Selling Gateway: Caveat Emptor
Facing 2024 deadline, NASA issues a report defending the Lunar Gateway, Ars Technica
“On Wednesday, as NASA continued to press lawmakers to support an accelerated plan to return humans to the Moon, the space agency began distributing a document titled Why Gateway? The document summarizes why NASA thinks a space station near the Moon is critical to human exploration, and it was first shared internally by the Gateway program office at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The document can be read here. The five-page paper is not signed by any NASA official, nor is a point-of-contact listed. Additionally, because there are several grammatical errors and typos, it appears the document was rushed into production. Since it is not marked “for internal use only,” and it written at a fairly general technical level, it seems meant for public consumption, including members of Congress amid criticism of the concept.”
– NASA Wants The Lunar Gateway To Do Everything For Everyone
– NASA’s Advisors Struggle With Gateway Selling Points
– Bridenstine: Gateway Is – And Is Not – A Space Station
– NASA’s Solution To Operating A Human Facility Like Gateway: Droids.
– Former NASA Administrator Griffin: Gateway Is A “Stupid Architecture”
Let us hope that the item/program/spacecraft’s name has indeed officially been reduced to (since it is referenced solely as) just ‘Gateway’.
http://thespacereview.com/a…
I also hope somebody line-edits the document again. Just plain embarrassing, that is.
Will the rationale ever be able to fit onto one Power Point slide? Some folks in places of power find tl;dr to be their natural habitat.
Didn’t they say this was written at JSC. Poor grammar, spelling, technical errors-par for the course.
That document does contain some logic and a reasonable flow from goals to the need for Gateway. But that logic is driven by a number of assumptions. For example, using Gateway in phase 1, the first landing in 2024, will allow us to expand it and continue to use Orion in the sustained-presence phase 2. This is stated as an advantage, and assumes that Orion both can support a sustained presence and that it is the desirable way of doing so.
Actually, quite a bit of it depends on the idea that we’re too far along with the current plan, and 2024 is too close, for us to do anything else (than SLS/Orion/Gateway) phase 1. And that, once we’ve done that for phase 1, it would be wasteful and inefficient to throw all that away and do something different for phase 2. If you accept those assumptions, I guess the idea makes a certain amount of sense. If you don’t accept those assumptions (and I don’t), it doesn’t make all that much sense. The described phase 2 isn’t going to work, because it’s based on things that just aren’t going to produce what I’d call a sustainable presence.
But some things the document mentions just strike me as odd. For example, Gateway with a minimum habitable module in phase 1, will “provid[e] a temporary home for the crew who remains in orbit during the surface sortie.” What part of the crew would that be, what would they be doing, and why did we send them to lunar orbit in the first place? In the case of Apollo, the Command Module pilot did stay in orbit. But that was because NASA was not confident in automated systems, or the idea of docking with a vehicle on autopilot. Having an astronaut always in the CSM, with his hands on the wheels when and if necessary, was considered mandatory. Automatic systems and robotic spacecraft have come a long way since then. The idea of sending people to lunar orbit but not to the surface just strikes me as either bizarre or archaic. (And, no, I don’t buy teleoperation of surface hardware. The round-trip light time is only 2.5 seconds. Getting rid of that does not justify the effort required to get someone to lunar orbit and back.)
As a weight saving measure, the ability of the Grumman Lunar Module to actively dock was removed.
Another reason to do lunar surface rendezvous and refuel there instead with fuel landed separately. Having to carry down the fuel to both get down and back up seriously constrains any lander design.
This is a technique similar to we’ll need for Mars. No one is going to send people to Mars until there is a fully fueled return vehicle already on the surface (via in-situ propellant generation).
Yes. The Apollo approach of orbital rendezvous was based on the fact that they could not count on precision landings. It wasn’t something they could do, and there was no way to test it out prior to needing if for a manned mission. But that’s changed. The Apollo landings, from Apollo 12 onward, were acceptably precise. They are trying to manage precise landings on Mars for a sample return, and they aren’t too far from that. And that’s with a robotic spacecraft at a range of over 0.5 AU. So that fear of precision landing is no longer an issue, and objections to lunar surface rendezvous are archaic.
They seem to be assuming that without the Gateway, surface operations would be limited to 4 days total. It’s not clear why that’s the case, but as you say, if you just don’t leave any crew in the orbiting spacecraft then you don’t need a Gateway to make up for the limited life support aboard Orion.
From Eric at ArsTechnia
The document also provides some clarity about how long humans could stay on the lunar surface under the present Gateway approach—four days.
So four days is what you get WITH the Gateway. In fact, they spend about as much time transiting between the Gateway and the Moon as they do actually on the Moon.
The document makes the assumption that we have to go the way of the Gateway because Orion is the only option and it cannot do a Moon mission any other way. We are talking circular logic-we made some mistakes so we best keep going with the mistakes we made. It might make for more mistakes.
It’s darkly amusing to read their list of reasons for the Gateway and see that basically all of them are “we simply can’t modify any of the other hardware in time to meet a 2024 deadline”. The only exception is the need to keep crew in orbit, which can be avoided if the whole crew goes down in the lander and Orion is left in a monitored uncrewed orbit. But if you take that part out, then the Gateway serves no near term purpose whatsoever.
I greatly dislike it. If they build this, it will absolutely be a tollbooth on other NASA-funded crewed exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit. It will pick up a constituency within NASA and outside among contractors and politicians, and they will become a hostile force against any mission architecture that doesn’t include the Gateway (perceiving such as a threat that “devalues” their project).
You (and others, I think) have used the term ‘toll booth,’ but I’m not sure what you mean? I think of a place where very car stops and pays to use the road. Is this the sense you have?
The idea is that all future crewed efforts done by NASA will come under pressure to use the Gateway in their architecture, whether it makes sense or not. They’ll be forced to go through, forced to effectively include it so as to justify the cost it has on the NASA budget line.
That’s exactly the sense people use the words “toll booth.” If they build it, it will be a barrier to alternative approaches to lunar landings. People will ask why, since we spent all that time and money on Gateway, in order to facilitate lunar landings, would any sane person propose an approach which did not use Gateway? Admitting that Gateway was a dead end or a mistake would not be politically unacceptable and unspeakable. So any approach which does not use Gateway will face an uphill battle, and any approach which does use it will (potentially) be forced into a less efficient and more expensive solution.
“If they build it, it will be a barrier to alternative approaches to lunar landings.”
So… the crew on the Gateway will be able to stop SpaceX from simply landing Starship on the lunar surface? I don’t think so. Same goes with anything that Blue Origin eventually come up with. Or for that matter, the Chinese.
The Gateway will be the essential node in the network for NASA missions, and maybe for NASA’s international partners, but it won’t matter a damn to commercial actors. They’ll just land on the Moon.
I’d hope so, but Blue Origin is the only company (or Mr. Bezos is the only person) talking about going to the Moon on their own dime. SpaceX would be more than willing to take a NASA contract to send people to the Moon. But they aren’t going to do it at their own expense. That means using Gateway, if NASA goes ahead and builds it.
And even attracting investments or donations from rich patrons could be harmed. Before they were successful, SpaceX did have problems because the “experts” at NASA and the established aerospace companies were telling people Mr. Musk was just a crackpot. (Well, they phrased it differently, but that was the essence of it.) If NASA goes ahead and builds Gateway, how much money would go to some guy saying he’s a whole lot smarter than the experts at NASA?
Let’s break this down:
Orion can’t do low lunar orbit due to propellant limitations so it needs gateway to be able to go somewhere for crew transfer.
SLS is too far down development path to make changes so we won’t use it for anything but crew and let commercial build gateway.
International want to go to the moon but don’t have deep enough pockets to go without us so if we say gateway first they follow along like a lap dog.
We now are asking commercial to build a lander system that goes through gateway because that is the only place a crew transfer can happen.
The question isn’t why gateway but why any part of this useless architecture beyond the sunk cost.
If the agency really wants to get back to the moon in just over five years they should have by any means necessary scrapped it all and taken a fresh look at what makes sense not what we have pissed away billions of dollars and dozens of years on but sadly I don’t think gerst and others really care about achieving the goal.
Well, yes. The logic of this document is about how Gateway is critical, and it’s all based on the assumption that the current architecture is valid and can not be scrapped. In part, that assumption is based on the idea that scrapping it and starting over would take too long, and would not allow the required 2024 landing. If you buy that, then all else follows. If you don’t, well, then your someone who posts comments to NASA Watch as opposed to making the decisions.
Why can’t we be decision makers questioning the plan and posting on nasawatch?
Maybe you have more connections or authority that I do, but if I tried to call Mr. Bridenstine, I probably wouldn’t even get to, let alone past, his secretary. I can’t even get some of my friends, who I’ve worked with for over a decade, to admit launching Europa Clipper on SLS is a brain dead idea. More people than you might expect do read NASA Watch and these comments. So we might be making suggestions and offering ideas. But the actual decisions are made by people who got elected or were appointed by people who got elected. (Or selected by people who were appointed by people who got elected. I’m not on that list either, unless you count research projects worth under $1 million.)
The entire idea is based on Orion in its currently under-powered form, and yet ESA has said they do not want to be stuck building ATV derivatives because they have learned enough from them, so a couple missions, NASA gets to design and build a new service module too-and they’ve already spent the money and gotten nothing.
This paper also disproves the argument that it’s ALL the fault of Congress. The Congress Critters just want the pork to keep flowing to their districts, it’s NASA that is their partner in pork by offering them these complex architectures that uses existing components/contractors and divides the work among the NASA Centers that creates the stagnation. Dr. Griffin sold the Congress Critters on Project Constellation. Under President Obama it morphed into the current mess of SLS/Orion/Gateway with the white elephant of the ISS burning money forever.