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Space & Planetary Science

Smoke and Mirrors and New Horizons 2

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 24, 2015
Filed under ,
Smoke and Mirrors and New Horizons 2

Second Horizon, Space Review
“The New Horizons 2 proposal was an effort to gain approval for a mission that was not recommended by the planetary science decadal survey or any other independent group. But the NASA review panel recommended that any New Horizons 2 proposal should also be reviewed by the National Research Council’s Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, or COMPLEX, which was considered to be the “the keeper of the decadal.” No such review occurred and New Horizons 2 was soon forgotten.”
Keith’s note: Interesting how New Horizons supporters hyped the Decadal Survey backing of their mission to get it approved and then turned around and tried to push a mission on NASA that had no Decadal Survey backing or credibility whatsoever. #hypocrites.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

15 responses to “Smoke and Mirrors and New Horizons 2”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    Who can blame them, Keith? They are high on science!

    And while I don’t know for sure makes sense that lots of teams try end runs around the decadal, thinking their project will Solve World Hunger, or something.

    • DTARS says:
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      Shouldn’t NASA have more projects that help solve world hunger?
      As cool as super expensive planet exploration missions are (always flown on high dollar launch vehicles).
      Shouldn’t NASA be doing more work with spin offs that would help solve world hunger.
      The ISS veggie project is a small step in the right direction, But why is ISS so wasteful. Shouldn’t NASA be doing more to farm in Space? Today to have people in Space we have to launch all the food for each person. And we burn up their waste. Isn’t the first step to settling space, farming in Space? Isn’t a large percent of the cost of ISS the cost of sending pre packaged food to space? Isn’t there a market for a farm in Space now? Couldn’t that “farm” reduce the cost of future human space ventures commercial or not? I don’t understand why NASA didn’t use the shuttle tanks to build a space station with gravity or why ISS is so wasteful today.
      Wouldn’t space farming techniques help farming here on earth?

      As cool as seeing Pluto was, maybe it is better NASA does more to help US here on earth, the other 99.9999 percent.
      http://www.spaceflightinsid

      • Jafafa Hots says:
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        We need to start mining the SPAM asteroids.

        • ProfSWhiplash says:
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          I’d rather do experiments on them to practice collision avoidance methods, for planetary protection, such as …

          …attaching rockets to the SPAM-eroids and send them all into the heart of the sun for maximum & totally satisfying destruction!!!!!!!

      • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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        NASA does have projects that help fight world hunger. Primarily by providing data from satellites which show where good locations for farming are, which allows for better land management, better and more sustainable farming and ecological practices, that sort of thing.

        http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.go

        Here’s a page dedicated to NASA’s work with agriculture.

        http://www.nasa.gov/topics/

        NASA has neither a directive to farm in space, nor is there currently anywhere to do this. Growing crops on the ISS is out of the question, there isn’t space to do it nor would it be a good use of the astronaut’s time. It would be like requiring the staff JPL to grow all their own food – they have much more valuable things to do with their time and energy.

        No, there is no market for a farm in space right now.

        Growing crops in space might reduce some costs for some future space venture, long duration space travel and particularly if we are spending long periods of time on the Moon or Mars.

        The Shuttle tanks weren’t designed to be made into a space station, they would have had to be very significantly altered to provide that function. NASA did study the concept in the 80s, but it was never a very practical idea.

        No, farming techniques for space wouldn’t help farming on Earth, it’s the other way around. On Earth we develop the things needed to grow things in space.

        NASA does more study of the Earth and work on problems here than it does to study the rest of the solar system / universe. The majority of NASA’s active missions are Earth-observation satellites.

      • Brian Thorn says:
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        The Shuttle could carry an External Tank into orbit, or a useful payload into orbit. But not both.

        • DTARS says:
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          I had always heard that they could have designed the shuttle to do both, perhaps by making the tank a little bigger bought decided not to.
          Anyone here know first hand???

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            It would have required extensive modification to the Shuttle’s ET, at a cost of several billion dollars. It just was not worth the expense.

          • DTARS says:
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            Several billion dollars?

            Chump change

            How much money did we spend on the shuttle program?

            We launched how many shuttles? And all we built was ISS. We had already learned the dangers of zero G. During the space shuttle decades. We could have built a gravity wheel as Von Braun had planned.

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            According to you, it seems we didn’t spend enough. The shuttle ET was basically two large tanks, one for hydrogen and one for oxygen. Relatively simple and lightweight, it didn’t have any of the things it would need to be in orbit on its own (thrusters, guidance, power, communications, etc.) or any of the mechanisms necessary for it to be joined to some other structure in space, like a hatch, docking ring, or connector module. It would literally add tons of weight and an enormous amount of complexity to the tank, and Brian is exactly right, it would prevent the Shuttle from carrying any other useful payload. There would need to be many Shuttle launches just to deliver enough modified ETs into orbit for a rotating space station.

            Furthermore, these ETs would be empty. no floors, internal structure, no experimental space, etc. There would need to be many more launches to bring that stuff up, install it, etc.

            It just doesn’t make sense, it would be far too costly and a huge waste of resources.

          • Brian Thorn says:
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            Not practical. Shuttle was a space launch vehicle and NASA was already trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the system to meet DoD payload requirements. Sacrificing payload to put the ~70,000 lbs. tank into orbit would have been a hard sell, to say the least. Making the tank “a little bigger” takes you down a slippery slope. It means you need a little more thrust from the engines/SRBs to lift the extra tankage and fuel, which means the vehicle has to be stronger to handle the extra weight/thrust. The larger vehicle means a larger development budget, and all this just to put External Tanks into orbit to form a space station that Congress and the President would not approve for another ten years (1984). And Shuttle development was on a shoestring budget, which it exceeded by something like 20% anyway. No, it wasn’t practical.

            That’s to say nothing of the foam insulation “popcorning” space debris problem, and we saw with Columbia how much of a challenge modifying the foam turned out to be.

      • david says:
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        There were many studies of carrying the ETs to orbit and repurposing them for various uses. Ronald Reagan even granted access to them but all the feasibility studies came to the conclusion there were too many problems to overcome. The mass fraction of the External tank, ratio of tank mass to volume is less than a plastic cigar wrapper. Other than that, here is a good summary of the conclusions of the studies.

        https://spacefrontier.org/e

  2. sunman42 says:
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    Still displays higher ethical standards than those behind the ISS Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which legend has it was accepted after an elevator conversation between the PI and Dan Goldin. No decadal survey, no review, no nuthin’, and only cost a mere $1.5B or so.