Making Rockets Obsolete

Great article. This is the type of thinking that we need to have to allow mankind to truly explore space. Be it manned or unmanned, Dr. Chang-Diaz puts it best when he said "in space, power is life". Hope more people can make the shift in thinking that he did to bring us out of the past and into the future.

I remember attending a presentation in 1998 or 1999 by Dr. Chang-Diaz while in AE graduate school and listening as he made extinct the notion of using chemical propulsion to power the exploration of our solar system. As good as it sounded, at the time I thought VASIMR would eventually get killed-off by...well, development or funding problems. But NASA's past financial support of this technology and the JSC ISS folks allowing the system to be tested on station, an office that is (rightly) obsessed with safety, indicate NASA's strong and serious support for this technology. The success of VASIMR will allow the U.S. unrivaled access to the solar system--if we can just get Congressional appropriators to fund us back to LEO.

ruh-roh, there's that "a paradigm shift" red flag! i.e. let me sell ya some'n that's gonna cost alot & might not work.

Helps to remember that for every paradigm shift success story (nuclear subs in this story) there's a host of paradigm shifting failures (Titanic, Hindenberg, etc.)...

Agree that distant space exploration needs some warp speed development but would want to see an independent FMEA & design safety criteria before allowing it on ISS, much less on a rocket as a payload, or on the moon, or anywhere else. Would that thing have enough power to explode the moon?

Seems like back in the 80's maybe, there were a lot of anti-nuke protesters around the gates at KSC fussing about some sat with a nuke thing payload on Shuttle. Columbia wasn't all that long ago for people to have become safety complacement.

So Ad Astra would really have to open up with the Safety & failure analysis as well as independent analysis before the US should commit to significant funding.

Keith's mentioned before that Griffin was anti-Shuttle & anti-Station, and apparently CxP FMEAs haven't been completed - so not so sure that he would have made a decision about this thing on ISS with a full Safety analysis & requirements in mind.
Is the Crew Safety office concerned at all?

Last question, are there any competing warp speed technology R&D projects anywhere that don't involve nuke stuff?

Titanic and Hindenburg were not failed paradigm shifts. The Titanic's sister ship served as an ocean liner until the 1930's when newer ones replaced it. It was a bad command decisions that led to hitting the ice berg. And you still have ocean liners today. The Hindenburg had already made numerous crossings when it ran into the wrong storm, the one weakness of large airships. If Germany didn't have other plans in the late 1930's it probably would have been replaced with an upgraded model.

In terms of Nukes, they are not critical to this system, just a way to make it more effect. The VASMIR on the ISS will run off of the solar panels. You could also use solar panels for Mars missions, they will just not deliver as much power as a nuclear reactor. In terms of protests, that is simple, just buy the nuclear reactor from the Russians and launch it from there. They don't have the issue with protesters like the U.S. has.

What the VASMIR does is give humanity the solar system. All we need to do is make it up to LEO and then from there we will be able to economically go anywhere we wish to explore new worlds and exploit new resources.

VASIMR or another advanced propulsion system is the kind of R&D that can open up the solar system to human exploration, and could be done on a reasonable budget and at a reasonable pace. Advanced propulsion systems (it was called the Orion Project) were an important part of Exploration until we started off in the ESAS direction.

Charlie Bolden said Chang Diaz was his hero for having pursued its development, even after NASA stopped funding; he is right. The the kind of bold entrepreneurial spirit and visionary thinking the space program needs more of.

You could develop a translunar or transplanetary vehicle based on ISS elements and systems. There was already a USHab shell built but not yet outfitted; you'd want to add an additional module for redundancy of habitable, pressurized volume, a Cupola, and an airlock.

This is a reasonably sized and outfitted volume to house a reasonably sized crew for multi-month trips. The ISS modular architecture is perfect for outfitting for various future missions.

Together with the ECLS, power system, and other components common with or based on what we have on ISS today, could easily serve as a first step in exploration.

It makes a lot of sense to expand upon the systems, capabilities, and expertise we already have. Because it would be common with ISS systems and elements, you should not need a dramatic increase in manpower above what is now working on ISS, in order to develop and operate more of the same systems.

An advanced propulsion system like VASIMR can also make the Mars trip in a much more reasonable time-frame than any chemical system:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could-one-day-power-39day-trips-to-mars.html

http://io9.com/5323516/earth-to-mars-in-39-days

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/a_rocket_for_the_21st_century/

It need not be throw away. You could use ISS as a port to fly from and to.

The original reasons for ISS were to develop the systems for planetary missions, and to serve as a port for exactly these kinds of missions. Now we would be using the ISS just as it had been intended in 1985 and as was being discussed during SEI.

The trips could be done in a progressive series of steps, going from LEO to GEO; later a mission to L2; then circumlunar flights, and eventually trips to Mars, Venus, and other places.

It alleviates the need for an Orion style blunt body capsule, which is not the most useful or elegant way of taking crew or cargo to and from space and not needed if you can slow your lunar or planetary craft to come back to LEO.

And besides the obvious value in flying out of LEO and the potential for exploration, it is also the kind of vehicle that could be used for rendezvous and diversion of an earth-crossing asteroid, so it has real potential value for people and the earth.

Develop the trans-planetary vehicle on a tight budget and use the serious money to develop an advanced, more cost effective Shuttle II and Shuttle based heavy lift vehicle. If you cannot afford to go to and from earth's surface to space, then everything else becomes very difficult.

Shuttle was the right idea in the 70s; the technology may have been too advanced for its time and therefore expensive to maintain and operate.