explaining the obvious to the idiot/child.)
Ie, from an engineering POV, it’s not just to repeat Pathfinder, MER, or MSL; it’s to know that the program is to be developed over a dozen units. Hence the first can be simplified, stripped to its core, flying the fewest instruments, etc.
Cut your teeth on that, then the second should be easier, and so you start to add complexity, one by one. By the third, they can assemble them in their sleep. By the eighth, they can redesign them in their sleep; knowing the limits of every system intuitively.
Likewise, the missions themselves start off safe/boring and by the twelfth you’re aiming for “skylights”.
This is not just true of the main spacecraft/rover makers, but also of the instrument designers and makers.
So, the next version of the spacecraft/rover uses the proven, battle-hardened previous generation of instruments as its starting point. Then you big-fix the new platform; then once that’s proven, you add newer experimental instruments.
Rinse, repeat.
The cost of each program is the same. I’m not saying, “wouldn’t it be great if NASA had twenty times the science budget.” I’m not assuming one dollar more.
And so, maybe you are one generation of technology behind where the actual programs are (flying Pathfinders during MER, MERs during MSL, and so would be developing MSL now.) But the capability of each mission is ultimately greater, the risks that can be taken are greater, and the expertise of the guys developing that next generation platform will be greater.
Actually, I wasn’t taking offense, and I think we’re agreeing. It might be a matter of terminology. What you describe is what I’d call a good, operationally-focused program, and what you seem to object to is what I’d described as operationally-focused by poorly managed. I’d also say there is pressure to involve R&D in places where you don’t want it (i.e. starting over from scratch rather than just using the results of previous R&D work) and some pressure to do new and different things, because that’s exciting and that helps get funding.
Parts of NASA are still doing their jobs well, the Mars robotics efforts certainly being one of those. This thread started out specifically about NASA’s proposed human Mars exploration though.
The statements on the Space Shuttle boggle my mind. The aluminum-lithium materials used for the external tanks; the major upgrades in avionics for the orbiter; new thermal protection system materials; new SSME controllers & changes in the turbo pumps, MCC, and nozzle; upgrades to the launch control systems…the list goes on and on. Billions of dollars went into Shuttle upgrades.
As for budgetary decisions made on ISS utilization, the investments being made took into account the timing of changes to in-orbit capabilities that allowed for conduct of research operations.
PS: I assume you have followed the history of the Obama Administration’s funding proposals for Space R&T? Congress disposes of what the President proposes. But, in the first step, those “operations” managers generated the investment plans and rationales.
And, I could go on. So much of what you have written is mistaken or skewed.
While I respected you in your comptroller role Mal, I think you are stretching it if you are asking people to consider the modification of the aluminum in the ET, or the replacement of 1970 era avionics with avionics two decades later as the kinds of significant changes that were going to make the system safer or less expensive to operate; they had to make the avionics changes; it.had become impossible to maintain the analog displays of the 70s (in fact some dated back to Apollo in the mid 60s).
Those were not significant design/configuration changes. In the end they trashed the system to be replaced by?? Remember Orion and Ares was supposed to trade a $1billion/launch system with something more affordable, and it was going to be done by the time Shuttle ended. We are now looking at flying people on Orion a decade after Shuttle’s end, and $3 billion or more a year for a single flight because the vehicle is no longer reusable and the original booster couldn’t do the job.
Timing and the failure to use the experience base was all about what was wrong with ISS. Consider the management’s statements they had been too preoccupied with assembly to pay attention to utilization. They had thousands of people to worry about it, many experienced. (I know I was one of them who had to go looking for other work). They decided experience was of no consequence, and utilization was someone else’s job.
Knowing how to manage the multiplicity of functions was the key. There were no procedures or mission rules to follow.
I guess we’ll just have to disagree on this. Re: Safety: The ET’s dry weight change enabled a reduction in SSME performance level settings. The GPC improvement allowed the TAL to be done (if needed) without having to unload the ascent software and load the TAL software. Safety and reliability considerations dominated our planning for the Space Shuttle funding requests. Just because the planform of the orbiters didn’t change didn’t mean that new technology wasn’t being inserted.
As for ISS utlilization, I suspect budgetary guidance from OMB and Congressional actions had a significant hand in what could be done.
The current administration (at the elected and agency levels both) has been just as much if not even more overtly hostile to the development and utilization of new technology in the human space flight arena than the previous administration was with Constellation. From a technology perspective, COTS / CCDev are nothing more than are return to the Gemini & Apollo eras. The only even slightly new thing, first stage recovery of Falcon, is not a very substantial technical advancement and has yet to prove that it will be any more successful than shuttle in reducing costs.
“Constellation and Orion opted for no significant new R&D”
In fact, they were overtly hostile to it, with the result that they ended up with an architecture with inherently unsustainable costs, directly contravening the primary goal of the President’s VSE. It was disgusting.
Excellent commentaries sir! Precisely correct in every detail, well said, and exactly hitting the really important points. Please keep preaching it.
OTOH, the worst NASA director in recent history was Griffin, engineer. One of the best was O’Keefe, a “comptroller”, OMB, bean counter.
I hope NASA chooses Bigelow Aerospace BA 330 Deep Space Hab module over Boeing,Lockheed or ATK Orbital better choice more affordable $55 million budget.
Here is hoping that the SpaceX flight to deliver the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) to ISS goes as planned. Having even a small test module attached to ISS should give NASA more confidence in the use of inflatables for manned space missions.
Could there be a strategy after all, doing too little (and exposing SLS, Old Space mentality) so commercial alternatives, Bigelow, Spacex, et all become unavoidable and Nasa could finally can lead a program to Mars on its budget?
I’ve posed the following question on this forum before and have never seen a defensible response:
What is the commercial incentive for going to Mars?
Nasa go buying commercial services already in development, doing only integration and operations for a fraction of the cost of a mars mission based on the SLS. Despite political pressure today, in the near term could happen a turning point, when the cost issue become more evident to a wider public…”some truths become self evident…”
Possibly the same commercial incentive United Airlines has for flying me to France in March: A NASA contract is paying them to do so. If a private company can provide transportation to Mars and NASA is willing to pay, there is money to be made in the process.
In which case it is not a commercial venture, it is just another government contract and the service providers are just government contractors. And so my question remains unanswered.
I disagree. As I said, a NASA contract is paying United to fly me to a meeting in France. Would you say that means UA isn’t a private company? If not, then how is buying a geologist a ticket to Mars automatically non-comercial? Are you saying that any transaction is inherently non-comercial if a government is the customer?
I would say that means the service that UA is providing to NASA in your case is in fact a government contract and that UA is acting as a government contractor. I would say that because that is exactly what it is. Any purchase of goods or services by the government is a government contract and the provider is a contractor to the government.
But, you are still missing the essential point of my question because your analogy is inherently flawed. In the case of your flight to France, NASA is purchasing one seat for one trip on an airplane with hundreds of seats and that will make thousands of flights over its lifetime. The airline infrastructure that supports these flights is further amortized over many hundreds of other airplanes servings many hundreds of routes. In other words, your one ticket is but a drop in an ocean of business that the airline does, mostly with non-government customers. That ticket would be available regardless of whether or not the government purchases it.
If you were traveling to Mars though, who besides the government would be paying for all of the available seats to get there? Splitting hairs over contract formats doesn’t change the fact that ultimately the government is the only foreseeable customer paying for trips to Mars.
So, I repeat my question yet again because it still remains unanswered; What is the commercial incentive for going to Mars?
I think we are looking at this in a very different way. As far as I’m concerned, a simple exchange of money for a product/service is commercial. Regardless of who the two parties are (private companies, individuals or governments.) in most cases, where the government just buys something (plane tickets or whatever) no real contract is involved, just money and goods changing hands. A plane ticket might be an extreme (on the small end) example.
But there are many private companies who, directly or indirectly, are receiving government money. Go to a major, scientific conference and you will see plenty of companies advertising/marketing their scientific instruments, laboratory equipment, etc. Their customers may, in most cases, be academic scientists. But guess where the research funding for these scientists comes from. Mostly from the government.
Here in Boulder, there is private company which makes CubeSats: One unit of spacecraft systems, the bus for the rest of a 3U or 6U CubeSat, and integration of your payload into the bus. All you need to do is write them a check. Of course, Most CubeSats are funded by government contracts, so that check usually gets billed to NASA. I don’t think that makes Blue Canyon Technologies a government contractor.
What I would consider the primary distinction is what you dismiss as “Splitting hairs over contract formats.” For what I’d call a commercial transaction, it’s a straight exchange of money for a product or service. The customer doesn’t insist on telling the vendor how to make the product.
For a traditional NASA project/contract, that’s not the case. NASA has managers deeply involved in the guts of developing and building the product, with oversight and reporting on a weekly, if not daily, basis. All management by the vendor has to adhere to rules set out in lengthy NASA documents about how projects should be run (someone in another post mentioned 7120.5, which is a real fun read…) That can make the whole process much less efficient than a company who builds a product and sells it to whoever is willing to pay.
It;s actually analogous to NASA buying you the airline ticket and then specifying that all of the other seats must be remained unfilled. As you approach France, you jump out of the airplane with nothing more than a pressure suit while the airplane crashes into the ocean.
Funny. But mostly true. To make your analogy completely correct, the reason for specifying that all the other seats remain empty is because the plane can only reach France with one passenger.
I’ll be a little more charitable to NASA formal requirements. The real analogy would be more like having a requirement for uniform rules on travel, then noting that some travel, for reasons of availability, safety or security, may require a dedicated aircraft. Therefore, to satisfy both those requirements, all travel must use dedicated aircraft.
Most of the requirements many people complain about (including me) actually have some good reason behind them, or do follow from other requirements in some logical way. It’s just that the reasons don’t apply to all circumstances, while the requirements do. Or that some of the reasons are no longer applicable, but the requirements remain. Or that the requirement is designed to avoid a problem, but the cure turns out to be worse than the disease. Or that several, independently good requirements, combine in unexpected ways to create various problems.
That’s because there isn’t one.
Cheers
Actually, there is a commercial incentive for going to Mars in the form of launch services. By shifting excess launch capacity and production lines to mission hardware, infrastructure, and technology development, it will increase the flight rate of the existing, smaller fleet lowering launch costs. Lower launch costs are the key to new market(s). Since 70% of the missions are propellant, it will also allow more risk (reuse) with dirt cheap, class D propellant, offering advanced propulsion R&D the ability to deliver a commodity as a reward.
Most of the asteroids with resources are likely between Mars and Jupiter. If launch costs are lowered, perhaps ISRU there enables new destinations and exploration for the next generation.
If they can get the cost low enough, then the commercial incentive would just be that people want to go (even if one way) and can pay for it. Otherwise, there is none- but it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to Mars to make money. You’re going to do research.
Taking your second point first, if you’re not going to Mars to make money, then it’s not a commercial venture; it’s a public venture. Period. No point in further attempts to spin it as anything but government contracting.
Now, considering your first point – congratulations on at least coming up with some kind of argument for how to make money from Mars – send tourists. I am absolutely sure that you are correct that there are people who would be willing to pay to go to Mars. (I’d give you at least $100 to go myself.) The problem is that with the available technology, it’s impossible to go to Mars and with just barely plausible technology, it might be possible to send people to Mars for a recurrent cost per seat of at least several billion dollars. Since the addressable market that can afford that kind of ticket price is probably numbered on one hand, when the amortized cost per ticket of developing the technology and building the infrastructure is included, the actual cost per seat is in the several tens of billions of dollars (or more). Obviously not practical for a tourist industry. If, as you speculate, somebody comes up with a magical technology that can lower that cost per ticket enough to make it affordable for the average multibillionaire, what would the cost of developing this fantasy technology be and who will pay for it? If you try to fund that development cost with the tourist tickets that you sell to all the interested billionaires of the world, I contend that you won’t have sufficient billionaires to keep the ticket cost from ballooning by a factors or tens or hundreds and thus outside even their reach.
Nice suggestion, but your business case fails to close by several orders of magnitude and my question remains unanswered.
In direct answer to your question, Mr. Paz, there is no commercial incentive. But so what? Exploration is one of those things that cannot be measured or valued with dollars in any real sense. Yes, it must be paid for, so there’s that, but the value doesn’t lie in the cost. I know that lots of people see an equivalence between the ‘business case’ and ‘value’, but they are wrong.
You are asking the wrong question.
On the other hand, I feel a rant coming on. Again.
At some point, there is money to be made in space. Huge piles of money. Riches beyond the dreams of Mr. Musk, Mr. Buffet, or Mr. Gates. Or me. The money is in the raw materials floating out there beyond Mars.
Twentieth century Mars is a tragic side trip, in my view, a path down the rabbit hole of high gravity in an era of stunningly expensive tickets out of the same rabbit hole of high gravity. The tech just ain’t there. Worse, the tech not only doesn’t exist for living on Mars, either, but any Mars presence will require frequent resupply from one huge gravity well to another. Again, stunningly expensive.
Any scenario outlining methods of actually developing Mars with permanent settlements, of how a presence would function in Year 20 or Year 50 and beyond- if indeed such even exists- involves decades–a century– of continual resupply from earth. Costs will be so high that Apollo will look like Sunday brunch. Again, the tech just ain’t there. Mars will be a colossal boots and flags mission, and for what?
To waste many more hundreds of billion dollars that could have been spent developing the techniques needed to actually live in space? Money that should be used to design real propulsion systems, design real spaceships, real space habs, real centrifugal living devices; money for alternate fuel sources, space tugs and fuel depots, money spent learning how to mine, smelt and manufacture the incredible riches of the asteroids.
But no. We will have more purpose-built throwaway hardware with staggering development and operations cost. Sure, we will have talk of using the Mars atmosphere to generate fuel- as if that would make the slightest dent in the cost of maintaining a Mars presence. It will not.
But we will go to Mars. And in 2070 or 2080 citizens will wistfully wonder why we are not in space, all the while planning, no doubt, a Ceres landing. Or something.
“In direct answer to your question, Mr. Paz, there is no commercial incentive. But so what? Exploration is one of those things that cannot be measured or valued with dollars in any real sense.”
Mr. Spencer, I completely agree. In fact, I agree as affirmatively as possible with 100% of what you said in this ‘rant’. Spot on.
My question is posed to those who would have us believe that Mars has an intrinsic economic value. I would like for anyone who thinks so to please justify that assumption.
There is no commercial incentive because there isn’t any property rights. Name me a mining company that will start digging for gold on the white house lawn without the mineral rights IN HAND.
Is the value of a gold mine determined by how much gold has been taken out or how much is still in the ground? Are the value of the mineral rights to a tract of ground determined by how much gold has been removed or now much remains to be removed?
The question of ownership and property rights was discussed here a few weeks ago. I learned that while one wouldn’t own the mine one would own the product, and that the equipment used to remove valuable ore would be protected (at least I think that’s what the lawyer-type Thomas M. provided).
If that’s the case it’s pretty much the same thing as title, isn’t it?
Moreover, millions of valuable rocks exist. It’s true that they aren’t equal. Some will be richer in this, or that; some will have exposed seams, some not; some will be devoid of value; some will be in desirable orbits, some not. There is a lot to learn.
Perhaps ‘asteroid mining’ will operate under different rules than we use here on Earth?
If I sent a U.S. golden eagle https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
to Mars and a robotic arm set it on a rock .. would the gold suddenly lose it’s value? Or would would that gold coin still be worth it’s weight in gold? As Long as I have a chain of custody proving OWNERSHIP of that gold coin .. it does not matter WHERE that gold coin is physically located, it is still an asset of mine that I an carry on the books.
Baring a few, specialized applications, gold has only one value: You can exchange it for other things. If you move your coin to Mars, who would buy it or trade something for it? Most people wouldn’t accept a piece of paper stating the change in ownership. By placing it out of reach, you make the gold coin less valuable.
Does’t matter it is ownership of an asset.
Does matter. In fact usability for intended purpose is the whole point of ownership.
In my work I frequently represent land owners with beach or river frontage against the many agencies moving to deny those owners full and complete access to the water- so called ‘riparian’ rights, in some cases. Denied, those properties have far less value.
and you would immediately see those same effects on mars?
I’m not sure what you mean- the thread has several points?
Actually NOTHING on the surface of Mars has value unless it can be used on the surface of Mars.
Your mention of beach property reminded me of something which may be relevant, and if not.may be entertaining.
My grandfather once bought some undeveloped land, on an inlet on one of North Carolina’s outer banks. Before he could build a vacation house there, a hurricane came.through and made the inlet a little wider. Which put his land under water. According to North Carolina law, that means he no longer owned it: Waterways are considered public property. Oddly, if, in the future, another hurricane or any sort of deposition puts the land above sea level, the property rights will automatically return to his heir (one of my cousins.)
I think that’s a fair example of how odd property laws can be, and how.access to the property can be an issue. What property rights for objects in outer space will be like is hard to predict. But I suspect a large number of lawyers will make quite a bit of money resolving these issues.
“In fact usability for intended purpose is the whole point of ownership.”
That doesn’t hold at all for lots of assets. Art, for example, or patent portfolios. Or securities in general, really. What is the purpose of a municipal bond to you, other than the return it brings?
I am so far from my area of expertise here that I demur to smarter people.
I think you are correct about access to land and its value. In the field you mention
There was a Supreme Court case on the subject. South Carolina banned development of beach front land on the barrier islands, following hurricane Hugo. Owners sued, on the grounds that depriving them use of their land reduced its value (and, as a result, the government owed them compensation.) The Supreme Court agreed, and sent the case back to a lower court to decide how much compensation was due.
Here in Colorado, I understand that it is illegal to sell property which is.isolated.from roads. E.g. a lot completely surrounded by other people’s land with no roads in or out. If you can’t get to the land, without someone else’s permission, it isn’t considered land which can be legally sold.
That particular rule about access is uniform across the country as far as I know. Certainly the case in Florida.
Not really. It depends on how good the provenance is of the “Mars gold”. If everybody agrees that the gold is genuine and hasn’t been taken or tampered with, it holds its value even if it is only represented by paper certificates here on earth.
Ever hear of a gold ETF? That’s basically how most of the gold bullion on earth changes hands these days; the bars themselves sit in a vault somewhere — it’s the paper ownership documents that change hands. Yet the gold retains value.
Of course the problem comes in if you can’t conclusively prove that the “Mars gold” is genuine. What if a buyer demands an assay, or if the chain of provenance proves to be faulty or fraudulent? This too happens to earth-based bullion — the gold is still gold, but it becomes illiquid because either ownership cannot be established or the gold itself has been adulterated somehow (usually by alloying with a base metal).
Money is a very fascinating topic, and off-topic here — the point is that your Mars gold does indeed have value as long as you can prove provenance and purity. That’s how any gold holding works.
I disagree with the analogy. The paper-value of the bullion is based around its useful value. It carries the assumption that I can, if I wish, withdraw my gold in physical form. (Or sell it to someone who has practical use. Or who wishes to transfer it to another vault.) The cost of the transfer is built into the paper-price.
The price therefore includes a value-assumption about the difficulty of accessing and transferring the actual physical gold.
The value of gold on Mars must also include that additional cost-value. And since it costs more to transfer gold to/from Mars than the gold is physically worth, therefore the value of gold on Mars is zero.
The value of paper-ownership of gold on Mars is… well, not zero, but based purely on its novelty value of owning a piece of paper with the words Mars and Gold on it. It is a gag-gift, not an asset.
Somehow, I often end up disageeing with myself. In this case, I’d have to say that a gold coin on Mars would have some value. It could, in theory, be collected and returned to Earth at some future time. If and when that happened, it would be something you could sell to people who collect rare coins, simply because it was a coin which had traveled to another planet. That would make the coin vastly more valuable than the worth of the metal. I don’t know enough about the rare coin market to say if that would offset the transportation costs, but collectors of rare items pay based on the item’s rarity. So it might work. I can even imagine people selling a paper title to such a coin, long before there was a hope of returning it to Earth. But this is an extremely small and limited market. It isn’t the sort of thing which would fund Mars missions.
Indeed, based solely on rarity. Certainly not the sort of land-rush that Vladislaw is imagining.
Nonetheless, it’s value while on Mars includes that expected return cost.
But you are right that I’m just assuming, based on what little I’ve seen of the rare coin market, that the value of a coin-that-touched-Mars would be vastly (vastly!) less than the cost of retrieving it.
The most valuable coin is worth $10m. (Excluding the idiotic gimmick 1 tonne gold coin from Australia.) That ain’t gonna cover the cost of retrieving Vladislaw’s Martian Eagle.
Plus I don’t think it would fetch $10m anyway. By definition, no-one will make another 1794 Flowing Hair Dollar, but if you can send something to Mars and retrieve it for less than $10m, we’ve “solved” Mars and the market would be flooded with artefacts.
Hence, as I said, any paper-title would be little more than a novelty gift.
(Give it a couple of hundred years, and maybe as “the first documented Vladislaw Martian Eagle” it becomes valuable again.)
You can carry the asset, true, but accounting will require you to also carry the costs associated with the asset, including moving it to market. I’d say that gold coin is worthless.
Gold on an asteroid is slightly less worthless, based on current technology, but it’s not at the bottom of a gravity well either.
actually since it was the ONLY gold coin on mars.. it would make it even more rare and unique which would only increase it’s value if it ever returned.
If and only if.
Until then, its value is its value returned to Earth minus the cost of that return.
Just as the value of gold in the ground is the value of the gold minus the cost of getting it out of the ground.
The value of: a tonne of material dissolved to trace levels in sea-water; a tonne of material as a mineral buried a mile below ground; a tonne of material as the same mineral concentrated in good quality ore; a tonne of material as the same ore on a train heading to a transport ship; a tonne of material processed into pure form; and a tonne of pure material further processed into a final useful product; are all different.
This surprises you?
ownership of resources.
Which ones? We know an awful lot about Mars now. What are the resources on the surface that have commercial value?
You are confusing value and wealth. Owning a screwdriver is an asset, but in a life or death situation where you need a saw, a screwdriver doesn’t have any value.
If planet earth suddenly decided to give you the total property rights along with all mineral rights to 1 million acres of Martian landscape do you believe it would be totally valueless? Do you believe there would be absolutely no IMMEDIATE commercial value to those million acres?
Resouces gained for next to nothing have an immediate asset value determined by cost of extraction and transportation costs and the current market value.
In such a life or death situation, I might be able to trade a screwdriver for that saw I desperately need. So the screwdriver could be quite valuable.
I’d say (although it isn’t an original idea) that a thing’s worth is depends on what other people will pay (or trade) for it. If someone gave me a million acres, including mineral rights, on Mars, what could I get for it? Would you be willing to buy some of it at $1000/acre? Would the owners of my apartment complex (a real estate management company, so I assume they know the business) take some real estate on Mars in exchange for a month’s rent? Somehow I don’t see that happening.
People have been buying the moon from Dennis Hope for 30 bucks and acre for 30 years. That is just paper with no real force of law.. I would think a speculative market would INSTANTLY open up and speculators would be free to bid how every much they want on what ever options were presented. from mineral rights to royalties to outright ownership but it WOULD create instant wealth that could be used as collatoral.
… Companies have been buying Coal mineral rights in north dakota for over a century, that vast bulk has never seen a shovel .. it just get bought and sold and kept in portfolios.
Seriously? Now you are pulling our legs, right?
Why would anybody buy land on Mars other than for novelty? The purchase wouldn’t be an investment. It would be disposal of discretionary income.
Because it would be an asset, just like any piece of ground, and no taxation, as it stands right now. It would be a wealth builder, it would create the market mechanics for title deeds etc… I could only see how it would a positive overall, please explain how it would make things worse?
It’s about like an island that can’t be reached. Sure, you own it, but so what?
Property is only valuable if you can find a willing buyer. And in the commercial space, buyers depend on the underlying zoning as well as the political environment.
Your lot in Martian Acres might overlook Valles Marinaris, but the lot has negative value. Hold it a couple of centuries and who knows?
So what? So having assets are a waste of time? As I have stated, I am from ND. we have about 800 years of coal. There are some coal mineral rights claims that have been bought and sold and held as an asset of OVER a century. Not a single ounce of coal has ever been mined on hundreds of those claims .. they just get bought and sold over and over.. I do not see ANY difference in a corporation holding a claim for Luna and buying and selling them for a century without anyone actually mining anything. Just because no one chooses to mine or exercise a mineral right that does change it as an asset.
I don’t think I’ve conflated the issues, Vlad. There is nothing on Mars of any value or potential source of wealth other than the intrinsic value of knowledge.
A millennia from now? Who knows? But today, too hard to get to Mars and too hard to use anything one might find. I could be littered with gold, which would be valueless by the time it was brought back on earth.
The point is not to bring this stuff back to earth. The point is to use it (and sell it) to other people *on mars*. All you need is a group of people on Mars with a demand for commodities (which there will be, people needing food, air, shelter, clothes, and whatnot). This demand will in time drive suppliers to provide goods sourced locally. The same basic process has happened with every frontier man has ever colonized, and Mars (and the Moon) will be no different.
Mars will be neither colonized nor occupied for hundreds of years because the costs of getting there are prohibitive and because continual resupply will be required. Mars is stunningly inhospitable. It is a very very expensive hellhole with no value in the traditional sense, other than for intrinsic scientific research.
Lot of iron there (that’s why Mars is red). Hematite is common on or near the surface, and that’s a major iron-bearing ore. That’s a valuable building material for use on mars (probably not worth shipping off mars, but definitely worth mining for building stuff on mars).
We now now that water is fairly common in certain regions of mars, and even rises to the surface on occasion. Water ice is probably the most valuable “ore” on Mars there is: water, air, and volatiles for rocket fuel.
And I’m not even going into other metals that are probably recoverable in signficant quantities: nickel, aluminum, titanium, tungsten, and other valuable metals.
Mars offers a gravity well that would entice settlers and tourists who might not want a lower-gee environment as a living space (as with a space station or inflatable space-based hab). Thus gravity becomes a valuable property of Mars real-estate if you want to build places where people will live.
Most of this commercial value is predicated on colonists needing this stuff since it wouldn’t be economic to launch it back to earth, of course, but the same is true of any other extra-earth resource. Why would colonists go there? Who knows? Lots of reasons (adventure, entrepreneurship, spiritual urge), but the desire is manifest and thus the commercial draw is manifest as well. Those settlers/colonists will need a functional Mars economy eventually, which means that a local (sustainable) source of commodities will need to become available.
Any commodity has “commercial” value if there is a demand for it. Even dirt. Americans buy millions of dollars worth of plain old dirt every year to put in their gardens. Same with gravel, and salt, and wood chips, and even animal manure. Nothing is ever completely worthless.
All correct.
But you left out the requirement to wear a spacesuit 100% of the time, or to live in some sort of protected environment (underground sounds appealing); you left out the radiation hazards and the stunning cold. There’s regolith, of a sort, but soil? Nope; farming will be hydroponic (this is an area where The Martian gets the science wrong).
OTOH the sunsets would be cool.
Interesting. In the past, you have advocated the value of asteroidal resources, but I can’t remember if you said anything about the means. Would it be purely robotic, or would it involve humans onsite? If it involves human presence, I think asteroids would be a more difficult location. All the difficulties for Mars, which you just mentioned, would also be present. With the added difficulties of more limited in situ sources of bulk goods and the possible benefit of 1/3 gravity. Mars’ gravity does also make exports more difficult. But I’m not convinced that this is a fatal problem.
I’m also curious about your comment about growing food on Mars. I’m pretty sure the book, _The_Martian_, got some facts wrong. The movie version certainly got more wrong. But the Martian regolith and fines do contain all the right elements for growing food and (I think) many of.the correct chemicals. With processing, I’d think that could be turned into viable soil. Not necessarily the sort of processing that book and movie showed (just add human waste and mix) but still something which could be done. You know far more than I about growing plants. Do you think the regolith-to-soil processing would be more difficult than just using hydroponics, or am I missing something else?
Some brief responses as this thread is getting…narrow: I’ve advocated developing the tech needed to live in space, not Mars, because Mars’ gravity adds to many access problems. As to how it’s done, well, that’s why research is needed. Probably people with advanced machines. I envision living in space habitats as much more achievable than supporting a Mars colony.
Mars’ soil is pH 8.4 or so according to Phoenix although other findings show a lower pH. These are manageable but not ideal. Soil structure though is problematic, being essentially a collection of fines to smallish stones with a high thermal inertia. Manageable with considerable input of resources. Presence of frozen CO2/H2O ices below the surface at variable depths needs investigation. I’d say that making any semblance of soil with an acceptable structure and including necessary microbes is an uphill battle. Likely much easier to just grow hydroponically–a well understood tech with – higher net yield. Soils in southern Florida are similarly with very low organics; growing in sand is close to hydroponics.
Unfortunately, most of the commercial value you identify would be paid for by people on Mars. Where are they going to get the money? Supporting the rich tourist industry is one thing, as would be a fully internal economy (if such a thing ever has or could exist.) But people on Mars would have to import some things (everything they really needed and couldn’t make locally.) Where’s the money for that? I don’t see it unless there is something of _exportable_ commercial value.
How did American settlers pay for food or hides that farmers or hunters grew? Money arises at need; it doesn’t have to be legal tender. (In fact, early on, most transactions are barter until a certain scale is reached.) But any putative colony on Mars will certainly have a functional infosphere, and money will be digital in any case. I can reach my bank account from anywhere on Earth; there’s no reason I can’t do so from Mars as well (allowing for a bit of latency).
That touches on some interesting points. I would say the European colonists of America had a big advantage over hypothetical ones on Mars. Necessities, things like the food and hides you mention, were available locally. Imports, and money for them, were required for expansion or as luxuries. So commercially viable exports were important, but not critical for survival.
A colony on Mars would lack that advantage. Some requirements could be produced locally, but not all of them (E.g. replacement microchips, at least for the initial colony. Semiconductor fabrication would not be available for some time.) So imports would be required for survival, as would be money for those imports. Some money could come from Earth.
Rich colonists tapping into terrestrial bank accounts (as you suggest), donations from people on Earth (as early American colonies got a small amount from supporters back in Europe), selling easily exported things like software (no reason a programmer on Mars couldn’t export his work to Earth) and, I suspect, grants for people on Mars to do scientific research.
But that isn’t a whole lot of money for buying and importing goods required for survival. This is actually the main reason I think the first extraterrestrial colony will be on Mars. Most, but not all, of the necessary supplies can be produced locally. The necessary imports would not be bulk goods. So the money for those imports would be less than what other locations (the Moon or asteroids) would require. But non-zero, commercially viable exports would be needed.
I look forward to future discussions with you on the issue of a Mars colony as we have very different interpretations of th possibilities.
NASA only has the budget for reusable space based, hardware, until they are out of the rocket business they are not going anywhere.
“Of course Sam Scimemi has no idea. […] NASA creates this problem by virtue of not saying what they mean – or meaning what they say.”
That’s because NASA (nor anybody else) isn’t going Mars in the predictable future. They’re going to the Moon. All this Mars gibberish is just cover tactics waiting for an administration that ins’t bound up by lunar phobia like the current gang.
The case for sending people to the Moon isn’t really anything other than “it’s closer and cheaper”. The Moon’s so close you can do nearly all the research you want with robots remotely operated from Earth, or even operated from a space station in an elliptical lunar orbit.
Don’t tell me it’s for rocket fuel out of the lunar south pole, either. Neither fuel nor launch costs from Earth are what get you on crewed missions, and if you’re not doing a lot of them (which seems likely for the foreseeable future when it comes to interplanetary missions), then it’s going to be a lot cheaper just to send up a ton of fuel from Earth and transfer it to a depot (or to a spacecraft) in Earth orbit.
It is a test bed for technologies needed for safe travel to Mars and back.
Unless there is a reason to go to Mars, that’s not a very good reason to go to the Moon.
True, however…
Unless there is a reason to go on the lake, there is no reason to get in the boat.
Unless there is a reason to go outside, there is no reason to open the front door.
Unless there is a reason to drive, there is no reason to get in the car.
I can plug any destination/mechanism pair into that phrase that I like. So it is not really an argument against anything except activity.
We already know that there are business opportunities, the question is can they be profitable. How can we know if they can be profitable unless someone goes and looks? Robots are a slow answer, the question/answer/followup question cycle is measured in decades. Also they cost money too and are not versatile enough at dealing with setbacks because no one can go out and pull them out of the sand if they get stuck. We study the surface of a balloon through a lens the size of a pinhead.
We pay hundreds of times more of our paychecks on communications satellites, at much more disproportionate advantage to us individually, than what each of our portions of a Mars mission would cost.
But it won’t be a Mars by NASA for billions of $$$. It will be Mars by private companies for millions of mostly someone else’s $$$. NASA is just the guide. Wait and see.
Expansion must be practical and evolutionary. If the cost can be reduced sufficiently the market will expand.
But what specifically are these “business opportunities” on Mars? (Aside from servicing the government market.)
Short-term? Research grants in climatology (climate change makes much more sense when it is viewed through a Planetary Science lense), xenogeology, maybe xenobiology and/or xenopalentogy.
Long-term? No one knows yet…call it unobtanium for now. 😉
If all we have going for Mars is servicing the government market then we have nothing. Doing it that way is probably going to always be too expensive. NASA says 2035. Planetary Society says 2045. Doing only “Flags and Footprints” isn’t possible because if someone goes then they have to stay for about a year to wait for Earth to swing back around anyway. So no matter what you’re there for, or how long you want to stay, you have semi-permanent structures. No one wants to live in Orion or Dragon V2 for a year.
You’ve inherently conflated a few different questions in your post, but here goes…
The case for going to the Moon next is precisely because “it’s closer and cheaper”, not to mention vastly easier than Mars, and actually within the grasp of present and foreseeable technical capability, unlike Mars. Which are extremely good reasons. I for one would infinitely prefer to see actual human beings flying actual missions to the Moon versus endlessly rehashed proposals and studies of missions to Mars that can’t and won’t happen in our lifetimes.
The case for commercial exploitation of the Moon is precisely the resources that are available there. In which case the vastly easier accessibility from Earth and the vastly shallower gravity well in comparison to Mars mean the Moon is far more commercially valuable than Mars ever can be.
If you think a lunar crewed mission will actually get to completion, then I suppose it would be cheaper and easier. Of course, Constellation got cancelled, and that was for a program that was way more minimalistic than doing something like an actual base and/or resource extraction. Honestly, the lunaphiles’ only hope for another Moon-oriented program is if they can sell a base on international diplomacy grounds.
As for “commercial extraction”, there is no case for commercial extraction of lunar resources unless you find an incredibly rich vein of gold and valuable metals right at the surface. The only case for using lunar resources is to support activities in space, and even then it only makes sense if you’re operating a very large number of crewed missions outside of LEO – otherwise it’s much cheaper just to send everything up from Earth, especially if you get launch costs down.
“The only case for using lunar resources is to support activities in space”
Yes, exactly. And for that purpose, there is absolutely no value in any resources on Mars for use anywhere other than Mars because it is even harder to get to. While some argument can be made for the value of exporting resources from the Moon, there is no plausible argument for there being anything of value to export from Mars.
As I have said, you are on to something, but framing your assessment with terms like ‘closing the business case’– the phrase du jour, it seems– betrays your fundamental objections.
Governments do things that individuals cannot do. In the best cases they do these things because the activities will in some way benefit society as a whole. Surely space exploration is an example.
There are some who feel that nothing is worthwhile unless there is a financial return. Others who criticize governmental efforts by applying inappropriate and, at least in some cases, patently disingenuous assessment techniques.
“There are some who feel that nothing is worthwhile unless there is a financial return.”
You’ve entirely misunderstood me. I’ve never said that I object to public funding of space activities of any kind, whether funded by government spending or private charity. Nor have I ever said I object to commercially driven space operations. That’s because in general principle, I’m in favor of all of these things.
My only objection is the current fad of conflating government spending with commercial incentive just because somebody did some hand waving and figured out a different way to write a government contract. We all need to come to accept the implicit fact that government spending does not represent an economic demand that can sustainably incentivize commercial investment. It is not, never has been, and never will be. Just because I understand and accept that natural fact of economics does not mean that as a voter I object to public spending on space activities nor that I do not have interest in seeing development of commercially viable space activities.
This notion that providing services to the government constitutes a commercially addressable market is disingenuous and will only lead to disappointment.
The question really is; what space activities can attract commercial investment, and what space activities that can not attract commercial investment do we the public wish to see our tax money fund. Which leads back to my question – what is the commercial incentive for going to Mars? Without an affirmative answer, Mars will remain the provence of government (and possibly charitable) funding.
I stand corrected. Thank you.
(And I do wish Keith would choose a format for comments that is friendlier to longish back-and-forth that is so valuable).
Yes, there is commercial incentive ‘To Mars’.
Innovation and creativity are the foundation of which are economy is really founded. The nation requires two non sole source LVs and they continue to provide launch services to DOD, NASA, and ‘commercial’ satellites. The US and world has excess launch capacity. The USG has and will continue fund advanced R&D, especially since all the tax incentives (stock for pay, shareholders, etc) drive companies to short term gains (often at the expense of the environment)
‘To Mars’ vs ‘To Moon’ mass is 4 times greater and the former offers 100s of times more opportunities for exploration and advanced technology. But more importantly, with reuse, the launch costs can be the same or lower than ‘To Moon’ with the decades old expendable approach. It also has the advantage of substantial more IP participation. Without this stable lower risk demand, industry has not invested for decades in lower costs to space, only relying on the USG ‘market’–so let the USG Mars market provide the incentive :).
Perhaps ISRU of the asteroids where most of desired resources reside between Mars and Jupiter will provide this commercial market, or a fleet of 1000s of communication satellites, or tourism…but it will not happen without significantly lower launch costs. Its time to take the next logical flexible path step…in space propellant storage and transfer and relatively cheap infrastructure to cycle between L2 and Mars. Quite the exciting future indeed.
Nothing in what you said constitutes a extractable economic value in going to Mars.
As for your comparison with going to the Moon, it is delusional to think that it will ever be cheaper to travel to Mars than to the Moon.
We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin’ that road to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
Interesting how the Mars mission pages: Mars mission concepts online here at NASA, show about the last 30 years of concepts.
I know several now retired NASA engineers who worked their entire careers, some since the early 1960s, planning Mars missions which never happened. Interesting how Orion has no place in any of these missions-after all who would want to go on a multi-month trip to the planets confined to a little capsule? If you carry it along as an earth-return capsule, then that implies you are throwing away the rest of the spaceship-highly unlikely.
As shown in the film The Martian, the best prototype of a Mars ship is called the ISS and several of its elements, like the Hab module now sitting in Huntsville, AL, could be directly employed in the Mars program.
In Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle and Station, NASA worked for years to define a baseline program prior to the program being approved and funded. NASA management is skipping a couple steps this time around in embracing a Mars program that has no design. Congress is dictating that NASA build pieces which might prove never to be needed.
I would like to see Skylab-II with Bigelow and commercial crew and cargo to the complex.repeat this Mix at Deimos
NASA need to follow COTS model to develop Deep Space Habitation Module going to Mars be more affordable. Its the most successful NASA program to date that works through fixed price milestone based contract and create competition with several companies make best Habitation Module and affordable price is the way program done right the first time.
Want to go to Mars? Just give up half a trillon dollars is all.
They are doing habitats along with deep space propulsion as part of NextStep commercial partnership agreements, or am I missing something?
It’s all here…
http://www.nasa.gov/nextstep
We can’t say how, because there are too many things we simply do not know. These must be clarified in detail before a detailed mission design can be constructed.
Is there really an economically mineable resource of water ice on the moon that we can use to move crews and other time-critical payloads to Mars? If so, we need a design for exploiting that, with a credible cost estimate. If not, we need to know if there is water ice on Phobos that we could use instead, and a similarly detailed cost estimate for using that. My guess is we should go straight to Phobos, but we need detailed investigations of Phobos and the moon before we can make a sensible choice.
How long can a crew endure 0 g, or significantly reduced g ? If necessary, our mission plan must include a centrifuge for the crew habitation. Likewise, what level of high-energy cosmic ray exposure is really acceptable for the crew? We can probably bury our crew habitat on Phobos deep enough to shield it (on the Mars facing side of Phobos, no doubt), but we need details about the requirement. (We may need to relax the exposure limits for the earliest crews, before we can make a decently shielded refuge on Phobos or Mars. Again, what are the cost implications?)
How can we divide up the Earth-to-Mars transport between slow solar electric (for massive cargo) and faster chemical rockets (for crew or other time-critical payloads)?
Etc, etc. It is nuts to make a budget or a schedule until we have done our homework of critical matters like these, that have major cost (and, I hope, savings) implications.
There are no NASA generated requirements for a habitat because NASA only ‘does’ requirements as part of a mission development. SRR System Requirements Review, a key 7120.5 gate review. No mission; no SRR; no requirements.
However, the $55M is probably being pushed by corporate lobbyist, not being pulled by a NASA led mission design. NASA is a funnel: money gets poured in the top, and comes out the bottom to industry. Some of this money, of course, goes to lobbyist, who work to have more money put in the top.
This is what happens when there is no real rationale for a NASA led Human Space Flight program.
I’m not sure that’s correct. At least for robotic missions, there are level 1, and sometimes level 2, requirements generated by a Science Definition Team (for directed missions) or a proposal (for PI-led missions.) That’s before the formal approval/start/selection of the mission. However those requirements are as “notional” as the mission concept or proposal that generated them.
Agreed. And nothing gets committed to till SRR for robotic missions, even Level 1’s held by HQ/SMD. That’s what Phase A is all about….can we really do it?
I suspect NASA will end up buying tickets on the SpaceX MCT before they have a vehicle of their own. NASA is seriously heading down the road of becoming a scientific research team, rather than a pathfinding national space project. Is that a bad thing?
It’s a good thing in some ways even how hardware has been bungled so often (not always, for sure). That was the role of NACA.
But before it happens they must write off SLS, which isn’t likely to happen as long as certain US Senators are in place. It’s not like big projects haven’t been written off before but from memory I don’t recall one this big.
I can’t think of anything on this scale being cancelled either. The closest I can think of was the 1972/1974 Mars lander (unmanned), Voyager, which was going to launch on a Saturn V. But that’s not close to the scale of SLS. You could also say it wasn’t cancelled but descoped into the much smaller Viking mission.
[late reply] Thanks for that insight Michael. You’re right, projects have been cancelled even at this late stage, but in this case there is currently actual hardware being produced and tested. That seems a deliberate NASA decision, designed to make SLS harder to cancel.
For a system that hasn’t had to confront any fundamental hardware challenges, it’s costing an awful lot. No new engines (they’re going to use up their stock of SST engines and build single-use versions later), no new boosters (adding a new segment and more vectoring to the nozzle doesn’t count) .
To get an idea of what the space program could be like, have a close look at the videos of the rollout of the latest version of Soyuz. The rockets are mated with some speed, and transported to the pad at a jogging pace. Horizontal integration allows fast access to work areas. Reducing preparation time reduces all time-related costs, but I see only SpaceX taking these lessons to heart.
The objective, as you say, is partially to funnel money to states and regions controlled by politicians. Saving money is fundamentally antithetical to this objective.
I stand corrected. I was only thinking of NASA precedents. Since we are talking about Congressional budget decisions, SSC and navy building programs are quite relevant.