Hearing on NRC Human Spaceflight Report
Pathways to Exploration: A Review of the Future of Human Space Exploration
Witnesses will be:
– Governor Mitch Daniels, Report Co-Chair (testimony)
– Dr. Jonathan Lunine, Report Co-Chair (testimony)
Committee Reviews Report on Future of Human Spaceflight, House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
“The report confirmed that NASA lacks a plan for human space exploration. The NASA Authorization Act of 2014, which recently passed the House with bipartisan support, requires a detailed plan for how NASA will land humans on Mars. The NRC’s report offers suggestions on the best way to reach that goal. The report also calls into question the Obama administration’s continued focus on the Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM), highlighting “an underlying concern that ARM would divert U.S. resources and attention” from other potential missions.”
Committee Considers the Path Forward in Human Spaceflight, House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Democrats
“The witnesses emphasized the need for sustained investments in the U.S. human space exploration program over multiple Congresses and Administrations in order to commit to a pathway approach and successfully achieve a human mission to Mars. Specifically, both Governor Daniels and Dr. Lunine emphasized that if budgets continue to only increase at the rate of inflation, the goal of landing humans on Mars will never be attained. The co-chairs also made it clear that regardless of the pathway that is adopted, there needs to be consistency over a long period of time that survives the changing U.S. political landscape.”
– Hearing Charter
– NRC Says NASA Is On The Wrong Path to Mars, earlier post
– Report From Slow Motion Advisory Committee on Human Space Flight, earlier post
– NASA Should Maintain Long-Term Focus on Mars as “Horizon Goal” for Human Space Exploration, earlier post
Congress should just pass a Mars law. Have someone draw up a plan. Anyone can try to amend it. As time passes it may be needed to be changed and a it can be amended. Have hearings with any body that has a stake testify. Try to get it passed. As time passes it may be obvious that goals have to change, since they will not be met. I doubt that it can pass now. Put everyones wants in it. Then try to get funding. Put a Lunar base in it for a certain date. Try to get some funding. If none comes through, then let it slip. Some day the funds may be available. Mars may slip for fifty years. SpaceX might go to Mars but the way their crew has slipped year to year, the Mars colony might slip too.
There already is a Mars law, in the sense that Mars is mentioned as a long range goal in pretty much every NASA authorization act or appropriations act passed by Congress, or space policy created by the White House. There just is not a specific Mars Act, which may be more along the lines you mean. As long as Mars is a 30-50 year goal, I do not believe any government will or can write an Act. Most Acts are designed to be implemented within a year or two; and most laws created by government are designed for LOTS of taxpayers, not a handful of space explorers. So any standalone Mars Act likely to pass Congress and the White House needs to have lots of details of what happens in the immediate years to follow and how this Act directly benefits millions of U.S. taxpayers in very specific ways.
Exactly! Otherwise it is just kicking the can down the road as we have been doing since 1973.
One of the first things that really needs to occur is the changing of the NASA charter. Expect big things in the 114th Congress. “Settlement” will be the legislative buzz word from January 3, 2015 to beyond. It is possible you may have even heard some whispers already. It has not been the best kept secret.
fwiw
Policy is determined by appropriations, not the charter. There are many Americans who would like to go to Mars. There are very few willing to pay for it with a tax increase. If we want to go, we have to find a way to do it for a price tourists are willing to pay.
Why would there be a tax increase?
SLS/Orion is funded to nearly $3b/yr. So funding to the 2021 first crew flight is $21b. And funding to 2032 SLS-130 launch is therefore $54b. (Ditto for ISS to 2024, $30b.)
If you cancelled SLS/Orion, even allowing for the cost of shut-down and RIF, you could offer, say, $15b in prizes for commercial manned lunar missions by 2021, and $33b for prizes for commercial manned Mars missions.
All without increasing taxes by a cent.
See Paul not carrots up but mine
Most people that read NASA watch would be out looking for a new job.
There’s always money available, its just a number on the computer at the Fed. The only problem you’d run into is spending so much on the program and your productivity in the rest of the economy is not able to supply the goods and services necessary to keep inflation from setting in. At that point you’d want to dial back the program. Productivity is so much higher now than when we had Apollo and Vietnam going at the same time.
I read the Apollo program was 0.4% of GDP annually. Today GDP is $17 Trillion, so 0.4% would be like $70 Billion annually or over a million jobs with a multiplier of 1 (fiscal multiplier is typically < 2).
a better yardstick may be the percentage of the Federal budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Federal spending as a percent of GDP has been pretty flat, average 20%, so kind of the same comparison.
Did the committee even bother to _read_ the report they paid $3.6 million of our tax dollars for? It clearly concludes that using the SLS/Orion technology directed by Congress, and with a level budget, or even one that increases with inflation, there is _NO_ path to human spaceflight to Mars. None. Zilch. Zero. All the Congresspeople can say is that it must be Obama’s fault. That’s the difference between analytical thinking and political thinking.
Perhaps the fairest value by which to estimate the resources expended on the program would be people. About 400,000 people were estimated to have worked on Apollo at its peak and today about 40000 are working on human spaceflight, a factor of 10x.
However, in contrast, at that time we had littleinternational support, we had few computers that could do little, we were building the entire infrastructure of human spaceflight, and then we did not really know how to do the job. We were in the early phases of learning.
So, should we be able to do more than what we are doing?
I think so.
But key is working smarter. Building an Orion which is too heavy and too large for its missions, and trying to reproduce an Apollo or a vehicle that is redundant with Dragon or CST, is not smart.
Constant attention to Mars, when we are no where close to scientifically or technologically able to conduct such a mission is not smart.
Thinking further. Interest is the problem. It looked like there was 39 people watching. I must have been thinking of authorizations. They authorized COTS-D crew ASAP and NASA ignored it. They talk of roadmaps. Go ahead. Just have all the plans labeled A etc. authorized. SLS, Falcon Heavy, fuel depot. Get someone, probably free, to draw up detailed plans. Technical, cost, time. That would be a Road-map. The really big problem is that SLS wants to block everything else and not what is best. Maybe once they are all laid out and can be checked, it might work. The Pres. would veto it. Not invented there.
It is ridiculous to require a “detailed plan” for Mars exploration at this point because we lack critical information needed, in particular the availability of extra-terrestrial resources that would make the project practical.
Water ice on the Moon could possibly be used to produce rocket fuel if there is enough of it, in rich enough deposits at the poles, although the economic benefits of building infrastructure on the Moon to process it, and run a round-trip rocket system to tote it up from the surface (and then land again on the Moon — it must be reusable) seem quite marginal.
Water ice is fairly likely to exist on Phobos, which has almost negligible gravity and a total mass of around 10 trillion tons. That could revolutionize the economics of the whole project, allowing easy shuttles from Phobos to the surface, and meaning we could run the Earth-to Mars segment from LEO to Phobos entirely with solar-electric propulsion for massive cargo, and possibly for crew except for a fast bit through the Van Allen belts.
These considerations are likely to revolutionize the cost of a Mars project, but we need more investigation of the Moon and Phobos before “detailed plans”, especially any budget, can reasonably be put forth. In the mean time infrastructure that will certainly be needed for any plan needs to be considered, in parallel with robotic missions to study the poles of the Moon and Phobos. A high-Earth station, probably at Earth-Moon/L1, will be needed, and a REUSABLE! LOX/LH2 shuttle to carry crews from LEO to HEO and back. And solar-electric propulsion vehicles to lug cargo from LEO to HEO, and from HEO to Phobos.
No heavy lift rocket is necessary if the Falcon 9 family comes anywhere nears its cost/kg targets, so SLS is a dinosaur that needs to be put on ice until the necessity for it is clearly established.
I think you just described the sort of “detailed plan” with precursor missions and technology demonstrations that is being requested. Your proposal is at least one stepping stone approach to getting to Mars. There are others, I’m sure. I believe a detailed plan is needed, because right now the NASA “plan” is just: build SLS/Orion, do the ARM mission in 2024-2025, then ten years later go to Mars orbit. That’s NOT a plan. It’s a gap of 10 years. At the very least, NASA needs to lay out a detailed plan of the sorts of activities, precursor missions, technology demonstrations that are needed in order to reduce risk and enhance technology readiness levels so that we can be ready by the 2030s, then followed by the funding required. Or perhaps this plan will show that there are too many technology gaps and unknowns that cannot be reasonably addressed in 15 years, even with a funding increase above inflation for those next 15 years. A detailed plan would reveal that either we think we can get to Mars in 15 years or we can’t and need to aim for a different time frame.
Best plan is to give All the money to Elon so it will not be wasted.
Nope. If you had paid attention, you would have seen that the best plan is to have more than 1 contractor providing launch services. The best plan is not to just give all the money to SpaceX but rather to pay a number of contractors to provide services.
Agree lol. Was a sarcastic remark
The problem is not fuel, it’s cost. The stepping stone is not the moon or an asteroid, it’s the ISS and the infacstructure we will build in LEO.
Cheapest best place in the solar system to mine fuel in the near future is EARTH. Fuel is cheap just launch it on F9Rs or FHRs again and again till they blow up.
Falcon H1 making her 51th flight to fuel depots blow up in a fire ball. Spacex launches FH2 tomorrow.
Fuel is cheap on the ground, but thousands of dollars per kg above LEO, where we need it to land on the Moon or Mars. I am convinced that sustainable human space exploration is absolutely dependent on the use or extraterrestrial resources, which will probably initially be LOX/LH2 (that is, water ice)
In the long term I agree but not the short term. Reason we need a fuel depot plan I would think.
Everyone seems to forget that NASA HSF is no longer capable of this type of work. Budget and policy are irrelevant until technical competence is restored. We have spent $12 billion over the last 9 years on a capsule that is years away from flight, ignoring the upcoming stunt called EFT-1. By the time it flies crew, it will have been 16 years in development at a cost of $20 billion assuming the schedule holds for an EM-2 flight in 2021. This patient is brain dead and won’t be waking up and getting out of bed to run a marathon anytime soon.
Who said any of this will be done by NASA HSF?
You got me there. It will have to be someone else. Of course, I can’t think of a business model that will get the type of investments needed to do that. NASA HSF, if it was capable of such a thing, would take a trillion dollars and 3 decades, but that would be quadrupling the budget and that ain’t gonna happen. The “new space” folks could do it on the cheap for maybe $20 billion. But where is that money going to come from? This is two orders of magnitude more difficult than what SpaceX has done so far.
We are sitting on top of a falcon Heavy. You would not believe the size of our trunk. Years ago an idea to make Spaceflight more affordable was to have passagers fly with cargo. But the shuttle blew up and it was decided that Spaceflight was to dangerous for humans. So they stopped.
Well shuttle was not as safe the vehicles as we have today. With pusher escape we can safely ride on top of a big falcon Heavy payload.
We are paying tourists that help reduce the cost of the fuel depot project.
Needs to come from SLS and Orion
Plan to go anywhere in the inner solar system soonest.
While NASA is F ing around with saucers and parachutes Spacex is building recoverable rockets so you can afford to have all the fuel you need to do a fueled landing on mars or the moon.
D2 with Super dracos leap frogs NASA again.
You clearly don’t understand what the decelerator tests are about or are for. Dragon 2 is in no way a leap frog of the decelerator. I suggest you do some research to understand what the decelerator is all about.