MSFC Gets 2/3 Of The Lunar Lander – JSC Gets 1/3
NASA Administrator to Discuss Human Lander Update for Artemis Program, NASA
“NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, joined by U.S. Representatives Mo Brooks, Robert Aderholt, Scott DesJarlais and Brian Babin, will discuss updates on the agency’s plans for landing humans on the Moon by 2024 through the Artemis program at 3:10 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 16. The remarks will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.”
Alabama space center will manage NASA’s lunar lander program, Ars Technica
“As part of the carefully negotiated agreement, Marshall will have responsibility for the overall program as well as two elements of what is planned to be a three-stage lander. The center in northern Alabama will oversee commercial development of the Transfer Element–planned to ferry the lander from the Lunar Gateway down to low-lunar orbit–as well as the Descent Element that will fly down to the surface. … Meanwhile, the Houston, Texas-based Johnson Space Center will oversee development of the Ascent Element. “
Keith’s note: Watch as the MSFC Transfer and Descent elements get too heavy and then squeeze the JSC Ascent element. We’ve seen this movie before.
The problem comes to a head with the lack of long-term understanding of exactly what humans will be doing back on the Moon. If we are going back just to plant flags and take photos then not much of this really matters. If not, then the plan must look at the next 20 years of needs and proposed efforts and growth. What are the odds that the right thing will be done?
I’d guess the chances of it being done right involve words used to describe a person’s weight: Slim and fat.
Keith’s note: Watch as the MSFC Transfer and Descent elements get too heavy and then squeeze the JSC Ascent element. We’ve seen this movie before.
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Why so cynical?
/s
33 years of interactions with NASA.
To be fair, for most of that time NASA was (and continues to be) hobbled by Congress and various Administrations, true?
It might not be that bad, but there is a potential for it. Many managers, when confronted with conflicting opinions from technical experts, place more faith in the experts they know or who are from their institution. In this case, that means the folks at Johnson may face an uphill battle if they get into an argument over resources with the folks from Marshall.
But I think a definite result will be plenty of finger pointing and blame games. There will, inevitably, be times where someone needs to make a design change to one of the three vehicles. And that will cause some redesign and rework by the people working on the other two vehicles. Interface Control Documents are supposed to avoid that, but that never works perfectly. Especially when you can’t just walk over and talk to someone for ten or twenty minutes about what a particular details in the ICD means or how important that detail is.
So there will be a certain amount of redesign and rework. That’s going to impact cost and schedule. When that happens, I’m confident the people at Johnson and Marshall will be pointing there fingers and all saying, “not my fault, they’re the ones who caused the problem.”
And that’s not a NASA thing. A fifteen minutes drive from me, we’ve got a collapsed highway overpass which will take months to fix. The cause (sinkhole forming under the pilings) is under investigation. The state department of transportation, the contractor who built it and the contractor responsible for maintenance are, predictably, turning the investigation into a circular firing squad.
“So there will be a certain amount of redesign and rework. “
Oh I am sure if it means keeping the floors swept and power points continuing Shelby will agree to every redesign they can think of..
Seems to me there was a Mars probe that was messed up because the contractor’s contract technical requirements troop didn’t have enough sense or experience to call the customer and say, “Hey! Are we working to metric or English units?” Oops!
That would be Mars Climate Orbiter. But it wasn’t as simple as using imperial units when they were supposed to use metric. Spacecraft failures rarely are. The way NASA does things, there is always some other step or thing which will catch and correct one single mistake, no matter how stupid. But that system isn’t set up to catch two or more stupid mistakes in combination. In the case of MCO, there were three real problems in the interface between the spacecraft builder (LMA) and the operator (JPL). Using imperial units rather than the specified metric ones was one. But that would not have been a problem, if not for the others. And there were also two or three operational errors, where the problem could have been detected and a failure avoided. But, again, someone made a bad call or a real mistake, and the problem was not avoided.
By the way, it isn’t technically “English” units. I work with someone from England and she has a fit when someone says that. England is largely metric. But then I yank her chain and ask about pubs selling beer by the pint, highway signs with speed limits in miles per hour, and people who still describe someone’s weight in stones. But that’s just a personal joke. For all aerospace purposes, the United Kingdom is metric.
Heck, even when metric is specified, the sim folks will use meters, flight software folks km. Fortunately I stumbled across that one.
Yes, but that is just a matter of moving a decimal place. About the only one I can almost convert is meters are about a yard and a third, and a “klick” (kilometer) is 5/8 (.625) of a mile.
“Yard and a tenth” might be a better fit. I recall someone using a 10% rule-of-thumb for Us-metric conversion.
That’s one of the easy ones. If it’s way off and way off by a multiple of ten, you’re using the metric units with different prefixes. The only time I messed that up was helping a student who’s code was giving answers off by a factor of 10,000. I stated looking for things like cm versus km. No that’s 100,000. Or maybe… It turned out to be something totally different. The code left out a square root of the proton mass-to-charge ratio (9,788).
But this is actually the one forgivable thing about the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter. When things are way off, or it’s something you have intuition for, you ought to be able to catch unit errors. If a tall, solidly built man tells me he weights 100 pounds, I’d almost instantly know he’s got pounds and kilograms mixed up. In the case of MCO, the unit error was in something no one has any intuition for.
When you use attitude control thrusters to turn a spacecraft, you use balanced pairs so that there is no net acceleration. Of course, that’s only true if the pair of thrusters are absolutely identical and perfectly mounted. Since that never happens, there is always some, small net acceleration. Not much, but enough to make a 100 km difference on the way from Earth to Mars. So the navigators need to know how many Newtons they get when they apply so many Newton-meters of torque to turn the spacecraft. That’s where the MCO feet to meters mistake was. But it’s a small number. The difference between very good manufacturing and just barely meeting specifications could make a factor of five difference. No one could have been expected to look at those numbers and say, “Wait. Are you sure? That number looks way off.”
pounds/newtons – not feet/meters.
FWIW, it’s U.S. Customary Units
That really depends on the navigation software. You could do it any number of ways. A torque to force ratio has units of length, but if you wanted to calculate linear and angular acceleration separately, you’d want input in units of force. I don’t know what navigation software the MCO project used.
The report said the small forces code used Newtons & thats what the ICD had. LMA supplied data in pounds.
In this case, the number that I noticed was velocity aberration, which the FSW calculated only because of reuse.
…
What was this thread about again?
“When you use attitude control thrusters to turn a spacecraft, you use balanced pairs so that there is no net acceleration.”
Or you plan to do both attitude and course correction simultaneously.
I recently flew on a Delta Airlines 737-900, which has a video display on the back of the seat ahead of yours. You can punch up flight numbers, either in metric or “Imperial” units. I learned metric in high school in the 1950’s, BUT I still think in English/Imperial (feet/sec, inches, etc.) and have to convert!
It’s like learning a foreign language (really learning one.) You can’t do it if you have to think about it; it has to be unconscious and intuitive. I switched my smartphone settings to Celsius a few years ago, was pretty confused and poorly dressed for the weather for about six months, and then developed an intuition for it. When I checked the weather forecast this morning, I knew a high of 32 was a bit warmer than I’d like. I honestly don’t know if that’s 90 or 95 Fahrenheit. (O.k. I just checked; it’s 89.6…) That’s no different from trying to speak a foreign language by doing a Mark Twain and translating things word-for-word on the fly. You aren’t going to get from “sure” to “d’accord” reliably. You might if you stated with “of course”, but don’t count on it.
“Why so cynical?” Because humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1973.
Like the Altair Lander it won’t survive the next Administration. New President, New Goals…
Depends say wh flips in 2020 then NASA goals won’t realistically change until the fy23 budget submit in Feb of 2022 given how long it usually takes for a president to get around to picking a NASA administrator and formulating a pivot. So by October 2022 the appendix H Landers will have been funded for two years assuming bridenstine gets his $1.6B upper this year and more Artemis money next those companies are going to lobby hard to let them land on the moon in less than two years at that point and will the new wh have enough congressional support to over turn two years of funding they already went along with? Obama didn’t hence why Orion and SLS survived constellation cancellation without skipping a beat for the most part.
Given all this work will be done by commercial companies awarded under the BAA appendix H hopefully means the mistakes of programs past can be avoided when companies like blue origin and SpaceX say thanks for the insight but that’s not what we are going to do. Ultimately the appendix H companies should be driving the design with NASA just offering assistance, testing and oversight as needed . It may not be as free range for the companies as commercial crew but hopefully not as poorly managed as SLS or Orion. They have to find a happy medium balance of inline and oversight roles for msfc and JSC.
I’m trying to figure out how three stages to get from HLO and back fits in “sustainable”. Maybe I missed something…
The Gateway to low lunar orbit tug would be pretty easy to reuse, assuming they designed it with that in mind. If the tug returned the ascent vehicle to Gateway, it could also be reused. Again assuming they designed for that and sacrificed some of the mass efficiencies of a multistage, disposable system. But the descent stage looks like a write off. I suppose there are ways to reuse and repurpose it, if the plan called for multiple landings at the same site. Say turning it into a tank farm for propellents produced in situ. But that strikes me as marginal, architecture specific, and very dependent on the details of the planned missions.
And reuse of the Transfer Element would also be architecture-specific. But so far, we’re hearing only a push for a single landing. I doubt reuse of any of the three elements is being considered, but I do hope I’m wrong.
Isn’t it necessary for the ascent element to return to Gateway since it’s carrying the crew? I would think that’s an obvious element for reuse.
Obvious, to you or me. Does not mean that’s the way it’s going to be, especially if there is no written requirement to do so.
“Sustainable” and “back to stay” are often written, but have we seen a proposed architecture, with WH or NASA HQ backing, that’s compatible with those phrases?
It depends on the details. How long is the planned surface stay, and how long does it take to get from Gateway to a low lunar orbit? If the design is for one day on the surface, and the trip to and from low lunar orbit is a few days, most of the crew accommodations might be on the transfer vehicle, not the ascent element. That isn’t even a disastrously bad idea, since it would transition to surface base support relatively well. For transport from low lunar orbit to a base, you only need a lander with crew accommodations for an hour or so.
I was assuming anything going back to Gateway could, at least in theory, be reused. The transfer vehicle has to, by definition. The ascent stage might or might not, depending on what it and the transfer vehicle are like. The descent stage, by definition, won’t. That means it could, conceivably, be repurposed as surface infrastructure but it couldn’t be reused as a descent stage.
SRB O-rings.
ET SOFI.
Hubble optics integration.
TSS (jam, then break).
What management org is common to all these problematic programs?
Is this to soften the blow when SLS is replaced by a (more economical) commercial option?
One can hope.
Senator Shelby bringin’ home the bacon. Hoo-wee!
Hey, at least they are talking about a lunar lander these days. Illustrations bother me from my perspective which is not much (I’ve never designed or built a lunar lander). Crew quarters looks very small compared to rest of vehicle, exiting/entering using rope/pulley system which has issues, pilot cockpit and view very high. Maybe there are more practical designs but if they are going commercial then we will not know what they look like until NASA selects the company. I wonder how far Altair got until it “disappeared” during Constellation.
My opinion for sustainable lunar program is first have several rovers do detailed surveys and analysis (but robots don’t have the same excitement as boots on the ground). Last month a panel discussion with Greg Schmidt, Tony Colaprete, Lynn Harper, Brian Day at Foothill College in Los Altos Hill, CA and they showed various proposed robotic missions. I was amazed by some of the details people have been working on (they didn’t come up with this stuff in the last month). As if they were working on these lunar missions for quite some time.
Speaking of commercial development and selection, this is a new paradigm and may set the stage where NASA no longer does design/development of spacecraft. They simply become a funding source. Which leads to various issues of NASA becoming like NACA, NASA no longer does big things like Apollo, Shuttle, ISS (which most of you think Orion/SLS be cancelled). Which also goes along with Trump objective of dismantling NASA like EPA and State Dept.?