NASA closing out Asteroid Redirect Mission, Space News
“ARM called for sending a robotic spacecraft to a near Earth asteroid, where it would grab a boulder a few meters across from the asteroid’s surface and return it to cislunar space. Astronauts flying on an Orion spacecraft would then visit the boulder, performing studies and collecting samples for return to Earth. The mission, though, struggled to win support since its introduction in 2013, particularly in Congress, where members were skeptical that the mission was on the critical path for NASA’s long-term goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s. At recent hearings on NASA’s 2018 budget request, members showed no interest in reversing plans in the proposal to cancel the mission.”
Keith’s note: On the heels of the ARM cancelation NASA has come up with a new large project – the mini-space station “Gateway” located near the Moon – under the same strange justification as ARM i.e. that it is necessary in order to send humans to Mars.
Low cost access to LEO and more capabile Earth and Space observation, particularly from the ISS, seem higher priorities to me. However if a base in lunar orbit is planned, the obvious justification is to support exploration of the Moon.
True, but there is no money allocated to develop a lander. And NASA currently has no spacesuits which will work on the moon.
There are some suits in museums which worked on the Moon …
I love you
The suits in museums are surely not safe to use. Making new suits to the old Apollo specifications won’t happen, because NASA will want something better. That and everyone who made the old suits has surely left NASA and the contractors by now, so a lot of that knowledge might be lost. So even making new copies of the old design will require extensive qualification testing (pretty much the same testing you’d need for a new suit design). So, NASA will surely keep working on new suit designs.
NASA is, in fact, putting some money towards developing new suits, but they don’t have a suit design anywhere near ready to produce. In fact, articles have been written recently on the dwindling number of space shuttle era EMUs which are currently being used on ISS. That hardware is getting old and some of those suits have already been retired.
New suits are not a solved problem from a NASA management point of view. NASA will still need to spend quite a bit of money on suits, especially if the goal is lunar operations.
At some point (soon) Mr. Musk’s suit designs will enter the fray, at which point all bets are off.
The moon suits were (as I recall) made by Playtex. The actual work done by ladies who were sewing girdles the day before. The thinking wa that they had the unique experience of woking with similar materials.
An episode of a podcast (spacerockethistory, a wonderful look back at NASA from NACA to the STS, mission by mission and including the USSR missions) mentioned that the sewing process was stopped after every single stitch was done. Could be apocryphal I suppose but not presented as such.
https://itunes.apple.com/us…
Sewing is something that I’ve enjoyed from time to time. It is hard to imagine such a process yielding a straight seam; but if it’s the case surely it is emblematic of management thinking. Or something.
SpaceX suits and Boeing’s CST-100/Starliner suits will be launch/entry suits similar to the orange launch/entry suits worn by the space shuttle astronauts after the Columbia disaster. None of these suits would be useful on an EVA due to lack of a life support system and the extra layers of protection needed on the outside of the suit for thermal control, abrasion resistance (absolutely necessary on lunar suits), and etc.
Things that are different, just aren’t the same.
There isn’t a lander in development, but it’s possible one could be developed at an affordable price and reasonable speed, if traditional FAR cost plus contracting methods are avoided.
The spacesuits are certainly a rectifiable problem, if the will is there to go to the Moon in the first place.
Yes. Unlike the 1960’s we know what the requirements are, so its just a matter of building them.
Great point. And all the more reason for my own hero worship as I look to the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo days, where so much was unknown, and so much basic research was required. Spacesuits as an example went through dozens of iterations; the Wikipedia page has a pretty good run-down of US/USSR suits.
More hero worship: when I was but a wee lad I devoured books by Wiley Ley and others, big spreads with pictures and talk about space. This sticks with me: the rocket-powered sleds on tracks over a trough of water used as a brake. My god! We had no idea how many G’s we could take. We didn’t even know if we could swallow in micro-G. A spacesuit that actually allowed a person to work in space seemed nearly impossible.
Those scientists and researchers were taking real and heroic risk. And it’s easy to look back at the now-seeming primitive nature of the research. Basic questions, unanswered, now with real data by these heroic folks. Thousands of them go unnamed.
I’m reminded also of Wally Schirra calling his capsule Sigma 7, at least in part to signify the ‘summation’ of those thousands of folks making the flight possible (and, in truth, as a statement about the engineering nature of the flight, an explanation I never fully grokked). Whatever he called it, those Mercury 7 were either certifiably crazy .
They all were strapping themselves onto a questionable rocket (though safer by his flight) and doing it in the name of defining those requirements.
Heroes.
(Sorry for the digression. Your comment about the 1960’s, and the reading I’ve been doing on the Mercury Program reminded me.The more I learn, the more I admire those guys. All of them.
And they did it with paper, pencils, and 12″ K+E slipsticks).
Well there is a robust lander in development right now. Just not by NASA. Something formerly known as the BFS. Quite sure the folks developing the BFS will be happy to lease a few of them to NASA for a pittance of what NASA will spend to developed their own.
Perhaps, but BFS is still many years away. SpaceX is concentrating on Falcon 9 operations, Falcon Heavy development, Dragon operations, Dragon V2 development, and their communications satellite network development. They have a lot on their plate that will take priority over BFS, at least in the short term.
No. The EM L1 is a low energy gateway to the Solar System. Hence its name…
It’s low energy in the sense that launching from the new gateway has a low deltaV. But the mission is manufactured on Earth and transported to the gateway. Hard to see the advantages.
The advantages is you use it as an assembly point. So you no longer need massive new heavy lift rockets – Falcon 9 Heavy, Delta IV and Atlas V will work fine.
You also have a place to checkout deployed spacecraft and fix problems caused by their high G Earth launch and being folded inside a payload faring before allowing them to do a low G departure to their destination. And you also have options for much larger spacecraft by sending them up in modules to be assembled at the gateway station.
In many ways, then, if I follow you, this is a reiteration of an early Apollo question: Earth rendezvous, or Direct, or Moon-Rendevous, or?
If I recall history correctly, Moon rendezvous had the chief advantage of dropping most of the mass before the astronauts left the moon, with the obvious advantages (leaving aside the many disadvantages as viewed from the 60’s), and negating the need for an even bigger rocket than S5 (which was Dr. von Braun’s approach).
But where is any clear advantage of assembly in a LeGrange station? Over Earth orbit?
In fact as the issue is discussed here and elsewhere I’m not yet seeing any advantage to Gateway, other than useful ness as a deeper space “practice” site, and as a place to send SX and BO. Every other reason for Gateway falls apart mostly because the same things can be done in LEO. And it certainly makes no sense if ISS is still around.
What Thomas said about only needing smaller rockets to get off the Earth’s surface still applies higher up. Remember, LEO is still down in Earth’s gravity well. Having a final assembly point at L1 permits individual delivery of the smaller pieces parts on smaller rockets (or upper stages) already in the stable, while the boost FROM L1 of the big-mass assembled vehicle/whatever will then require a lower delta V to get going to where it’s going. (Clarke exploited this specifically in 2001 for the assembly of Discovery.) Also as Thomas pointed to, the lower delta V from L1 permits a lower bit of rocking & shaking for the assembled hardware with even old-fashioned chemical propulsion, including deep-deep space telescopes and other such sensor-laden vehicles.
Plus, as you note what I noted, we gain the a-little-farther-out experience in cis-lunar space at an excellent staging location for almost everywhere else beyond. In particular, the L1 point eliminates some seriously complicating phasing constraints for lunar surface access while not excluding or seriously constraining deeper-space mission trajectories.
While indeed some individual cases may end up adding up to a higher total delta V, the Gateway’s multi-armed operational flexibility brings significant advantages across a number of technical disciplines.
Yes. Imagine an Europa mission using a single launchof the SLS, with all the limitations, risks and costs.
Then imagine an Europa mission from EM L-1 that was assembled from a half dozen Falcon 9 heavy launches, a spacecraft twice as massive, fully checked out in the space environment it will work in, slowly accelerating away from the gateway station on a solar-electric ion drive using massive but light weight solar panel that didn’t need to unfold themselves but could be unpacked once at the station.
Tell me, which has a lower risk of failure and would be able to do more science per dollar?
Good riddance ARM – an ever shifting plan to do something. It was just an excuse to keep funding SLS. Will Gateway be any different? Time will tell but the chances as excellent that Gateway will be as undefined and vague as ARM was.
Aside from the make-work aspect for SLS, I never understood the antipathy towards ARM. The kind of tech needed to move rocks about in space seems obviously useful, applicable to not just rocks.
The size rock they were going to try and move with ARM was not of significance. Just what would we be doing handling rocks that size in deep space? If you think it is meteorite protection, tons of rocks that size bombard Earth everyday and burn up in the atmosphere. Far larger rocks are a potential issue. ARM would not have resolved such an issue. As far as moving big masses, ISS weighs nearly a million pounds, which is sizeable. We reorient it and change its orbit on a continuing basis. Its something we now know how to do. I never understood the reason for ARM. A rendezvous in deep space? Dozens of space probes have done this. An EVA in deep space? We’ve done that too. If its going to cost billions of dollars for each flight, Orion + SLS, then we ought to get something for that kind of expenditure.
You’re missing the point. The boulder might not have been impressive but this would have flown the largest high power solar electric propulsion system to date. This is critical technology that needs proving out, and now its just gonna get regulated to station keeping
Doesn’t sound like you have used any logic for this argument. In order to test a new technology, you must conduct an expensive though nonsensical mission? Perhaps you need to identify a sensible mission first?
ARM is a sensible plan. First you gotta think in terms of small stepping stones instead of big apollo jumps, and second you gotta realize that landing anywhere as an alternative is out of the question nasa lacks the means and funding to develop all the significant pieces of hardware at the same time meaning once SLS dev is out of the way you need to stall for time as the mission enabling payloads are being developed (ARM was the only enabler cheap enough to be developed simultaniously while SLS was sucking all the money away that’s why the first gateway module is gonna be the propulsion bus meant for ARM)
So anyway first comes the ARM mission pretty much as proposed
Then with scientific questions from the boulder sample in hand you scale up the hardware from ARM, and associated visitation missions to make a sort of proto-DST to travel out to the asteroid you got the boulder from
Then with a long duration mission under your belt you can scale up again to the DST and travel to martian orbit maybe even visit phobos or even land depending on funding, and what hardware you can pre-place beforehand.
Ideally these steady scaling accomplishments would keep public and political momentum instead of haveing to hear people complaining that you’re going to lunar orbit to sit in a can doing nothing for 6 weeks once a year for the next decade because nasa needs to stall for time to develop all its lander’s and such for a real martian or lunar mission
Plus ARM was going to use its mass plus the mass of the boulder as a gravity tractor
Planetary Protection Ver 1.0
FYI OASIS redux 1997!
http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.e…
Could we fly the “largest high power solar electric propulsion system to date” as part of a mission which does something useful? I can think of many applications which are more useful than moving an asteroidal boulder into lunar orbit.
do share these useful applications, but omit the ones that can be done with existing rocket stages those will have trouble finding traction
There are plans for a 2022 Mars telecommunications orbiter, which include using a 30 kW solar electric propulsion system. ARM would have used a few, 50 kW units.
What about an upgraded version of the 2022 telecom orbiter, expanding it to space-to-space capabilities to relay for future orbiters as well as landers (this would be equivalent to a Martian TDRS system). While you’re at it, throw in some atmospheric science of the sort we use to study the Earth from geostationary orbit. I’m sure the Mars science community would be supportive of this, while the small bodies science community didn’t see much point in ARM.
You might say that could be done with conventional rockets. Possibly. But so could ARM. It would just be much, much more difficult and expensive.
I’m not following you? How did you move from the space-tug/ARM notion to an orbiter? Are you saying that the propulsion system used for station-keeping in Mars orbit would require a 30kw solar electric system?
I guess I wasn’t clear. The ARM concept, as I understand it, is to use solar electric propulsion to take a medium-sized spacecraft (big enough to select and grab a ~4 meter diameter rock) to a near Earth asteroid and then return the rock to a high Earth or lunar orbit. Unless I’m doing the math wrong, a rock about four yards across would mass about 100 tonnes.
The question was about how to demonstrate and test a similar propulsion system. Specifically what other mission, with more useful goals, could do so. Simply in terms of propulsive capabilities, Mars is farther (or higher delta-v) but many useful things can be done with a smaller payload.
As a ball park estimate, I think the same electric propulsion system could deliver deliver about half a dozen, 2000-kg sized spacecraft to Mars orbits. I mean getting it there at a realistic launch mass and cost, not station keeping once its there. That’s essentially the on-orbit infrastructure needed to support the next half-century of Mars exploration, plus some nice science like global weather/dust storm monitoring.
hmm. Actually I was thinking, not so much of moving meteorites around, but of perhaps-dead satellites in orbit, or other space junk; developing very high solar powered electric propulsion, too, is very important tech as Mr. Passing points out.
It is also a personal prejudice playing out: the notion that the real riches of the solar system are on neither Mars nor Luna but in the Asteroid Belt, and that exploiting these riches in order to build an industrial base in space will need a stunning amount of enabling technology. Powerful space tugs are just one among mining/extracting/smelting abilities.
At some point – no doubt in the distant future – we will build real spaceships and we will do it in space. At some point will abandon the fixation with deep gravity wells, recognizing that the Mars/Luna question as the next destination excludes other, more valuable and more reachable targets.
At some point the cost delta between space industry and gravity well industry will tip.
And when the real wealth of the system is developed, the California Gold Rush will be a gnat’s ass.
Because everyone recognized it for what it was, a make work stopgap proposed by the Obama Administration which didn’t want to return to the Moon (been there, done that) and wasn’t will to commitment the money actually needed to go to Mars.
Yep. Obama again!
Since you forgot.
https://www.nasa.gov/news/m…
” So we’ll start — we’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. “
When that proved impractical they decided first to bring a asteroid to where the astronauts would be able reach it by the Moon. Then that was downsized to just a boulder. So this was the next logical step in a decline of what started as a bad idea and probably would have happened no matter who was elected.
As for the Moon. The exact statement.
“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there.”
And don’t forget his bragging about the SLS from the same speech.
“Next, we will invest more than $3 billion to conduct research on an advanced “heavy lift rocket” — a vehicle to efficiently send into orbit
the crew capsules, propulsion systems, and large quantities of supplies needed to reach deep space.”
And of course for your laugh of the day.
“Some have said, for instance, that this plan gives up our leadership in space by failing to produce plans within NASA to reach low Earth orbit, instead of relying on companies and other countries. But we will actually reach space faster and more often under this new plan, in ways that will help us improve our technological capacity and lower our costs, which are both essential for the long-term sustainability of space flight. In fact, through our plan, we’ll be sending many more astronauts to space over the next decade.”
The Obama Administration did everything it could to cancel Constellation and put the funds thus saved into Space Technology, a strategy which seems prescient in retrospect given the revolutionary progress of SpaceX and Blue Origin in creating new cost effective launch vehicles. When Congress and industry lobbyists forced the Administration to continue the core of the Constellation program, but without the actual funds for a lunar landing, and then demanded that the Administration assign them a mission, there was little to do except to create a mission that required the minimum current investment.
The handwriting was on the wall even then for those that cared to read it.
The Obama Administration just turned NASA over to Congress as they had no real interest in it beyond his one “Kennedy-like” photo op and his campaign goal to use Constellation funding for education.
https://www.wired.com/2007/…
Accepting this assertion as fact – and given the little I know about it, even though I try to follow this stuff – I would ask: “So what?”
I would even point out that in 2008/9, the new President had arguably more urgent matters requiring his plate.
NASA, in medical terms, was then, as it always has been: a chronic, not acute problem. Mr. Obama triaged NASA.
Regrettably this abdication of responsibility created a vacuum that was filled by nefarious characters.
Forgive me. Sometimes humor is completely lost, mostly due to my poor writing skills.
My friends on the right just love to blame Obama for all sorts of things, that’s all, some correctly, others, not so much. It’s this predilection that I was referring to.
The left did the same thing with Mr. Bush. Not your truly, of course. Never.
The problem with President Bush is he had the right idea after Columbia, first return to the Moon, then Mars, then beyond. But then he just turned it over to Dr. Griffin who turned it into a quick pit stop on the Moon, then Mars Direct. So he dropped the ball as well.
If NASA had continued with the original directive they could have finished OSP giving them a shuttle “replacement” by the end of the Bush Administration, then worked on EOR for a return to the Moon with the OSP winner serving as the CSM element, then now be developing the spaceships to go to Mars. As it is Boeing will only be flying its modified OSP entry, CST100, in the next year or so and we are no closer to the Moon or Mars then when President Bush stated his space vision.
At this point, Thomas, I don’t even give a damn about targets.
Just go somewhere.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are working on it. 🙂
At least they will continue to develop solar electric propulsion capability. That will be quite useful for future Mars missions.
Great, canceling one bridge to nowhere for another bridge to nowhere, but with a fancy misleading Star Trek’ish title. Not sustainable, just another waste of time and money. Will they never learn?
I believe its more a ‘Stargate’ title – I remember the episode, and the Wraith overran the Gateway station between the Milky Way and the ‘Pegasus Galaxy’.
No, the term gateway comes from the studies at CalTech showing EM L1 and EM L2 are the low energy gateways to the Solar System. It has nothing to do with Stargate.
And that would be one value of a EM L1 station, launching robotic spacecraft into the Solar System after first checking out their performance.
Do you have a reference to those studies? I’d like to go over the math. You get a tremendous advantage making propulsive burns at closest approach to a large body. In this case, the Earth. Launching from the Earth-Moon L1 or L2 points gives that up, and I don’t see any leverage you gain to make up for that.
Some paper links. Martin Lo at JPL has done most of the work on it.
“Lo added, “This concept does not guarantee easy access to every part of the solar system. However, I can envision a place where we might
construct and service science platforms around one of the Moon’s Lagrange points. Since Lagrange points are landmarks for the Interplanetary Superhighway, we might be able to shunt spacecraft to and from such platforms.” A team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, working with the NASA Exploration Team, proposes to someday use the Interplanetary Superhighway for future human space missions.”
https://www.nasa.gov/missio…
Two papers on it.
http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/pub...
http://www2.esm.vt.edu/~sdr…
A station in a Halo orbit at the EM L1 gateway would make access to the entire Solar System easier. Payloads could use chemical propulsion to climb out of Earth’s deep gravity well, then be be checked out at the gateway while being attached to Solar-Electric or nuclear-electric propulsion systems that will allow them to efficiently travel to Mars and the Solar System beyond.
No huge heavy lift would needed even for human flights since commercial systems like the Falcon 9 heavy, Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V heavy could handle anything in modular form.
Instead of SLS a much superior pair of reusable human spaceships could be assembled out of modules for repeated trips to Mars based out of the gateway station.
Let’s see.
It’s about 2 hours from my house up to Tampa.
But why not just start out from Sarasota? Heck, it’s just 30 minutes!
I can even save more time! I’ll ask Suzie to meet me up there! She can drive the Tahoe, pulling her Tesla behind her. We can leave the other cars behind, putting everything into the Tesla for the Tampa drive.
Think of all the gas I will save!
Wrong analogy. I want to fly to Seattle so I drive an hour east to the nearest Airport to transfer to a plane to fly to Seattle.
You are saying it makes more sense to build massive rockets to fly from LEO Earth to Mars rather than to use existing rockets to go to EM L1, than board a spacecraft optimized for deep space flight to fly to Mars.
The first is expensive and unsustainable. The second is less expensive and sustainable. We would probably still be going to the Moon if instead of LOR we had followed the more logical model of build a space station in LEO, then boarding a spacecraft based there to go to the Moon as in the 2001 movie. You are arguing we should make the same mistake now with the Mas architecture.
I think that’s still an incomplete argument. Why not build the space-optimized vehicles on Low Earth orbits? Using space-optimized vehicles is clearly a good idea. But, if the destination is another planet, it isn’t clear why L1 or L2 is a good way station.
“You are saying it makes more sense to build massive rockets to fly from LEO Earth”
Not at all. Your vision – assembling true space craft, in space, serviced and refueled by reusable rockets from Earth – is the only sensible way forward.
Assembled in Earth orbit, this spaceship would surely cost less than assembly light-seconds away. So what’s the chief advantage of L1 construction? Lower TMI energy? Lower escape energy for any destination?
But do the reduced energy requirements for TMI from L1 over LEO compensate for the huge expense and hassle of working light-seconds away?
And about those energy requirement. It’s correct to focus on the necessary drive authority for TMI from L1 or from LEO.
A mission some years ago [name escapes me] involved an electric propulsion system on a small craft in Earth orbit; a small squirt at perihelion successively widened the orbit into an increasingly exaggerated ellipse. Another well-timed series of squirts and the craft went into lunar orbit.
Admittedly this was a slow process. It’s also a good reason to build much larger solar-electric systems.
Working at L1 will be hugely expensive. And for what? To make TMI easier, yes, but is that reason enough?
That was ESA’s Smart 1 that was placed in a GTO by chemical rockets so it would be able to gradually use its Ion engine to reach lunar orbit. It was launch in September and reach the Moon in February on a journey that only takes 3 days with chemical rockets.
The NASA missions, Deep Space 1, Deep Space 2 and Dawn all used a chemical booster to reach escape velocity, and so had to be stressed for the “kick” when the engine started and the “kick” at the end when the chemical engine shut off. Think of taking the science instrument of your choice and bashing it with a board twice…
And that is the problem with departure from LEO, either months of climbing out of the gravity well at low G or a couple of good swift kicks. But it is manageable and still better than the bigger and more frequent kicks from an Earth surface launch, and then unfolding it.
That’s correct for Deep Space 1 and Dawn, but Deep Space 2 were a pair of Mars impact penetrators. They rode along with the Mars Polar Lander mission, and only used chemical propulsion.
Ok. “Electric propulsion” were the magic words. The benefits from a burn at a low altitude were all about the Oberth effect. That only works for high-thrust systems, which electric propulsion definitely isn’t.
I can believe using a high Earth orbit (or L1 or L2) is a good idea for planetary, electrically propelled missions. Add a space-based, reusable, chemical rocket tug to get there from a low Earth orbit and on-site testing, and this approach seems attractive. I’ll even drop my concern over what this does to launch windows (superimposing the window for the planetary trajectory on the window for the Moon being at the right phase) since electric propulsion trajectories are quite forgiving about launch windows.
For bonus points, fuel the LEO to L1/L2 tug with extraterrestrial water. And, for extra bonus points, come up with some propellent which an electric propulsion system can use, and which can be mined in space. Xenon definitely can’t be produced until your off-world colonies have large nuclear power plants.
But what you’re describing isn’t really what NASA was describing. Other than the orbit, their gateway station isn’t intended and doesn’t seem suited for assembly and testing of electrically propelled missions. It’s a can designed to test long-duration hardware and biology, not a construction shack and resupply station. In describing this gateway station, I think NASA even mentioned the “benefits” of launching things in one piece (with a very heavy lift launch vehicle) rather than in-space docking or assembly of components.
Of course NASA is not thinking this way. NASA has lost all ability to think out of the box. The last original idea they had was LOR. Since Explorer 1 all robotic spacecraft were launched by a single rocket from Earth, and that is how it will always be…
And so you get ever larger and more expensive rockets that are hardly used… And robotic space missions cost so much you have only a few a decade.
Yes, the ISS could be used for this today IF a chemical space tug is used to lift the finished spacecraft out of LEO. Of course you run the risk of the Van Allen Belts and the cloud of orbital debris in LEO, but both are manageable.
But knowing NASA the Space Tug will probably cost as much as the Gateway Station to design and build 🙂
Well, the space tug I mentioned doesn’t have to be built by NASA. I’ve heard that either the government of Luxembourg or SES are funding some work on asteroid-mined water, simply to supply a reusable LEO to GEO tug. That approach is potentially more efficient than a chemical stage or the newer use of electric propulsion (with the time and radiation issues.) It’s not a proven case, but it’s about as close to a viable business model I’ve seen for extraterrestrial resources.
Some other things are also changing a bit. I can now walk a kilometer from my apartment, sign a check, and buy a space-qualified star tracker. Qualified for deep space uses at that. Ok. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I would have to empty my bank account, and my bank would want more than a personal check for that. The company involved actually would want more notice, even though their web page does have an “add to cart” option. But some things are changing.
Over the past few years someone posted here a chart showing the required Delta-v to and from various solar system destinations. I don’t find it by searching but I do recall that the number to just about anywhere from L1 or L2 was low, at least to these non-scientist eyes.
The Interplanetary Super Highway is over hyped. See potholes on the Interplanetary Super Highway
However using Farquhar’s route, Trans Mars Insertion is only about 1 km/s from EML2
If there were a propellent source near EML2, a staging platform there would certainly be worthwhile. One possible propellent source is the lunar poles, about 2.5 km/s from EML2.
A carbonaceous Ivuna in a loosely bound lunar orbit would be an even closer propellent source to EML2. But that doesn’t seem likely in the near term. ARM is being sidelined.
Application to Mars aside, there was some work done as part of the ARM Program that will be useful in future NEO/NEA efforts.
Oh, and this is why I wrote this several years ago: http://www.sciencedirect.co…
Can this get any more absurd? Cut the crap and get on to moon base. Nasa is at least 30years from a serious Mars mission and 20 years from getting the life support developed to keep four folks alive and productive for 25+ months. A new Administrator needs to lose most senior ” this is how we’ve always done it ” Nasa management.
Who will be the customers? How many are there? How much are they willing to pay?
Customers? Since when is NASA supposed to have paying customers?
You should know the NASAdouble standard by now, if it involves the Moon it must pay for itself. By contrast no one has to justify the billions wasted on Mars over the decades because its “MARS”.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Cite?
I didn’t intend to imply that NASA feels it must have a paying customer for either mission. I am suggesting that if we want to see human spaceflight become a sustainable enterprise, we should insist that this be the case, because only then will there be a motivation to reduce the price to a level that will permit a viable market.
Yes, that is the key. moving spaceflight beyond government funding. But you have to determine what the markets are first. Additional human and robotic missions to the Moon would do so.
Common knowledge doesn’t require citation. As every Moon advocate knows when the Moon comes up as a NASA destination the individuals advocating are always asked what the cost/benefits are, why its worthwhile going there, who will pay for it, etc. These same questions are never asked when Mars is the goal.
NASA could have used the Shuttle to return astronauts to the Moon anytime in the last quarter century. And NASA could have done so within what Congress considers a reasonable budget for it.
http://www.nss.org/settleme…
But it seems that six short human missions on the near side are regarded as more than enough to understand an entire world. And so when anyone proposes going to the Moon they are either asked what the commercial reason is, or how it helps NASA going to Mars. It makes about as much sense as Spain, after making six voyages abandoned exploring the New World to send voyages to Australia.
Laughed when I read this memorable statement.
Lunar advocate Dennis Wingo said in a interview at Maker Faire, “to sustainably colonize Mars we must industrialize the Moon.” We can still go to Mars but to do it cost effectively, we should use the resources of the Moon. But as you said everyone loves to talk about Mars because nobody will question cost/benefits/etc.
Why?
Any time you want to land on a body with a significant gravity well you dramatically increase cost and complexity. As long as you’re doing ARM- or Gateway-style missions without need for a lander, you have at least a small chance of getting it done with the budget provided. You want a base someplace? Talk to your members of Congress. They hold the purse strings.
Mars aside, there were some positive efforts within the ARM program that are useful in moving NEO/NEA characterization efforts forward.
Building a habitable waypoint at one of the Earth-Moon libration points outside of Earth’s deep gravity well is an enabling steppingstone to crewed exploration everywhere else in the solar system. Like ISS, it provides an incremental platform upon which and through we can expand our operational skills & technology envelope—but beyond the Van Allen radiation belts into the wider domain of cislunar space where many of the rules are different.
As we learn to regularly conduct activities at such a distant place we will also be studying the new environment’s effects on us and the machines, thereby lifting the learning curve further outward. Flying to & from the platform itself will take us beyond the tentative steps taken with Apollo into the realm of regular and more perfected ‘deeper space’ operations, ultimately achieving the same maturity we now see with the crew & cargo delivery flights to ISS, delivery flights that are finally falling under the expert hands of private companies.
They are calling it a gateway for a reason: it (or an evolutionary upgraded version of it) can serve as a staging waypoint for trips to and from the lunar surface (from which water will likely be recovered for propellant & crew sustenance), to Near-Earth and other asteroids, to Mars’s moons, and potentially Mars itself.
ARM began with a reasonable premise but devolved into an unfunny joke: invest much money into auto-grabbing a meters-wide rock off of a distant body and hauling it home to be a second tiny moon of the Earth.
We already have a Moon holding much potential for scientific inquiry and resource exploitation, though, and we even have some experience working on its surface. Obviously a return to the lunar surface lies ahead, and this suggested gateway may serve as an important component of such a strategy.
The proposed gateway facility will allow us to become experts at working in distant space, demanding both improvements in access to space from the Earth’s surface as well as exploring advanced exploration technology (tethers, aerobraking, propulsion, power) along the way.
Doing these things will help provide many of the pieces required for building up the capability to do all the other things: even, perhaps, boulder retrieval from distant bodies.
“enabling steppingstone to crewed exploration everywhere”
Actually it is not. This station design is not advancing any of the biophysical data needs to either enhance microgravity protection of humans or provide insight into how human systems will function, safely or not, in any other gravity environment. To date we have two real data points, 0g and 1g, and a tiny bit of 1/6g (not statistically relevant). The ONLY way to do that is to build a station that creates an artificial gravity environment at any level between 1 and 0. And there are NO plans on doing this. Second, no one has proven that any space station at such a location will provide any increased gain in knowledge regarding human space flight than continued use of the ISS could provide. Oh, and there is no immediate plan to go to the Lunar surface, so no need for a gas station near by.
“Oh, and there is no immediate plan to go to the Lunar surface, so no need for a gas station near by.”
And there is the problem… we have a space program without a destination. I don’t count Mars because NASA’s Mars Exploration plans are vague and unfunded – no strategy to really get humans to Mars in a reasonable time period, at reasonable risk and at reasonable cost.
In contrast, returning humans to the lunar surface is far more achievable and can deliver some valuable science as well as allow us to gain experience in beyond Earth operations. The Moon is largely unexplored and yet its right next door. Mars can wait – we should return to the Moon first.
The Gateway station makes sense to support lunar surface exploration, and as a central hub for exploring Near Earth Asteroids, as well as exploiting Cislunar space. You are correct though in terms of the point about artificial gravity. We should be emphasizing future space technologies that provide artificial gravity and thus avoid all the biomedical problems caused by operating in zero G for extended periods.
Destinations are worthless without a purpose.
VSE and then Constellation had a clear destination, the moon. And yet resulted in… well, Constellation.
Unless you have a clear purpose for going to a destination (not BS excuses made up to justify a decision already made), you will get the same kind of mission drift and program chaos we’ve seen since the end of Apollo.
—
Technically, both VSE and the Shuttle had purposes, but both were ignored in the actual programs. (The Shuttle was meant to be a low cost space truck. VSE was supposed to explore ISRU lunar resources for fuelling BEO missions.)
You *could* collect meaningful data on fractional gravity without having to build a full outpost for humans. A large centrifuge unit attached to ISS to study mice. Oh, something like this (now rusting away in a Japanese car park…) http://www.spaceref.com/iss… https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
not sure at most a visit once a year for a 30 day stay when you bring all your logistics (H2O/Food/O2) with you is really meeting your concept.
I agree. It gives a destination for commercial cargo and crew to advance to and build up our Nation’s domestic commercial spaceflight transportation services.
It will provide a spot for a reusable commercial lunar lander to be parked at and refueled by commercial services.
It will provide another hub for commercial habitat providers to park test units.
You’ve hit on the one point that makes such a Gateway supportable, in my view. ISS is performing a valuable service in this regard. Hard to see Mr. Musk’s business without that NASA contract and destination.
Akin to airmail, back in the 20’s, as many here have mentioned numerous times. And some may argue that this is not the function of government, but they are wrong.
“commercial spaceflight transportation services”
Don’t you have to have a viable commercial industry BEFORE you start providing services. Blacksmiths, bartenders, store clerks, and on and on did not go out to California in 1847 in preparation for the gold rush two years later. It makes no sense. And in this case, WHY are they there in the first place. Unsustainable.
It is a good thing those people going out to california had government outposts and forts along the trail huh?
Good thing that once they got there the government built a railroad so they could get goods sent to them and send the gold back east.
At the time, the only government who had built roads and forts in Alto California was Spanish. Transportation from the US east coast was mainly by ship until about twenty five years after the 1849 gold rush. But el Camino Real was a fair north-south road, and the chain of missionaries and presidios were the settlements and forts.
I stated this:
“It is a good thing those people going out to california had government outposts and forts along the trail “
Forts like JIm Bridger, in wyoming, were built in 1842 …. The jumping off points had forts also.
Historic forts of the west
http://ida.net/users/lamar/…
Did you read what you linked to? It details in the last three paragraphs what I have been saying, about the fur industry creating most of the infrastructure and knowledge of the regions. The forts it is describing came later, much later, most after the Civil War as part of the government strategy to force native Americans on to reservations.
Sure. And those forts were critical for people traveling over land to the west coast. The settlement of the Oregon territory is a good example. But the large majority of the people who migrated to California during the gold rush got there on ships. So the government-funded infrastructure for over land travel isn’t really relevant.
We were not talking about the period AFTER 1849 but BEFORE
I guess I’m missing your point. The US government infrastructure you are referring to was not significant during or before 1849, when compared to commercial, ocean-based travel. At least not as far as California was concerned. I didn’t say anything about the times after the gold rush, except to say the shift from ocean to land/rail travel happened later.
Again review your history, the U.S. government basically ignored the west beyond the Missouri until after the Mexican-American war. Indeed. most of the land didn’t even belong to the U.S., just the Missouri watershed. Most of the trading forts and infrastructure was privately built by the fur industry and private entrepreneurs trading with Mexico. They also pioneered most of the trails the government expeditions would later survey, after the gold rush.
Well it was ignored because the war didn’t end until 1848. My point is there was way points along the trail and hopping off points.
Fighting on what is now U.S. territory ended in early January 1847 with the rest of the battles then taking place in Mexico.
Yes, and the key point is that the trail along with the jumping off points you mention were developed by private entrepreneurs, many former fur traders, serving the needs of the immigrates. It wasn’t some government funded program.
And after 1848 the government often bought key facilities, like Fort Bridger, from the private owners. The also hired private wagon firms to supply them. “The Wagonmasters” by Henry Pickering Walker (1968) tells well the story of the private firms that linked the communities and military bases together in the old west.
Yes, and most of the infrastructure prior to the Civil War was privately built and funded with NO input even, let alone funding, from Washington D.C. That was why the West was able to develop so quickly, no one had to wait on some government decision on what to do, they just did it.
Again, check your history. Fort Bridger wasn’t built by the U.S. government, it was built by Jim Bridger as a private fur trading post. No government funds were involved. Just because someplace has fort in the name doesn’t mean it was government built. Many like Fort Bridger were privately owned and funded trading outposts.
The military didn’t establish a camp there until 1858 during the Utah War when the U.S. Army was preparing to attack the Mormon settlers. They then used the existing privately developed trails and private installations like Fort Bridger to simplify their logistics.
Except those outposts were built mostly by private fur traders and the Mormon. Army outposts west of the Missouri were few and followed the wagon trails, not pioneered them. Trails like the famous Oregon Trail were first developed and used by private entrepreneurs in the fur trade. Please get your history correct. The West develop as fast as it did because entrepreneurs led the way, as on the Internet.
Dr. M: I’m thinking you would enjoy a Netflix series called “Hell On Wheels”; the setting (for much of the series) is the westward-bound side of the Transcontinental Railroad.
It’s historical fiction replete with stereotypical characters. But it’s also a revealing look at the West right after the War of Yankee Aggression.
Not the true west really, but the camp followers that emerged after General Dodge took over the construction of the Union Pacific. “Hell on Wheels”, the construction town, was an anomaly, following the workers as the railroad move on, but the actual communities being built along the railroad were the real West, folks quietly farming the land, raising cattle and other livestock while building a new life.
It was also an anomaly as the other transcontinental railroads built out at a slower and more measured pace as they only had the land subsidies and not the bonds the UP benefited from for funding. Also they made more use of Chinese workers who tended to be much less rowdy.
Anomalous, yes. But the description of the west in those days, observations on the placement of new towns and the reasons for it, range war issues, interactions with Native Americans, and more – all work together to build a realistic picture.
And the rail road did not exist there for another 20 years. They mostly traveled by ship. A history lesson is warranted, me thinks.
“The first gold found in California was made on March 9, 1842. Francisco Lopez, a native California, was searching for stray horses. He stopped on the bank of a small creek in what later was known as Placerita Canyon, about 3 miles (4.8 km) east of the present-day Newhall, California, and about 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Los Angeles. While the horses grazed, Lopez dug up some wild onions and found a small gold nugget in the roots among the onion bulbs. He looked further and found more gold.[28]
Lopez took the gold to authorities who confirmed its worth. Lopez and others began to search for other steambeds with gold deposits in the area. They found several in the northeastern section of the forest, within present-day Ventura County. In 1843 he found gold in San Feliciano Canyon near his first discovery. Mexican miners from Sonora worked the placer deposits until 1846, when the Californios began to agitate for independence from Mexico, and the Bear Flag Revolt caused many Mexicans to leave California.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Donald is correct. Gold wasn’t the driver for Americans to go to California until 1849. It was the sea otter fur, ranching and trade with Hawaii. The book “The Outer Coast” by Richard Bateman (1986) documents well this trade that was started by New England merchant captains in the 1790’s. It was the main driver of the California economy at the time. No one paid attention to the gold until Sutter’s Mill, which Mr. Sutter was building to provide timber to build ships and housing.
No he is not. That would be like saying, people want to take a taxi from their house to another person’s house, but you can not have a commercial taxi service to service those people until there is a walmart store built.
Donald was saying you can not have a commerical transportation service until there are businesses to service.
You are confusing businesses with markets. Markets always come first. Captains didn’t just sail to California for fun, there was money to be made. The more profits that were made, the more ships sailed there. This trade started in the 1790’s. And then folks hearing of the money to be made started looking for overland alternatives. At the same time Americans sailing on the ships started to stay to make their fortunes.
BTW, try operating a taxi service without destinations. See how long you will stay in business 🙂
And again, gold was not a factor for the first fifty years. The discoveries in southern California were not large and didn’t excite anyone. The discovery in 1849 did because California and the southwest had just become part of the U.S. This combined with the stories returning soldiers told of the potential of the region triggered it when the first ship full of goal reached the eastern ports.
/waaaayy off topic, a genuine question:
In that context, then, what is your view of the modern mobile telephone? a phone, dramatically enhanced with clever software, married to a strong and capable computer, all linked by a touch screen. Arguably the iPhone created the market for an app-driven mobile device (leaving aside simple mobile phones). Which came first?
Folks were talking on phones before the modern mobile phone, it just made it easier, just as folks were taking photos before it, using chat on computers and using email.
It emerged because the government broke up the AT&T monopoly and the new mobile phone firms were now in free market competition with each other, first making phones smaller, lowering the cost of using them, then adding features like texting, email, and so on. Anything to get more customers away from the competition by making their phones better. Its how free markets work.
No different than automobiles hundred years ago. The Model T was very simple and cheap, other firms then started adding features, more room, more colors, bigger engines and self-starters, and also started focusing on different segments of the markets. Its how free markets have always driven technological innovation.
The Internet developed the same way when the Bloucher Act of 1992 took away the NSF restriction on commercial uses of it.
That we why we need to get space away from government decision making and into the hands of real commercial customers. Again World View’s flying a chicken sandwich is a good example of the later. I know some space advocates are shocked, but its no different than using mobile phones linked to the Internet to play Pokémon.
Cool, “Gateway”, like the station in Frederick Pohl’s books…
Yup. HeeChee ships!
Hey, can’t complain… it’ll be newer space station! They can apply all the lessons learned on how to (and how NOT to) build a proper orbital outpost. Just send up a central node (rad-hardened to act as a storm-shelter), surround it with a couple of B330’s, and there ya go! (for NASA self-esteem, they can parade around artist renditions featuring a docked Orion … actually overlaid on a Dragon2).
No partners?
That era is over, with the end of Post War Globalism.
The ISS is an aesthetic nightmare. We can do better. Where are the Space Architects? Is that even a thing?
And forgive me, all of you talented engineers who labored mightily on it and with great success. It works for a first pass but the thing is just butt ugly.
Someone please design a space station that looks like something more than a gangly and messy monster.
And lest anyone think this observation is trivial – it is not. Let’s design something that grabs the popular imagination?
I see stations evolving more like Borg stations than Star Trek stations…
Real things have to work. Hollywood designs only have to look shiny. Hence Hollywood designs don’t need giant solar arrays, they don’t need huge radiators, they don’t need easily accessibly components that can be accessed by robots and space-suited astronauts, and they don’t need to be scaled to fit on a launch vehicle.
On a real space station, that means you’re always going to end up with something that looks like a chemical refinery.
For 40 years people have been insisting we need something that “grabs the public imagination”, and you know what? It never freakin’ works. During Apollo 13, before the accident, not a single network did a live cross to the crew while they were in-flight, because during Apollo 12 they got more complaints about interrupting scheduled programming than they did complaints about not seeing the astronauts.
We have SLS because we had Constellation, because a bunch of old farts wanted to re-live Apollo. “We need to inspire people again!” they insisted. How inspired is the public by SLS?
[And in reality, the NASA programs that have garnered the most public enthusiasm in recent history were New Horizons and before that MSL. Robots. (Ugly robots too.)]
Maybe you are being facetious? ISS is, for what it is, a simple, straightforward design for something that had to be designed and built by several nations over a period of several decades, and launched piece by piece on about 50 different launches. It is functional. The design might have been simpler and more ‘elegant’ if it had been designed by a single contractor and launched on one or a few heavy lift launchers, but that option was first discarded in 1970 and again during the Freedom to ISS transition. ISS was designed by space architects. It may be the only space vehicle/facility to have ever been designed by space architects, so it may be the only known example of their work ever deployed in space.
I doubt anyone could call the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module a thing of beauty. But I know what you mean. One problem is aerodynamics.
When things are designed for functionality with small margins for esthetics, the technical requirements drive their appearance. For aircraft, the need for aerodynamics drives both functionality and esthetics, so they have a certain look to them (note that older aircraft, say the Wright Flyer, lack that cool look.) Something designed for use exclusively in space doesn’t have any functional needs for aerodynamics, so it typically lacks that esthetic, streamlined appearance.
But you could still do something. The streamlined look isn’t the be-all or end-all of esthetics. The National Gallery of Art’s east building might be a good example. Both its architecture and the large mobile sculpture in its lobby are hardly streamlined or conventionally esthetic, but I rather like them and I’m not alone in that regard. Maybe the engineers designing the next space station should talk to someone like I. M. Pei.
OK, guys, thanks for responding.
My professional work is land planning. Imagine a new site of 1,000 acres: developers come to me with raw dirt and a bottom line. There’s no infrastructure, access roads are narrow, no sewage plant, no water management; the permitting environment, too, involves a dozen or so agencies from local to Federal, including the Corps of Engineers, all of the wildlife people, the EPA; and of course there’s local zoning. Usually these sites are zoned Agricultural, so they need a series of hearings to move the zoning to something more suitable (PUD, usually). Add Land Use Comp Plans as another level.
Got the picture? Now, in the olden days the developer would call a civil engineer. He’d grid the thing out, double loading every road. We’ve all seen this style of subdivision: if you fly into RSW you see it; or see Levitttown or hundreds of other ‘communities’. They generate unbalanced and tangled traffic. Utilities are very complex and expensive maintenance. No sense of community beyond your lot line. No recreation: no bike paths or nature trails or (god help me) golf courses). Your backyard? That is it. No mas.
Jump forward to the more modern era, where we’ve learned how to make curvilinear streets, how to amenitize water management; how to create a place where people actually want to live. We know how to preserve huge amounts of existing natural areas (often more than half of the site) with no loss of yield. Most of these changes, once the trend started, are market driven.
And while many do not see the appeal of a gated community like this (I don’t), many do, and for a lot of very good reasons: better sense of community, terrific recreation, protection of property values…the list goes on and on. And those aforementioned engineers? They are right on board, an essential part of the process.
Now you might be thinking that there is a huge $ delta with this sort of a community. And you would be right. The developer makes a lot more money. A LOT more money.
The approach I outlined not only has a similar density, but it is cheaper to build and has a far greater financial yield. Oh. And for you out there aesthetically challenged? It is nicer!
The argument that ‘it’s just the way it has to be’ is a defensive posture. Those design engineers CAN do a better job. They are smart and they are talented. And maybe, yes, the service of an architect would be helpful.
We can do better.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I studied many years ago with Larry Bell at U Houson department of archetecture; he approached architectural design of the space station primarily from the standpoint of the interior, as that is where the residents spend most of their time. He was SFAIK the first to propose that unused berthing hatches be fitted with a transparent hemispherical dome, which ultimately evolved to the cupola module of today, to permit crewmembers to immerse themselves in the exterior view and the primary esthetic object, the Earth.
So I agree that esthetics are important, but (like your land developments) they must also be efficient and functional, and there may be room for new esthetic concepts that will appeal to us once we get used to them, like the architecture of FL Wright.
Bell’s approach was sound, viewing as he did the experience of the users and using that experience to generate form.
And that’s the issue for any designer: generating form. How does the form of your creation reflect the needs of the users – the function.
Form follows function. And funny you should ask: http://spacearchitect.org/
Space stations are not supposed to be aesthetic. They are supposed to house humans safely, in all regards. The problem is that there are no third+ generation stations that are designed to use all that is learned from the past regarding human safety and future knowledge needs/gaps. They keep making the same old mistakes because of MONEY.
I’m simply suggesting a different way of thinking, that’s all. We don’t build gridded new towns anymore because someone was looking outside the box (well, modern PUDs were partly a response to environmental and zoning issues to a large extent).
I am not saying “make it pretty”. Simply pointing out that what we have is a gangly and unappealing monstrosity. Looking at the thing it is hard to grasp it, visually, to get any sense of what it is or how it works, other than the results of an erector set experiment.
And as the astronauts relate, iit s noisy, crowded, hard to sleep, and basically an unfriendly place with crap strung all over the walls and floors as if nobody really thought it out. All of the video that comes from it shows a place that is extremely unappealing place to actually live. Which it is.
And I don’t mean to poke a stick at anyone. I am certain that everyone involved in the design knows we can do better. Let’s learn fro the experience.
And if it turns out to be more pleasing, a target hard to miss, so much the better.
I imagine you might like something like this space settlement. It houses around 2,000 in eight different communities within a radiation shield.
https://thespaceshow.files….
It is designed to be built with heavy lifters like the BFR and New Armstrong.
Its not the solution, its just the start of one that corrects all of the huge problems with the O’Neill designs.
What would be the rationale for something like this Gateway? A new space project, at great expense, to occupy another generation and send money to another contractor? If it is just another space station, then why is another needed? We have one. It is far more accessible. Use the ISS for as long as it can be used. NASA needs a plan and a strategy. A Gateway is neither.
NASA is a like a diabetic that keeps eating the sugary snacks like ARM and Gateway, as a substitute for real food, while being denied the insulin injection of cash to deal with the consequences.
I keep having this vision of astros & cosmos taking a selfie, just as an ITS flies by the window on its way to a manned landing on Mas.
In case folks miss it. The so call Gateway is more or less a scaled down SLS core. Since they are basically modifying a SLS core LOX tank as the habitat module. Something that only the SLS Block 1b and maybe the New Glenn can lifted due to the 8.4 meter diameter.
The case for the Gateway will be moot if the ITS tanker enters service. Since it can be used as a space station, propellant depot, lander or cis-Lunar transport. IIRC the ITS system is suppose to be in service by the mid 2020s if there is no development issues.
You got sources for this? As far as I’ve seen the Gateway is comprised of the propulsion module meant for arm, one of the yet to be finalized “nextstep” deep space hab designs, and some docking adapters, not some sort of lunar skylab type design.
Meanwhile, a generation is still wasted…
Where is the simple, easily digestible rationale for a Lunar Mission? Or Mars? Where’s the fifth-grade reading level discussion for space exploration? Something that every taxpayer can fully understand, agree or not?
Nowhere because it does not exist.
Justification can be found, certainly. Everyone reading this text knows the reasons for space exploration; and every reader will have a different catalog of acceptable reasons. Every scientist will have a rationale. Similarly every starry-eyed dreamer, convinced that the stars are our destiny.
Each person has her own ox.
Each line of thinking or justification contributes weight to the go/ no go decision. But each line of thinking, taken separately, contributes only a very small amount of weight to the final tally. Planetary Science? 15%. Atmospheric Research? 10%. Geology? 20%. Finding a new home for humankind? 5%. And so on. None are compelling on their own.
Imagine standing in front of a skeptic, wanting to convince her that a Lunar Mission is a good use of money. She’s an honest broker, a fair-minded person. She is capable of assessing evidence.
I start down the aforementioned list of things that a Lunar Mission will accomplish. And as the words “Planetary Science” leave my lips, I see her eyes are glazing. She is shuffling her feet. She is glancing around.
I blurt out “Atmospheric Research!”, trying not to raise my voice, at the same time wondering if exposing my own passion will help win the day.
“Adventure”! “It’s our Destiny!”
But the war is lost.
You’re asking for what people in planetary science have started calling an “elevator speech.” Allegedly, someone got a mission approved by happening to be at NASA headquarters, happening to get on the elevator with a very senior official and being able to explain the whole point of his proposed mission between the ground and seventh floor (or sixth floor, or whatever, the story isn’t clear…) I actually don’t see any such justification for manned missions to the Moon or Mars.
But let’s look at it in a different way. Do we need an easily understood and explained reason, which everyone will accept (or, at least, take seriously enough to agree to disagree)? Was there any such justification for settling Plymouth, New England, in 1620? As opposed to staying in either Plymouth, old England or Leiden, in the Spanish Netherlands? For a small number of people, who were willing to do so at an affordable low cost, it was worth it. For a number of reasons, those people were generally regarded as crackpots at the time. And, although most of them were motivated by religious reasons (or, more properly, being able to live in a culturally and linguistically English place without getting persecuted for their religion), I strongly suspect some of them had other motives.
In a similar manner, and if the costs are low enough, what’s wrong with a similar effort to go to Mars or the Moon. It doesn’t need to be something the majority of the people agree with, or even understand. The manifest destiny crackpots and the scientific geeks can pool their money and go, without needing widespread, public support. Of course, that does depend on the _if_. The if and only if the cost are low enough part.