New Asteroid Redirect Mission Imagery Released
NASA Releases New Imagery of Asteroid Mission [Watch], NASA
“NASA released Thursday new photos and video animations depicting the agency’s planned mission to find, capture, redirect, and study a near-Earth asteroid. The images depict crew operations including the Orion spacecraft’s trip to and rendezvous with the relocated asteroid, as well as astronauts maneuvering through a spacewalk to collect samples from the asteroid.”
Marc’s note: So while Congress refuses to fund the Asteroid Redirect Mission in the current budget process, NASA is pressing forward as if this mission is going to happen. You have to love their tenacity. However since Congress can’t agree on a budget NASA is proceeding as it should under its existing mandate.
still only shows the crew accessing one site on the asteroid, how do they know that is the most interesting part and not some other section under the hefty bag? all that way for one site on the asteroid? explain to me again why a robot can’t retrieve that sample? oh right asteroid mission like this means SLS/Orion still have a justification to spend another 10 years building them. no asteroid mission no need for the SLS/Orion then MSFC and JSC congresspeople wont be happy.
Would you want to let the thing go and capture it again? Is it possible to capture again with the same device? Or maybe they just cut open a few spots and try those. They would know where to cut based on imagery from before the capture and compared to the part of the asteroid that is visible in the first opening – match imagery in first spot to 3D computer imagery from fly around and then they know where everything is. Pick a few interesting spots within range.
I think the robotic capture/ion engine part stays attached for some station keeping/stabilization plus it being in a somewhat stable Lagrange point means you could go back to it.
Also, aren’t the EVA suits going to be in the Orion capsule with the astronauts? Aren’t they going to be breathing on them and contaminating them with terrestrial organic matter? How are the astronauts supposed to get “pristine, uncontaminated” samples?
Looks like a fun mission if you are on it. It might catch the public’s attention for a few days. Then what?
So we are spending tens of billions of $$ and about 20 years to reach a point where we can do one mission that is about as exciting as an Apollo trans-earth EVA, like those done on Apollos 15-17?
I guess its something to do. Really does not advance technology. Really does not advance science.
Really not nearly as sophisticated as most Shuttle EVAs or ISS EVAs.
This will prove the capability then, of what exactly?
That we have enough confidence in the Orion capsule to do a 2 week mission?
Based on Apollo which had far more flight test experience by the time of any of the lunar missions, we never had the confidence to get around an Apollo 13 type of incident. We always depended upon the LM to provide critical backup capability as long as we could during the mission. Remember Apollo 16 and the SPS anomaly and almost cancelled the landing? Given what we learned I’d guess we’d never have approved another Apollo 8 style mission. This mission is essentially the same as An Apollo 8 style mission. Has safety ever considered this for Orion and given their approval? My guess is that they have not.
I think NASA manned space flight needs some serious attention a renewed discipline.
There’s only one mission profile worth aiming for with SLS hardware: to revisit and update the HSF Venus / Mars combined flyby proposed by Bellcomm in the 1960s. It would fire the global imagination, and it would set the stage for human landing on Mars.
Stage 1 – this will show that we can accurately detect Near Earth Objects (NEO) and their path. Needed for the planetary defence of the Earth.
Stage 2 – we can build and send Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) spacecraft to intercept the NEO. We have new technology that permits the spacecraft to catch the NEO including matching velocity and rotation in 3D. The NEO can then be brought under control and pushed to lunar orbit. A larger version can be used to catch dangerous NEO and divert then to solar orbit – active planetary defence.
Stage 3 – this tests the Orion can take off on the SLS, transport the astronauts to lunar orbit and bring them back safely. The new spacesuits will also be tested. Examining the sample from the NEO may be useful scientifically.
It also gives a boost to those companies proposing asteroid mining as this could be a testbed for them.
I think crew safety is reasonable; the Apollo normally returned without the LM as a backup, and the EVA suits can be kept reasonably clean. From a scientific point of view the mission is questionable since robotic missions to the NEO and main belt asteroids with in situ testing would be considerably more cost effective. That said, at some point in the future shipping asteroidal material around the solar system may be economical. The part of the project that busts the bank is unfortunately the use of SLS/Orion, which of course is the reason the project was proposed.
OTOH, if SLS/Orion is a fixed point in space-time, this capture/retrieve/visit proposal may be the most useful thing we can do with it.
The 10s of billions of tax payer dollars this will cost, if it were to actually fly, epitomizes the disconnect the bureaucracy has from how they would spend their own money and how they spend your money. Thankfully this adventure will never see the launch pad but unfortunately it will spend billions more before it is put out of it’s misery. Just imagine how much solid innovative technology development and breakthrough science could be funded and what it would unleash for a quarter of the funds that will be wasted in the next few years on this monstrosity.
I’d asvise that you don’t keep saying this, because I think it’s actually going to happen, like it or not, sensible or not. The bottom line appears to be that, in the fairly long time frame coverned, it’s this or nothing, and if either NASA or any part of the government were to argue for nothing, it would amount to professional suicide. The public doesn’t much care right now, but watch what happens it the only HSF mission on the books is taken away from them.
Steve
I agree with Fred
ANY mission done with SLS and Orion is a complete disaster.
Doing nothing is better than the public seeing NASA/Congress lighting our hard earned money up and dropping it in the sea!!!!!!!
We must start over with recoverable affordable rockets!!!!!!
No other way!!!!
Steve as you told Fred why don’t you tell Elon to stop his Falcon R program because it makes NASA HSF look so expensive and foolish!!!!!
By Steve’s own logic, Falcon-R wouldn’t “take away the only HSF mission on the books” in the public’s eyes, it would be adding a whole new extra thing to HSF.
You and Fred may be absolutely right, of course, but I can’t see how either NASA or Congress would accept not doing, or at least planning, any major HSF (or HSF-related) program(s) for many consecutive years, since they still want to see a NASA budget in the neighborhood of $16-18 billion a year, which both NASA and Congress need to survive in their current forms.
The only alternative is to scrap this program and come up with something new — something that hasn’t already been proposed and rejected, and something worth doing that can be done for the likely near-future NASA annual budget. And we need to bear in mind that every time a program is started, or even just seriously proposed, and then canned, the reputation and viability of the entire space program is seriously endangered in the public’s eyes, even the many successful, unrelated programs.
At some point NASA / Congress / White House have to pull their collective thumb out and actually do something meaningful. The longer they fart around, the less meaningful their ideas like inspiration, mission and vision become. That’s how I see it, anyhow.
I consider it most unfortunate that things have been finagled into a situation whereby we seem to be dependent on SLS and Orion for continuation of NASA and the civil space program because, like you and Fred, I firmly believe that SLS and Orion are both major mistakes that never should have happened. We were thoroughly outmaneuvered; score one point for the pork dealers in Congress.
Steve
logedon wrote a book about how the sprint to the moon using the unaffordable the Saturn V ended progress to affordable access to space, putting our space future on hold for some 50 years. Now they want to repeat this mistake with a similar unaffordable stunt???
What if SLS flies a few unaffordable missions. It most likely will take another 50 years to recover.
What if you kill SLS, Congress and NASA will have to design missions for Spacex’s rockets and he will use some of that profit to work to get us off this rock.
Lol what if #3 lol
A while back a wise man said that in a last gasp to save SLS that they may use spacex recoverable tech to make SLS cheaper is there a y serious work being done on that at this time???
to be Continued
Hi George,
I think SLS is a much worse case than Saturn V. During the Apollo Era it wasn’t progressing to a spacefaring future that was the goal; it was beating the Soviets, a goal that made a big difference in the political situation throughout the whole world, and not directly related to space at all. There is no comparable goal for SLS.
Even more of an issue to me is the fact that Saturn V was the only viable solution for Apollo (There was a Gemini-Titan proposal that would have made LEO, but not necessarily the Moon, but it never got off paper). Today, SLS is not similarly an “only solution”; there are alternatives that are, in fact, better technical solutions than SLS — but, once again, the overriding goal is political (pork), not directly related to space at all.
However, as others have pointed out before, using different words, you don’t mess with Congress without paying a price. If SLS were canceled, through a move by anyone other than Congress, what would the consequences be? Aside from everything else, I suspect it would be many years before Congress again agreed to fund a major NASA HSF program — no matter who designed the mission and no matter whose hardware was being pushed for — and no matter what the cost, safety and sustainability advantages were.
The net result would almost certainly be the NASA budget being slashed every year for years afterward, until even the highly successful non-HSF programs were suffering. I realize it sounds petty when laid out like this, but Congress members will always find a way of doing these things and making it seem like they had no choice, that they’re hands were forced for the good of the nation, and they get away with it because the average voter doesn’t know the difference. If they can’t have their pork, then no one gets any dessert.
This leads me to believe that outright canceling SLS could do more harm than letting it fly a couple of times first. There is a lot, technical and non-technical, that might be learned, but the big thing is that the US won’t have thrown away any of it’s space assets and skills by going into another extended limbo period in HSF.
Living with this BFR for a few years will buy NASA and others some time to develop new program proposals (missions more relevant to today), and also give them time to line up the necessary support, peer reviews, and industry reviews for the new missions that will give them more viability. Currently, NASA proposals go pretty much straight from NASA to the government, and any outside reviews begin to happen after the government is already putting up opposition — everything is out of order and nothing is either efficient or effective.
Finally, one of the biggest drawbacks (in my mind) with SLS in terms of today’s space environment is that it is a completely American program. Orion at least has an ESA involvement. I realize that there is still a very strong “we are the champions” attitude in the US and I support national pride, but we’re at the point in space development where every program (in every country) of significant size, that isn’t strictly national security, should be reaching out for international participation. There are more arguments for this and fewer against it every day, but I won’t get into that now because we could easily fill a book with the explanations and reasoning.
There are still a lot of powerful people who are fighting the international approach, to any extent and under any conditions. All I can say is it’s bloody well time they grew up and started living in the real world, in the present world. Instead of wasting time, money. sweat and worry on the competitors, make them part of the team instead, where you’ll both have similar goals and be working cooperatively towards the same ends, which will be shared by all. It’s past time we started looking at relative advantages and longer time frames, instead of continuing to hobble ourselves by thinking in alleged absolutes (which aren’t really) and insignificantly short time frames.
All of this is, of course, only how I see it, and I welcome discussions.
Steve