NASA's Advisors Struggle With Gateway Selling Points
Keith’s note: The NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee is having problems trying to explain why NASA needs to build the Gateway. If they can’t figure out why it is needed, how is NASA going to sell this whole Gateway thing to Congress and the taxpaying public?
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IMHO @waynehale @NASA needs a swear jar for every time someone uses "notional" as a verbal crutch to get through a description of the TBD Gateway architecture when they should just say "we don't know". Admitting that there's a problem is the first step toward solving the problem. pic.twitter.com/41aK9KGRx2
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) December 9, 2018
If Gateway becomes anything beyond a pure, streamlined transportation staging facility for evolving & then supporting sustained activities in/on
(a) Cislunar space
(b) the lunar surface
(c) destinations beyond
then it will have failed of its elegant promise as an exploration/exploitation-enabling springboard and will be doomed to undergo the same, painful bureaucratic accretion process that Shuttle & Station underwent, to their doom and to the doom of the explosive flowerings in space activity expansion that they might each have brought forth to the benefit of all.
I hope it sticks to its original roots.
The problem is none of those activities need any orbital support, especially from the odd orbit they are placing it in.
Why? Why go into another (admittedly shallower) gravity well to build a facility for assembling (hypothetically speaking, because that’s ask we can do, so far) craft and support facilities for human exploration of other planetary systems— when we can do that more economically in earth orbit?
If we can get water from the Moon, the mass balance favors refueling in lunar orbit rather than lifting all that mass from Earth. If we have a large planetary spacecraft using electric propulsion, you would definitely not want to send it up and down the long, slow and fuel-inefficient trip to low Earth orbit. You’d want a place well above LEO to transfer cargo and people. A lunar orbit wouldn’t be too bad for that, especially you were also supporting lunar surface operations out of the same station or if you could produce in situ propellent for an ion drive on the Moon.
And that illustrates what is perhaps the key problem with the Gateway, it’s lunar retrograde orbit. A tight EM L1 halo orbit could actually provide some justification for it. For one, it would be possible to do an abort from the lunar surface on the near side of the Moon at anytime as the position would barely change in relationship to it. The same would be true for communications. It would be able to equally support multiple sites on the Moon. It would also be an ideal location for spacecraft with ion/plasma propulsive to use to department on interplanetary flights, both human and robotic ones. But NASA is not putting it in that ideal location…
Although using water from the lunar surface for fuel is good, you will get most of the same advantages if you produce LOX from the Lunar regolith. Remember 80% of the mass of water, and fuel for a liquid hydrogren rocket, is Oxygen. And LOX is a lot easier to handle than Hydrogen.
I think the numbers for using in situ oxygen alone are pretty tight. Yes, it is about 80% of the propellant mass (78% for the advertised mix of a SpaceX Raptor) but for an Earth-Moon or Moon-Earth trip, about 75% of the initial mass is propellant.
If you go out carrying enough methane to get back, and use lunar oxygen, your mass breakdown at launch would be something like 75% propellant for the trip out, 10% methane for the trip back and 15% spacecraft and payload. That’s enough that a little extra inefficiency could eat your whole available payload. It could work, and digging up lunar oxygen is much easier than digging up lunar water. But that might not be enough.
It’s nice to imagine that, but that’s two if’s (if we can get water, which is not happening anytime soon, and if we have a large, planetary spacecraft, ditto) that are not part of any architecture I’ve seen advertised. And there’s an implicit third if, that is, if we have the gumption to make a long and expensive commitment to going to another planet — assuming Mr. Musk and his true believers aren’t already there to greet us.
There’s also a great deal of hydrogen between us and any other planet (about 0.1 atom or ion per cubic centimeter). Maybe we ought to be thinking about designing ramjets with large collecting areas (intakes).
More “ifs” to the proposition: if we can learn to mine on the moon; if we can learn to collect and use the prodigious amounts of energy required to split hydrogen and oxygen from water; if we can get the collected energy to where it will be used; if …
It’s a very long list. And just like all of the mini-tea needed to operate in space, technologies that NASA is well-suited to develop (long term storage of resources, “tugs” to move things about, methods to generate a bit or pseudo-gravity, among others), none are being developed.
But all are sine qua non. All of them. Meanwhile, NASA talks about nothing but Big Picture.
I agree with this reasoning. But I am skeptical that mining and processing water on the moon will be very easy. The Apollo missions found out very quickly that the lunar soil was much more abrasive than anyone thought. Couple that with a bunch of aerospace engineers (I have that degree) designing super lightweight mining and processing equipment and I think you’ve got a recipe for very expensive lunar water mining missions that output less water than the total mass landed on the moon.
We’ll get there eventually, but when we’ve got Mars rovers with tears in their aluminum wheels, that says to me that we don’t have enough (aerospace engineering) experience to build robust lunar regolith mining, handling, and processing equipment.
In summary, building the Deep Space Gateway is doing the easy part first and putting off the difficult parts (reusable lunar landers, fuel depots, and lunar water mining). I’d rather see NASA start retiring risk on the difficult parts of this approach rather than doing the easy bits first. I’d like us to get to Mars in the next 20 years. I don’t see how the Deep Space Gateway, as currently envisioned, helps with that in any way.
Personally, I’m not skeptical about lunar ice mining being easy. I’m more or less certain it will be extraordinarily difficult at first, and the learning curve will be steep. But if we don’t figure it out, and with work I think we can, the Moon isn’t really on the way to anywhere else. So I agree that the surface hardware is something we ought to be working on.
On the technical side, I’d say things like delicate, low-mass wheels could be replaced by high-mass, 3D printer parts using lunar regolith as the raw materials. And you would, correctly, point out all the infrastructure that implies. I don’t think those issues are unsolvable. But anyone who thinks the factory will be up and running, just as soon as the first mission lands, should probably consult a psychiatrist.
I agree. Folks have spent so much time and effort on thinking about how to get to the Moon no one has been doing the research of what and how to do the critical infrastructure development once we are there. And the firms that are going to do it will have to move beyond aerospace engineers to involve mining engineers, chemical engineers and civil engineers. Especially sad is that I have not seen any work done on the most critical need for lunar mining, the development of the explosives technology it will need.
I hadn’t thought of explosives. I’m not sure they are necessary, but they are traditional and convenient for mining. Unfortunately, the common ones we use require carbon and nitrogen, which aren’t available on the Moon, and hydrogen, which would be awful expensive for that application. (Using hydrogen rich explosives to mine water might not brake even.) All the materials for thermite are easily available, but that’s neither a real explosive or useful for mining.
Mining would be nearly impossible without them. They are critical for breaking up the mine face so the loaders are able to scoop it up for the trucks to transport. Given the nature of the Moon, and the rock mechanics involved, you won’t be able to do any mining on a major scale without a good explosive. It would be like mining in pre-industrial days.
That depends. If the useful material is in the regolith, you wouldn’t need to blast to brake it up into scoopable pieces. And that’s a real possibility for ice. I seem to remember seeing photos of terrestrial extraction equipment for that sort of work. (Deserts with sand rich in some mineral worth extracting, and, no I’m not mixing up reality with _Dune_…) But if the ore is in solid rock, you’re right. Doing without explosives would be a painful way to get it out. Finding out which possibility is correct would talk some prospecting and test mines. I’m fairly sure we agree about the value of that.
Yes, prospecting, the recovery of samples for testing and testing different extraction methods is long over due in terms of lunar development. Hopefully NASA will make both a focus of its commercial lunar rover program. Maybe NASA needs a economic Development Committee for the Moon to recognize its goals there are different than for the rest of its robotic spacecraft.
I’d like to see the rationale that Gateway could ever be a transportation staging facility for activities in/on
(a) Cislunar space
(b) the lunar surface
(c) destinations beyond
where it is situated.
It is in a useless location because of an Orion capsule that lacks the capability to reach a useful orbit.
And the entire idea that you need a throwaway expensive Orion in the first place is a non-sequitor.
NASA is wasting money and time on an architecture that makes zero sense, established by an “engineer’s engineer” who has never previously had a role in defining a space system architecture; his chief success in his career was shutting down the Shuttle. What a waste.
And it appears NASA is descoping the exploration upper stage to where it’s useful only for the gateway
https://twitter.com/SpcPlcy…
Maybe NASA ought to get someone who knows how to communicate what they are doing? I guess it is either that, or maybe they do not know what they are doing?
It’s the latter. Deep Space Gateway is a kluge in order to give SLS/Orion a cheap “destination” a.s.a.p. The reality is that it’s in a bad orbit if your goal is to land on the moon. But since SLS/Orion can’t go directly to a low lunar orbit, this compromised orbit is the best they can do.
Rather than be honest with the public, they’re trying to come up with “justifications” for that compromised orbit. The result is you simply can’t concisely communicate why it’s in this stupid orbit rather than a low lunar orbit, which would make sense if your ultimate goal is to use DSG as a staging area for lunar surface missions.
Even if SLS *could* deliver to a low lunar orbit (which is the hope with Block 1B, if it ever flies), it is *still* hard to see how you could justify the Gateway if the goal is to get to the lunar surface and do something useful there.
But as Bob Zubrin says, it is a tollbooth, not a gateway, to any destination on the Moon.
It is not the SLS that is the issue, It is the puny ESA service module of the Orion. It doesn’t have the Delta-V to get to and back from LLO.
You got to remember that the Orion was suppose to be injected into Lunar orbit with the canceled Altair lander. The engine specs of which is 4 RL-10s for the descent module. Then return to Earth with the propulsion provided by the Orion service module with almost full propellant tanks.
Jeff: I get your frustration and I share it.
It is all too easy to assign motivation when in fact there is not a single data point supporting the argument…other than skepticism, of course, with which I share your thinking. But I just cannot accept that this is a useful point to make. It’s nothing more than guessing.
That is why it is so maddening! We are left to wonder just what the f*ck our agency is doing.
Keith’s masthead become more apropos every year. Indeed we might learn something here. God knows we won’t learn it from NASA.
A related question is what “transparency” means. I get the impression that many people think they are being transparent if they tell everyone what they decided. For me, transparency means hearing all about _why_ that decision was made, and the discussions and information that went into the process. But I also get the impression that many managers and politicians do not want that, and I have no idea what sort of rules could realistically produce the sort of transparency I’d like.
Not to say my prophetic abilities are any better than anyone else, but I’ve been saying this was a “bridge to no where” ever since it was announced. I said the same thing about the previous asteroid capture ideas and you know where that went. The reason we have been flying in circles for 45 years is that no one wants to seriously and with a long-term sustainable outlook answer the question of WHY or follow anything up with appropriate funding. Our species would rather build bombs than think seriously about the long future. I tried to answer this WHY question correctly in a paper from 2015.
Ultimately, doing and selling “science” as the motivation will NOT get humanity off Earth permanently. And given 45 years of ever growing risk aversion, no one wants to seriously challenge or change the status quo. If NASA and the US want to remain leaders in space they must completely revamp their philosophy, motivation and means or go the way of the Ming Dynasty and Zheng He’s fleet. History will pass our short 200 years by, and resting on our spaceflight laurels will not suffice. We should have been somewhere different and in mass over 20 years ago, and you see what is being sold as timelines today.
Ultimately, doing and selling “science” as the motivation will NOT get humanity off Earth permanently.
Indeed: “science” will serve as motivation for nothing more than a tiny handful of government employees sporadically going into space for limited periods of time. And as robotics continue to improve, even *that* will be increasingly in question.
Barring discovery of an Extinction Level Event in the near future, there is no motivation other than bringing more and more of deep space into our economic sphere that will create the necessary motivation to, as you say, get humanity off Earth permanently. And that motivation will have to come, it seems, from the private sector.
Maybe they should just be honest and tell folks that since they have a shovel they are just looking for another hole to dig to keep busy.
The problem is the shovel is gold plated with a one meter long handle (the orbit DSG will be in) and they’re trying to tell the public how it’s going to help dig a three meter deep hole (supporting lunar landers which will need an extra transfer stage just to get from DSG to low lunar orbit).
Everyone keeps saying the gateway is for Luna . is not and never has been .. it is about Mars.. and it has never been about anything other than that.. all the moon talk is just a smokescreen for Phase II and the SEP unit that makes up the mars transport…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I think you’ve said that before, but I’ve yet to see any evidence of it. The current plans don’t really go anywhere, and “phase 2” seems to be extremely vague and undefined. Do you have any actual references for it being all about Mars, as opposed to the Moon, or is that just speculation?
Phase II .. there would not be a phase two .. at all .. there would be budgets for luna .. I just do not see it other than lip service.
Incorrect. Some along the way have wrestled it into being ‘all about Mars’, but the original idea for a cis-lunar ‘outpost’ was to enable cis-lunar operations AND lunar access, with eventual possible support of further exploration (including Mars).
See http://www.thespacereview.c…
Here’s an excerpt zeroing in on the original ‘outpost’ ‘s purpose:
The “Earth’s Neighborhood” steppingstone was a unique proposal for the agency, and included the possibility of establishing an “outpost” at the Lunar L1 Lagrange point. This would be a mini space station that would serve as a “mission staging and crew habitation platform… for assembling and maintaining large astronomical observatories and conducting expeditions to the lunar surface.” The outpost would consist of an inflatable habitat similar to the TransHab module that was developed by NASA and then canceled by Dan Goldin in 2000. Unmanned elements of the architecture would use high efficiency solar electric propulsion to move from low Earth orbit to a final destination. The propulsion stage would be reusable.
The Lunar L1 point, according to the NEXT team, was a compromise among competing requirements. Solar observatories could be assembled there and sent to the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 points, and the Lunar L1 outpost could also provide easy access to the lunar surface, as well as a jumping off point for missions to other planets. It could also serve as an assembly and maintenance point for astronomical observatories. The program’s focus would be on developing technology and using humans to support scientific research such as solar and astronomical observatories and eventually planetary exploration, or “science-driven, technology-enabled,” to use the original DPT group’s phrase.
The current manifestation of this outpost, the so-called LOP-G, has become mired in many other things for various (mostly unfortunate) reasons. But it’s original conception, which I believe still embodies technical wisdom toward serving to establish a sustainable solar system exploration architecture, is as a staging facility for various cis-lunar operations, including lunar surface exploration & exploitation.
yes . commercial operations .. but nasa is still doing phase 2
Thank you for digging this out; it starts to answer my question about how smart and thoughtful people came to propose the gateway.
Like a lot of things that NASA does, though, an original bold and creative idea becomes subject to so many committees and interests, each carving out a piece while ignoring the whole, that in fact the whole becomes something that nobody wants. Certain parts of STS come to mind as an example.
If luna was the target there would not be a phase II .. it is that simple also the budget would reflect that luna is the target .. there is no budget for luna…
https://www.nasa.gov/topics…
https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
I just do not see it .. I see NASA dollars funding commercial activities .. not much about NASA going to Luna.
V,
You stated that Luna was ‘never’ (your word) a destination of the Gateway architecture. The article about NEXT I linked above explicitly contradicts this assertion. If you can’t ‘see’ this extant historical fact, I cannot offer you anything else. Perhaps if you were to read the original NEXT report it might convince you, but I tend to trust Day & Foust.
As for what the outpost/gateway has become (and still seems to be becoming) since its original conception…that is another (to some painful) matter.
My own pet peeve (okay, one of them) is the obsession some have with Mars as THE ultimate destination objective of all human space exploration, gateway or no. As you can read in the article, the original premise for the NEXT lunar L1 outpost (from whence today’s Gateway was sprung) was as an incremental stepping-stone toward access to the entire solar system (including Luna), not just Mars.
Other various forces inside & outside NASA have corrupted this infra-structure-minded vision in various ways. “…it is about Mars” is only one faction that got louder during the previous Administration’s tenure when justification was perceived as needed for the silliness of the ARM…especially it’s final boulder-grabbing manifestation (the one I am convinced began as somebody making a joke in a meeting…). Even the NASA Administrator who launched the NEXT effort (Goldin) in the 90s had his own sights set on Mars, thinking the Moon would be a distraction, but the NEXT team’s technical analysis of the broader picture (NOT just Mars) brought forth the idea of the cis-lunar gateway.
Folks are free to disbelieve the NEXT analysis & conclusions, but I still find their arguments persuasive…which is why I consider a proper Gateway wisely employed to be the best path forward.
Now, if the powers-that-be could only stick to “proper” & “wisely employed”…
When the gateway was first brought up it was specifically for a hub for the phase II SEP transport for mars. There was IMMEDIATE push back on what was then only a concept. Like SLS Orion having to try and find things to justify it so to with the gateway .. more and more it is being sold as something vital for luna when it CLEARLY is not needed at all for Luna. We do not NEED a gateway .. if you take the Mars phase II component out of LOP-G then there is absolutely no need for it to exist where they are putting it.
What you are describing (Phase I/II, etc) is but one denomination’s rendering of the Gateway gospel that sprang up along the way in the wake of the original 1990s proposal by NEXT. Before it got renamed as Deep Space Gateway (and later LOP-G) [What you seem to be claiming to be when it was ‘first brought up”] it was the NEXT Lunar L1 outpost, born of an appreciation of the logical, physical, and programmatic value of such (‘such’ being the original NEXT proposal for it, not later derivatives) a facility in such an orbit.
While one can obviously build an architecture of lunar return, exploration, & development without such a NEXT-proposed outpost (please let go of your Phase I/II obsession for a moment if only to consider the broader scope here), that does not mean such an approach is the best most sustainable pathway to both Luna and the rest of the solar system. One can imagine the early colonists in America attempting to settle the new lands without using any of the local resources to do it, too…but that doesn’t mean it would have been the best way.
I will try and dig up the youtube video of a NASA meeting relating to mars.. I do not recall the name of the NASA guy but from the talk they were having .. it was clear .. they wanted SOMETHING at a lagrange point for a mars take off point .. all the points that became the gateway and mars transport were laid out in this talk .. a couple YEARS before anything else done .. this talk took place after the second shuttle accident and after the President Bush announced the Vision .. so for me it was clear as crystal that elements at NASA wanted this for MARS .. there were absolutely NO mention of anything Lunar or anything asteroid.. it was a pure hub for a mars launch .. so there is nothing you can say .. because I heard it directly from people at NASA that wanted a hub by the moon to go to mars.. period ..
V,
Note the date of what you are citing here: post-2003 (“the second shuttle accident”). NEXT’s outpost proposal happened in the early-mid 90s. What you are describing is one of the pathways that accreted around/mutated from the original outpost concept, something I have acknowledged from the beginning (I should have noted that said accretions began in the wake of VSE (Moon, Mars, & Beyond) and continued into the Obama Admin (SLS & ARM) and now the current Admin (Back to the Moon…again).
You said it was NEVER Luna. The 90s NEXT L1 Outpost explicitly includes the possibility/likely intention of supporting lunar surface operations (and other functions supporting cis-lunar space & beyond). Gateway was a relabeling of the NEXT Outpost idea with alternate ‘priorities/purposes’ attached down through the years.
Therefore, your original ‘never Luna’ assertion was incorrect. It is that simple.
And. at this point in time, it (whatever anyone wants to label it) remains a (pinch nose) ‘notional’ premise. Therefore, the original NEXT concept is out there for consideration for the sake of choosing the best possible path for ultimately enabling access to ALL points & purposes in the solar system…including Luna, a resouce-rich satellite which may serve itself as a Gateway to points beyond.
“so for me it was clear as crystal that elements at NASA wanted this for MARS .. there were absolutely NO mention of anything Lunar or anything asteroid..”
I think you have just used the magic words: “elements at NASA.” I have no doubt _some_ people within NASA were thinking in exactly the way you describe. But others were thinking of the Moon and others thinking of asteroids. The thing we are now calling LOP-G was never entirely under the control of the Mars people, even if they may occasionally have talked about it in that way. It was, as I understand it, a bunch of factions pushing for their interests and arguing about hypothetical designs.
I agree and NASA has a history of this very thing.. A original idea then has to add everything but the kitchen sink to try and close a business case.
See https://www.nasa.gov/featur….
The opening excerpt in the article is from the ‘Gateway Partnerships Memo’ authored by the head of NASA Human Spaceflight from May 2018. The link to said memo is provided.
Then see https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
Again, other functions are listed for the Gateway, with the source being NASA management.
Here is an IEEE paper abstract from 2018 from Boeing personnel—predating the LOP-G name change—which undeniably carries your preferred “Mars slant”…but still acknowledges the Gateway’s other functions.
https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
Again, even when Mars is advocated as prime by the particular authors, the other functions are still described as an essential justification. There are other references out there and nearly all of them, even when they push Mars as prime, include the references to lunar surface access support.
Your suggestion below that ‘everything else BUT Mars’ had to be added to sell ONLY the Mars objective is a (I would call it) delusion created by looking at the actual total evidence through red-tinted glasses. The unbroken data trail back to the initiating NEXT effort in the mid-90s wherein the outpost then DSG then LOP-G ALL included lunar mission support amongst an array of other functions…including eventual Mars missions…destroys any suggestion of validity to your ongoing proclamation. Just because a few people in various circumstances tried to sell ‘the rest’ as window dressing to a Mars effort is hardly palpable evidence countering the actual truth.
I suspect that a more likely possibility as a source for your perception of this false narrative is that the lunar-support element of the outpost/DSG during the Obama administration went underground at NASA (de-emphasized even in official materials & presentations) in response to President Obama’s Tax Day declaration at KSC that VSE lunar return was out and something else (say, Asteroid Visit/Asteroid Redirect/Boulder Collection…all of course in support of the eventual Mars prize…with Orion hobbling along and eventually Ares 5/SLS rising from the grave thanks (gee, thanks) to Congress) was in. I recall articles even here on nasawatch describing such a thing going on, of the actual engineers at the centers just biding their time while quietly still working toward lunar objectives until a new Adminstration came in.
Again, ‘never Luna’ is easily shown as being a false statement.
Is there any explanation, regardless of the number of bullets, that passes the JFK Rice Stadium speech test?
“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago [now 91 years ago], fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
“We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win….”
Can anyone at NASA make such a claim about the loony gateway with a straight face?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of lunar gateway. In fact, China has one called Queqiao operating right now.
It’s the implementation that is the issue. Get rid of requirement for a heavy lift launcher, require modular construction just like ISS but without specialized launch vehicles and suddenly it starts to make sense.
Queqiao is a communications satellite with no capability to host astronauts or to do anything else. That’s useful infrastructure for a far side operations but very different from NASA’s planned Gateway.
That’s the very point. It’s a communications gateway which is appropriately sized for very immediate and useful need.
You can scale the concept incrementally up from there from simple comms gateway, to maybe only robotic hydrazine refuelling dock, to whatever your fancy, including building interstellar ramjets and hosting zero gee olympics.
Why did NASA immediately jump to something that absolutely needs a heavy lift vehicle without clear trade of capabilities, needs and alternative solutions to these needs – i think we all know.
Also nitpick: Queqiao isn’t just useful infrastructure for far side, it’s also a perfect asset for landing on lunar poles, which are likely real valuable patches of real estate.
Be Clear, Be Concise, Show Benefit. Learned these words from an Former NASA Center Director and they left a mark.
Can we just do these 3 things?
Seems that we’ve struggled with this simple 3 step process for some time and this struggle is not unique to the current discussion.
If we can’t be Clear, If we can’t be Concise, and worst of all, if it seems we’re fishing for a Benefit, how in the world can you sustain support for anything? It does seem however, that some programs can do just that, i.e., ignore the 3 step process, and continue on their merry way.
Maybe the idea is not to sustain support, but its is just about keeping the money flowing during this Administration while waiting for the next one to hit the reset button again. Or until Starship/Super Heavy lift makes it irrelevant.
If Gateway was to be on the Moon instead of in orbit, would all of you still be pooh pooh’ing it?
That’s a moot point, since that’s technically impossible at the moment. I probably wouldn’t criticize a technically viable for a lunar base, but then again, I might. My standard is to look at the goals and see if the plan is a sensible and effective way of achieving those goals. An orbital versus a surface station isn’t a key difference to me. I might object to a surface station which couldn’t support further efforts. What bothers me is deciding on one approach and then trying to come up with reasons to justify that decision.