The Path Forward In American Space – 2014 Edition, Dennis Wingo, SpaceRef
“I AM UNEASY. I resent the passive attitudes many scientists have toward the challenge of science, especially their passivity concerning the greatest scientific, technological, and industrial opportunity of all time— the development of space— a challenge so limitless and exciting as ultimately to surpass all previous human accomplishments…. I am angry that so many scientists do not voice the scientific benefits of the expedition to the moon, concerned that industrial directors in charge of tomorrow are tranquil to the future, disturbed that our non-scientific Congress is unrealistic in its reasons for space appropriations, and disgusted with scientific journals that have abdicated their responsibilities of leadership and fail, even, to present a point of view. Hundreds of important scientific and cold-cash reasons abound for going to the moon…”
These words could have been written by myself or a number of other space advocates over the last few years (it could also be written about Mars). However, these were written as the preface to a book “The Case for Going to the Moon”, written in 1965 by Neil Ruzic, the editor and publisher of the 1960’s era journal Industrial Research. The forward to the “Case for Going to the Moon” was written by Arthur C. Clarke. …
Before I read Dennis’ fine work “Path Forward…” this evening, I would mention that in doing background reading in response to the hearing on a 2021 Mars flyby and issues with SLS and Commercial, I read again Buzz Aldrin’s framework for NASA. In all due respect, his paper is all over the map and is not a coherent path but I do very much like his support of the idea of sending astronauts to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and maybe lazy-Eights around the Earth-Moon system. Such missions could be used to prove the subsystems of a habitat for the journey to Mars. It would also provide some chance of surviving a greater array of mishaps in contrast to sending humans on a 2021 loop around the Sun & Venus to flyby Mars. People claim that anything done with the Moon is just rehashing the “been there, done that” of Apollo. If all you do is an Apollo 8 mission, well yes. But extended missions of months need habitats including protection from space radiation. The latter could be better proven if the habitat is at a Lagrange or around the Moon for months at a time. Some of the robotic construction that could build a Mars base could be proven on the Moon but the cost of getting anything done on the surface of the Moon is cost prohibitive given NASA’s present funding levels.
“The worst possible choice would be to retain both programs and continue to loot the rest of NASA, including commercial”
Retaining ISS provides payload to the commercial program. The HLV is too big, to expensive, and leaves no budget for mission hardware. Adding GCR shielding to a re-entry capsule is not practical and a 20 day capacity is inadequate for a trip to Mars.
The path forward for NASA is quite clear: Build a DSH. Place the equipment needed for the year long trip to mars and demonstrate it in the proper environment at L2; components in LEO if practical. L2 Gateway in place to all destinations.
Build a LEO Zero Boiloff Depot and the required transfer stage. Include EP to reduce total mission mass. Work on other enabling technologies outlined in the Grand Challenges.
2.9B/year for a decade. If less or or shorter time, fantastic, If more incremental improvements required, fine. Strategically plan all the missions. Include commercial in the architecture.
Its now 2024. Make a decision on ISS. If the trip to Mars is practical, focus on intermediate steps or 2030. If not morph the transfer stage into a lander. The basic parts of a sustainable architecture are in place. Contrast this plan with the projections of the program of record.
Again, what is the purpose of going to Mars? I am truly interested in what people think.
The purpose of going to Mars is to expand mans technological capabilities which drives innovation and improved standard of living. If you think of all the ancillary things that have been made possible by space exploration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… it really is a no-brainer to continue in that vein. That this nation can come up with literally trillions of dollars to bail out fraudulent bankers (and not just in the US) and cry poor when it is time to do things like this is disgusting to me.
First, I agree that we have had a massive misallocation of financial resources over the last 40 years and my first two tables in the article make that clear.
Second, is that your first point is only conditionally true. A flags and footprints mission of the kind currently baselined for the NASA DRM’s actually sets back technological capabilities in the same manner that Orbital Express set back on orbit servicing by having a system that cost far more than what anyone would pay to use.
This is why the philosophy must be agreed to and then have that guide the implementation of any human spaceflight missions whether to the moon or Mars.
Rob,
But what makes Mars particularly suited for the goal of generating secondary benefits?
“We need big challenges to stretch us” is all fine as a general sentiment, but why Mars specifically?
Personally I see Mars as a trap. It’s the “challenge” of climbing a mountain. It’s all dramatic and big, but when you get to the top, there’s nowhere else to go. It doesn’t lead anywhere.
Just so, Paul. Going to Mars in purpose-built machines is a death trap for human expansion.
Good comparison with the banking bail out. And for just visiting Mars, it could drive innovations and benefits back on Earth but the cost of visiting Mars is too much for this budget and its wiser to make such journeys an international effort.
‘Good comparison’? Really? Banks were helped because to do otherwise would have set the economy back 50 years. There’s no comparison save scale.
“Banks were helped because to do otherwise would have set the economy back 50 years.” Pure conjecture and hyperbole. You need to study the Savings and Loan crisis. Hundreds of institutions were closed and hundreds of banker went to jail and the economy did not go backwards. The people were bailed out not the corporations.
Rob: your URL is incorrect; it has an extra right parenthesis at the end which results in an error. You might want to change it from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Let me respond once again. We are a day away from the first part of the Neil Tyson Degrasse’s Cosmos series. A hour before day light savings time, I am watching part 1 of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos Series from 34 years ago. Upon arriving on Earth, Sagan first discusses in detail the glory of knowledge that was bound in the great library of Alexandria. He describes the great discovery that the Earth is 40,000 km in circumference, by Eratosthenes, the chief librarian of Alexandria. Over 2300 years ago, knowledge and a perception of the World was known that took nearly 2000 years to recover. The great library was destroyed, knowledge lost, western civilization collapsed. It is a risk that remains today that involves of Humankind. Elon Musk with SpaceX, Mars One choose to go to Mars for the adventure and discovery but it is also a safeguard that Human civilization will not perish – by sending us out to other planets, our future, continuity of our shared knowledge is given greater assurance.
Amen…
Dennis:
Mars is in the far future, a future when easily available caravels sail the oceans of space, safe ships of proven technology and safety, ships available to private enterprise of sufficient means. Here’s why:
Why did the Europeans sail west? In the end it was the allure of spices and gold- profit. Those brave souls traveled, not in purpose-built craft, but in the same machines used for ordinary commerce, sea-worth vessels in use for hundreds of years, ships improved over countless iterations.
By the mid-15th, anyone with sufficient underwriting could go wherever, including a chancy trip west which resulted in huge profits for Spain and Portugal, so much money that the politics of Europe was changed dramatically.
That’s why your point about developing the tech is essential. We went to the moon with purpose-built, expendable equipment. Space will never ever become the source of stunning wealth that can come to us until we have the infrastructure available. Once that happens we will never look back.
Expanding this thinking, there really is no case for Mars as the initial target. The money is in raw materials: the astroid belt. Mars will become attractive over the course of time when we can use it (or Phobos/Deimos) as forward bases, likely a hundred years out.
Why? Because we know what’s on Mars: nothing! More than nothing: nothing in a gravity well, nothing in a difficult to descend atmosphere. Nothing, save scientific progress and the supposed search for life.
Hyperbole aside: Is it exciting? Yep. Does going there make me dreamy? Yep. But a trip to Mars now would kill human space flight, worse then Apollo did. It’s a simple fact that we live in a capitalistic society. Make it pay or it will die.
For now, focus on building the space interstate system: better propulsion, better on-orbit living conditions, methods of extracting materials from space-borne objects including the Moon, and the tech to actually build things in space.
Moon? Maybe. Mars? Ask me in 2080. ‘Ad astra increments’ as Paul Gilster says over at Centauri Dreams.
…..Some of the robotic construction that could build a Mars base could be proven on the Moon but the cost of getting anything done on the surface of the Moon is cost prohibitive given NASA’s present funding levels………..
______________________________________
And the purpose of going to Mars is…..?
One long term purpose for Mars is propellant, just like others 😉 have proposed from the moon. With a gas n go architecture, trip times for earth return or to venture deeper in space can be reduced. Intuitively, the L2 Mars (+ Venus?) cycler could substantially increase the mass budget for all science missions.
Phobos and Deimos seem to be quite proper first targets for humans to avoid the gravity well, as outlined in the pre-ESAS Griffin white paper.
Mars appears to have significantly more minerals available than the moon. The moon however has a number of asteroid impacts which provided the resources. Is it more economical to simply go directly to the source or redirect the source? Amount of robotics vs HSF?
Regardless, the L2 staging point appears to offer a tremendous flexible path forward within the budget to examine and offer hope to all the paths forward without breaking the bank. It allows the crew to maintain and assemble L2 satellites, cyclers, and new lighter weight technologies to provide crew health. it also acts as a safe haven for lunar operations, while allowing a reusable LEO to L2 transfer stage to reduce costs. Quite the exciting and flexible path future.
One long term purpose for Mars is propellant,
Three words, gravity well, atmosphere.
The Moon’s propellant resources are insufficient to drive long term exploration. However, it lowers the cost initially so that you can get the infrastructure in place to harvest the far larger resources of dead comets in near Earth space. I include possibly Phobos in that class.
Mars does have minerals, whether there is sufficiently more than what the Moon has to overcome the disadvantage of the gravity well and distance from the Earth is an interesting trade that I think that Mars will fail in the near term.
No matter what, if those Martian minerals are bound like on the Earth, it will take a lot of energy, read nuclear power, to liberate them. There are a lot of NiFe fragments there as well that have been identified by various rovers so I do think that there is good resource potential, but also that it is more valuable for a Martian colonization effort than it is for export.
I am a supporter of Martian colonization as well but Mars does not stand alone, at least not in the near to mid term.
As for breaking the bank, there was an open cockpit lunar lander proposed by NASA JSC as part of the Lunar Gemini idea by Gilruth et. al. That could be used today to get humans to the surface of and return to orbit of the Moon.
The Altair lander was an outgrowth of the SEI era First Lunar Outpost, and was far too big and costly to be much more than a powerpoint fantasy designed for Sortie class missions. A base class facility on the Moon simply does not need that kind of a vehicle.
When gold was spewed out of ancient volcanoes, and then those volcanoes were pushed down/buried/erroded over time left veins of gold. Though mars has a lower gravity, will not there be some similar pure strains of certain minerals through volcanic processes or will the lower gravity have changed that dynamic?
Also I have read that a lot of gemstone mines are actually the volcanic tube for the lava flow from ancient volcanoes. Would not mars gemstones beable to mined in a similar fashion? *curious*
(great article)
I would not rule it out.
Biggest volcano in the solar system 🙂
If you want to continue out, why Mars and not Ceres as the big goal?
The technology and processes developed for Mars surface will be extremely specialised (like much of the technology and processes on Earth is for Earth conditions). It will do nothing to prepare us to spread further. Whereas the technology and processes developed for Ceres will be generally applicable to any icy asteroid and many ice-moons; and an awful lot to any asteroid at all, and the vast majority of moons.
“Strategically plan all the missions” was literally meant to include all missions and make careful choices to reduce the mass and cost for the
most number over say 30 years, rather than a destination by 2020.
A basic infrastructure of relatively low cost and development time coupled with lower costs to LEO is absolutely essential, as well as some consolidation of infrastructure + commonality.
Storage tanks, power, attitude control and refrigeration technology just needs the TRL higher–no showstoppers–a basic, flexible, sustainable infrastructure.
The next step is reusable. An L2-Mars (Venus?), LEO to L2 tug, and especially gravity well hardware. Assembling 20 kg for every kg landed on the moon for example + hardware is a significant cost hurdle. As Dennis points out, try to launch the minimum required and trade the mass/risk/cost with the margin. The NASA community is absolutely outstanding in this regard, but it is hidden with all the politically driven agendas.
Imagine/assume that a LEO ZBO depot, a reusable LEO-L2 and L2-Mars tug. was in place. Now do the mission planning and costing, when the prop costs can be delivered without all the fixed costs in different FYs than
hardware. Bell shaped curves, with the proper TRL raising prior to mission hardware has a tremendous impact on the way NASA does conducts business. Go figure.
If however, “core programs like SLS/Orion will be preserved” HSF, IMHO, is going nowhere.
$5B for a 100mT and capsule every other year–do the math or just examine a decades of studies failing to arrive at reason for those to exist.
Perhaps Dennis can write a follow on with an an Exploration Roadmap that is launch vehicle independent-NASA’s new charter–with propellant costs dropping from $30,000 to $3,000 to $1000 to $100 and the effects on destinations and missions with reusable elements. Filling the required sized transfer stage on orbit rather than in one shot. IOW: A focus on maximum number of missions over 30 years.
That is a great question. I think Elon Musk and others conclude that you go to stay. I use ‘Mars base’ loosely. A base periodically manned is expensive. Musk, Mars One are willing do it themselves. No one will bail them out if their systems fail at 100 million miles away. And the purpose is linked to fundamental drives – to survive (the human race) and to explore. And the settlers, once there a year or more in low gravity cannot come back. And their off-spring’s physiology will truly be Martian. If NASA wants to go to Mars to visit and explore by hand, it needs to be international to spread the cost.
I have hoped that by putting up the actual budget numbers that it become clear the problem is not money, the problem is priority.
Oh I agree that $17B is enough but first it is not priority but rather common sense and foresight to recognize that SLS and Orion must be terminated in favor of all commercial. You have to free up some of the bound up funds. Then you can start thinking of destination priorities – asteroid, Moon, Mars, all of the above.
JWST? Well darn, its unfortunate that another project management failed so badly. This time GSFC with help from HQ. The choice made to continue was reasonable, IMO. ISS continuing to 2024. I support it but continuing beyond that date should bring in more partners to reduce cost. I do not know if it can be done and if not, an assessment of what has been gained in 10 years (2014 to 2024) will decide whether you drop it in the Pacific or sell it for parts, etc, etc.
And if NASA frees up funds then priority in exploration can be tackled. ESA has matured and Japan’s JAXA and why not China, too. Our priorities in exploration could be not sequential but concurrent programs to the Moon, asteroids and Mars.
As Keith said, “bait and switch”- we need to be careful.
Rocky
To come back to your comment. When I think about costs of doing business on the Moon, I look for a comparison. How much different is the environment of the Moon vs a mine a mile underground. Not that much really. Vacuum? Yes, but as the Chinese have just found, it is the dust that is the killer. Rovers and other mobile equipment for employment on the Moon must be built much more like mining equipment than finely engineered and balanced aerospace designs.
This is what the Russians did with the Lunakhods and even the GM built lunar rovers vs the billion dollar class delicate machines on Mars. Looks like Curiosity is going to be life limited by wear on the wheels, something that an engineer in the mining world would have considered as a first order problem.
Instead of only sending complete systems to the Moon, send 3D printers, materials handling robots, magnetic rakes on rovers, the things that are needed to build other things. RESOLVE is a great mission and probably the only one that could get funded now, but it is such a tentative step. With lower launch costs from SpaceX we can build things a bit more robustly and just go for it. It would cost far less than another multibillion dollar delicate machine destined for mars.
Oh I agree that the challenges are surmountable and whether Lunar or asteroidal, the robotics need to become self-sufficient. Industry in space will become completely independent of Earth resources. But the first economic hurdle is big in comparison to say drilling a mine shaft a mile deep on Earth. With the latter you quickly pull ore and have returns. Not the case with the Moon or asteroids. It will be a trickle. Low cost flight will help but building the payload – machines and self-sufficient ones will be costly.
“The worst possible choice would be to retain both programs and continue to loot the rest of NASA.”
One reason to retain ISS is to provide payloads to comm. cargo/crew.
HLV should have been terminated at the last shuttle flight a decade ago–no need for its HUGE size, development, and ops costs. Orion…just like shuttle…trying to do everything..simply cannot protect against GCR and be a re-entry capsule; 20 day capacity is useless for mars-fortunately there is a better way.
If SLS/Orion are retained, by the early 2020s NASA has no mission hardware, so its aptly named the rocket to nowhere.
The path forward for NASA is really quite simple.
Build a DSH. Outfit it with the things you need to head to Mars and incrementally demonstrate both crew and hardware can survive the trip to Mars in the proper environment within the architecture mass and cost budgets. Examine and test high and low risk (mass) approaches on cost.
Build a LEO Zero Boiloff LH2 depot and EP. Build the required transfer stage to get to L2. Include the commercial players in the architecture.
Plan missions for all the destinations, skip the stunts.
10 years with the 2.9B/year should be more than adequate. If its shorter and cheaper, great. Takes several intermediate builds…that’s okay too.
Its now 2024. NASA has the basis for a sustainable architecture.
Quite an exciting time indeed! Contrast this with SLS/Orion approach.
Start lining up propellant suppliers including IPs and decide the fate of ISS. Commence missions. Show the world NASA is ready for Mars by the 2030s. If not, keep working the issues, and morph the transfer stage into a lander, all staging from the L2 Gateway.
This plan gets NASA back to the moon (or Mars) faster while providing a sustainable architecture at the same time.
Another is to provide an existing platform to test prototypes of modules for new stations/habs/ships/etc. If you want to test a system without a complete station, you have to simulate the conditions on Earth. Or you have to launch a test of the system by itself, with something else to mimic the rest of the systems (say power and attitude control).
If you just bolt it onto an existing station, you get real data under real conditions. It may actually simplify development.
(Especially if SpaceX can keep lowering launch costs. It may be cheaper to launch a test article to test at the station than build (or modify) giant test facilities on Earth. I wondered about this with the build-and-mothball A-3 vacuum test stand at Stennis, intended for the build-and-cancel J-2X upgrade. Would it have been cheaper to launch tests on the $57m/launch F9 in actual orbit than build a $350m+operating costs stand to simulate orbit?)
Ha very interesting thought. We may be testing rocket engines in space in the future for at least the latter tests, due to lower launch costs.
@mu: i really appreciate your comments- sometimes though I find them pretty acronym-rich making it hard for non-scientist people like me to follow? I hope you’ll spell some of them out for the non-technical citizens? 🙂
Same here, GCR = galactic cosmic rays/radiation. DSH = Deep Space Habitat. IP = international partners? EP?
Well, no one is mentioning that great big, huge, honkin’, 800 pound gorilla sitting in the room so I will (drags out the dead horse to start beating it … again) people, historically, have explored for one primary reason, resources.
For the better part of history those explored for resources have been considered *free* once they are found. You might have a contest with other life forms sitting on those resources, but that has usually been considered a minor matter.
So, why goto Mars?
The human species explores in the hope of finding free resources, or at the very least, resources that can be bought or gained for pennies.. That means establishing property rights so the explorers can gain property and all resources located on that property and aquire them for a song..
Depends on cost. Currently cost of sending humans to Mars exceeds any potential value of resources. Only solution is to vastly reduce cost of access. First and most expensive step is access to LEO.
Depends on the size of the land grants. William Penn did okay when he got a land grant from the crown to pay off some debt.
Indeed. There is much to learn from history.
I read your article with great interest and find myself agreeing with much of what you said. It still bothers me a great deal that we’re discussing all of these “maneuvers” because our current political class, on both sides of the aisle, are shockingly limited in their vision of what is in the best long-term interest of the country. I mean, when the Augustine Report tells you the funding needs to go in one direction; and the elected officials consistently send it in the other direction, that is a fundamental mismatch that can’t be overcome by clever thinking. I admire what you’re doing. You’re trying to take lemons and make lemonade; unfortunately without a little sugar you just have lemon juice; and we know how sour that is.
You make an excellent point about how much the budget has been cut up during the current retrenchment at NASA. We seem to be able to fund unlimited unemployment checks, but there’s no money to hire skilled people to do important work for the country. Believe me, if you could follow me around for one day, you would be shocked at how much money is wasted by the government. Just how much money would it take to appropriately fund ISS; Commercial Crew; SLS upper stage development; and the critical path technologies that Gen. Lyles talked about? I have a feeling that it would be almost a rounding error in the scope of the entire Federal Budget.
I don’t know about the rest of you; but I personally pay a ton of taxes and while I don’t like throwing my money away; I can afford to pay a little more if it were going to any or all of these goals. It’s critical for long-term health of the nation; and I’m tired of playing this zero sum game. I’m tired of people thinking that because I support heavy lift; I don’t believe commercial crew is important. If we want to explore and develop space in the coming century I can’t but help believe that we need to do more than one thing at a time. We need to learn to chew gum while we walk and still managed to get someplace that strategically important for the country.
Once again Mr. Wingo I enjoyed your essay, keep them coming.
To me there has been a fundamental misallocation of federal resources since the 1960’s, and the tipping point year was FY-1967. You can see it if I plot that same data back into the 1950’s. This was the “War on Poverty” and the “Great Society” ideas. This thinking has failed and has felled many civilizations in history.
I would posit that the federal government is what Lincoln envisioned, an investor for the future of the nation. This is exactly his motivation in funding and pushing to pass the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 when the outcome of the war between the states was still in doubt. This was the motivation for the national highway act of 1926, in which a young Lieutenant named Eisenhower helped to get passed by trying to take a military convoy across the country and writing a scathing report on his problems. This is what president Eisenhower pushed with the Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956 that gave birth to our present highway system.
The government should be the investor for these types of things, and not for transient ideas like weather stripping or solar panels for schools.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
Dennis: I read your stuff wherever I see it: here, Space Review, wherever. You are a smart guy with clear thinking- thinking driven exclusively by rational thinking and not by political bias- and I’ve read enough of your writing to spot it. It’s not there.
On this issue, though, I’m surprised, and I couldn’t disagree with you more. Those social programs were first-of-a-kind. They were well meant. They failed in some areas, excelled in others, but the underlying motivation of helping our citizens was laudable and not to be discarded.
I can make plots too, Dennis. I can plot military strength that decreased dramatically after a war- effort. I can plot wealth concentration. I can plot mean income for the middle class vs the oligarchy-class as another example. And I am old enough to remember when companies made money hand over fist- and at the same time families could thrive with a single wage earner. When they could rely on retirement plans. When ‘union’ wasn’t a dirty word but a way of protecting workers- the same workers now being brutalized by low wages and a stagnant economy.
The purpose of government is simple: create a level playing field. The recent, ironic cries of ‘class warfare’ are spot-on: those of us in the middle class are being mercilessly pummeled by the 1%, who have gained control over the congress by convincing ordinary citizens to vote against self-interest.
This makes me so damn mad. We live in a stunningly rich country- a country rich enough to have it all.
And now we’ve both had a say I, for one am going back to discussing NASA.
(sorry, Keith. I couldn’t let that comment go by without a challenge).
They were well meant. They failed in some areas, excelled in others, but the underlying motivation of helping our citizens was laudable and not to be discarded.
The motivation is fine, it is the execution that has been an utter failure. Take a look at poverty between 1967 when this got cranked up and today. Just about the same. Education? Our educational system is at third world status today.
There is an old saying that the road to hell is built of good intentions. We have been busily building a freeway there.
If we had continued to invest in the future, with technology, infrastructure, and building for the next century rather than the next election we would not be in the position that we are in as a nation today.
The reason that the 1% meme exists is that the 1%, the 10% and the 99% are more intent on looting the treasury than building for the future.
It is ALL of our faults and to blame one segment or another of society is just perpetuating the problem.
And we need to invest in public education, as I remember JFK doing in response to Sputnik.
Michael: I couldn’t agree with you more. The top 10% control more than half the wealth. They could easily finance human space if they wanted to, but they don’t. Percentages don’t matter. If we eliminated Medicare, the wealthy would want the entire budget cut as a tax break and would not pay a penny more in taxes for space.
Excellently written. I like that Wingo writes in favor of both commercial space and the SLS, an unusual stance nowadays.
However, let’s not put the cart before the horse. It is imperative that Congress fund the commercial crew program to see it launch as soon as possible. Both SpaceX and Boeing have said they could launch by 2015 with funding. Congress needs to provide the funds to insure that they do.
Bob Clark
Everything has a value, but also a cost. We’ve tried to move the demand curve for decades and it is not going to move. We need to shift the supply curve, i.e. vastly reduce the cost off access to space. This will make a bunch of missions practical which are not worth it today. To reduce cost we need technology, particularly practical reusable launch systems. Hey, we knew all this back in 1974. Why did we forget it?
There are plenty of ways to shift the demand curve, and they are less expensive than an RLV, and will lead to an RLV…
NASA has been trying to shift the demand curve for decades, and it cannot be done. The only time demand peaked was Apollo, and after one landing it collapsed. We’ve tried all manner of “spinoffs”, lunar bases, solar power satellites, a moon race with China. We’ve made ludicrous claims about perfect semiconductors, perfect ball bearings, continuous flow electrophoresis. All fell on their faces.
Human spaceflight is valuable, but its value is not infinite and never will be, and if we ever want to see more than ten people in space at once it’s time to be more realistic. There have been a couple of studies of demand. Unless we can provide seats to LEO for <=$1M each, we cannot reach the break point for a sustainable market. An RLV is not expensive, in fact SpaceX is already farther along in many ways than NASA was with the Shuttle.
Here is a story from USA today that figures into this. In the status quo space biz there will be pushback that basically dismisses the idea of manufacturing on the Moon. That is old thinking. Here is an article from USA today about how the formula 1 world is using 3D printing of Titanium and aluminum parts to shorten development times and increase their competitive posture.
http://www.usatoday.com/sto…
I wonder about manufacturing on the moon or in space. It’s so obviously the way forward in the long term. Could you point me to a discussion on this issue? Why would the space biz be against it?
Michael, it is more the absence of discussion. If you go back in time and read space related literature from the 50’s this was obvious. During the Apollo era it was pushed aside for the race. In the 70’s and through the late 80’s the idea resurfaced and some serious prepatory work was undertaken. This was all cast aside again when the first lunar outpost idea came along. It was reintroduced in the Vision For Space Exploration and then cast aside yet again with the Constellation program.
Look at NASA’s budget for the development of these processes (or lack thereof) and it becomes evident the state of people’s thinking in this area.
The Transcontinental Railroad is the best example of what
can be accomplished through foresight and just plain hard work. Looking back it is hard to imagine that it could not have happened.
For another example look to John Wesley Powell’s explorations of
the Grand Canyon. Shortly thereafter, mining and eventually tourism businesses developed. In short order, mining was joined by the tourism. People got up off their backsides, took notice and moved out to explore and enjoy their world.
The interstate system is a better example of how government affects citizen welfare when it chooses to exercise responsibility.
Both are relevant examples and the railroad is interesting because it was much more of a public/private partnership. Google “The Pacific Railway Act of 1862” and its amendments.
One problem with the article is that there is no “peak of eternal light”. They just don’t exist on the surface ! With the extensive coverage of topography on both poles, we now know that for sure.
Having sunlight for 200+ (Earth) days is pretty good already; no need to become factually incorrect.
Bring a 150m-high pole and then you can get eternal light, maybe. But I guess it doesn’t sound as good and easy.
From Bussys work several years ago the summer time at the North pole is continuous along the northern edge of the crater Whipple.
Even with the worst case of 43 hours of darkness out of 780, I would hardly say that this is a show stopper or even slower downer for using solar on the Moon.
(I had meant to post this here…)
Dennis Wingo should be commended on an excellent capture of the issues that will define NASA’s future, as well as putting the past in context. As he points out at the end “Unless we can bring a return on investment from our manned spaceflight activities, they simply will not persist in the face of daunting demands on the budget brought about by the retirement of the baby boomer generation.” This is key, and I fully agree. Yet – by leaving the option open to an SLS and ISS program that become more “rational” and “develop a rational program of exploration and development” I have to wonder if eternal optimism is tainting everything that was said before in this well done piece?
We should be open to the possibility the budget goes nowhere, remaining at levels that are not much different than today, and that this too may be a dose of optimism. We should consider the possibility programs like SLS are incorrigible, and so too would be any progeny, trying to develop landers or habitats or any other exploration elements much as was done before. That is to say, slowly, at ridiculous costs, leaving any possible missions so far in the future as to be irrelevant, and inevitably consumed by events.
Do we really need a strategy that relies on programs like SLS to be rational? That program is quite rational already. SLS is an organic coming together of people around their rational interest. The strategy needed for furthering exploration and an expansion of humanity beyond Earth need not be rational – not to everyone anyway. It need merely align an understanding what is not going to change, how NASA will continue to decline, and how some key events could tend to unfold, to set up some saving grace for NASA, well out of harm’s way. It may be time to think more like Hari Seldon on strategy, setting up a Foundation (and a 2nd Foundation as well), even if it means making Trantorians think this is all part of the plan to save an Empire no longer worth saving.
First, I readily concede that with the current large programs, we are already operating well outside the boundaries of a rational space program.
There is another reason for throwing the two programs together. The current argument by the SLS crowd is akin to the highlander syndrome. (from the movie of that name, meaning “there can be only one!”). Their argument is underpinned by the assumption that the only possible way to do beyond Earth orbit exploration is by using SLS, with large ground integrated payloads, brought together in space, as long as that space is no where near ISS. It was the plan from day one by the previous NASA management that ISS be sacrificed on the altar of SLS, to fund SLS payloads.
They were able to kill the existing NASA heavy lift program that put over 120 metric tons into orbit (Shuttle) several times a year for a heavy lift program that can only put 70 tones into orbit once per year. If you look the SLS/Orion program consumes as much money as the Shuttle did during its operations and the Shuttle was considered unaffordable. With SLS you have a slower pace of launches with tens of billions more dollars required to enable less payload to orbit (the 105 metric ton version).
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that the SLS could not go to ISS. The SLS program uses as an argument AGAINST sending Orion to ISS that they would have to add many tons of ballast. Well… Instead of ballast there are a lot of other things that could fly.
The SLS crowd argues that well we have gone this far and all we have is the booster with a crappy upper stage that is not that much better than a Delta IV so give us a lot more money for further development so that we can do what we claimed we could do to start with.
A former Air Force general that I know stated that programs like this are like designing a self licking ice cream cone.
The only possible way in a rational world that SLS can survive is to tie it to ISS. SLS will survive until the next administration, The devils deal between Shelby and Mikulski guarantees that. However, what comes after that is where progress can be made. Or maybe even now…
The SLS could tie itself to the replacement of the ISS. It can launch 3 modules and a deliver stage in one go.
Having said that I suspect the SLS’s job will be delivering lunar base modules to low lunar orbit.
Two words, no money.
Things are slightly more complex in this case. The ISS already has a budget so the new spacestation can take over that budget.
Although what happens in the third year is an interesting question.
NASA is not going to give up one operational program for the hope of something in the future. That is what they did when they gave up the shuttle for Constellation.
Unless NASA does not have a choice. Lets hope relations with the Russians improve.
Sam Rayburn said, “First you gotta get elected.”
Let’s set aside for a moment my belief that we really need a heavy lifter to have a rational program for exploration of the solar system. The only program out there right now that has any kind of political support is Orion/SLS. Wheezing, anemic, underfunded, and supported for crass political reasons it is still currently the only game in town. Trying to shovel dirt in on it is like forming a circular firing squad, and strikes me as nothing short of insane. People talk about the upper stage development costing so much money. Were not developing antigravity here, we’ve already dumped a ton of money into J2X development. Build it and they will come.
As I’ve said before, I support it all. But, I do disagree with many on this website that think it can all be done on the cheap. I believe that kind of thinking is shortsighted, and will get people killed, and maybe, just maybe destroy what public support we have now for the exploration of space. Our job, all of us, is to convince the political class that they need to look farther than the end of their nose, and do what’s best for the country in terms of long term investments. Do we need commercial space? Hell yes. To we need to go back to the moon first before going on to Mars? I think so, I think anything else will be doomed to failure, because we need the Moon as a stepping stone; and for economic reasons. Do we need more research and development on life sciences, nuclear thermal propulsion, fuel depots, SSTO? Yes, all of it. But right now this is what we’ve got, and I think letting others shovel SLS into the same trashcan they shoved Saturn V development is crazy. The last 40 years of our space program has been like a giant game of “King of the Hill”. Somebody’s idea gets anemic funding, then everybody stands around and takes potshots at it until it succumbs, then it’s the next idea in line that gets lined up in the crosshairs. I think we should try to get together here and make an omelette.
That was at least partly my point…
The American public is willing to spend a significant amount on NASA, but not the amount needed for a safe and viable BEO spaceflight with current (SLS/Orion) technology. The CAIB report made this point clearly. So our first task is to substantially reduce cost. The strategy of reducing development cost by using “legacy” designs does not work because it increases operational costs beyond the level the public will support. Having worked at the grass roots for a few decades, I think it is fantasy to suggest that John Q. Public will allow the NASA budget to significantly increase.
So the highest priority is not going to Mars. it is reducing cost.
One other note-supporting Dennis’s observations on the long term direction of the NASA budget.
Here are two articles on how public opinion leans when deciding between our health care and other priorities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011…
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2010…
Dennis Ray Wingo
I wish I could message you privately for this but apparently there is no facility for that in Disqus. I wanted to say, with an article this fantastic and important, with the work you put into it, I think it deserves to be proofread by someone or a couple someones. There is a bunch of small stuff in there to fix.
Awesome article!
Yea it happens. No problem, I have thick skin and no one is paying me to write these tomes!
Ignore the quibbles and keep writing.