NASA's Fourth Plan To Return Humans To The Moon
NASA Administrator Hosts Media, Industry Forum on Lunar Exploration Plans, NASA
“NASA invites media to its headquarters in Washington Thursday, Feb. 14, to learn more about agency partnership opportunities with American companies to develop reusable systems that can land astronauts on the Moon. Events will begin with a media roundtable at 12:30 p.m. EST with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of the agency’s Human Exploration and Operations Missions Directorate, and Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.”
NASA has taken a significant step toward human landings on the Moon, Ars Technica
“For two years, the Trump administration has made various noises about returning humans to the Moon. There have been bill signings with Apollo astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt. Vice President Mike Pence has traveled to NASA facilities around the country to make speeches. And the president himself has mused about the Moon and Mars. However, beyond talk of returning humans to the Moon, much of the country’s civil space policy and budgeting priorities really hadn’t changed much until late last week. On Thursday, NASA released a broad agency announcement asking the US aerospace industry for its help to develop large landers that, as early as 2028, would carry astronauts to the surface of the Moon.”
Partnerships Between NASA and Industry Can Support Lunar Exploration, Say Two New Reports, NAS
“However, the two reports find that the activities undertaken to date, although aligned with community consensus for lunar science priorities, do not replace missions recommended in the National Academies’ most recent planetary science decadal survey and remain subject to many unknowns, such as the ability of standardized commercial lunar landers to interface with complex science payloads.”
The sad thing is nothing has been taken into account with
this new venture that counters the reasons why the other three were canceled?
So how can anyone expect this to progress any farther? As the old saying goes –
“The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”
But this time, we’ll keep SLS/Orion and use it to build Lunar Gateway (in the wrong location for supporting lunar landing missions). But, we’ll make up for the many billions spent on SLS/Orion/Gateway by saddling the lunar lander with the necessary delta-V in order to make the whole thing work. Brilliant!
What exactly is a better location to support lunar landing operations? And I mean better over-all, not just the lunar landing leg.
Low lunar orbit. Check out the location of Gateway and the delta-V needed to get from there to the surface and back. Now compare that to the delta-V needed to get from a low lunar orbit to the surface and back to low lunar orbit (i.e. what the Apollo LEM did).
Do we envision an orbiting support service station for each planetary body we want to explore?
Except for the “orbiting” part, we have some sort of support service facilities for every city we visit. It may be nice to have a big RV for cross-country trips, but try driving it into New York City and parking it there. You’re much better off parking it in the suburbs and taking the subway into Manhattan.
Some of the most interesting sites are near the poles, it isn’t clear what the inclination of the DSG orbit is or whether it supports polar exploration. Presumably it would be a docking point for reusable landers, however it is not clear why it would have to be continuously or even intermittently manned. Why not store the landers on the lunar surface instead and launch one into orbit to rendezvous with an approaching spacecraft?
Access to the lunar poles from Gateway looks likely. I still can’t find any hard data on the planned orbit, but it’s either a Lagrange halo orbit or a “highly elliptical near-rectilinear” orbit (which isn’t properly a L1 or L2 halo orbit, but does seem to be a three-body sort of orbit…) Either one would give reasonable access to the poles.
The idea of basing the surface-to-orbit boats on the surface is an interesting one. But it also opens a can of worms. I can see advantages. There are no station keeping or orbital stability issues for a surface facility. Mass for radiation shielding is just a shovel full of regolith away. But I can also see disadvantages. The thermal environment on the surface is much more variable than it is in lunar orbit. That means storing hydrogen and oxygen produced in situ would be more difficult. A surface facility would also tie operations to one location on the Moon, while an orbital facility could potentially support landings at a wide variety of locations. (Although that could be mitigated by adding a suborbital hopper working out of the surface facility.)
I keep coming back to the basic problem: We can’t pick the “right” option without knowing what we’re trying to do. There are lots of possibilities, and they all have advantages and disadvantages. Figuring out which option’s advantages outweigh the disadvantages requires knowing what the whole thing is for. What are we trying to do? And saying “we don’t know yet” actually means what we’re trying to do in the short term is learn what we want to do in the long term.
Fuel.
Going from the surface to orbit to meet the crew mission, carry the crew to the ground and return them to orbit, then return to the ground to wait, doubles your delta-v requirements compared to waiting in lunar orbit.
Using 2.4km/s (LLO) and 420s Isp (HydroLox), doubling the delta-v quadruples the fuel required. For NRHO rendezvous instead of LLO it’s over 5 times.
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The exception would be if you could get fuel on the lunar surface. But that’s not (by any reasonable reading) on NASA’s horizon for this lunar plan. It’s strictly Apollo-done-badly.
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This isn’t a defence of LOP-G. It remains a stupid concept. Any fuel needed for station-keeping in LLO is dwarfed by the extra fuel required for the lander to start/finish in NRHO. You’re looking at upwards of 50% more fuel for the lander compared to LLO. Much more than a km/s of extra delta-v per mission vs a few tens of m/s per year between missions. (Forget hypergolics, using cold-gas thrusters for orbital maintenance would use less fuel. I swear to god, 73s cold nitrogen thrusters in LLO vs 400s+ hydrolox main engines in NRHO, the thrusters win.)
If you were planning on operating a base (and really returning to the Moon “to stay,” as in a permanent presence) storing the fuel on the surface wouldn’t double the delta-v. The surface-to-orbit boat goes up with the departing crew, meets their replacements in orbit, and takes the new crew down.
I wasn’t. Nor is this NASA proposal. (Indeed, mention it and you get shouted down because it restricts site access.)
And NASA’s architecture doesn’t “exchange crews”. One mission every couple of years, with a huge stretch goal of one per year.
If the fuel is coming from Earth, then to stockpile it on the surface means launching the shuttle/lander to retrieve the fuel from the incoming fuel-ferries, then land it back on the surface. That’s your doubling. Same total mass transiting each leg, too.
If you have ISRU fuel production on the surface, then and only then are you’re better off having the shuttle/lander on the surface between missions. But that’s also not NASA’s proposal.
Mars has two that are ready made, Phobos and Deimos. In the old science fiction stories (Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlien) you would transfer from your interplanetary liner to the surface shuttles at one or the other.
I would say no. For Mars, it’s easier just to land than it is to put something into orbit. Naturally we’ll want small things in orbit (like communications relay satellites that double as weather/observation satellites). But putting any sort of heavy (i.e. “crewed”) infrastructure in Mars orbit seems daft from a delta-V point of view.
It depends. Can I get water (and therefore hydrogen and oxygen for propellent) on Phobos or Deimos? Ripping water out of hydrated rocks isn’t my idea of fun, but it might be possible. If so, that changes things.
I also don’t like the idea of landing and launching complete hotels (or habitats.) I’d rather leave the accommodations for the Earth-to-Mars trip in space, and the accommodations for the Mars base on the surface. That means transferring passengers and cargo from the Earth-to-Mars craft to a landing boat, and that sort of implies some orbital infrastructure. If the Earth-to-Mars vehicle uses electric propulsion or cycling orbits, you wouldn’t want to get closer than a very, very high Mars orbit.
Why? The Earth-to-Mars ship is a space hotel. Put it in Mars orbit and it’s a space station. Why does the ground-shuttle need additional infrastructure? Perhaps it docks with a solar array, beefier comms system, etc, while in orbit, sure okay, but why does it need a space hotel in Mars orbit in additional to the space hotel coming from Earth?
If there’re people in orbit, they are in the Earth-to-Mars space hotel. If there are not, no space hotel is required.
But on Mars, everyone assumes any decent human presence will have fuel production on the ground, so you would keep the shuttle on the ground between missions. It restricts you to one or limited sites, but that’s where the fuel is coming from, so those are the sites you are limited to. (If Phobos is somehow an easy source for fuel, then and only then would you keep the lander in space, and then you’d keep it at Phobos, not in orbit.)
Yes, that’s a good point. I was making some additional assumptions. I was thinking the Earth-Mars ship would want or need some extra things, beyond transferring passengers and cargo to an orbit to surface boat. Things like refueling and maintenance, which could easily require some sort of on-orbit facilities. But, now that you mention it, refueling doesn’t inherently require an orbital tank farm; a tanker flight from the surface might do. And regular maintenance could be deferred and only done when the Earth-Mars vehicle was back at Earth. I suspect it could work either way, and it isn’t clear which way would be best.
What is becoming clear to me is that this whole discussion involves people with preconceived ideas. I’ve got unspoken assumptions and ideas in the back of my head, and so does everyone else. And I think we’re also all guessing and we’re probably all wrong. It takes a fair amount of operational experience before people actually know what they’re talking about, and we don’t have that. Consider the history of aviation. When some guy said they could put more planes on an aircraft carrier by making the wings fold up, I strongly suspect someone said that folding wings were something only a lunatic would consider.
Why would having an orbital station that requires maintenance help you maintain the Earth-to-Mars ship?
I mean where do the supplies for maintenance come from? The ship from Earth. Where are the maintenance crew? On the ship from Earth. What have they been doing for the entire trip from Earth?…
Putting a station in Mars orbit would just add another thing this incoming crew needs to service before they can descend to Mars proper.
(A fuel depot. Okay. But then we’re back to “keep it on the ground or keep it in orbit” argument. And I think keeping the fuel on the ground would be easier than low-loss orbital fuel depot.)
Trade studies are supposed to solve that. But somehow the weird assumptions seem to still slip in.
[Amongst space enthusiasts, I keep banging my head against the wall with people who talk about domes on moon/Mars, who will not accept that domes are bad pressure-vessels. Or propose lowering air pressure (and increasing oxygen %) to “simplify” engineering, who won’t accept NASA’s own research into the massively increased fire risk. Or NEP over SEP anywhere inside of Jupiter’s orbit (reactors aren’t massless, dammit.)]
I’m confused. I thought NASA found the fire risk acceptable for running a partial-pressure pure oxygen atmosphere (i.e. 21% of Earth pressure, but pure oxygen). It’s only if you run it at sea level pressure pure oxygen that you get the enormous fire hazard.
Agreed on SEP over NEP, though. Nuclear should only be used if you’re using NTR, otherwise SEP is just vastly easier (you would need huge solar panel arrays, but that’s much less complicated than the size and plumbing of a NEP system with its own huge radiator array).
The solar thing isn’t quite that clear. Those big arrays do have to be pointed at the Sun while the electric thruster has to be pointed somewhere else (and at a varying angle from the Sun.) So you need big, _articulated_ solar arrays. And, above a certain size, they have to be assembled and checked out in orbit, not on the ground and folded up in a payload faring. With a reactor, the radiators aren’t as big as the a solar array would be and they don’t have to be pointed any any particular direction.
Forgot to add something back then that I wanted to comment on… quoting in full because of how jumbled the sub-threads have gotten:
Radiators do need to be pointing in a particular direction. You have to have them edge-on to the sun, ideally shaded by the body of the main vehicle. It is really the same problem as solar arrays, just from a different direction. Solar arrays are bigger, but AIUI steerable radiators are a hard problem.
No. I used to think the same thing. It’s a myth that’s common through the space-enthusiast community, and even people who work in the field. Not sure why it’s so common when it’s 100% wrong.
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We think of fire like breathing, but it isn’t.
Breathing is wet chemistry. It works the way we think, only psia matters. Dissolving gas in fluid depends on the partial pressure of the gas. Hence the amount of buffer gas (nitrogen) doesn’t affect the amount of oxygen in the blood. 3psia oxygen in the lungs gives 100% oxygen blood-sats regardless of whether there is 0psia, 5psia or 11psia nitrogen in the air at well.
Fire is dry chemistry. It depends much, much more on the percentage of buffer gas (and even the type of buffer gas.) So pure oxygen at 3psi is almost as flammable as pure oxygen at 15psi. (There’s a slight reduction, but the percentage is the dominant factor. Obviously at some point the absolute psi has to matter too, nothing burns at zero.)
Chart below from NASA funded research. The percentage oxygen for ignition rises only slightly as the pressure drops, but the psia of oxygen itself drops quickly. Lower the pressure and you need less oxygen to burn.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
And to really mess with your mind, I’ll add a graph of flammability numbers (lower is more flammable) for samples under different gravities. Note that the test substance gets more flammable as gravity drops, with lunar gravity being the worst, then it improves towards zero-g. (There’s slower convection as gravity drops, hence less fresh air, but more heat accumulation so it burns hotter. Initially the latter dominates, until gravity gets low enough that the fire starts to self-smother, but even then it never gets back to Earth-normal.)
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
The combination means that on Mars, and especially on the moon, you’d actually need to run high pressure (lots of buffer gas) but low oxygen, just to keep flammability the same as Earth normal.
Lunar gravity would have to be the worst for fires. That sort of coincidence seems to happen. Mars atmospheric pressure just happens to be the worst pressure possible for high voltage breakdown and arcing.
I think I just realized why the idea of oxygen partial pressure determining fire risks is so pervasive. It looks like NASA believes it. Lower total pressure and constant oxygen partial pressure have been used repeatedly. Apollo used it for all the successful missions. Every NASA EVA suit uses it. The Shuttle shifted to it prior to EVAs. I’m not sure, but I think ISS does as well.
From the information you posted, that’s not because that gas mix is exactly safe. It’s probably acceptable due to a completely paranoid approach to materials and their flammability. Let’s be honest. Apollo 1, regardless of the gas mix, was a fire hazard and an accident waiting to happen.
But people like simple, straightforward explanations. Pure oxygen at one bar is a straightforward explanation. Adding in frayed insulation on wires, forgetting that nylon and other plastics do, in fact, burn quite well, hatches which take lots of time and effort to open, etc. That just confused the narrative and doesn’t give that simple, one sentence answer people often want when they ask, “why?”
The latter is the explanation for the examples you gave, not that “NASA believes it”. NASA has extensively researched materials flammability under different pressures and oxygen levels since Apollo 1. It’s why the particular example I linked to focuses solely on plastics, the primary material for material used in spacecraft. (But I have seen similar tests on some natural materials, but didn’t keep any links.)
But such material paranoia doesn’t help with a large base. Especially if you want to be able to bring in off-the-shelf parts, like laptop computers. You have to be able to relax the reigns a bit. (Which is why, I presume, ISS is operated at normal pressure/mix, except with higher CO2. With only the suits and airlock module subject to pure oxygen.)
I mean the “it looks like” part. NASA does use those oxygen-rich gas mixes, and that creates the _appearance_ that they consider that a safe practice. It takes further digging, as you did, to find out that it takes intensive work at fire prevention and materials selection to make it safe. Otherwise, people get the incorrect impression that 3 psi partial pressure is fine.
This is a good example of assumptions slipping in. I think you are assuming a single mission, or a number of stand-alone missions. I’m assuming regular trips and permanent or semi-permanent residents on both ends. That’s the savings in doing maintenance at Mars. You are not constantly transporting the maintenance crew back and forth from Earth to Mars to Earth to Mars. Since just about anything might need to be replaced, you need to stock all those parts somewhere. Or have facilities to fabricate them somewhere. On any single trip, you would not need all of those parts. You probably wouldn’t even need 1% of them. Why carry all that on the ship on every trip? Sure, if it’s only one trip, you’d have to and a station in Mars orbit wouldn’t make sense. But once you start thinking in terms of many, many trips, putting the warehouse on Mars is easier.
With some redundancy and very limited number of parts, a ship could deal with most problems for a few months. That is, long enough to complete the journey to Earth or Mars. Once there, you could do more through and permanent repairs. By analogy, can you think of any form of transportation where the vehicle carries all the parts, tools and personnel required to fix every thing that might need fixing? Cars? Boats and ships? Airplanes?
On other notes, I like pressure vessels under compression. Piling regolith on top keeps anything from popping open and gives you radiation shielding at the same time. As someone else mentioned, low pressure and normal oxygen partial pressure aren’t a fire hazard. But the long-term medical issues aren’t well understood and it does cause problems for air cooling of electronics. And, even near the Sun, nuclear power can be less mechanically cumbersome than solar. But that’s usually not enough of an issue to drive the design.
Wrong, see my comment to TheBrett.
Aye, but which 1%?
You have to assume the worst case and have enough spare parts on the ship to repair any system, (and backups of those spares.)
You’ll need ship maintenance crew on the trip to/from Earth able to maintain every system, because you don’t know what could go wrong during the trip. And you can’t send out a rescue, or helicopter in a specialist repair team from shore to a stricken ship at sea.
And that level of maintenance is all they could do in Mars orbit anyway. There is nothing that a space-station in Mars orbit adds that assists
them in that maintenance. Even if they did have dedicated ship techs on Mars flying up to the ship, they’d be working out of the Earth/Mars ship itself and maybe their shuttle, an orbital station doesn’t add any capability. (Unless you have a full-blown shipyard and “dry” dock in orbit. Which, again, seems a little ahead of the discussion.)
I am assuming that we are discussing a NASA Mars mission. Not SpaceX human settlement ideas. Obviously SpaceX wants to land the whole ship on the ground; you can swap out whole engines, gut old ships for parts, etc etc.
I think I’ve lost track of what we’re talking about. This thread has included a link to a 1970 paper on the virtues of a halo orbit station, combined with the another comment asserting that every President since Bush Sr. was really all consistently and totally for massive, sustainable exploration of the whole solar system (as long as you read between the lines correctly and knew the magic keywords…) Somewhere along the line, I think I lost track of the subject… But I think this subthread came from a question about whether it would ever, in any case, be useful to have an orbital station at the destination.
My comments about that were not assuming a Musk world with a full colony, but they were assuming a permanent, sustained and sustainable presence on Mars. Say a scientific station with a dozen people.
In more detail, I think that would require a reusable Earth-Mars transfer vehicle. Such a vehicle would require repairs and also preventative maintenance. But that does not mean work done during the trip. As far as I can tell, NASA is currently planning on no in flight repairs, just making everything so reliable or redundant that it will work for the two or three years of a nonreusable mission. If they can do that, it would certainly be easier to make it safe for a nine-month, one-way trip.
But things could (would) fail. With a redundant system, the A string might go down and the crew would swap to the B string. The high gain antenna’s Ka band transponder might try and they might have to switch to the X band backup. Probably meaning voice-only communications instead of video. Or they might have to drop to S band on the low gain antenna, and relearn sending and receiving Morse code… None of that is mission critical, and the spacecraft could safely get to Mars with failures of that sort. So hardware and parts to fix that sort of problem don’t need to be on board.
But you really wouldn’t want to start the Mars-Earth return journey without fixing them. Once you are on the B string of a redundant system it’s no longer redundant. So I was assuming some repair and maintenance capability, in excess of what could be done during the trip, would be desirable at both ends of the Earth-Mars route.
That might not be a full space station. Now that you mention it, it probably shouldn’t be one. But the parts and equipment for inflight repairs are only a small fraction of everything you’d need for all types of repairs as well as preventative maintenance. So I do see some value in an orbital warehouse or equipment depot.
Heh. That’s why I try to include quotes rather than just my reply. (Sometimes I have to collapse other sub-threads to see what connects to what.)
As to your reply, I can see there might be some repairs that can’t be performed in-flight. But anything too big or complex to repair en-route is, IMO, too big to repair in Mars orbit when you’re entire presence is a dozen people.
I can’t see a dozen people at a science station having the parts/skills to, for example, tear out the entire backbone of your electrical system to replace it.
And if you design the systems to be that repairable, then we’re back to in-flight repair.
NASA’s architecture isn’t really compatible with a dozen-person permanently manned science station either.
If we want to spend the time and money learning how to aerobrake large vehicles into Mars orbit, then sure. That’s not my area of expertise and I keep seeing people online say that we really don’t know how to do this yet.
This might be a good Mars Dragon demo mission, IMHO. Just getting a Dragon (or Dragon 2) into Mars orbit via aerobraking would let us obtain a lot of data.
It’s a good thing to demonstrate in any way. A Dragon might not be the ideal vehicle, but aerocapture is really valuable if we could do it.
By the way, it’s aerocapture not aerobraking that’s tricky. Aerobraking is when you use rockets to stop at Mars, but only enough of a burn to get into a very eccentric, minimum capture orbit. Then you use the atmosphere to circularize the orbit gradually and over the course of months. We know how to do that. Aerocapture is using the atmosphere to stop in the first place. There is nothing gradual about it, too much gas drag means a crash and too little means not stopping at Mars. That’s tricky and we’ve never done it. Most landers do it in a sense. But they actually want to slow all the way down to zero, so there is no balancing act of getting just enough drag but not a bit more.
Not too low. Most low lunar orbits are unstable due to mass concentrations in the lunar crust and the resulting irregularities in the gravity field. If you’re thinking of a significant, permanent or semi-permanent facility, I’d suggest a high enough orbit to be stable for at least a year. When (not if) something goes wrong, having plenty of time to fix it would be a good idea. A year is my personal feeling about what constitutes “plenty of time.” (Although Skylab experience may argue for more time…)
But he did say “over-all, not just the lunar landing leg.” The low orbit does benefit the landing leg, but not necessarily getting from the Earth to lunar orbit. Does the plan involve using in situ lunar resources for propellant? Is it significantly easier to use them for the lunar orbit-to-surface-to-orbit leg that Earth-to-Moon? If so, a hit on delta v from lunar orbit to the surface might be justified if it makes getting from the Earth to the Moon easier.
But even that makes assumptions about the architecture. Would lunar surface rendezvous be easier? Or Earth orbit rendezvous? Are in situ resources viable? (If they aren’t, we may just have to give up on a sustainable lunar presence.) Should we start with a flexible but suboptimal approach until we learn more? I don’t think we can even start talking about optimal orbits for a lunar space station before we settle those questions. At least, not talk about optimal orbits in a meaningful way.
I always liked putting a station in a Earth-Moon L1 Halo orbit. Easy to reach from Earth, not too difficult to the Moon’s surface, and always available to do an abort from the surface to. Also always available for lin-of-sight communications.
Put a suitable telescope on your EM L1 Gateway Station and you should getting really high resolution images of the lunar surface. Then add a second one on the far side EM L2 with a relay link to Earth and you would pretty much have the Moon covered.
Then I would name the EM L1 station the Columbia Gateway, and the EM L2 Station the Challenger Gateway to honor the crews of those two Shuttle Orbiters. I would also design them to be expandable to handle increased traffic to the surface.
There are advantages to a station on a L1 halo orbit, but there are also disadvantage such as station keeping requirements. I’d rather know what the station will be for and what it will do, before settling a location. On Earth, harbors, train stations and airports all facilitate transportation, but you wouldn’t want to use the Denver airport as a train terminal. Nor would you even think of flying planes into Denver’s Union Station. Actually, my real preference is to do something quick, dirty and temporary. We need to learn more before we know what sort of lunar infrastructure is desirable; once we know that, we’d be in a position to make sensible choices over were to put it. (And, as far as names go, I think Ellis Island would be a fine choice for a lunar port of entry.)
And that is really the core of the issue. The SLS/Orion/Gateway is an architecture looking for a mission since the original mission, to have the Gateway near a boulder retrieved from an asteroid, has gone away.
The Gateway was not originally proposed to support ARM. It was just made to look that way during the Obama Administration since the Moon was verboten. The Gateway came out of the DPT & NEXT efforts in the early 2000s.
Not really. They did talk about operating lunar missions out of a station on an L1 halo orbit, and they did call it a “gateway.” But it does not resemble the currently planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.
First, the current LOP-G isn’t on an L1 halo orbit. It’s designed to have significant propulsive capability and able to more to various orbits. Even the “highly elliptical near-rectilinear halo orbit” frequently mentioned in connection with LOP-G is not anything like a classical L1 halo orbit.
Second, the NExT 2002 annual report (which NASA has on line) describes that station as:
• “Requirements”
– Docking capability for Lunar Transfer Vehicle and Lander and pressurized crew transfer
– Crew habitation for ≥12 days per lunar mission for return phasing or advanced system
testing
– Vehicle support (power, att. control) for Lunar Transfer Vehicle and Lander
– Launch on EELV or Shuttle
– Habitat delivered via solar electric propulsion from LEO to L1
• Preliminary Concept
– “Half-length” inflatable habitat
– Delivered to L1 via Solar Electric Propulsion System
– SEP remains attached to provide power, attitude control
That has very little resemblance to the currently planned LOP-G. LOP-G has no initial capability to support a lander (and no clear path forward to add that capability), is designed around a requirement to use SLS to get it to the Moon, and doesn’t use an inflatable habitat. So the NExT concept is not the Gateway we’re talking about.
You don’t need a comms relay on the lunar nearside. Ground stations on Earth are more powerful than anything NASA would put in orbit at EML1, even allowing for the inverse-square distance.
An EML2 station requires roughly the same delta-v as EML1 to reach any part of the lunar surface. (There’s no advantage in EML1/2 going to nearside/farside respectively.) And it only requires slightly more delta-v from Earth, less if you don’t mind the crew spending an extra week in transit (but outside of the VA belts). It provides your comms relay for farside missions, as you noted. And provides a delta-v advantage for deep-space missions, like Mars.
It’s not necessary. Maybe not even desirable. But if you (here meaning NASA) have some idiotic insistence on building an unnecessary “gateway” station in lunar orbit, EML2 is your best choice.
LUNAR HALO ORBITS FOR ADVANCED LUNAR OPERATIONS.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archi…
Interesting, but that’s a 1970 study which is mostly focused on the orbital dynamics of L1 and L2 halo orbits. Admittedly, the physics hasn’t changed, and Bob Farquhar can be counted on for getting that sort of thing right. (Actually, given the timing, was that 1970 report the results of his 1968 PhD thesis?) Also, it was about Lagrange halo orbits, and the “highly elliptical near-rectilinear” orbit discussed for Gateway isn’t a Lagrange halo orbit.
But a 1970 study has very limited value when it comes to the choice of a modern, lunar orbital facility. It looks like this was written as an alternative to the then-current idea of using a low altitude (~110 km) polar orbiting lunar station. In context, it all looks like part of NASA’s ~1970s era view that the Shuttle would dramatically reduce launch costs, we’d the build a hugely capable space station (closer to Von Braun’s visions than the reality of ISS) and then we’d go back to the Moon in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
In terms of specifics, the study you referenced did not consider many things. That’s only natural given the fact that it was written in 1970.
1: It assumed travel from low Earth orbit to a lunar or near lunar station, using either chemical or nuclear propulsion. Electric propulsion, even for robotic cargo runs, was not considered.
2: It did not consider the use of in situ lunar resources. That, especially when used for propellent, makes a big difference in choices about a lunar station’s orbit.
3: It discussed the station’s role as a communications and command hub at length, especially far side communications from an L2 halo orbit. The implication is that a communications hub would need to be a manned facility. (The report specifically said science from low lunar orbits could be done by robotic spacecraft, so that wasn’t a point in favor of a low lunar orbit station. By implication, that means assuming communications would require a crew.) Since we are no longer in an era where radios require frequently-changed vacuum tubes, that becomes a moot point.
4: The study noted the instability of low lunar orbits, which is a serious concern. But it was written long before “frozen” orbits were discovered. Those are low but stable orbits. In those cases, the orbits’ altitude, eccentricity and inclination cause the effects of mass concentrations to average out to zero. The option of using such an orbit was not considered in this study, since that option was not known in 1970.
I could probably go on, but I won’t. A 1970 study just isn’t a useful guide to a 2020s plan for lunar exploration. That’s true no matter how smart the author was. But I will note that the report also only compared a halo orbit with a low (110 km) _polar_ orbit. From the sound of it, that was what most people within NASA were thinking of in 1970, as the logical choice for an eventual return to the Moon. So the study in question didn’t compare halo orbits to anything else.
All good points. For me it goes to the next step for NASA after the first lunar landings. When I read a lot of old NASA reports .. it seems to me there was a desire to not get bogged down anywhere until we got to mars. Not in LEO nor on Luna … Kennedy was already talking about Mars for NERVA in 1963. I just feel like MARS has always been the real goal for a lot of people in both Congress and NASA regardless if it was never voiced very loud at times.
But a low lunar orbit brings along so many problems if you want sustainable support of long-term operations. One-off missions, yes, but not long-term support.
Depends on what you’re using it for. If it’s to support one fixed lunar base on the surface, then LLO minimizes the delta-V to go between that location and the base. That’s what I was assuming we’d want to do with Gateway, but I realize now that’s just an assumption.
If Gateway is to support multiple missions to the lunar surface that are scattered about multiple locations all over the moon, LLO may not be best (although a polar LLO orbit would work, you may have to wait up to 14 days for the station to go over your lunar surface site).
Picking a spot for Gateway without knowing exactly what we’re going to do with it is daft. The devil is in the details (i.e. the math). Right now the location has been picked because it’s the only location that Orion can get to and return to earth, because it’s propellant tanks are undersized (because it was assumed the Altair lander would take up the slack, and it does not exist).
Funnily enough, the third-stage NRHO-to-LLO ferry-tug thing that NASA is proposing for the lander could carry Orion that last part of the way. (And back.) It’s the same delta-v.
Of course, once you get that mindset, you start to ask why a slightly larger third-stage ferry-tug-thing couldn’t do the whole return to Earth leg and be refuelled in Earth orbit. Indeed, why not fuel up a tug in LEO, launch the capsule and a smaller ECLSS service module, into LEO to dock with that and fly that to the moon? And that path leads to asking, do we need SLS if it can’t get Orion to the moon and we don’t need it to get Orion to the moon?
The weird thing is that you could come up with an architecture that still “justifies” SLS. Just go bigger. A much larger, but empty, third-stage/service-module for Orion (or refuelable second stage for SLS) which is fueled/refueled in LEO. You get to the moon with excess fuel. So you use the Orion-stack as an uncrasher stage for the lander, letting you reduce the lander fuel requirements, allowing a fully reusable SSTO lander, and possibly a larger lander. Large enough to require SLS (and the LEO refueling system) to get it into lunar orbit.
Oh look, I’ve justified SLS. I’ve replaced LOP-G with an actual useful capability (LEO refueling and a large LEO-LLO tug), and I’ve created a properly reusable lunar architecture. Boom! Done. Go home.
But what are the space station people at Johnson going to do? JSC hasn’t done any orbit-to-orbit or surface-to-orbit work in over a decade, and not all that much even then. They’ve never done in orbit fuel storage and transfer. You’ve invented an architecture which keeps the current work force and skill set at Marshall busy, but you’ve left a good portion of Johnson out of work. Do you expect me to them to relearn the sorts of things they we’re doing fifty years ago? I think the goal is to find an architecture which let’s them keep doing what they are currently used to doing.
Sometimes I think it would be cheaper if NASA set up retirement gardens just outside many of the centres with little make-work engineering projects (“build a birdbath”), and just paid $3-4 billion dollars per year to selected contractors in selected states to operate and supervise them, rather than constantly perverting the actual space program in order to make a pretend space program for each of the centres to wallow in.
Nah, they’d get angry that they weren’t doing meaningful space work. I remember Zubrin giving a really angry address back in 2009 or 2010 that essentially called the NASA Administration patronizing for cancelling Constellation while leaving some funding open specifically to just keep the lights on and jobs going for those engineers.
I have a cynical suspicion that come 2025, the whole project will be downscaled to another LEO space station. ISS will be gone, a lot of work will be done on the orbital gateway parts of it but almost none on the landers, and they’ll be looking at years still before it can be used at all in lunar orbit. It’ll be awfully tempting for them to change it to another LEO station, claim that it’s a “gateway to deep space” and will use the biennial SLS launches to send up new modules and to assemble missions to the Moon and Mars, and so forth.
Politically it would be a big winner, too. The aforementioned JSC people could keep doing space station stuff, Congress wouldn’t have to raise the budget, SLS and Orion would still be going, international partners could use the station too – hell, even the commercial launch contractors would win, since they could keep doing commercial crew and re-supply stuff to the new station. Of course, the human spaceflight program would be mostly stuck in LEO for another two decades, but maybe they’d do a lunar flyby and orbit once in a while with Orion and SLS.
The only caveats are if China lands taikonauts on the Moon in the 2020s, or SpaceX does it. In that case I think the embarrassment will get the “lunar” aspect of it fulfilled in some fashion.
For supporting work at multiple locations on the Moon, a low(ish) lunar orbit might still be a good choice. Someone would have to check the numbers, but what about a single base and a vehicle capable of suborbital ballistic hops to take parties to different parts of the Moon? If you were clever, you could make it a variant of the lander, and if you were too clever for my own good, you might even be able to make it a backup for the lander. This would be especially attractive if lunar oxygen were available at the base.
But in effect, NASA is proposing one-off missions. They arm-wave “reusing components” from the lander, but their reference assumes, at the very least, a disposable descent stage. That’s not “sustainable support of long-term operations”. That’s flags’n’footprints, disposable missions.
Those same missions could be flown directly, without LOP-G.
Not to prolong a discussion which is pushing 100 comments and has gone off into a whole bunch of tangents, but…
I think the original article and comments were about how poor NASA’s current plans are. In that context, it’s reasonable to consider ways of doing things which go beyond the sort of missions NASA seems to be thinking of. And that could easily be sustainable, permanent presence. Or using in situ resources.
Sure, but it’s reasonable to point out that that isn’t what NASA is proposing, and therefore has nothing to do with the planning behind LOP-G, and therefore can’t be used by Bob to defend their decision.
(Also, I’m not really sure how LOP-G could actually support long-term surface ops. Certainly not as envisioned. Nor be reasonably turned into something that could.)
Perhaps you can answer the opposite question. Why is the planned orbit for Gateway optimal for lunar surface operations? I have not seen any clear, technical justification for that claim, and the orbit was originally selected when Gateway was interned to support an asteroid mission.
That means the orbit is:
1, suboptimal for lunar surface work
2, by an absolutely amazing coincidence optimal for both asteroid and lunar surface work
or
3, a rigged selection, justified by someone who was actually interested in lunar work.
In my opinion, 2 is very unlikely and while 3 is possible (it’s the sort of thing I might try) I can’t see anyone going far enough to compromise the original goals. Which still makes the orbit suboptimal for lunar work.
I’m also curious about how Gateway would assist lunar surface operations. Nothing about the planned design makes it look like a fair, let alone good, transportation hub or node. I’d like to hear a detailed justification for what it will do and why it is in a good orbit to do so. Or a reference to a paper on the subject. I do not, however, mean the largely content-free remarks in press releases or media interviews. I’m interested in the facts not the sound bites.
It isn’t but the gateway has a Phase II which is Mars .. it always has been mars .. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
You’ve said that before, but I’m afraid that isn’t what I’ve seen or read. All I see is some incredibly vague references to Gateway being on the road to “Moon, Mars and beyond”, and some graphics with Gateway and some more-or-less vaporware “Deep Space Transport” in the same picture.
Those picture, by the way, shows DST as a nearly featureless cylinder with big solar arrays, a couple antennas (which I can tell are too small) and a couple of round things on one end (which are probably supposed to be rockets, but aren’t shown clearly enough to tell if they are chemical or electric.)
Poking around a little, I have found some published work on selecting the orbit for Gateway. Except for a vague mention in the introductions, supporting Mars isn’t considered at all. Nor do I see any indication that Gateway is actually being designed to have useful capabilities for supporting Mars missions. All I can find is some vague ideas that, somewhere around the SLS EM-4 or -5, they would start shipping Deep Space Transport to Gateway, and Gateway would play some also vaguely defined role in supporting flight testing and shakedown flights of DST. I can’t find any mention of concrete plans for Gateway to actually support operational missions to Mars.
Don’t get me wrong. I think a station in a high lunar orbit could be quite useful for travel to Mars. I just don’t see any real NASA plans to do so, or to make sure Gateway is suitable for that role. No offense, but I think you may be seeing what you want to see. On the other hand, I may be being too pessimistic.
“I just don’t see any real NASA plans to do so”
But how many ideas can that be said about Congress and NASA and plans over the decades. Has there ever really been any plans to go anywhere besides LEO? Anything that got any real long term funding (NOT job program pork funding) but serious funding and not using FAR contracting? We both know we are not really going to go anywhere with Congress insisting on cost plus FAR contracting. At one time didn’t congress almost put a gag order on NASA when it came to taking about Mars? and again talking about Luna?
What does LOP-G add to a Mars mission? Any other high Earth orbit would give the same delta-v advantage, and most better.
There is no delta-v advantage. Going to a higher orbit, stopping there, and then going on to Mars can only increase the delta-v. Even if you can refuel along the way, you end up with a higher delta-v; you just don’t have to launch as much of the propellent from Earth.
It’s clear what it add to a moon surface mission, either, at least to me, unless we are talking fuel depot. Aside from that I don’t see what the platform adds to a lunar surface mission
Keep on saying it enough to believe it yourself, V, but that doesn’t make it true. Mars is only one eventual destination beyond among many.
Well I am only repeating what some in NASA have said .. unless the Phase II is my own personal invention and NASA has never been behind Phase II at all ..
NASA is not a monolithic organization. Was there someone within NASA (or some NASA contractor) who wanted a Gateway Phase 2, and wanted it to be all about Mars? That’s certainly possible, perhaps even likely. Was everyone within NASA firmly behind that idea? No, almost certainly not. Were (or are) the Gateway program managers or people like the Administrator or the appropriate Associate Administrators firmly behind it? It doesn’t look that way. It seems more like they are willing to say there will be some future use of Gateway to support deep space missions, but aren’t committing to exactly what sort of deep space missions.
The NHRO is NOT optimal for one-off lunar surface operations but it is a reasonable compromise for sustained operations to and from the lunar surface, in particular a polar base. [The stable maintenance of its orbit plane perpendicular to Earth in the rotating E-M system is one advantage with multiple benefits, including maintaining abort options, communications, and a manageable thermal environment.] It is meant to serve not only lunar surface access but also cislunar trajectories as well as departure (and return) trajectories to the Sun-Earth L points and other destinations. Various papers out there generated during the past decade describe these items. I have provided links both here in comments on nasawatch & over on The Space Review. A search on NTRS for NHRO papers will find a number of them.
As noted elsewhere, the ORIGINAL goal of the DPT/NEXT Outpost/Gateway (the language behind this is still there today on the websites and in the Space Policy Directives) was to serve as a steppingstone to/from Earth to/from (a) cislunar destinations (b) the lunar surface and (c) destinations beyond. While some entertained and perhaps even accommodated the use of the Gateway in the joke called ARM, it was only seen even in the papers that specifically discussed ARM as one of many possible options…even if the NASA public websites back then reduced references to Gateway lunar support to almost nil since, officially, the Moon was shunned as ‘been there done that’.
As for Gateway’s current design (such that it appears to be), it seems to me to reflect a bare-minimum crew-tended facility with growth potential toward…what it needs/ought to be. Whether or not it grows properly into what it ought remains to be seen. There is most definitely danger there.
Unfortunately, you are just listing a few advantages, not comparing the advantages and disadvantages of various options. That “near-rectilinear” orbit does give you access to the whole lunar surface without waiting for a once every 14 days launch window. But so does a true halo orbit. In terms of access to the poles, any polar orbit would also do this (although not for equatorial sites.) Thermal issues are the same for any high orbit (i.e. high enough not to spend lots of time in the Moon’s shadow.) Communications isn’t an issue since relay satellites are cheap compared to a lunar space station. Etc.
The idea that any lunar orbit is a good half-way point to the rest of the solar system is a myth. The orbital dynamics does not work. The only cases where there is an advantage are when you are interested in very near-Earth orbits, like the Earth-Sun L4 and 5 point, or if you use in situ lunar propellent in exactly the right way.
Nor does the current design seem well-suited for much of anything. It’s a minimal, man-tended station, not even as capable as Mir. It has no planned facilities to support spacecraft going to other destinations. There is no apparent potential for expanding it to have that capability.
As far as the NASA web pages, and the papers on the subject, no they do not answer my questions. Just saying “Moon, Mars and beyond” on a viewgraph, or putting it in the introduction to a paper, does not make it true. Nor does it mean the content of the paper considers those destinations or goals. It’s just window dressing. More to the point, those studies all made inherent assumptions (e.g. that easy of access from Earth should be measured by the ability of SLS/Orion to get there.) Finally, there has been a long history of studies about some sort of station in lunar orbit or a halo orbit. But we’re talking about Gateway, not previous concepts.
Moreso, you can perform a plane-change by going from a lower lunar orbit to a higher one, doing the plane change then dropping back again. (“Low High Low”.) This will, pretty much by definition, involve the same delta-v penalty as ferrying the lander from NRHO to LLO and back to NRHO for each mission, as in the NASA architecture.
That would be a long trip, and crew accommodations would drive up the mass of the lander. I’d really like to keep the orbit to surface trip short and shoehorn the astronauts into the smallest space they can fit in. Yes, that does assume a habitat on the surface, not living and working out of the lander. But that cuts the per-mission incremental costs and I think that’s necessary for a sustainable program. And, yes, a NRHO station has the same trip time issues.
Anyway, that low-high-low flight just feels ugly. It works, but it isn’t elegant. I just feel like there ought to be a better solution and, without one, sustainability is going to be an even bigger problem.
It’s literally the same trip that NASA is proposing for the LOP-G based architecture.
Really? I always had the opposite reaction. It’s such a clever way to reduce the cost of plane-changes.
It’s like High-Low-High for Oberth burns into interplanetary space, it’s such a clever cheat. It’s so rare that anything in aerospace actually gives us a leg up. It always feels to me like space travel is trying to be as hard as possible, as hard as you think it is, it will be harder. (See, again, my post on oxygen, pressure, gravity and flammability. Why!? Why does every single stupid little thing need to be so difficult.)
I guess the low-high-low plane change isn’t so bad. But it depends on the details. In some cases, I think the delta-v is higher than the simple, one burn, brute force solution. So sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it’s not.
That is because there are elections and the new Administration loves hitting the Reset Button…
Notice that the failures aren’t on politicians. It’s on NASA leadership to come up with a politically viable plan to do things in a way that actually gives some results.
Congress didn’t invent Ares I for instance, that total writeoff was entirely on the bright “engineers” at our beloved space agency.
But SLS was entirely Congress’ fault because they wanted the Ares pork to keep flowing. So they wrote SLS into law and forced NASA to morph all of the Ares contracts into SLS contracts.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin started NASA down the path of Ares/CEV, but it was Congress that forced NASA to continue that same pork only reworked as SLS/Orion.
I’ve been told it would be political suicide for the current NASA Administrator to tell Congress that SLS/Orion simply isn’t needed, even though that’s the reality of the current situation.
Pork barrel politics is ugly and wasteful.
YAWN!
SpaceX & Blue: “hold our coffee”
The problem is not that any particular plan is bad, the problem is it seems impossible to follow through to goal. Wherever Musk decides to go is most likely where we will end up going since our government appears incapable of planning beyond one presidential administration.
That’s the problem. We need congress to pass a law stating what the next goal is, it is irrational that plans which would take multiple decades to execute are created and destroyed at the whim of an office that lasts at most 8 years in the same hands. Bush – go to Mars, Obama – Mars is too hard, or something, go to an Asteroid, Trump – Obama bad, go to the Moon.
Your characterizations are oversimplifications. The current Admin is trying to more smartly implement what both Bush Admin’s attempted to implement, namely, an evolving sustainable pathway toward ultimately bringing the solar system within the purview of humankind’s living space & economy. Both Admin’s intents were thwarted in large part by NASA’s responses to the Admins’ offered vision…and I use the singular because the over-arching vision (Moon, Mars, & Beyond…in that order of expanding further-enabling capability) has been the same.
The problem (or, more accurately, a big part of the array of challenges) is that especially with Congress all politics is local. You are right: laws need to get put on the books not just for ‘the next goal’ (which as you suggest has been a ping-pong match) but for the ENTIRE strategy, with the proper sequence of intermediary pieces defined.
With the govt-private landscape now changing in reality versus previous promise, perhaps the time has arrived wherein the ‘conglomerate space team’ (this includes Congress) can actually do this with some success.
But I am not holding my breath.
There is a history of doing that, but it is based on creating the legal framework for private industry to do it. That is why the most important thing for this Administration to do is not fool around with any NASA goals, but to follow through on giving the DOC the powers to supervise private space activities.
The other way would be to use Comsat/TVA as inspiration to create a Lunar Development Corporation which would leverage and partner with private efforts by using Bond Financing.
But there is really no way an agency with annual budgets like NASA will be able to accomplish a high visibility goal that is longer then a Presidential Administration.
If you had said high budget, rather than high visibility goals, I’d agree. Most of NASA’s robotic missions take longer than a Presidential Administration (especially if you include development.) They don’t have a problem, since their budget is down below $200 million per year, often well below that. It’s when the budgets become a large fraction of NASA’s overall budget that things get limited to one Administration. (Of course, you could say budgets of that size are part of being a high visibility project.)
The flagship missions like the Hubble and JWST have high budgets, but are generally invisible to the general public until they fly. That is because the public, and presidents, tend to be only focused on HSF goals. They only notice robotic missions when they start producing results, especially eye candy pictures. How many folks outside of real space advocates could have told you what the Hubble was or about the New Horizon mission before they flew?
True, President Trump did try to stop funding on a few climate change missions started under the Obama Administration, but that was because they were related to climate change, a separate issue from space exploration. Look at the JWST, the only push to cancel it has been the threats of member of Congress because of the cost overruns. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations have been silent on it.
And that is also one of the values of the Lunar Development Corporation, it would move a lunar return into that low visibility category so it will be ignored by future Administrations.
You can also add the Shuttle and ISS. They survived from Nixon to Bush Jr and Reagan to 2020+, six administrations and six-plus respectively.
Even amongst major “visible”, high budget programs, cancelling programs every President is the exception not the norm. Precisely because Congress itself protects its favourites. Look how impossible it was for Obama to genuinely stop Constellation and move NASA to tech development + commercial.
“and counting…” should be added to the end of the headline.
My money is on Musk before NASA. NASA has a lot of people in leadership positions that have shown themselves to be less than capable (that is saying it kindly). Look at Gateway, which is a waste. Look at Orion which is ten years overdue for a “safe, simple, soon” solution, and inadequately designed because they wanted to make sure to include internationals building a module that could not do the job, so even if it flies in the next five years it cannot do the job and needs a total redesign. And what is the job? Repeating Apollo? Nonsense. Apollo wasn’t sustainable and neither is this kluge. And ISS, underutilized because of pulling relatively minuscule money from the user community to put into an already over-inflated engineering base; who made it too difficult to use in the first place. NASA had that all figured out years ago on earlier programs and trashed all they knew in order to put “the right people” in charge. The “right people” are clueless. NASA’s human space program is dieing.
It’s a struggle here to find anything constructive to say about this. The overwhelming temptation is to just <rolleyes>. However there does seem to be a bit more lunar stuff out there these days… away from the NASA purview. Maybe…
Could Boston Dynamics land a bunch of their walking robots at various interesting sites, equipped with some cameras and dust protection of course? I’ve read that BD is a bit of a scam, all the impressive videos are run from a laptop off-camera. But, what’s the problem with a couple of seconds of latency since they can apparently self-stabilize?
Boston Dynamics doesn’t use radiation hard electronics, or the sort of redundancy that can make radiation soft parts fault tolerant. I don’t think we can realistically expect one of their robots to last long on the Moon. But it would be interesting to see what they could do, if they teamed up with someone who did know about building hardware for a space environment, and came up with a new design for a lunar robot.
However the vast majority of the lunar surface can be reached by simple wheeled vehicles. There are rugged areas where wheels may not work, but legged robots have not yet been demonstrated superior, maybe BD can build some rock climbers.
That vast majority of the surface is a majority by area. On Earth, the more interesting places tend to be in more rugged terrain. The flat plains don’t contain as many interesting, geological features as the mountains, cliffs, canyons and steep river banks. I suspect the same thing is true on other worlds. So I wouldn’t bet that the majority of the _interesting_ lunar surface is accessible to wheeled vehicles.
Yeah, but Daniel’s question was whether a BD-type robot is actually better able to reach those places.
Walking up a grassy slope, or hopping onto plywood boxes, is a long way from navigating a canyon descent or rappelling a cliff-face.
Wheeled vehicles can hit some pretty off-road sites. And remain vastly, vastly easier to build and operate than legged ‘bots. Have a look at the extreme off-road events.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WHRg…
https://www.autoglym.com/bl…
And that’s before you get into tracks, extreme armature suspension, and lunar gravity.
BD had an impressive wheeled robot too, that can hop and climb steep slopes, in 1 g.
In 1 g
I don’t know how power-hungry they are now, but I think the earlier ones needed at least 10 Kilowatts’ worth of power to move and do stuff. That’s a lot of power for a space robot – they’d either need large solar panels with generous batteries, or a small nuclear reactor on board (10 KW of RTGs would be pretty heavy).
I bet the NASA budget gets raided for some wall construction funds.
The senior Senator from Alabama will disagree with you most strongly on diverting NASA funds (pork) to certain Congressional districts for the vanity wall project.
It’s not big enough to play a significant role. The NASA budget, that is, not the wall.
Unfortunately, Mr. Trump’s wall may have some impact on spaceflight. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the wall may run through SpaceX’ Boca Chica facility. At least, that is being considered. DHS and CBP to have requested access to do some surveying (and SpaceX confirmed this and said they were considering it.)
I don’t believe it has an “emergency” portion of its budget.
It’s defence operations budgets and emergency preparation (hurricane/FEMA/CDC/etc) budgets that are “available” to be raided.
I’ve been tied up with actual work, ant not able to post a question that’s bothering me. And as this thread is so long I may have lost my opportunity, but…
When I asked if we would build an orbital platform for each place we wanted to visit, I meant it humorously.
Exactly what does a lunar orbiting station bring to the party- that is, if the goal is to establish a permanent base on Luna? How does an intermediate stop, and dock, help? I’m completely baffled.
Effeciency. You need reasonable room for the passengers on the Earth to Moon leg, and actually habitats (maybe just barracks, but possibly apartments) at the lunar base. But you don’t need to haul all that up and down, from the lunar surface to orbit and back. Nor does the Earth-Moon vehicle need to haul landing legs or the mechanical structure need to land in even lunar gravity. Perhaps you could, and Mr. Musk certainly thinks you could. But it would be less efficient.
Now, if costs are dominated by the development of a new vehicle, then direct landings make some sense. But once you start having regular traffic and the per trip costs start to dominate, then I think specialized landing and Earth-to-Moon vehicles will make more sense.
There is a separate but related discussion, over whether you need some sort of station or whether the surface to orbit boats could just dock with the deep space ships. I think I’d rather say that depends on the details of vehicles and infrastructure which are beyond anything we can currently predict. We’ll just have to try it and see what works best.