NASA Wants The Lunar Gateway To Do Everything For Everyone
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Well @SciGuySpace all you have to do is look at the requirements that @NASA has already levied on itself for handling extraterrestrial materials – on Earth – and then add possible biology reqs – and then do all of that inside *one* module on the LOP-G/Gateway thing. $$$$$$ https://t.co/FzrsHqsKrV
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 27, 2018
Keith’s note: In addition to all of the unfinished work from ISS that will somehow be accomplished on the Lunar Gateway NASA also wants to handle samples returned from Mars. Back in the 80s when NASA toyed with this idea they decided that an entire mini-space station was needed. Oddly it was on the same scale as the Gateway. To be certain, technology has advanced since then but the notion that NASA can shove activities with requiring high levels of biocontainment into a small, cramped mini-space station strains the limits of credibility.
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Why will they need a facility like that when they could just outsource the analysis to Elon Musk’s Mars explorers…
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
“The senior engineer reiterated the company’s aspirational Martian launch targets, featuring two uncrewed cargo BFRs in 2022 and four total BFRs in 2024, two crewed and two uncrewed. Whether or not the lack of change in those dates (provided by Wooster nearly a year after CEO Elon Musk’s identical date reveal in September 2017) asserts that SpaceX’s BFR and Mars research and development remains on track, it almost certainly confirms that the company’s incredibly aggressive targets are here to stay.
It should be noted that each BFR has a pressurized volume of over 800 cubic meters, so there will be plenty of room to provide a lab for analyzing Mars samples on site. No need to ship them millions of miles to the Gateway 🙂
Planetary protection would require some careful sample handling. The site of the BFR landing would probably not be uncontaminated, and there is back contamination to worry about as well. That’s probably a moot point, since the same thing is true of returning a sample to either Earth or LOP-G or any lab with people inside it.
As a financial matter, how much would it cost for a BFR landing, with the appropriate lab equipment and staff to use it, plus transporting the sample from wherever it was collected to the BFR landing site. After Mars 2020, there are two more missions required for the planned sample return, and they don’t look like simple ones. I suspect completing the current plan will cost more than $5 billion.
The good thing about the advances in molecular biology is that DNA analysis would be able to determine if any organisms found are related to life on Earth and, if so, how long it has been since they diverged. If it’s under 100 years than it would be easily seen as contamination from either the BFRs or earlier Mars landers.
The problem of back contamination would only be an issue if there were plans of returning to Earth as is planned for NASA’s Mars missions. Elon Musk is looking to settle Mars and so the plan seems to be that the crews sent there will stay there for quite a few years, long enough to determine any back contamination risks. In this aspect his mission is actually safer for Earth then NASA’s plan for returning samples to be analyzed on the Gateway or even on Earth.
As for the cost of providing biolabs on the BFR, I am sure if NASA decides not to fund one other nations, or consortiums of nations will be very glad to do so in order to reap the benefits and prestige that would come from finding life on Mars.
BTW I keep thinking of the results of the Viking experiments and wondering if NASA made a mistake by not repeating them in the decades since. The main reason they were dismissed as exotic chemistry was the failure of the Viking landers to find organic material and we now know from Curiosity that they were just not sensitive enough. Perhaps among the 300 tons of the first two unscrewed BFR there will be room for a couple of rovers that would be designed to do just that at a distance from the landing zone.
For DNA analysis and forward contamination, I agree with you, but there are counterarguments. One is that you don’t exactly get a date at which species diverged. It’s more like the number of steps back along a family tree. And that could depend on things like the radiation environment and mutation rate. Another counterargument is that we have not sequenced all terrestrial species, and some extremophiles may be very distantly removed species we have sequenced. I think that’s solvable by doing assays and DNA analysis of the species on actual spacecraft (pre- and sterilization.) If they are all easily identified as terrestrial, then we don’t have a problem.
In the case of back contamination, I don’t think a Mars colony would be exempt. Even one-way concepts like Mr. Musk’s do have BRFs returning to Earth (actually making many back-and-forth trips.) If they have any crew, that means people returning from Mars. The colony of permanent residents might be exempt from back contamination rules, but, if so, the returning BFR and crew would not be. That might involve an Apollo-style quarantine period for the crew. I’m not sure what it would mean for the BFR. (How do you quarantine the exterior of a ship landing directly on Earth?)
And, finally, for the Viking life detection experiments, I wouldn’t mind new and better ones. But NASA can paint itself into a corner. Viking was a life detection mission. NASA described it as a success. Therefore, mission accomplished. Why spend a whole lot of money doing something we’ve already done? If you try to explain that, don’t explain it with me as the intended audience. How would you explain it in one viewgraph and saying nothing which is not clear and obvious to, say, a former congressman. And without starting arguments by implying Viking was a failure.
a. Congessman would not remember Viking
b. If he does, remind him the project creates jobs in his district.
More seriously, even the 15 tons the BFR could land would provide a lot of capability for autonomous in-situ detection and sequencing of DNA. If Mars has no DNA, then any lif that exists is likely so divergent from us that contamination (i.e. creating a situation in whih it is unclear whetehr an organism originated on Earth or Mars) is unlikely. If there is DNA, it can be sequenced to determine if it is a terrestrial contaminate.
You put your finger on one of the problems of how science is done today. In the quest for funding and publication the emphasis is on new experiments and not repeating old experiments with only slight variations. Yet, it is often repeating those old experiments that enable a real understanding of the subject.
It is funny to think that the Mars rovers might be covered in Martian microbes, but we have no way of knowing it because NASA is still looking for the “precursors” to life.
Oh, one other comment about the idea of a sample analysis lab on a BFR (and getting back to an earlier discussion.) It looks like SpaceX can’t get 150 tonnes of payload to Mars per BFR.
At the 21st Annual Mars Society Convention (on August 25th, 2018, to be exact), the SpaceX “principal Mars development engineer”, Paul Wooster made a presentation about the company’s plans. Among other things, he was asked about how much mass BFR could land on Mars. He said 100 tonnes, but that included the mass of the ship. Since that’s supposed to be 85 tonnes, SpaceX seems to be talking about the ship plus 15 tonnes of payload. (By way, he also mentioned one-way trips for some of the early BFR and then either cannibalizing them or converting them to habitats.)
That will greatly limit what they will be able to do. It also sounds like the early missions won’t be making use of orbital refueling.
That would be consistent with the approach we have seen from SX: develop tech that just barely gets to orbit, as a for instance, followed by incremental improvement?
That might very well be the case. I just rechecked, and if I assume a fully-propulsive one-way trip, I get a landed mass of 90 tonnes for BFR. Given the fidelity of my back of the envelope estimates, that’s the same as 100 tonnes.
There are lots and lots of ways to use the martian atmosphere to slow down and stop. You don’t have to use rockets for all of that, and not doing so would greatly increase the landed mass. But maybe someone doesn’t want to try too many new things all at once. Of course, this is all speculation, but the numbers are consistent with using rockets for everything on the initial landings and plans to add things like high-velocity atmospheric entry later.
It defeats the point of doing a sample return if you can’t bring it back to Earth, where we can use all our surface laboratory capability to bear upon it. You should just examine them at the site where they were found.
The worst thing about it is that once it exists, you can bet that NASA is going to try and make all US spacecraft going to the lunar surface operate through it, to justify its existence. Reminds me of Zubrin talking about how he got some opposition from pro-space station people in the 1990s towards Mars Direct because it “devalued their program” if it wasn’t used in a Mars mission. I hope the next President cancels it, or it just never gets funding.
Spain did something similar requiring all journeys to territories in the new world must depart from Seville / Cadiz.
Sigh…
(gripe repeat) Problem is this Mars thing keeps entering Moon plans. Planners will begin lunar exit strategy before beginning to make plans to land on the Moon!
I believe you have that backwards. This moon thing keeps entering the Mars plans.
NASA is still set on Mars. The idea behind the gateway is the PHASE II – transport ship to mars.
If we are going to colonize Mars…I think the cross contamination is a total given..it’s just gonna happen
Yeah, you need to understand what the cross contamination is before you can colonize then. Otherwise, you could kill hundreds of millions. 100 million people x 500,000 lifetime earnings = cost of 50 trillion USD. Suddenly, doing due diligence isn’t so expensive anymore is it.
Would you like to make up a probability of that risk, to go along with the invented 100 million number?