Is There Another NASA Destination Pivot Ahead? (Update)
The date for the President's @NASA-related event on Moon->Mars issues is 19 July. Location is still TBD (but not in Texas). Odds are that this may be something at the White House itself – like the Nat'l Space Council event last summer – #StayTuned #ThingsChange #Moon2024 pic.twitter.com/57TzhlpxRK
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 13, 2019
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That would be hilarious. I’d feel incredibly sorry for Bridenstine and the other supporters of a return to the Moon, but it would be hilarious in a very dark way.
Live by the rushed Presidential space goal, die by the rushed Presidential space goal . . .
Best thing would be to set up a competition for a ‘commercial’, acadermia and industry partnership to build a largely self sustaining habitat on the Moon. Nobody is going to give NASA tens of billions $$ more, nor should they given how poorly NASA has performed over the last 20 years. NASA keeps spending billions upon billions and always seems to be another 5 years from flight. Others seem to be doing better. We’ll find out in the next year.
Administrator Bridenstine has been doing a lot of hinting about NASA doing a commercial lunar return, to stay. That would be a good day to announce it. Then NASA could dump the Gateway and focus on going to Mars, someday,
This would also fit with the leadership changes at NASA.
I am not sure Trump would want to challenge Shelby. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there’s no sign of such a change right now.
We’ll see.
I think he’ll say, “Fine, take until 2025 to develop SLS if you want. I won’t get in the way. However, we’re not waiting. We have capsules, and can have habitats and landers on the Moon’s surface by 2024 without SLS/Orion, for a fraction of the cost. I’ll redirect DOD funds, call it a Space Force thing, and get it done.”
Tell me that doesn’t sound like something he’d say. Oh wait, I forgot to insert the words “Best Ever”.
The truth here is that the Administration is starting to think about all DoD funding as a common pool that might be redirected to the priority of the moment. First the wall…
That would certainly be one way to bypass NASA HEOMD. And to precipitate a major political brawl. Not something this President is averse to.
We’ll see! Interesting times.
President Trump owes him a lot of payback. The only question is if it will be before or after the election.
He may well “focus on going to Mars”! But he better understand that we need some long-term data on the effects of REDUCED gravity on humans (male and female) before sending a crew on a “one-way” trip to Mars…one-way because without knowing the effects of reduced-g, a crew may wind up incapacitated or even dead! The best place for getting that data is on the Moon, and SLS/Orion/Gateway isn’t going to get it for us anytime soon, if ever! (Or, maybe, if Congress allows, we could ask the Chinese for their data, after they establish their research station in Shackleton Crater!
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
China has a lot of its own problems. Many factories are moving to Vietnam, their demographic time bomb starting to impact them, millions protesting in Hong Kong (and China hoping mainlanders are not watching), Muslim nations protesting the three million and counting Muslims in concentration camps. I don’t think their HSF program will make it beyond their space station.
You certainly may be right! However, in a controlled economy, it is possible to direct funds where they want to, rather than to solve a lot of these problems.
Regardless, I wouldn’t want to wake up to a “Sputnik 2.0” surprise just because we didn’t want to push hard enough…or at all! Remember the tortoise and the hare?
It’s hard for me to see how partial gravity could be worse than free fall, and we know that’s manageable for up to a year. So even if martian gravity is no better than free fall, this isn’t a problem for “short” Mars missions.
Partial gravity isn’t worse than zero-g. It may not be better long-term, but we still need more long-term data on g-forces less than Earth 1g and more than micro-gravity (zero-g to humans). If 1/6g over a two-year period takes care of the problem, even if the astronauts must exercise daily, then 3/8g on the Martian surface is no problem. (In point of fact, a ship enroute to Mars will probably have to have the crew habitat “spun” at 3/8g. If 1/6g isn’t sufficient, we may have to erect a centrifuge on the Moon to check out 3/8g. Any roundtrip Mars mission is NOT a one-year proposition, at least with current chemical propulsion systems. For establishment of permanent Mars colonies, data on long-term 3/8g is vital. The Moon is the place to start the research. If there are problems, then Earth is only 3 days away. The Moon can also show us the best way to develop techniques for in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which will be necessary to develop commercial applications.
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
Assuming there’s some basis to the rumors, I’d expect more of a methods pivot than a destination pivot. NASA as-is proved it couldn’t do the job in any timely way, so it’ll be reformed? Or bypassed for commercial providers? Or both? Possibly along with some redefinition of the job and of the timeline to fit the new circumstances.
Those are my thoughts as well. Solar System exploration, starting with Mars, on the current NASA budget through to at least 2022 (because THIS bipolar Congress will get nothing else done until then), should be the goal. Artemis was a non-starter budget-wise (at least according to a certain person who is no longer in charge of that part) and takes us in the wrong direction. It may have even been structured to come across that way and thus default back to the original, painfully slow and SLS-focused, LOP-G plan.
I expect that the Prez wants to change the plan so that it does not rely so heavily on the SLS development timeline and use the savings from (all) those missed SLS launches to fly commercial.
I picture that he will require multiple paths, setting program milestones and developing parallel contingency plans in case those milestones are not met. I say this because that is how CEOs build things and he builds lots of things. He’ll treat it like a hotel in a fast-moving, competitive market where things have to happen fast or not at all. He’ll basically do to the Mars exploration what Elon did to Starlink over this past year. Remember the mass firings in that program last spring?
(Chuckle) I remember some anti-SpaceX folks saying, “SpaceX had a sweet deal under Obama, just wait until the NEXT President takes over, he’ll put a stop to that!” The next President turned out to be a businessman who likes firing people who he thinks are slowing things down.
The fast plan to the Moon is dead! Long live the fast plan to Mars!
Well, it’s all guesswork at this point. FWIW my experience in these things is that the rumored “big direction change” speeches more often than not end up nothing of the sort. Just another non-specifically inspirational commemoration speech is the safe way to bet in most cases. This time? Given the speaker, less safe a bet than usual. Call it even money.
One quibble: Missed SLS launches would save little or nothing. The vast majority of SLS costs are program overhead that will be spent whether it flies or not. Program cancellation, now that would save some money. (Whether that money would then remain in NASA’s budget to be spent on other things is then the question – absent some sort of deal, SLS’s Congressional sponsors would be very unhappy.)
He doesn’t have the political power to cancel it outright. If Election 2020 leaves him in office, and increases his power, then maybe, but it’s still way to soon to read those tea leaves.
If the SLS mission continues to shrink due to commercial launcher capability, then Congress might decide to shoot the bird themselves no matter which side is in power.
It will be hard to defend SLS once Starship/Super Heavy is launching from Pad39a. Bigger, Better, and Cheaper will make SLS look like a joke.
The key to cancelling SLS/Orion would be a public “preference cascade” reaction against it, which would quickly peel away Congressional majority support for it. The minority regional SLS/Orion pork coalition depends on majority Congressional acquiescence, which would quickly vanish if it became a public embarrassment.
How many Presidential “rocket to nowhere” tweets and speeches would that take? The President does have the power to kill this thing. Whether he calculates it’s worth the costs is the main question. I would guess not, for now – but you never know.
Actually, now that I think about it he does have the stones to try and cancel SLS, and attempting to do so could certainly steal some attention. However, he is fully in campaign mode at this point, so I don’t think he’d do it unless he thought he’d found a way to spin it into more support with his base and center-right.
He doesnt build squat. All he does is leverage debt.
So who built Trump Tower, the tooth fairy? I’m saying that he will attempt to apply a real estate CEO’s attitude to it.
The best thing Trump could do is end human mission destination efforts for now, and put the dollars into developing and testing technologies needed for human missions to the lunar south pole and for Mars, and ramping-up pre-cursor robotic missions. For example, when is NASA going to send a lander and rover to permanently shaded areas in the lunar south polar region, to prove-out water ice obtainability and the ability of rovers and ice mining equipment to operate for long periods in an extremely cold environment?
Not nearly showy enough.
That almost sounds like Mr. Obama’s attempt to cancel Constellation and add the money to Space Technology and Commercial Crew. Unfortunately that also meant shifting funds from one state to another.
So Mars by 2028?
If you look at the AP-NORC poll, when asked “Which do you think should be a bigger priority for the United States space program – returning astronauts to the moon or sending astronauts to Mars, or should neither be a priority?”, Mars won by 37% vs 18%. I suspect Trump knows about this, a return to the Moon is just not enough to get people’s attention, so he had to throw Mars in.
But while his reasoning is entirely selfish and not related to space exploration at all, by some cosmic coincidence, his space goals are more and more aligned with Elon’s.
Anyways, if you build an exploration architecture from first principles, it should do Moon and Mars missions at the same time, I believe Zubrin is the first to point this out. An architecture that can handle Mars can easily handle the Moon too, and since you can only launch to Mars every 2 years, the architecture will need something to do in the mean time, the Moon is a natural choice.
I thought the new plans had Lunar exploration on the pathway to Mars exploration as we need to learn lots of stuff before we go ambling about in different places.
I thought the whole point to returning to the moon was to learn lessons or gain experience that we can apply in going to Mars.
I thought we’d “all” agreed that going to Mars now was Way too much of a risk.
Yes, I know Lunar experience is not directly applicable to Mars but it’s better than turning up on Mars with no off-world experience.
No. Perhaps you want to think that, but no. There was no such consensus and no tangible plans of that sort. There were some vague, nebulous statements along those lines. But I think that was mostly just to get advocates of Mars missions to support a lunar program.
Actually, if practicing for Mars were a goal, Artemis and its predecessor plans would have been structured to do things the hard way. For example, multi-month stays on the Moon, to give experience long-duration stays in partial gravity, even if the astronauts didn’t have anything to do during the lunar night. I don’t see any evidence of NASA going out of the way to maximize commonality with a Mars mission. They are doing things the hard way, but that seems to be driven by the goal of using SLS and Orion.
I thought the slogan was “forward to the Moon and Mars” ?
I thought we were returning to the Moon to expand human presence and to learn how do to things off-world.
If not, then why ? Why establish a Lunar colony ?
To go from where we are today to travelling to Mars is such a leap into the unknown that I can only describe it as fool-hardy.
That would be one of several slogans, and please remember that slogans are just that. They frequently don’t have much of a connection to reality. I also don’t remember anything about a lunar “colony” in connection with Artemis. The words I’ve heard are “sustainable presence”, which could mean a two-person visit once a year. As far as why? is concerned, I have no idea. I’ve heard multiple justifications. It seems like they are suppling enough to let everyone latch onto one they like. But that’s about marketing Artemis, not about the true, underlying motives.
Mind, any reasonable reusable Cislunar transport architecture can also throw substantial payloads to Mars on weekends and third shifts.
But yes, using SLS and Orion and “any reasonable reusable Cislunar transport architecture” aren’t a good fit either.
In theory, long-duration habitats and other Mars developed tech needs a shakedown period before expecting it to perform do-or-die for a multi-year Mars mission. Cislunar orbits are a good place to do that.
In practice, Artemis doesn’t look to me like it does that. The original LOP-G plan at least appeared on the surface to demonstrate that it wanted to look like it of does it…but the whole “we can’t afford to launch that pig SLS more than once per year” bit makes LOP-G drag on and on like a soap opera and thus seems to me to be overkill as a Mars tech test bed.
NASA astronauts would have landed on Mars just in time for Elon to walk up to them and hand them all beers made from Mars-grown barley.
The entire NASA leadership is so ossified it’ll take more than firing Gerst to shake things up. Maybe replace the heads of all the space centers? Plus their entourages? Fine by me if that’s what it’ll take.
Just to toss out a crazy idea, what about making the directorships a rotating position, like an academic department’s chair, and perhaps requiring they come different centers? A directorship is a management position, and technical expertise isn’t really a requirement. It would, at least, keep the director from viewing “his” center as a personal empire.
It’s hard to have a good strategy when you flap in the wind like a leaf.
Wow Trump is going to make an announcement on the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
Let’s run around like chickens with our heads cut off.
Expect Buzz Aldrin there with a pivot to TOR:
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
Trump coukd give 2 squats about space exploration. With him, its all about splash & dash for his base.
I hope it’s Proxima Centauri!
RE a possible big top-level push to do this thing commercially instead…
The thing about doing any crewed mission at NASA commercially is that it has to overcome HEOMD’s full-spectrum political immune response. The system first powerfully rejects any such plan, then if that fails, engulfs and assimilates it into something too slow and limited and expensive to compete against HEOMD in future. (See the ongoing binding down of Commercial Crew with a thousand HEOMD threads.)
Politically, it’s very hard to outright overrule HEOMD and bypass them. They still have HUGE residual public affection left over from Apollo, and to a lesser degree Shuttle. Unless they’ve very visibly failed. (And they’re quite good at obscuring and obfuscating their failures.)
I’d say the current Artemis/SLS/Orion mess constitutes “very visibly failed”, but I’m not exactly the average-voter paying-little-attention audience that counts.
The key question here is, does this White House see this mess as “very visibly failed”, and are they now ready (IE, annoyed enough) to invest some effort into communicating that to the public?
Past White Houses have typically shrugged and moved on at this point in NASA’s failures to execute their space ambitions. This one, as many have noticed, is different. So who knows what’ll come next.
I think you’re placing too much blame on HEOMD. Or perhaps not enough blame on others. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel has very similar views on doing things the NASA way, and they aren’t part of NASA. They are a congressionally-mandated, external advisory panel. And in other parts of NASA, such as the Science Mission Directorate, there is the same mindset that the management of a mission or a project should be in control of everything required for mission success. There are specific exceptions to that, such as the launch vehicle, but those exceptions are well-established tradition. You don’t see SMD buying a commercial Mars communications satellite (even though they could really use one) and letting the vender sell off half a dozen bays for random, unrelated scientific instruments. That’s just not how things are done.
ASAP members are appointed by the NASA Administrator. I’d assume HEOMD has made sure it is stacked with like-minded people.
I’m not sure they even need to bother. That’s related to the problem SpaceX originally had, and other “new space” companies have, attracting investors. People tend to consult the “experts”, and put “experts” on advisory panels. That generally means people with length experience doing things in the established way. It’s more of a self-perpetuating problem than something requiring work to actively rig the process.
ASAP I don’t regard as in any effective way independent of the established HEOMD culture. It tends to tell HEOMD what it wants to hear – occasionally, when HEOMD has been cutting corners from the established ways, more than it wants to hear – but ASAP basically sings from the same sheet of music. Appointed by the NASA Administrator, culturally captured long ago.
As for the rest of NASA, well, I don’t doubt there are other large deposits of long-accreted dysfunction within the agency.
But HEOMD (and its ever-changing alphabet-soup of ancestors) with their primordial urge to shape and control any and all means of human space transportation, inevitably intersect with my life’s work of pushing for radically cheaper space transport for all.
SMD I’m sure has its problems, but they generally don’t directly and damagingly impact the transportation side of things. So, I wish reformers there well – but, not my circus, not my monkeys. (Life may well be too short to fix any of NASA, never mind fix all of it.)
I guess my point was that it isn’t a “HEOMD culture” you’re complaining about. It’s a culture which is widespread in other parts of NASA and, actually, many of the more traditional aerospace contractors. You may see it most in HEO, but that may be because you focus on that more. I’m definitely not saying the problem doesn’t exist within HEOMD.
Well, we’re down to quibbling over the difference between “*a* HEOMD culture” (that implicitly originated there) and “HEOMD’s culture” (with no implications on where it came from or who else might share it.) The latter, FWIW, is what I’ve been talking about.
Mind, I could make a pretty good argument that, within NASA at least, this perniciously hidebound not-invented-here dog-in-the-manger culture DID to a large extent originate in NASA’s human spaceflight element, given how that element was both central to the origin of NASA, and also always the largest-by-far tail-that-wags-the-dog department within NASA.
But I don’t think I’ve said or directly implied any such thing in this discussion.
In the larger context, of course, much of the badness we’re discussing is quite common among long-established, results-indifferent bureaucracies of all flavors.
Oh, good. Now we don’t have to wait for the next election to start all over from scratch. The suspense was killing me.
Can we make it something new and different this time? What about an astronaut (female) floating in a balloon in Venus’ upper atmosphere? The launch windows are more frequent and convenient than Mars, the gravity is Earth-like, and at the right altitude above the clouds, the air is acid free and pressure and temperature are Earth-like. O.k. that’s a pretty pointless idea. But since it’s never going to get off viewgraphs before the next election and course change, why not?
Yes, the Administration’s goal is so much better served by causing enormous uncertainty in the entire industry – government and commercial. If they want to pivot to a commercial effort – the commercial people have the same calendar as the rest of us. They don’t have 14 months in a year. We are just running out of time (between now and 2024).
Why did we choose 2024 again?
Might it have something to do with an election for President that year?
No, commercial people don’t have 14 months in a year (even though some of them do work 50-60 hours per week). What they have is stable leadership and goals which has been unchanged for the last 20 years, and they also have their own resources to work towards these goals, independent of what the administration wants. So it doesn’t matter if there is uncertainty in the industry, commercial people are working on their own goals as we speak, they didn’t start now, they started years ago, and they’ll keep working on it regardless of what Trump or Pence says.
After the administration figured out what exactly they wanted, and if it just so happens their goal aligns with commercial’s goals, then administration can arrange to inject some additional funding with little strings attached to commercial companies’ existing efforts, which hopefully results in both sides reaching their respective goals faster, so win-win. This is how public private partnership is supposed to work.
This pivotal change is reinforced by many comments here about Mars. Reminds of what Paul Spudis wrote in his book “Value of the Moon” that when he was on VSE committee everyone discussed lunar exit strategy [to Mars] before defining a plan to return to the moon.
If they switch back to Mars, after choosing a Moon first path it will make a laughing stock of the US space program. It’s not that difficult to work out (i.e. it’s not ‘rocket science’). The Moon is a natural stepping stone to Mars, and near Earth Asteroids. Mars is a natural stepping stone to the main belt asteroids (think in terms of a crewed Ceres mission mid-century perhaps), and ultimately, the Outer Planets in the second half of the 21st Century. How hard can that concept be to understand???
Where the debate needs to happen is ‘how’ we get to where we are going – not ‘where we are going’. The NASA SLS-Orion-Gateway approach is not the most cost-effective or quickest path to the Moon. The best path is to give the space launch task to commercial space, and have NASA focus on making ‘in-space’ operations more cost effective. The money, time and effort spent on SLS and Orion and Gateway could be better spent on developing fully reusable ‘spaceships’ that are multi-mission. They operate purely in space, from a commercial space platform, and employ nuclear propulsion to get us to the Moon, Mars, NEAs or anywhere else in the inner solar system (orbital Venus survey?). At the end of the mission, they redock with the platform and prepare for the next mission. Have a fleet of 4 or 5, and suddenly, we are getting together the means for on-going human space exploration across the solar system.
Use commercial technology wherever possible to make such vehicles practical, and cost effective and because they are fully reusable, that would reduce cost compared to a $1bn per SLS launch plus cost of an Orion, and a lander. Most importantly, it would force NASA to break out of its Apollo era mindset and try something entirely new.
Hardware and mission concepts aside – the purpose of doing human spaceflight needs to be clear. At the most basic level, we need to evolve into a multi-planet species, and develop a self-sustaining and expanding human presence in space that is the basis of a space-based economy that adds prosperity and economic growth to Earth, and sustains human space exploration, space colonisation and resource exploitation. Its not about a ‘mission to the Moon or Mars’ by a certain date, or ‘flags and footprints’ – its about the future of human civilisation as a space-faring species.