In Space No One Can Hear Space Advocates Scream
Stay the Course To Mars, OpEd, Chris Carberry and Joe Cassady, SpaceNews
“What should be made clear, however, is that the next president will not need to reinvent our national space policy. The overall policy direction is fine, but despite a lot of progress with architectural elements and growing support from a number of stakeholders and policymakers, a clear pathway (including necessary precursors) has yet to be fully articulated.”
Keith’s note: There is no American space policy other than go to Mars – someday – without identifying the money needed to do so. The Planetary Society would love to stall those notional NASA Powerpoint plans an extra decade if they could. So long as space policy is focused on what space advocates want nothing much will happen. Only when they find a way to make it truly relevant to a much, much larger portion of the 99.999% of Americans who are not space fans will there be a chance to change the dynamic. Otherwise its just going to be 4 more years of space advocates howling the same old ideas at the wind – and wondering why no one will listen to them.
One of NW readers posted this, I forgot who, I saved it in my “quotes files” because it is insightful. I’m posting it here:
—quote—
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980’s. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn’t even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like “manifest destiny” and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn’t need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
—end quote—
Guilty 🙂
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
To be fair, with a destination the question then becomes what a crewed program should be used for. The Moon’s there, but it’s also so close that robotics are an easy and much cheaper alternative. The microgravity research justified it, for a while.
That is the Moon’s advantage, that telebotic robotics are easier and cheaper to do. Then humans will follow to support the robots and do tasks the robots are not able to do easily.
Robots are rapidly becoming autonomous, so i don’t think people are needed at mars just to control them. But if people can get into orbit easily and inexpensively then it still makes sense for them to go, not just for research but for sightseeing as well.
Yes, and the 20+ minute delay already works fine for science robots like those on Mars now. But it will not work as well for the industrial one needed for settlement and development of its resources.
“….We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on
building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar
LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations
beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that
is already well mapped and explored.
—end quote—“
A partially agree, but I don’t think Mars or the Moon is well mapped and explored.
What is important about the Moon or Mars is the location of usable water.
With the Moon we don’t need much water- a million tonnes for rocket fuel or few thousand tons of water for drinking water is all that needed to utilize the Moon.
For Mars settlements/commercialization there is need of easily accessible water.
The main thing of importance regarding mars in terms to human settlements is water which is available as it’s available in almost any place on Earth.
On Earth one could dig a well almost anywhere and get water- even in any desert. And if nothing else one get fresh water by processing sea water.
On Earth one can get whatever quantity of water one needs for about $10 per ton or less, and for Mars one has to get to point less than $1000 per ton of drinkable water or say $100 per ton of salty or not poisonous or polluted water- or some kind of water which costs less the $500 per ton to make into drinkable water.
For exploration needs one could get enough water from Mars air, but this isn’t economical enough for settlements- or there isn’t really enough in the air and it requires a lot energy- when consider a settlement may need hundreds of thousands of tons per year.
Or it seems if there is location on Mars where one can get as much water as a person may need and pay less than $1000 per ton for drinking water [and much less for grey water] this should a more desirable location than places with higher costs to get water.
So need exploration of the Moon to find where and if there is minable lunar water, and need exploration of Mars to find water which could be less than 1000 times the cost as it’s on Earth.
Until it becomes relevant to the person in the street, in terms of providing them with either a better life, the prospect of a better life for their children, or some other national need they agree with, support will just be limited to the space advocates.
When President Kennedy proposed Project Apollo to Congress on May 25, 1961 as one of his urgent national needs going to the Moon was just one of five national space goals he outlined, the others being comsats, weather satellites, larger rockets to make the goals possible and a nuclear rocket.
http://www.jfklibrary.org/A…
Four of these goals were achieved because the average taxpayer, and/or the business community, saw real value in them. The only one not achieved was the nuclear rocket, because no one was able to make a real case for it after America beat the Soviets to the Moon. Project Apollo was supported marginally, but it took really linking it to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, making it basically a geopolitical crusade, to gain enough traction to endure.
There is no Mars plan or policy. More generally there is no human
space exploration plan or policy, lunar, Mars, whatever. We do have a
policy imposed by congress to keep money about where it was, and with who had that money since Shuttle days. The policy is to keep ATK (Utah) humming along, and Michoud (LA), and Rocketdyne (CA), especially assuring all that money flows through MSFC (AL). Less advertised, but there, we have a policy to keep the Shuttle Orbiter project going – this was JSC and still is JSC, except now reduced to just the cockpit and ancillary parts of the orbiter. We call that new office, same money, “Orion”. To boot -ditto for KSC doing final assembly and checkout of the orbiter, uhh, Orion that is.
A real policy and a plan have things, and budgets and schedules attached, even if only as scenarios – paths 1 or 2 or 3 etc. What is going on in NASA, and this is driven from the top, is an “anti-plan”, an attempt to avoid putting anything down on paper because nothing will look remotely serious, and most such stuff will be laughable. The JPL and the NRC look-see at sand-charting (budgeting, scheduling) out a future scenario of stuff (and now the Planetary Society) all have semi-laughable features, like that NASA starts getting some budget plus up soon, or steady budget increases over time matching inflation (ill-defined at best), or just waiting till the ISS ends (usually earlier rather than later).
The anti-plan is to cause confusion, to use the fog of war to make people think parts of a Mars exploration capability are in work, when all that’s in work are unsustainable jobs programs – SLS and Orion. Avoid even thinking about using other capabilities in the plan – commercial, ISS or otherwise. (Throw in a commercial bone for good looks just to shut up the person who asks). The anti-plan further assumes stakeholders will have infinite patience. Just blame the stakeholders as being unrealistic when they ask hard questions about what happens next that’s significant (queue “space is hard”, repeat three times…make person feel stupid, say SLS is being built, or some such weld just finished on Orion) . And never, ever show that IF the ISS ends in 2028ish, maybe some small part of those funds might go to something like private space stations (fight that idea), and maybe some portion of that capability might be available for a new start – most of which will all probably be consumed by inflation by then anyway making any funds freed up a moot point.
Above all, the plan is to avoid saying or showing how congress has placed us into a trap, as many inside NASA actually like it that way.
If what you say is true than the question comes up of why are we wasting money on NASA at all? It sounds like NASA is nothing but a modern version of the WPA, but at least the average American received value from the WPA spending, better roads, new bridges,electric power and public buildings. What value is NASA providing for its $18 billion except some nice pictures to use as screen savers.
How many everyday folks knew or cared about Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase? I think not many. He bought it. He sent Lewis and Clark out to explore it on military money (didn’t ask Congress). They published some of their findings (from the East side of the Rockies) while they were out and met commercial efforts heading out as they were headed back on their return trip. John Colter jumped ship (with permission) and joined up with the commercial interests…much like retiring NASA personnel going to work for Commercial Space companies.
The problem we have is that NASA and Congress have kept sending out new “L&C” expeditions because Congressional funding is conditional on the “spend the money on me over and over again” mindset. Any Human mission to Mars plan that has the word “Congress” in it will never get off of the ground because doing it that way will always be too expensive to consider. Space advocacy (and I’m as guilty of it as the rest of them) has worked to talk to people (who mostly just want the government to save money to spend on THEIR Earth-bound social program) to convince Congress (who mostly just cares about spending money on things…not actually exploring space) and get them to enable NASA go to Mars. Like Keith keeps pointing out here on NASAWatch that approach has gone, and will go, nowhere.
If someone wants to promote “boots on the ground” on Mars, in a way that carries true impact with results sometime before the 2030s then they should get a job in the PR department at SpaceX…or someone else who cares.
Wasn’t there some kind of debate that NASA is driven by “Search For Life Elsewhere” rather than research and develop spaceflight for private companies to do space travel on an industrial scale. The SFLE is science driven but it only pushes for minimum use of capacity. Unlike if need to have it done on an industrial scale, it has to be done by capacity of hundreds of tons and be sustainable.