Kicking The Can Down the Road to Mars
Keith’s note: I just listened to 45 minutes of NASA presentations at the NASA Advisory Committee’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee Meeting. The topic: radiation risks during a human mission to Mars. I have seen this movie before.
I was not exactly sure who was talking since no one ever bothers to give their names such that people listening on telephone/Webex know who’s who. The topic was radiation and a human mission to Mars. Let me preface all of this by noting that I organized peer reviews and advisory panel for NASA’s life science division back in the 80 and 90s. I have been listening to this discussion at various levels of technical jargon for 30 years. What I heard today could have easily been said 20 years ago – and often was. It does not matter now who the NASA speaker is or was.
In a nutshell NASA feels today (as it has for a while) that the radiation risk to humans traveling to/from a mission to the Martian surface is acceptable. There are no show stoppers. No one is likely to die, get hurt, not be able to do their job, help others etc. When pushed a bit they will add this caveat: the risk of subsequent cancers from such a mission is higher than you’d otherwise expect for people of the same age/health. Otherwise the mission is doable – and the NASA life science folks know all that they need to know. Or do they?
8 April update: This observation by a NAC HEO committee member today is rather illuminating: NAC: #NASA presentation yesterday: “they were talking out of both sides of their mouths: we see no show stoppers but we have no standards” — NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 8, 2015
Eventually during these presentations someone from the committee (or the news media) will ask if NASA is so confident that a crew can survive and perform a complete mission, then why is NASA continually spending money to understand the radiation risks. The NASA speaker will do their best to make sure the questioner knows that A. the speaker is the expert and B. of course NASA understands the risk. But when pressed again as to why the money needs to be spent year after year they start talking about trying to understand how to mitigate the risk i.e. what things need to be built – what procedures need to be followed – to keep the crew safe.
Today’s speaker said that the current exercise device on the ISS could not be used on a mission to Mars without “slight” alterations. I worked at NASA. “Slight” = $50-100 million and 5 years. You never get them to answer if the current device will be adequate since a “yes” from them would mean less funding to work on the 0.01% of the nits they want to fiddle with. No one works with what they have. Its all got to be new and shiny even if it takes NASA a decade to develop and uses technology no one in the real world uses any more.
When I sat in meetings at NASA In the mid-80s the speakers talked about doing life science research so as to be ready to support the missions to Mars that NASA would do in the early 2000s. Then in was 2010s. Now its the mid 2030s. So long as NASA has a goal that is so far away, whatever life science research you do to get ready is OK since whatever you do will help – somehow. But there is no urgency to get done by a certain date and no one has actually said “yes we are going to Mars on this date in this spaceship” yet. So whatever you do is OK. Since the spaceship and the mission are never known beyond Powerpoint you can only answer general questions and when specificity is called for you punt and say “show me the mission and then I can tell you what I need” Of course the mission designers say “tell me what you need and I will tell you what you can have”. So it all gets into Catch-22 Zone rather quickly. Space Station Freedom/ISS development had a lot of this.
So you can’t get much of an answer as to what exercise equipment or storm shelters might be needed on a Mars mission since the life science person has no mission design to analyze against. Its not their fault. And if that life science person uses available data to give you and answer they’ll get yelled at since its not ‘baselined’ and everything is ‘notional’ at NASA. Conversely, the mission is in the 2030s somewhere so the designers are not going to even begin to design anything for another decade. As such you can use the ‘notional’ Powerpoint template and draw pictures to your heart’s content since – well, its all “notional”. One committee member said today that a lot of this discussion is about “things in the future” when the space hardware is designed. Gee, I heard that in 1985, 1995, 2005, and now in 2015. When in doubt: punt. “NASA” = “Never A Straight Answer”.
And as is always the case, someone asked if NASA has looked at what OSHA, DoD, EPA etc. does i.e. other government agencies who send employees into dangerous areas – including radiation hazards. The response is that they all seem to have figured out how to do this. But not NASA. As is always the case NASA either says that these other agencies have solutions that do not apply to NASA or “yea, yea we’ve talked to them – but we work in outer space so …”
And of course none of these Mars missions in the 2030s are in any budget – notional, proposed, or projected – that means anything to anyone actually working at NASA today. So it is hard to blame people who can’t give you a straight answer. Just look at what their management has given them to work with – and what the agency has had to work with in terms of guidance from Congress and the White House. Just in the past 10-12 years NASA has veered away from the shuttle towards the Moon, then away from the ISS to Mars and away from the Moon and back to ISS, and now back to Mars (and maybe the Moon) and also some boulder on an asteroid.
NASA’s solution now is to just say that everything it does – regardless of the real connection to sending humans to Mars – is on the “Road to Mars” even if NASA does not have a map, a car, or enough money to put gas in their tank or buy their meals – while on the road. And that road takes the most illogical, parsed, backtracking, time-wasting, inefficient route possible to reach the eventual destination after decades of confusion.
Depressed yet? I sure am. I grew up during the Apollo years being told we’d have humans on Mars in 1981. I was 14 when they landed on the Moon. The people who told me about going to Mars by 1981 were the same ones who had just gone from zero to humans on the Moon in less than 10 years. Of course I believed them.
At this point, SpaceX might get there before NASA!
I would think it is pretty easy to beat a horse that only pretends to be in the race.
The big difference between 1965 and 2015 is that in ’65, we felt we were under an existential threat. That’s the sort of thing that inspires engineers, policy makers, and check writers alike.
Find another way to focus everyone’s attention and NASA will crank up and get it done.
Absent that, the people in the room who are already focused and at work have their headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
There are other differences. NASA, as an agency, was relatively young in the 1960s and their workforce reflected that in their age, energy, and attitudes. Today, NASA largely does not have that same sort of start-up type of mentality from the 1960s when everything they did was new, bleeding edge, and focused on one goal (beating the USSR to the moon to prove the superiority of democracy and capitalism over communism).
There is something to be said for an aging government agency whose centers often seem to be more interested in protecting funding for their particular center rather than advancing the goals of the agency at large. Couple that with Congressmen who are also concerned with maintaining funding for their districts, over advancing national goals, and you’ve got a recipe for exactly what we see today. Lip service to the overall goals (sending men to Mars or some other beyond LEO destination) while spending money by the billions on programs like SLS which will never be economically viable as part of a larger space transposition system.
Probably yes.
SpaceX got something NASA doesn’t, a passionate leader that wants to set foot on Mars himself before he dies.
By the numbers, Space X is NOTHING without NASA.
What numbers????
The number of NASA paid flights?
Yes, plus building on the long Research, Development, operations experience and accomplishments made by NASA (you don’t think that Space X people just woke up one day with all this great rocket knowledge or do you?). To go to Mars there is a great chasm of knowledge to be closed (of course don’t tell this to the Mars One crowd) and SpaceX like others will rely on NASA/Govt research to further apply and build their Space transpiration systems. I wish them the best, we all need NASA to focus on the gaps in knowledge so that Space X and others are enabled.
NASA is not some god like, stand alone, enity. It is a TAXPAYER funded agency working for Americans by Americans. All accumulated knowledges belongs to the American taxpayers and those same taxpayers are more than happy to allow American companies utilize that knowledge to employ more Americans. American aerospace engineers have worked at many rocket companies more so than just NASA. That government research, owned by the American taxpayers is there for the express purpose of being shoveled into the private sector as fast as possible.
Cashola. By any other name Space X is a Government Contractor, just a different model for acquisition.
One that produces positive results rapidly.
It is called progress
Here we go again…
“… NOTHING without NASA” is a common but oddly spiteful sentiment which probably needs exploring more than Mars.
It goes hand in hand with the idea that SpaceX is ‘just a contractor’ – some kind of unworthy appendage – that it is just doing a 1960’s Mercury programme, and that all those unfunded Space Act Agreements are cheating in some unspecified way.
It is as if, to have any credence, any new US space company has to a) do everything from scratch b) do it unaided and c) take up where NASA left off. (And in case you are thinking otherwise, SpaceX et al. have been fulsome in acknowledging their debt to NASA.)
So my question to Neil.Verea is what kind of leadership do you want the US to have and NASA to provide?
Do you just want NASA to be in pole position – on their own, ahead of the rest and devil take the hindmost – or do you want leadership in the sense of guiding and encouraging US firms to develop space technologies and services?
To put it another way, are things like Hubble, Apollo and the Shuttle the only accomplishments that matter or can the commercial resupply programme and commercial crew programmes also be a point of pride for NASA?
Yes, you are right.
Yes, you are right.
Oh don’t get too jaded about how repetitious it seems. After all, given 30 years, some presenters and some of the audience may be going through this stuff for the first time.
Ouch. How true.
Imagine what NASA could have done with the trillion dollars being spent on the F-35 boondoggle. We could have built the first version of the Enterprise with that much money.
Exactly. It’s not as if the NASA community lacks the desire to explore. NASA lacks any coherent national commitment behind it. When war is 60% of the discretionary budget and NASA is less than 2…
NASA’s budget is 0.6% of the federal budget.
You’re correct, as a % of the overall budget. I said discretionary budget, which is a subset. Point is, we spend >30x on war vs. NASA.
Of course we do- we are bordered by quarrelsome neighbors! What if those crazy Canucks invaded and made us learn French? Ever think about THAT, bub?
No. If there is one thing you can really count on at NASA, it’s history repeating itself – even when that history if filled with pain and suffering and stupidity. Mars will never happen. Moon is more likely, but only if Hillary wants it.
most likely not… if bc Garver will be the Admin then!
What is your evidence that Garver is anti-moon?
Lori is rather pro-Moon.
This to would require I think funding in part from international sources for the lander perhaps we could help this idea along somewhat?
http://yellowdragonblog.com…
We spend a lot of money for the foreign military assistant program that benefits the defense/military industrial complex, what id we diverted some of those funds to NASA programs in partnership with the recipient nation.
Any talk of shifting money from one federal program to another is disingenuous. That’s not how programs are funded. They must stand on their own.
The fact is, the politicians really don’t think that NASA’s budget needs a significant increase. That fact won’t change by pointing at another government program and crying out how wasteful it is and how great it would be if NASA could have that money instead.
I am not saying foreign military assistance to israel or the others is wasteful
my blog posts suggest Israel and the others could build the lunar lander , gateway space station or what have you with the money we already give them every year, my idea is what the congress calls revenue neutral.
Indeed the very same defense contractors who make weapons for israel and the others would and do make products for these countries as this is how foreign military assistance programs works
these American defence contractors would instead partner with the israelis to make landers
By proposing these sorts of in kind agreements, you are essentially asking the US and Israel to shift money from the defense of Israel to manned space exploration. Good luck with that given the current instability in the Middle East.
In my blog article I suggest 20% or some 800 Million per year enough over 10 years for some beyond earth orbit payload
Is NASA the right American enterprise to send humans to Mars?
What are the choices?
Given the ossification of NASA – it seems as an institution to repeat the same mistakes each time a president gives it an opportunity to explore BEO – I think is fair to revisit how the government can best marshall American resources to send humans to Mars.
NASA isn’t the exclusive option.
Looking back to the 19th century, the Pacific Railroad Acts succeeded in attracting American manpower and capital to build transcontinental railroads yet didn’t require the establishment of a National Trains & Tracks Administration to do so.
Starting n the 20th century, the National Science Foundation has sponsored the U.S. Antarctic Program, without creating a sprawling agency, by financing and coordinating research outposts, while contracting out much of the construction and operations to the private sector and relying on USAF for transporting scientists.
In the 21st century, the federal government could choose to establish another Corps of Mars Exploration organization, potentially relying on contributions from NASA and USGS, while directly engaging universities and the private sector for other elements.
OK, still seems like government funding, with some new bureaucracy administering funding (& perhaps performing oversight & technical coordination?).
NASA already does this, all the time. Perhaps not as well as some would like, but adding a management layer might not accomplish much in terms of cost efficiency or mission performance. (see: transition from DCI to DNI in the intelligence world)
Do you know anyone else with the money for it, who is willing to put up money for it? I don’t see any such folks this side of 2050. Elon Musk doesn’t count, either – he can talk about Mars all he wants, but SpaceX ultimately depends heavily on NASA’s commercial crew funding plus whatever he can scrape out of the launch market. Until he’s got either $50 billion or $5 billion/year to dedicate to it, it’s all talk.
Thus the satellite venture. If you want to know if he’ll have the funds, keep your eyes focused there.
What a great question… NASA has become very risk-averse, perhaps understandably so because of Challenger and Columbia, and do they do spend a lot of time worrying about biomedical risks – when those might actually be the smallest risks for a Mars mission (compared to the technical and operational risks). So you could say NASA is stuck in a “paralysis by analysis” mode right now. Could a Mars mission be privately funded?… I guess MarsOne thinks so… They may be on to something.
“NASA has become risk averse” is an interesting statement. True, of course, but the interesting part is “why?”
My opinion, it’s a very rational response to the environment – as compared to the Apollo, Shuttle, and even ISS eras, funding is so limited for individual projects, and penalties so severe for under-performance, that risk is to be avoided at all costs. So I’m not so sure it’s an inherent characteristic of NASA, as much as NASA doing what it has to do. Of course, a few decades of forced risk aversion, and it becomes part of the culture…
I’d argue it is not a rational response. It took two shuttle disasters to end the program, and even then flights continued until ISS assembly was complete. I think this risk averse attitude is coming more from NASA management than from the politicians who hold the purse-strings.
That “paralysis by analysis” is the destructive dead-end mode that NASA finds itself.
Back in the Space Race, the urgency to achieve had NASA operating (as SpaceX does now) in the “fly it, and try it” iteration style. It is messy and can be deadly, but it makes things happen.
Now NASA has to plan and analyse everything to the most minute detail before acting. What they finally build is what will be the final product, even tho the intervening 10 years has invalidated that path.
The real problem is when a mid-course correction occurs and the whole process begins anew, while policy and funding change more quickly than the planning – build – fly schedule.
It might be just a bit irresponsible to send humans on a trip to Mars without spending the requisite amount of time to resolve those biomedical risks. Or, as someone remarked to me, are we willing to risk sending humans without some fairly high confidence that they will be able to function and carry out their missions when they get to Mars. The risk/reward calculus has to be convincing; otherwise, telerobotic exploration can, however painstakingly, accomplish a great deal.
I think there is something to this idea of doing an orbital mission by 2033, after ISS hopefully ends its mission in 2024. The time required isn’t unreasonable, and a Mars mission gets a lot less complex if you’re not landing on the planet.
Of course, that only happens if they don’t try and extend an increasingly decrepit ISS any longer, or just shrink NASA’s budget by that amount. If they do that, then you might as well just not plan for a manned Mars mission from NASA ever. No possible commitment they make for it could be taken seriously unless it was in the next 10 years and was funded in advance.
In terms of likelihood, which ISS assumption would be most useful right now for NASA’s exploration planning-on the one hand that the entirety of ISS funding is available post-2024, or that very little if any is available? The ISS community, NASA, public and private partners alike, will not easily fold their cards. ISS discussions underway could easily deviate from the extreme assumption of all ISS funding being freed up in 2025.
In a commercial ISS follow-up scenario NASA would transition funds to buy NASA crew time aboard a station that is developed and run more economically. Transportation of the crew and associated cargo would conceivably remain on NASA’s plate as well, albeit at a lower level. Purchase power declines by 2024, judging from budget history, and broader federal budget trends, would also make any remainder smaller in real terms.
So say half the funds free up, but represent a smaller purchase power as well. Exploration plans that assume less than 100% of ISS dollars free up, and that these are actually smaller amounts would be more realistic no? Half as much dollars, meaning exploration plans for those dollars need to be spent twice as efficiently. Less real purchase power in traditional terms, meaning another amount of efficiency must be leveraged through new ways of doing business. This would be realistic, useful planning.
Is planning for the alternative, all those ISS dollars to the dime, and some unreal budgetary increases through then and forever after, at all realistic planning? I think not.
That is one possibility – that what remains of the ISS funding after budgeting and inflation gets mostly eaten up by a second ISS, possibly a private one operated under contract Commercial Crew.
Same bad outcome as the one I pointed out in my post. Any money NASA might have for a manned Mars mission gets consumed to pay for another space station, with the added effect of creating a commercial lobby to protect said funding for said space station. At that point, you might as well just ignore anything NASA says about manned exploration beyond LEO, which will be worse than useless – likely a lot of blather about how they’re definitely hoping to get to Mars in 2047, 2059 tops guys!
Will NASA Ever Send Humans to Mars? No. We’re a cowardly and gutless nation and risk averse. We’re too interested in non-sense than exploration.
Harsh. And not really accurate.
Certainly we have our faults: we are easily distracted, we have allowed our education system to deteriorate, and we are war-like; we are profligate in our spending, and we lack the ability to content with issues much more serious than space exploration- climate change, senseless wasting of oil and public health come to mind.
But gutless? We are unafraid to look in the mirror and change- witness the long road, starting in the 60’s, towards true equality for every person. It’s been painful as hell. And we have made steady improvements on public health. Not gutless, Not cowardly. Hard work has created stunning wealth. Our work is to develop a sensible way to use that wealth.
Let’s keep our focus.
With the leadership currently in place, NASA is going nowhere. We see this everyday. The slow pace and screwed up design of Orion; the lack of planning for use of the ISS; that Shuttle was terminated without a wimper and without ensuring the technology of Shuttle was directly transferred to future systems. Each of these dumb moves has cost the US taxpayer $$billions, the experience of the technically capable engineers, and the future plans and pride of NASA. NASA continues to ride on the coattails of the past.
What is amazing is to see these high ranking, supposedly experienced “leaders” who are leading us nowhere. I wouldn’t put NASA on a manned mission to either the moon or to Mars for another 25years at least. That assumes we dump the current set of losers who have not been leading and move on to a totally new set of hopefully better qualified and capable.
Presidential declarations like this are quite common. If you really want to know how much the politicians value NASA, look at the NASA budget as a function of time. While doing this, remind yourself why there were some spikes in funding (e.g. Apollo/Saturn development and post-Challenger redesigns and additional money to get the shuttle flying again).
I agree with the current system we’ll never get to Mars. But before everyone goes nuts bashing “NASA leadership”, think about that a little. The fact is, NASA doesn’t set it’s own goals, Congress does through the power of the purse. NASA can make some decisions way down at the lower levels, but the high level direction is set realistically set via line-item by the legislative branch, and NASA just does it’s best to twist and turn and produce something within that framework. Sure, POTUS could say we’re going to Mars, and when Congress won’t write the check we could all turn the lights off and go home out of spite. But that’s what you’re talking about – you either do what Congress funded, or you do nothing. It’s actually the law – NASA can’t “volunteer” to work on anything that’s unfunded. We got a whole series of lectures on this during the last government shutdown – volunteering to work violates federal law by creating an unfunded mandate which creates legal liability for back pay in violation of the budgetary law. We were barred from even reading our email.
If you want to argue that NASA leadership should be better at fighting with Congress, that’s all good. Although there are some weird laws regarding cross-agency lobbying that you run into.
Don’t really get all this….”No more boots and flags missions!” <-> “We want to go to Mars”. What else would such a mission be?
Mars ain’t the mission. Mars is just a location. The mission is to get out there!
Bigger picture. We want a space economy, a sustainable long-term push to get there, spacecraft that are reused, spacecraft that are never meant to leave space, possibly built in space, in-situ resource utilization, fuel depots, robotics advancement, Pan Am flying to a huge rotating wheel space station. NASA can’t do it alone unless they get a ton more funding. They can, however, lead the way, like they’ve done with ISS and providing a destination and a demand for LEO cargo resupply, and in techological advancement in needed areas like they’ve always done. Some people say it’s reminiscent of how the US government supported westward expansion. NASA lowers barriers, business opportunities will be discovered, more activity in space breeds more activity. Maybe this takes 100 years, but it goes a lot quicker if done sustainably. That is why not flags and footprints. Those first flags and footprints have been untouched for 46 years now. In an alternate reality, if we had kept to this sustainable vision and were just now getting to human moon missions for the first time, we would actually be ahead because we’d be doing more than just sending two guys to the surface for a few days on a handful of missions. That’s not how history turned out, and we did what was needed at the time, but interesting to think about the what-if.
Well let’s just invite other countries to our moonbase then. Being friendly and inclusive about it is the best way to start things off. We retain plenty of soft-power. We have a start with ISS and our spaceflight relationship with the Russians.
Would NASA’s Planetary Protection Office (PPO) let it happen? There is an hypocrisy with the PPO and NASA’s stated long term human Mars goals. Meanwhile the PPO is pushing millions of $ extra cost on the Mars 2020 rover to assure what exactly?