Where Is NASA's Plan For Sustainable Moon/Mars Exploration? (Update)
Keith’s 10 Dec update: ; I asked Jim Bridenstine today if this report has been delivered. He replied that it has not.
Findings from the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group Preliminary Draft, 4 December 2019
“At the 6th meeting of the National Space Council, the following recommendation was adopted: “Within 60 days, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator will designate an office and submit a plan to the Chairman of the National Space Council for sustainable lunar surface exploration and development, including necessary technologies and capabilities, to enable initial human missions to Mars.”
Remarks by Vice President Pence at the Sixth Meeting of the National Space Council, 20 August 2019
‘And I recommend to the public’s attention the public record that you will find that we are setting specific timelines for the Administrator in the next 60 days to designation of an office and submission of a plan for a sustainable lunar surface exploration and the development of crewed missions to Mars.”
Keith’s 6 Dec note: The 6th meeting of the National Space Council took place on 20 August 2019. The 60 day due date would therefore have been 19 October. It has been 47 51 days since the due date passed. Has anyone seen this report? Was it ever delivered? If not, when will it be delivered?
– Dear Colleague Letter From The Lunar Exploration Analysis Group On The Proposed NASA Budget Amendment, earlier post
– The Planetary Science Community Is Split On Artemis/Moon2024, earlier post
LOL…..Title….LOL…
Mr. Lovarro needs to get busy. In reality this was needed 15 years ago when NASA was looking at Orion and SLS configurations so that they were not wasting time on configurations that would have little to no value in the long term. Now they have expended 15 years and tens of billions on a design that really cannot support the missions without significant upgrades and mods.
We have already lost that battle and will be continuously be reinventing the wheel going forward.
I just recently discovered that the guy in charge of “exploration integration” is yet another Flight Director who needed a job because there were a few too many Flight Directors. If you want to strategize exploration then it might have helped to have someone with a science background and experience and the ability to strategize long term exploration goals. Yet another example of the undue influence of the operations community on long term human spaceflight. Sorry it is not the same thing as building a checklist.
I’m not sure I agree with that use of “operations community.” If we’re talking about anything sustainable, it’s going to be an operational system, not a research/development/X-vehicle sort of thing. So you do want people who know how to operate a system and make a new system operational rather than experimental.
_But_ that does mean a whole lot more than following a checklist, or even writing a new one for an established system. Every Shuttle flight was different, and the schedules and checklists were all one-off things people like the flight directors wrote. But that was a well established task. There was, in effect, a checklist for how to write the checklist. That’s the sort of job I expect from United Airlines, and they’ve got good people to do that sort of thing. But I expect something different from Boeing, when it comes to what sort of narrow-body aircraft I’ll be flying on in twenty years. I expect the people involved to know and understand what makes the vehicles operable but to do things which go beyond simply operating an existing system.
I am all for getting operations involved in the engineering once the vehicle has been designed, certified, tested and is flying. I am not for operations managers (flight directors) being moved into engineering DDT&E management functions when they have zero experience in those functions.
The problem is that the design can make a system much harder or much easier to operate, depending on the details. Those details may not be obvious to someone who’s never used a similar system. I see this problem all the time, especially in software development. Requirements and designs are set by people who aren’t users, based on what the think the users would want. That doesn’t work well. I think it’s much better to have the users deep in the design process from the start. That is, however, very different from putting them in charge despite a lack of relevant experience.
Designers understand that ‘users’ and ‘clients’ aren’t always the same person.The design of a new community, for instance, places improvements where I think they would be best appreciated. And every time I get started writing another set of HOA documents, I pity the homeowners slogging through them!
Keep in mind that the client (usually developers) respond the historical market preferences, as best they can. This is entirely what drives the proliferation of golf course communities, for instance.
Yes, and I think that’s part of my concern. The users, customers and designers are often different people with different priorities. In the case of developing a community, that can easily mean the designers will do what the developers consider profitable. Even if the future residents would hate those details.
Someone once came up with an idea I liked. The designers of a community should sign up to live there. At least a certain fraction of them for a significant number of years. That’s like asking a modern worker who builds aircraft to fly on the planes he built. Or someone designing spacecraft to swear he would fly on the vehicle he designed.
Especially when the designers have never had to operate and maintain systems like what they are designing. I’ve seen aerospace systems with access panels that could only be reached by standing on your head!
That is what an experienced system engineer who has operational experience does.
I was replying to a comment that operations people should only be involved _after_ “the vehicle has been designed, certified, tested and is flying.” That would exclude system engineers with operational experience. That’s what I was objecting to.
“Every Shuttle flight was different, and the schedules and checklists were all one-off things people like the flight directors wrote. But that was a well established task. There was, in effect, a checklist for how to write the checklist.”
One of the ways that we’ll know that we actually have a sustainable exploration program is when there are standard checklists to follow. If NASA were flying 100 times per year instead of less than 10, you’d see that sort of thing start to happen because it simply becomes unsustainable for every “taxi” trip to LEO, or landing on a prepared surface on the moon to have a different checklist for each and every mission.
When your operations people come from an environment where every mission is a snowflake with a completely different shape, I fear what kind of influence that will have on something like building spacecraft (e.g. the first Orion mission won’t have a docking port on it, which made it nearly impossible to consider launching that mission on anything but SLS).
Yes, no and thanks. What you wrote made me think and refine my opinion. I’m saying you want a real expert at operations involved in development. Someone like John Aaron. He was very definitely an operations guy. But he also knew exactly why the checklist was written the way it was, could improvise, and could invent a new checklist in the case of an emergency. I think that’s exactly the sort of person you would want during the development of a new spacecraft. Putting a robotic check-box checker in charge is a bad idea, but getting people who actually know how things work in practice is a good one.
What you need is someone who understands the big picture, from basic science to operations to exactly why we are there in the first place, especially if anyone wants this endeavor to be sustainable. No one seems to understand the 50 year plan much less the 4 year plan, and the past 50 years proves that. No one in the position of providing funding understands it either. And we will get the program we deserve because of this hubris and lack of vision and understanding.
Part of the problem is that it takes NASA so long to implement a design that the original designers are basically retiring when it starts to actually fly. Look at SLS/Orion, roots go back to 2005 (Ares V, Orion) and it will be about 20 years later before it actually goes to the Moon.
ISS is another, work started in 1983 and the first element didn’t launch until 1998, It was finally finished in 2011, 28 years later.
NASA really needs to shorten its development cycles if it wants to get things accomplished.
And this all boils down to the problem of “WHY” we are there in the first place. Doing science alone will never get human populations or industry or anything else in mass off Earth.
Nope it won’t, and that is what is driving Blue Origin and SpaceX, business opportunities in space. They are there when you get the launch costs down.
That’s true, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think NASA has gotten lost a few times, due to those long, multi-decade programs. The Shuttle, as originally envisioned, was supposed to lower costs and help build a sustainable presence in orbit (along the lines of von Braun’s massive space stations.) And the point of that presence in low Earth orbit was to build spacecraft of the size and capabilities needed to support a major presence on the Moon and trips to Mars.
But all that was so far down the line, that I think the near-term objectives turned into goals in and of themselves. The Shuttle wasn’t developed as a tool for sustainable presence in orbit. It was developed to develop a space shuttle. The decision to build a space station (back when it was Freedom not ISS) was made for the purpose of building a space station. They actually had to put out RFIs and commission studies to decide what the space station should do _after_ deciding to build one. And on-orbit construction of large spacecraft seems to have completely disappeared from the plans.
Sounds like a bureaucracy on autopilot. Next thing you know they will start a 20 year program building and operating an international space station by the Moon just because they feel comfortable with space stations. ?
They said it was sustainable, isn’t that enough?
I think Bridenstine has the real plan for a sustainable Moon/Mars architecture in the bottom drawer of his desk, under lock and key. It is much more viable than any of his predecessors had, including George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush with their Administrators, due to the rise in capability of private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. But it is under lock and key because politics. What becomes of the 2024 deadline totally depends on the 2020 presidential election. After the election, we shall see what direction NASA will go in – still to the moon hopefully, but by which method. And no matter which party wins, his real plan (with private launch providers) will still be the one that works.
I am most interested in the overall architecture and mission design for
moon landings & take offs. My first and foremost question. What will we use for Propulsion Systems? If left up to the individual companies, we may end up with different approaches. Apollo used hypergolic fuel & oxidizer and it was very effective. Nowadays, I am not sure however, because at least Blue Origin’s moon lander is supposed to use Liquid Hydrogen & Liquid Oxygen. Presumably, SpaceX will use the Dracos & Super Dracos and build us a moon lander. What are the spacecraft’s performance specs, dry mass, fuel load, etc. to get two people to the surface and back up?