NASA's Moon Plans Are Missing Something Important
What's the one important thing missing from this @NASA chart about a "Path To The Moon"?
Answer: A lander. https://t.co/yFfnudgFuW
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 9, 2018
What's the one important thing missing from this @NASA chart about a "Path To The Moon"?
Answer: A lander. https://t.co/yFfnudgFuW
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 9, 2018
The chart is also missing a picture of BFR flying artists around the Moon between EM-1 and EM-2.
Yes, and also it doesn’t show the BFR flying circles around the SLS & LOP-G.
It’s very late in the comment thread but this has been on my mind: what really bothers me about this whole thing of SLS, Old Space, New Space, etc.
It’s really easy for those of us out here to snipe at the folks making decisions, folks who don’t respond. There are continuous charges that the program is simply a jobs program.
But I call bullshit.
First, I’m never comfortable assigning motivation through guesswork.
More importantly: It is claimed that the technical prowess of this country, as it resides in one of our stellar agencies, is being wasted. Profligate.
I’d like proof. And I’d really like to hear from the other side, sadly mute.
So I wonder exactly how an informed NASA decision-maker would address the SLS/BFR criticism that we see here, over and over and over, including from yours truly.
And I don’t mean in NASA-speak. I mean over-a-beer speak. And I’d start from the simple premise that there IS a logical reason to go forward with SLS. That it makes actual architectural sense. That even in the face of ‘new space’, SLS is a defensible program that is going to yield out-year benefits. Those are the assertions, certainly.
I’d like to think that there are really smart people making these decisions and that they are making them soberly and with foresight.
What would this off the record NASA person say?
I would think that one of the off the record reasons is that they don’t feel that they can count on BFR. Which is valid. Based on the success SpaceX has demonstrated so far many of us tend to assume that BFR is a given, so it’s easy for us to say don’t bother with anything else. I suspect the reason this is not stated publicly by NASA is because it would probably create a huge public relations backlash considering how popular SpaceX is (headline –
“NASA doubts SpaceX, continues with SLS”).
One of the “official” reasons is that SLS is able to use previously developed hardware, which sounds sensible to non-technical congress type of people. But even as a layman I am skeptical because it’s hard to imagine that using 1970’s technology would be more efficient, unless maybe you could use it exactly as is, so that even if it’s less optimal than newer designs you at least save on development costs. But of course they can’t use it as is, which I would think erodes much of the potential gain in development costs.
So yes it would be interesting to know what other architectures were being considered and how they technically compared. From someone who was actually involved in those decisions. I am open minded, but certainly skeptical.
But I have not seen any architecture for a Mars craft yet. It would seem to me that first your determine the specs of the spacecraft that takes humans to Mars will look like, then determine what type of launch vehicle is needed.
Yes, it is an interative process. You make some assumptions on payload to LEO and Faring size, see if they work, then modify your design. But at the moment it seems that goal is to build the largest launch vehicle possible, then worry about the Mars payload.
I think they stated pretty early on with SLS that it was intended to provide heavy lift for deep space missions, the details and destinations of which were (and still are) being worked out, but they are convinced that for any deep space mission you are going to need heavy lift. And probably as much heavy lift as you can get, so yes their strategy (modified slightly from what you said) is to build the largest practical launch vehicle. Even though initial missions will be cislunar I think they have always planned for SLS to go beyond that.
Musk’s approach is somewhat similar, the big difference is that he is building the largest economical launch vehicle. Yes he has a specific mission in mind of landing on Mars, but what makes the second guessing more complicated for us is that we don’t know if he first specced out the size of spaceship that he needed and then designed BFR/BFS around that, or was it the other way around and he first determined what is the most economical size heavy lifter, and that is what set the resulting BFS volume and weight capacities. I tend to think it was the latter, especially with the resizings that have occurred, but unless Musk has revealed his thinking on this we don’t know for sure.
Another advantage with Musk’s approach is that it will support multi-launch missions better than SLS, assuming BFR works as smoothly as Falcon 9. Both economically, and also because I don’t expect there will be a problem launching multiple BFR in relatively quick succession, during a Mars launch cycle for example. Whereas I don’t see them being able to launch multiple SLS very easily.
In practice, even when you’re talking to people over beers or dinner, a fair number of them are still trying to convince you of something. Companies wouldn’t have a budget for entertaining customers if that weren’t true. So don’t assume being off the record is the same as being entirely honest.
But I have seen some the arguments (not from the management, but by people who those managers listen to.) I think a whole lot of this is about judgement calls which made them go in a direction I don’t agree with.
I wouldn’t, for example, say that they don’t trust SpaceX to deliver BFR. They would probably feel the same way about any non-NASA development program. If it’s critical to a sufficiently important NASA project, NASA managers need to have some control of the schedule, budget and capabilities. There are exceptions (using Soyuz to get to ISS…) but I don’t think those were something NASA management was eager or happy about. Once you decide that’s correct, then it _must_ be a NASA-developed launch vehicle, or an existing one.
Requiring a super heavy launch vehicle is another decision that takes you to SLS. There’s a paper by McNutt and Delamere (possibly in the opposite order) that looks into this, and both authors are the sort of people who end up on NASA review boards of one sort or another. The logic is that any Mars mission will be large enough that some on-orbit assembly will be required. I don’t think anyone disputes that. They then go on to estimate the required mass of a Mars mission, and I think they did a fair ballpark estimate. Then they say the only experience we have with on-orbit assembly is ISS, and we can use the cost of ISS, its mass, and the estimated mass of a Mars mission to estimate the cost of the Mars mission. The result is a obviously unrealistic cost. Therefore, to make it viable, a Mars mission would require as large a launch vehicle as possible, to reduce the cost of on-orbit assembly. That takes you to SLS.
But I dispute that cost estimate. Since we were supposed to learn from building ISS, we ought now to be able to do the same thing for a lower price. We also know from Falcon 9 that _some_ things can be developed for far less than it would cost NASA. And there is some unexplored trade space when it comes to the launch vehicle size. Even SLS (or BFR) will require on-orbit work to get to Mars. I don’t know how SLS and NASA would do it, but SpaceX is talking about propellent transfer from six tankers to one BFS. Seven launches and fuel transfer is clearly easier than fifty launches, dockings and assembly. But what about fifteen launches? A Falcon Heavy, or a Delta IV Heavy, might be able to manage that. It might not be necessary to go all the way to SLS or BFR, in order to keep the number of launches and the amount of on-orbit work manageably small.
Risk associated with the number of launches has also come up. If you did need fifty, then odds are one will fail. If you believe that a failed launch will doom the mission (either politically, or by trashing the schedule and budget) then that argues for a super heavy launch vehicle. If you think, as I do, you can just manifest fifty two launches instead of fifty, and shrug off a launch failure of just another load of propellent, then super heavy launch vehicles don’t look so important.
But those are all issues where reasonable people can disagree. I can’t prove would be a mistake to count on SpaceX and BFR instead of a development program (for SLS) which is directly under NASA control. I can’t prove that on-orbit assembly would cost less than it did for ISS. I can’t prove a large number of launches increases robustness by making each launch less critical and more replaceable. That’s a matter of debate and opinion. The problem is that I’m free to debate it, and NASA’s way of making decisions isn’t as transparent as we might like.
As far as I know BFR is the only potential alternative to SLS in a similar timeframe which is why I only mentioned SpaceX, but yes if was a different company NASA would have the same reservations. In case it wasn’t clear, my “NASA doubts SpaceX” headline doesn’t mean that I think NASA feels that SpaceX is untrustworthy or unreliable, but rather that it would likely be perceived that way if they publicly admitted that one reason that they are continuing with SLS is because they don’t want to count on BFR as it is currently planned coming to reality. Or to put it another way they presumably don’t want to sit on their hands while waiting to see if SpaceX (or anyone else) comes up with something that they can use instead of SLS.
Actually NASA did forfeit quite a lot of control with CRS and CCDev. Although these programs had milestones with specifications that had to be met NASA still basically left the companies on their own to a surprising degree, considering how critical the timeline was to ISS operations. And considering that CCDev success isn’t a 100% given yet since both Boeing and SpaceX are running late and neither has actually launched any astronauts yet. Then again NASA has always had more than one company working on these projects in case one didn’t come through, and they also had Europe and Japan as backups for cargo and they have Russia as a backup for crew. But I still think they went out a limb with these programs in a way that NASA has not traditionally done.
In theory they could have done the same with heavy lift and had a similar program, perhaps called CHL, where they set some specifications and some milestones. Especially since the timeline doesn’t seem to be all that critical considering that the payloads and destinations keep changing. But for whatever reason they decided to do all of this in-house. Of course the suspicion is that politics had the biggest influence, but as Michael Spencer says we don’t really know that without fully hearing both sides.
Thanks, both of you. Food for thought. Maybe the largest takeaway is lack of transparency.
I get however how a super heavy launcher comes into play at the end of many scenarios.
One thing that I did not mention when I posed the question was cost. I’m not opposed to a really pricey solution, if it is the best solution.
But is it? One thing that NASA simply does not do is iterate. Folks criticize them, for instance, when the aerospike was dropped because (at least in large part) there were issues with composite tanks.
If super heavy lift IS necessary – and it looks like SX has the same answer on the right side of the equation – then how does SLS fit that bill? The project has taken so long that fundamental parts of both the requirement equations and the solutions equations are eroded by the march of time.
It’s possible that the inability to iterate – here I’m looking at F1- F5 – F9 – F9+ – FH – ITS – BFR. Is this a chain of iteration that could be managed by any governmental agency? Would there not be folks on the sidelines? “After spending $X on a 5 engine version, Michoud finally tossed in the towel, wasting millions?” Musk simply brushes it off: “We went to F9 because it was better”. Dunno if NASA has this flexibility.
Perhaps -doubtless, actually – there are NASA folks looking t this flexibility with very longing eyes.
In the end though I think Keith has it right: just plain lack of focus. Period. It’s a defensible lack of focus, in my view, but there it s, just the same.
Marshall, which would do the lander, doesn’t have the budget to do one. Too busy with SLS.
Or the ability. Judging by SLS.
Politics aside, I don’t see why Marshall would be the natural choice to build a lunar lander. Have they ever designed something to land on an airless body? Or any planetary body? Even if you go back to Apollo, I think a fair fraction of the design work (and all of the fabrication) was done by Grumman and their subcontractors. And Grumman doesn’t exactly exist anymore. This may sound like heresy, but JPL might be the only NASA center with relevant, recent experience.
MSFC would be logical to do it as the lead propulsion center for NASA. It also makes sense from a political POV.
Why does building a lunar lander require propulsion development? If we take the recent LMA study as an example, we’re talking about a lunar lander with a mass around 22 tonnes (dry) to 65 tonnes (wet.) A lander would want an acceleration around two lunar gravities, with the ability to throttle down to one. Let’s call it 210 kN maximum thrust. They baselined hydrogen/oxygen fuel. Two RL-10s would do the job (even if the price hurts, and I wouldn’t advice hiring Marshall to develop a low cost rocket…) If you want a different fuel mix, you can shop around for alternatives. Or pay any one of a number of private companies to develop one. Unlike the 1960s, there are multiple options out there. So I’m not sure why NASA’s lead propulsion center would be a natural choice to develop a lunar lander.
That’s cause a human lander seems to be an an after thought for Gateway given surface ops is what 2030? I wouldn’t be surprised if they were in such a hurry to run for the PPE RFP cliff they send the requirements out to industry with an undersized GNC attitude control system that isn’t extensible to eventual lunar lander and crew surface ops. Gateway isn’t a foothold for human kind in space it is a foothold to keep SLS/Orion in business.
There is zero budget for a crewed lander. Gateway exists because it’s one of the cheapest ways to use SLS/Orion to do something beyond earth orbit. Unfortunately due to limitations with Orion’s service module, Gateway will be in an orbit that’s not particularly useful for actual moon landings (despite NASA’s PowerPoint slides).
So they are designing the “exploration” program to fit the rocket rather than designing the rocket to fit the program.
Which begs the question, why is the Orion service module the limited size that it is when even the Block 1 version of SLS has a LEO payload of 70 tons? Isn’t the Dragon supposed to be able to land on the Moon?
The Dragon2 was suppose to, but that option was eliminated when NASA made the certification process too difficult for it to land on land. As for Orion being so heavy, it has to be, otherwise they wouldn’t need to build the SLS to launch it ?
Dragon 2 was never claimed to be capable of landing on the moon. You’re confusing it with Mars and Red Dragon.
There were some papers at conferences discussing a lunar Dragon, but that was dropped before the Red Dragon since the Moon was not a destination under the Obama Administration.
Source for these “papers”?
No-one who understands delta-v would propose a Dragon lunar lander. I’ve seen physics-naive users ask the question on NSF/Reddit/StackExchange/etc, but they generally get shot down by the first reply.
[Edit: Heh, it’s such a common idiot-question that r/spacex has it in their FAQ of things you shouldn’t post.]
I believe it was one of the ASCE conferences. Basically you added external fuel tanks to it. This gave you enough fuel to get the necessary delta-v for landing. Remember delta-v is a combination of both the engine thrust and the duration of the engine burn. Since the Moon is a vacuum you don’t have to worry about aerodynamics.
Civil engineering. So nothing to do with aerospace or rocket engineering. Basically a novelty talk by a random, about stuff he didn’t understand.
Delta-V, in this context, is a combination of Isp and qty of fuel. For a lunar landing without a service-module/third-stage to put you into LLO, you are looking at 2.4-2.6km/s for the landing burn. More for course correction burns. But I’ll use 2.4km/s.
Superdraco has an Isp of around 235s. That gives you a wet/dry ratio of 2.8:1. Plus you’d need to about 10% extra for the cosine losses due to the angle of the SDs on the capsule.
That is, you need a bit more than twice the mass of the Dragon capsule (and the payload) in just propellant in order to land a Dragon capsule (and the payload) on the moon. Plus the mass of the tanks and extra plumbing, plus the >3:1 fuel cost of that mass.
Given the density of hydrazine/NO2, it would be several times the volume of the trunk, so you’d be building an entirely different structure in place of the trunk. In effect, in order to turn Dragon into a lunar lander, you have to add a lunar lander.
And then you have the problem that FH can’t loft that much mass to TLI. It runs about 8 tonnes to TLI, while we’re looking at 18 tonnes plus three times our payload.
So triple FH launches and assembly on-orbit? Falcon U/S can’t loiter for on-orbit assembly, so you’d need to develop a long-duration booster-stage and launch that on a fourth flight (although now you’ve got a service module to put the franken-capsule into LLO, reducing landing delta-V to 2.1km/s.)
And what do you get for that effort? The wrong vehicle on the moon for the job of delivering your mission hardware.
It’s a stupid idea.
You have never been to a ASCE conference so you haven’t a clue of who presents there. The presenters are very knowledgeable about aerospace technology, often far more than at ISDC or SFF. If I recall the one that featured it was sponsored by JPL. There were a number of presentations by engineers from SpaceX. The one this year was sponsored by NASA Glenn.
I note, however, that you haven’t challenged a single calculation. Nor have you said who made the lunar-dragon proposal, nor when. Just a vague reference to “one of” the conferences. (Already downgraded from your earlier claim of “some papers” at “conferences” plural.)
Keep in mind that there is probably no more difficult place to land than on Mars with its combination of atmosphere thick enough to require a heat shield, but too thin to really allow a parachute to slow a craft completely for a soft landing. Add to its .38G surface gravity and its easy to understand why NASA state they don’t know how to land astronauts there. The Moon is an order of magnitude easier, all you need to do is to carry enough fuel. Also remember the Dragon2 was originally designed to land anywhere in the Solar System as Elon Musk noted.
https://www.teslarati.com/e…
I will look for the paper(s) that were proposing it for a lunar mission, but its really a dead issue since NASA basically killed off the Red Dragon and other variants with its paperwork requirements, which is why SpaceX moved on to the BFR/BFS and moved beyond NASA.
{sigh} No, as I showed, it’s not just a matter of adding more fuel. A re-entry capsule is the wrong vehicle to land on the moon. But a perfectly logical vehicle, if it has parachutes and retro-thrusters, to land on Mars.
For the moon, retro-thrusters are the wrong engines, too low Isp. A re-entry capsule is the wrong design entirely. The F9/FH upper-stage can’t act as a service module, making it even harder. Just the extra fuel alone (ignoring other necessary mods) exceeds the FH launch capacity. And multi-launch adds another layer of changes needed.
On Mars, you have a re-entry capsule doing a re-entry, the thing it was designed for. It’s harder than Earth, which needs either parachutes or retro-thrusters, but if you have parachutes and retro-thrusters, you might be able to manage it. As long as FH has enough throw for Mars (which it barely does), you can land a capsule with a tonne or two of payload.
BFS is a different story because it combines a reusable long-duration upper-stage with a service-module with a capsule with multi-launch via orbital-refuelling. It shows the kind of changes you’d need to make to Dragon in order to land on the moon, ie, design a completely different vehicle.
The SuperDracos are not just “re-entry” thrusters, they are designed to rip the capsule away from the booster even on the launch pad in the 1G environment of Earth. Just take a look at their specs.
I said “retro” not “re-entry”.
I’m not sure what you are trying to argue. I haven’t mentioned their thrust. It’s their low Isp that’s the problem. As I’ve said. Repeatedly.
Why are you still trying to defend this stupid idea?
So Elon Musk was wrong when he said it could land anywhere? In any case it’s moot point as he has moved on to a true 21st Century Architecture. He’s leaving capsules and similar types of Apollo re-enactments to NASA and Old Space.
Yes, Mr. Musk was wrong when he said a Dragon could land anywhere. Or, more properly, it could only land anywhere with lots and lots of extra help from other flight elements. Enough that it would be fairly pointless, and easier to just design a more optimal vehicle for the purpose. I mean, technically, a Dragon could land on Europa. If you carried it into Europa orbit with a BFR. But I’m not sure why you’d want to do that.
Yes. 235 seconds is very unimpressive for a NTO/MMH bipropellent thruster. The thrust is also too high for an efficient lunar landing. Given the way they are mounted on Dragon 2, you’d need to fire two for balance, and the SuperDraco can only throttle down to 20% (which is pretty impressive.) I make that two to three times lunar gravity, depending on the payload mass. That means no hovering and looking for a flat, rock-free place to land, as well the timing of the landing sequence a little tricky.
The atmosphere of Mars is a huge advantage over the Moon. You’re thinking of the decent sequence. But the problem is stopping when you get there. A spacecraft on a minimum energy trajectory approaches the Moon’s surface at 2.5 km/s. For Mars, it’s 5.5 km/s. You need to get rid if that velocity, and that can take a huge amount of propellent if you use rockets.
Take InSight, which will be landing on Mars later this month. It’s a landed mass of 358 kg, plus 189 kg for the entry heat shield plus another 67 kg for propellent. Without the atmosphere, if you took off the heat shield and replaced it with more fuel, that might be enough to slow a spacecraft by 1.4 km/s (280 sec. specific impulse and rounding down because there’s overhead for the tank mass, etc.)
To stop a 358 kg spacecraft at Mars, all propulsively, would 2300 kg of propellent, and that’s not counting the mass of the tanks. Having an atmosphere lets you do that for 189 kg of heat shield and 67 of propellent. That’s quite a bargain. Landing the same mass on the Moon would take 530 kg of propellent with a fairly good biprop thruster or 700 for one with the specific impulse of a SuperDraco. And the tank for that much propellent would take about 50 kg away from the payload. I’ll admit controlled entry is more complicated that firing a rocket, but the mass savings is huge.
Dragon has a long history with SX. We all remember DragonRider, and then Dragon2, which massed 14,000# (May 2014). Then came July 2017 when Elon said that yes qualification was a bitch (it’s the legs through the heat shield). but the real reason is he felt there was a better way to land on Mars.
Turns out Elon had some ITS/BFR wet dreams in the meanwhile, making propulsive landing kinda pointless. I see it as similar to cancelling the F5 when the F9 was coming along. Similarly Boca Chica was to be the Mars launch pad but looks more and more like just a test site.
So now Drago will enter the history books as a swell way to get to ISS but not much more.
SX does what we criticize NASA for NOT doing. They adjust.
That’s a good question about SLS. Orion (capsule and service module) is the most a SLS Block 1 can send to the Moon (26 tonnes.) But a Block 1B is supposed to be capable of 37 tonnes. I’m not sure what logic is behind the current plans.
No. The Superdracos have too low Isp. Fuel for a 2.4km/s burn would take up the entire capsule.
Dragon 2’s powered landing option was nixed when NASA balked at SpaceX testing this using ISS cargo missions. It would have used the Super Draco engines for landing. They wanted to do a “Red Dragon” mission, but that would likely have required less landing fuel than on the moon since the moon has no atmosphere to help slow the capsule before the landing burn.
All of that said, I’d expect that a lunar landing Dragon 2 would need a lot more propellant to land than what it would normally carry. So it would likely be a “one off” Dragon 2 and likely wouldn’t be able to carry a crew when landing. This is all my opinion, of course.
NASA have the unannounced and unfunded by NASA Moon lander known as the BFS which might be flying by about 2022 as stated by Steve P in previous post. Which also make the entire LOP-G project moot. Since what can’t you do with a BFS orbiting the Moon that the LOP-G can do?
Both schedules are likely to slip, but if SpaceX does fly people around the Moon prior to EM-2, at lower cost and with reusability, the “SLS is required for our specific planned missions” argument probably wouldn’t be enough to hold back what would likely be an increased tide of opinion to cancel it.
But it will not be a NASA solution. NASA wants a human tended LOP-G station with only 90 cubic meters of pressurized space. The BFS is much too large at 1000+ cubic meters of pressurized space and it’s not a space station, but a spaceship.
NASA is basically puttung our a RFP for a little pop-up camping trailer and you are offering a huge Class A “bus style” RV for 1/50 of the cost of it. Didn’t you read the RFP? You know how it really ruins the adventure of camping out in a tent when someone drives up with a big RV. Remember, explorers are suppose to rough it and test their skills against nature, something that will be difficult to do when you have a private room in a luxury spaceliner ?
I’m not buying the luxury spaceliner. That feels too much like the original claims about the interior of the Airbus A380, and I never believed them.
When they first announced the A380 project, Airbus was talking about using that vast amount of space for things like all-first-class seating, and setting aside part of the lower deck for a gym, spa and/or lounge. I think they even said something about shops… Once they got close to production and started taking orders, that turned into an optional layout but the started saying there were other options and it would naturally be the customers’ choice. Today, I think they have delivered a few A380s with some of those luxury options, but nothing close to all of them. Virtually all A380s have the usual layout with most of the seating designed to cram in as many passengers as human physiology and psychology allows.
I strongly suspect that’s what’s going to happen to those 1000 cubic meters and plans for 40 cabins and luxurious accommodations. It’s going to end up being 100 cubic meters worth of luxury accommodations for half a dozen people. The other 900 cubic meters will be dormitories cramming as many people in as they can. (And they may want to do some studies on how many people can fit into that space for six months, without risking homicides.)
But, to be fair, the Apollo command module only had 2 cubic meters of pressurized volume per person. Assuming the luxury layout, BFS would something like 15 cubic meters per person (the reference I found said 40 cabins, but I’m not sure if those are single or double occupancy.) Even the cramped dormitories I expect would seem spacious compared to Apollo…
If I recall the walls were movable so they could be single or double as the occupants wished.
But I still question if BFS will be carrying that many to Mars. There are too many other things being negelected in plans for Mars settlement. Getting there is just the first step, then you have to build your habitats, create systems for food production, air and water recycling, etc.. In most cases we probably don’t even know the questions to ask yet, let alone the answers. It’s why I expect that most of that mass/volume will be used for equipment and supplies, not settlers. You might even see robotic BFS with all cargo being sent. And then let’s not forget planetary protection as a possible show stopper, or something at least that will slow it down.
Personally if I was planning it I would be looking at Phobos for the first settlement, or at least a base, before going for the surface.
What I do expect is that the majority of settlers flying on BFS will be going to the Moon to establish an industrial base there and only small groups will be pioneering Mars at the start.
You’re probably right about initial Mars flights being primarily cargo. But I think the space available for passengers will be crowded. A related issue is the nature of the people on board. I suspect most will not be paying passengers. Establishing a colony implies a fair amount of hard, manual labor and specific skills. That is not necessarily a match with the people who can afford a ticket. 10% paying passengers and 90% hires employees might not be a bad guess (and also defining who gets the luxury cabin and who ends up in the dorms…)
As far as establishing lunar bases with BFR, or anything else, that raises an interesting issue for passenger accommodations. A minimum energy trip from low Earth orbit to the Moon is five days. More if passengers are on board while the spacecraft is refueled in low Earth orbit. Aircraft have given us experience about how tightly you can pack in people for an half-day trip, and submarines have given us experience for multi-month trips. But I can’t think of anything similar for few day to one week trips.
Not in recent memory unless you count ocean cruises, but that is a very different environment. Pre-WW II ocean crossings would be a better model to use. Decades ago railroads also did it with pullmans and sleeper cars, but they could get off the trains at stations so its not a good analogy. It will probably be a trial and error process to see what works.
The gravity on Phobos is way too low for practical human settlement. You could easily throw a baseball into orbit if you were there.
Yes, but hitting a baseball into orbit would completely redefine a home run…
“The BFS is much too large at 1000+ cubic meters of pressurized space and it’s not a space station, but a spaceship.”
That depends on how it’s configured. With those big fan solar arrays, an ECLSS capable of years of operation, the ability to capture satellites and work on them in a pressurized environment & re-deploy them (Shotwell, in Madrid) and the ability to refuel in vast quantities there are few jobs BFS could not do.
Its because NASA is still operating in the Obama era policy of not doing landings. Bureaucratic inertia can really slow down organisational change and innovation, and NASA is a massive bureaucracy. They won’t think about landers unless they are instructed to by the US Government.
Yep, and probably hoping to run out the clock until the next Administration replaces the Moon with Mars again.
Isn’t NASA’s plan to utilize COMMERCIAL landers and NOT a NASA developed one?
There should not be a NASA lander in the picture.
“NASA issues call for payloads to go on commercial lunar landers”
https://spacenews.com/nasa-…
Commercial Lunar Payload Services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
So, why not mention the company that has already announced a commercial manned lunar spaceflight capability, and which also proposes manned landings?
Because they are hoping that BFS goes away. It would look silly for someone to develop a LEM type lander when the BFS is already landing on the Moon. Kinda like comparing the Orion to the BFS. The small 500 kg lander being proposed should be good enough to deploy the robots needed to prepare a landing area for it.
That said I see the potential of designing a small hopper that could be used for excursions from bases on the Moon. Designed right it could also double as a shuttle between orbit bound deep space exploration vessels and the surfaces of asteroids and small moons.
I won’t restart the debate about small surface-to-orbit boats being more efficient that taking a large habitat up and down on every trip…
But, yes, it would be easy to build a suborbital, lunar hopper which could double as a ship’s boat for a asteroid or small moon mission. If you did it right, you could simply remove the main engine. More than 1/6 g is way too much acceleration for “landing” on an asteroid, but the attitude control thrusters on a lunar hopper might be just about right. Using attitude control thrusters rather than main engines for small burns is a relatively common practice on robotic missions.
Or, now that I think of it (and just after hitting send the first time…) why pull the main engine at all? If you don’t need to save mass at all costs, just leave it on and don’t use it.
There shouldn’t anything on that chart but commercial systems. NASA needs to get out of the launch business and the space station business. What we should see are a trio of large nuclear powered interplanetary research vessels with artificial gravity assembled in orbit by the BFR/BFS, 1,000 + ton vessels capable of taking NASA astronauts to Mars, Vista and beyond. But it will take a while for the folks in Huntsvilles and Houston to reconginze the BFR/BFS is not a threat but an opportunity for NASA to once more boldly go where no
one has gone before.
BTW, they should name those new Deep Space Exploration Vessels (DSEV) the Enterprise, Challenger and Columbia.
“Enterprise, Challenger and Columbia”
Ouch.
Yes, name them after the first three shuttles and to honor the crews of the two that gave their lives to explore space. Basically it also returns NASA to the early 1980’s before 30 years of failed space policy destroyed the dream of going boldly and made NASA risk adverse. Astronauts will never walk on Ceres or explore the Jupiter Trojans to learn about the early Solar System if NASA is too afraid to take risks.
Keith posted a link for a FOIA data dump and here is what I just found.
Internally NASA wants commercial human landers.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
In that slide, the word “commercial” appears only for the (already announced) small robotic missions. Nothing to do with manned landers.
The names of the spaceships are something we can debate once we have them. Personally, I’d like to see a USS V. I. Grissom or a USS Sally Ride. I’m more interested in seeing USS stand for United States _Spaceship_.
Yes, if NASA is able to grasp the implications of the paradigm shift taking place there will be a number of vessels to name.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I’ve heard NASA people say that they are doing Orion and SLS in order to keep a few of their people trained and experienced. Its probably important keeping in mind that their operational experience on Shuttle and ISS does nothing in terms of building experience in requirements, specifications, design or manufacture. However given the slow, laborious, and ridiculously expensive costs associated with the NASA projects, they would probably be wiser to hire some of the people who gain some training with the commercial developers like Space X and Sierra Nevada. Those people have been learning to do the job at an accelerated pace and reduced costs, and would give some credibility to NASA as far as establishing some bona-fide expertise, something NASA lost a generation ago. People trained on ISS, Orion or SLS have probably had more negative training than positive, and only know how to do the program in the slowest most expensive least expeditious way possible.
That’s really a small lander at the moment. It looks like they are targeting something in the 500 kg range (and it isn’t clear how much of that would be payload.) While NASA wants to start using commercial landers of this sort around 2022, it isn’t clear who (if anyone) is actively developing such a beast. This may take some time to evolve into a commercial lander for astronauts.
There is a few commercial lander scheduled for their attempts to land on the Moon.
Moon Express with the MX-1E micro Moon lander is supposedly flying on a Rocketlab Electron sometime in 2019.
SpaceIL with the Sparrow mini Moon lander is schedule for Q1 2019 as rideshare payload launched aboard a Falcon 9.
PTScientists with the Alina lander carrying two Audi Lunar Quattro rovers is schedule for Q3 2019 launch aboard a Falcon 9. Destination is the Apollo 17 landing site.
Astrobotics with the Peregrine lander with several rovers is schedule for 2020 as rideshare payload aboard an Atlas V 531.
However none of the above landers is a path to a manned lander IMO.
Fair enough, although only two of those companies are US-based and I think NASA would have some legal hurtles to buy a services from a foreign company. But even for robotic missions, those are pretty small landers, and I’m not sure how easily they could be scaled up.
Maybe if they bought it directly, but they could just become a partner with the appropriate space agency, as they are with the Orion service module and ESA.
Only PTScientists might face legal hurdles. Not the Israeli SpaceIL, unless you think the Jewish lobby in Congress is toothless.
The closest of the nascent Moon landing cadre to be in service is the Alina lander with a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. NASA could just buy and operated Alina landers plus the Lunar Quattro rovers themselves, especially after a successful Apollo 17 site re-visit.
Moon Express is somewhat iffy with involvement of Naveen Jain.
Commercial Moon landers have get started with smaller vehicles before there will be larger one.
Israel is no exception to the laws (and policies) on NASA purchasing services from foreign countries. It’s not on any black list, but neither is France or Canada. Those rules aren’t absolute, but they can be a pain. I’ll stick to what I wrote: There are hurdles.
But since you mention a planned Apollo 17 site revisit, I’m curious what the legal status of that is. There was some discussion of that a few years ago, including a proposal to make it a national park. I’m pretty sure that went nowhere (especially since it’s illegal.) However, NASA or some other US government agency might have some say in the matter. If the Apollo 17 site had one of the laser retroreflectors, visiting the site might violate the Outer Space Treaty (getting dust on the mirrors could be considered interfering with US lunar operations…) But those are only at the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 sites.
AIUI the Apollo hardware still belongs to NASA and therefore the US government according to the Outer Space Treaty. So you can’t handle or retrieve the hardware without permission of the owner (NASA). But nothing stop anyone from visiting the site, since legally no one can claim any piece of Moon real estate. Maybe the threat of being label a vandal of history might be enough deterrent.
The Apollo 17 site re-visit is mostly a survey by HDTV cameras on the condition of the Apollo hardware after a very prolong exposure to the Moon’s surface environment. AFAIK there is no manipulator devices aboard the two rovers. Think of the rovers as movable hi-definition cameras.
I was asking about the Apollo 17 site because I’m interested in legal precedents on how the non-interference clause will be applied. There has been back and forth discussion of how the Outer Space Treaty does or does not allow claims to extraterrestrial real estate. There is a clause in that treaty prohibiting interference with other nations’ activities.
I’ve argued that a de facto claim could be made by setting up a sensitive experiment at the location you want to claim. Then you could prevent anyone else going near it, on the grounds that this would interfere with your activities. In the case of the laser retro-reflectometers left at the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 sites, they are still in use, to measure the tidal evolution of the Moon’s orbit. One could claim that any rover driving near them could kick up dust, which would then settle out on the mirrors and degrade their performance.
That is a very good argument to use and there is a legal precedent with the GEO orbit. Technically no one may own the GEO orbit but the ITU has mandated a 1 degree separation between comsats or it won’t issue a license to use the assigned spectrum. This 1 degree separation is to eliminate interference of the radio signals. The result has been to create pseudo property rights in the form of orbital “slots” that may sell for hundreds of millions of dollars if the are in a desirable location.
A strict definition of non-inference with previous research sites, and other sites involving human activities on the Moon has to potential to involve into similar pseudo property rights for it. But like comsats if will emerge only once activities start on the lunar surface and the nations involved work out “rules of the road” to govern them.
Musk is talking a lunar BFS landing & base around 2025.
https://twitter.com/elonmus…
Some small commercial Moon landers will fly in the next few years and some will make it to the Moon surface,
If the SpaceX BFS does the #dearmoon flight. When that occurs, a possible follow-on Moon landing by a BFS in a few months after the flyby. There is even the possibility that the #dearmoon flight might included a side trip to the Moon.
Of course Musk does have a history of being over optimistic in scheduling. Seems the 2025 date for Moon Base Alpha is in that category. Take 2025 as the NET date for a Moon base if the #dearmoon flight happens in 2023 and no major issues arose with the BFS.
It was my understanding that Blue Origin was already working blue moon in that direction. From that image I posted from NASA’s internals it looks like 2026 would be the start of human lander funding.
I think it is everyone’s understanding that Blue Origin in working towards lunar landings. But, at this point, it is not at all clear if those plans have even left the PowerPoint stage, let alone leaving the drawing board. That could mean five or more years until testing flight articles. And if NASA plans call for a _start_ of funding for a human lander in 2026, the first flight might not be until the early 2030s. Please don’t get me wrong. I think this is the right way to go (and it seems like you did a good and fast job of going over those FIOA files.) But I strongly suspect we won’t see commercial, manned lunar landers in the next few years. I suspect ten or more years is more realistic.
Or ever.
There’s a future where NASA is struggling to complete Gateway, then at 50%, while BFS buzzes by.
There’s a future where NASA realizes that landsites are implied by SLS and decides to shift directions.
And then there’s a future where NASA starts building actual spaceships, behemoths that live in space and capable of travel about anywhere in the solar system. Sorta like BFR.
Even quicker, once BFS is flying NASA could just buy a pair and outfit them for space exploration. Since they are designed to carry a 100 settlers to Mars it would be no problem to customize their interior with labs, remote sensing systems, robotic landers and small sats and still have room for a crew of 15-20 astronauts. Then use them to explore Mars, Venus, the Martian Trojans, and of course the Moon. You have a precedent in their purchase of a B747SP which became the Sophia Flying Observatory.
I’m not sure NASA would know what to do with that much room. Historically, instruments for robotic, NASA missions have cost about $1 million per kilogram. If 75 tonnes were available and someone tried to fill it with instruments, the traditional approach could cost $75 billion. (And, by the way, SOFIA cost close to $1 billion to develop and about $100 million per year. I guess that’s an improvement on $1 million per kilo…)
Once you start talking about dozens of tonnes, NASA (and most planetary scientists) will have to get over trying cram in every gram of capability. That approach may be justified when you can only get ten kilos of payload to a destination at the cost of a third of a billion just for the launch. But not it doesn’t make sense if tens of tonnes can be delivered for tens of millions of dollars.
Yes, and you have the luxury of carrying spare parts, and even spare equipment, in case something breaks in Mars Orbit and you need to fix, so maybe add a repair shop to the list. Also given the time spent in space it might not hurt to use the extra mass for improved shielding. BFS will indeed take a shift in thinking when it enters service.
I would posit that taking away the extreme mass requirements would (sadly) NOT change the paradigm for planetary scientists or astronomers. They have other reasons for designing bespoke billion dollar spacecraft.
Another important constraint is frequency. When missions per planet are on the order of once a decade (or worse) then the build becomes extreme.
An argument against bespoke machines, no? What about the more modern notion of building an actual spaceship [BFR] that takes you places, albeit requiring refueling?
The launch frequency is, to a large degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If missions cost a billion dollars each, NASA can only afford a small number of them per decade. Launch costs do affect that; it’s not like you could fly ten, $100 million spacecraft for the price of one, $1 billion dollar spacecraft. When a launch costs $150 million, that doesn’t work.
I wonder what price SX will set for the Falcon 9 interplanetary missions? Roughly 1/2 of the usual Delta II 150 million maybe?
F9 will throw over twice as much payload for maybe 1/2 the cost.
I don’t think that will change the frequency of missions, and/or the current paradigms, sadly. Might get a bit more out of each mission.
Seems like a whole lot of fresh, new results could be obtained by a fleet of nearly identical telescopes designed to fly on cheap F9 launches, Astrometry, Photometry, and asteroid studies would benefit from modest instruments.
I can imagine a fleet of nearly identical icy moon orbiter probes to explore out planet moons to fly on cheap FH launches.
The cost difference isn’t as much as you might think, but NASA isn’t helping in that respect. A NASA (or government) purchased Falcon 9 launch runs about $100 million. A Delta V costs NASA between $150 and $200 million, depending on the configuration (one to five solid rocket boosters, a four or five meter payload fairing.) The payload is similar, although the payload for a Delta depends on whether it’s a 511 or a 451… The Delta II you mentioned is now officially retired.
But a big part of that ($40 million for SpaceX and $30-80 million for ULA) goes to special services and oversight which the government requires. Commercial launches are more like $65 million and $100 to $150 million, respectively.
Identical missions are, in my opinion, a good idea for certain targets. The best case I’ve heard is for a large number of identical, small spacecraft to do asteroid flybys. They are diverse (almost every one we’ve gotten close to looks different) and we don’t know enough about any given one to usefully specialize the spacecraft. You could argue (and at least one scientist has argued) that even limited imaging from flybys of a hundred different asteroids would be worth more than a detailed study of one. And both might cost the same, if you used a fleet of a hundred small spacecraft (e.g. 6U CubeSats) to get a hundred flybys.
That would be a cool mission; 100s of cube sats launched on FH. Even if the number was 44 or 75 or whatever. Give them some minimal ion propulsion and you might get two or three fly-bys per sat.
Might need to design in some out-of-the-box upgrades in interplanetary comms. in order to support such a mission. Right up SX’s alley.
I’ve not been able to find anyone who proposes many flybys being worth more than a single detail. Who do you have in mind?
I saw the idea at a conference on interplanetary CubeSats in 2017. It was presented by Walt Harris from University of Arizona, although I suspect his co-authors did much of the asteroid science justification. (He’s more of a hardware and instrumentation type.)
https://icubesat.org/papers…
I will say there are two annual conferences on planetary small spacecraft, and that was at the more… speculative… one. You see more wild ideas there and fewer presentations on what someone will be flying in two years. But Harris is a very solid planetary scientist, and I thought his arguments were convincing. Oddly, I saw him again two weeks later, and he was making a presentation on LUVOIR (a proposed orbital telescope that makes JWST look small.) That’s on the completely opposite end of the size-cost spectrum from CubeSats…
You mean equip them with escape pods, escape poles, triple thick radiation shielded rooms, layers of micro meteoroid shielding, 4 extra parachutes and multiple life rafts.
/sarc
MONEY!!!
The only purpose of the Gateway is to give SLS a place to go in lieu of a lander (similar to ARM).
I think it is deliberate to not have a lander. If a lander is in the plans, then need to allocate money for it. Also money for other hardware needed for lunar missions. But like manned Mars missions, lots of concept studies and artwork without the need to spend real money. Keeps the space cadets happy without having build and test hardware which may include setbacks when things fail.
NASA mangers are genuinely confused about what NASA’s role is even supposed to be. Forty five years ago after the Moon fever subsided, NASA leadership decided their goal was to make space a part of the country’s economy and that in order to do so they needed to establish a ‘highway’ and waystations starting with a Shuttle and Station. They got off to a good start but soon lost their way, making access to space more expensive and more difficult than it needed to be, not less. After 30 years of failing to upgrade or improve the Shuttle, and who had never designed or built anything, killed another crew and then decided if they were going to be killing crews, then they ought to make the reason worthy; they wanted to ‘explore’ which apparently meant going back to the Moon. I am not sure why living in a tin can out in the middle of nowhere counts as ‘exploration’. There is not that much to see from that distance. And there is no plan to land on the Moon, so there is no lander. So, why is NASA wasting taxpayer dollars? NASA’s job might be exploration, but there is no exploration happening. alternatively, NASA’s job might be technology advancement, but it does not seem like reverting to archaic methods is much of an advance?
NASA is counting on Gateway International Partners to provide a human lander. Accommodations for a human lander are being incorporated into the Gateway design, on a conceptual design level for now.
While NASA is just producing pretty charts, SpaceX is producing hardware.
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX’s next big BFR spaceship part finished in Port of LA tent facility
It will be interesting to see the NASA reaction when a BFS emerges from that tent and starts its journey to the test site.