Send More Money - Or Cut Something Out

Traveling to Mars or an asteroid is going to require several hundred tonnes of mass shielding in order to protect astronaut's brains from the deleterious effects of heavy nuclei during several months of exposure to galactic radiation. A single trip is going to require thousands of tonnes of rocket fuel.

If NASA seriously wants humans to routinely travel to Mars then they're going to have to start developing appropriately shielded interplanetary vehicles that either use Aldrin's interplanetary Cycler concept or start developing titanic, but light weight, light sails. The Japanese currently have the lead in light sail technology.

Marcel F. Williams

This is another fateous opinion by the WP, who has, like their colleagues at the New York Times, never supported manned spaceflight. The Post likes to have it both ways-here they suggest more spending for human spaceflight, but if such were forthcoming they'd howl about the wasteful spending on sending astronauts into space. You know what they can do with their editorial....

For once Frank you and I are in agreement. Boy, butter wouldn't melt in their mouth. The points that most people would agree to are pretty well fleshed out. Continue to fund the ISS because we must, doing otherwise is a political non-starter. The remaining 3 shuttle missions are stretched out over the next 18 months as another absolute political necessity. Continue development of the Orion spacecraft for both LEO & BEO operations, and start the immediate development of the heavy lift vehicle that is evolvable to 130 metric tons. I have often thought that most of the politicians in general were very comfortable with the shuttle because it employed a lot of people from a lot of congressional districts, and no matter how much money you spent on it…it really couldn't go any place. I think the keep pushing off heavy lift development into some Never, Neverland because politicians in general are very risk averse. To paraphrase the tag line from the movie Field of Dreams, "if you build it, you will have to go." We then need to complete the commercial cargo/then crew transportation system on a pay-as-you-show-me basis. And correctly fund the research & technology demonstration projects seem to have broad consensus (fuel depots, in situ resources utilization, nuclear thermal propulsion, nuclear electric propulsion, and closed-loop life support). No one is completely happy with this, but nobody is going to stroke out either. It is all very doable, but it takes money!!!!!! I know many of you guys think you reinvented economics, physics, and the vagaries of technology development, but I would entreat you, that like Mr. Franklin, you doubt a little of your own in fallibility… just in case Mr. Musk is more hat than cattle. Check out the link below on this guys promises & predictions. Regardless, we need approximately $5 billion more a year to get all of this done appropriately. We need to focus our energies on convincing the public servants in Congress to arrest the nearly 40 years slide in NASA funding as percentage of the Federal budget. If they won't do that, then they're not serious and our nation's future in space is in real trouble.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/25elon.html?scp=1&sq=Tesla%20Electric%20Cars:%20Revved%20Up,%20but%20Far%20to%20Go&st=cse

"If NASA seriously wants humans to routinely travel to Mars"

This is the issue, it isn't NASA's job to set up the infrastructure to routinely travel to Mars

Or spend the money smarter.
A lot has been invested in the failed Constellation, including the questionable and still struggling Orion. The SpaceX counterarts for LEO, Falcon 9 and Dragon, make a stark comparison in cost and time. If SpaceX, or Boeing (with the CST-100) succeed, it might be pretty embarrassing for NASA.

Potential smarter directions are: an x37 scale-up (1.6x-2x perhaps), refueling methodology, along with a space-tug, and foreign ally cooperation, as in a Moon landing, manned or robotic.

-A reusable, right-sized space plane (x37+), both manned and unmanned capable, is well within reach.

-Both refueling and a space tug can drastically change the playing field in regard to HLV requirements. Maybe a Falcon 9 can be used to refuel a space-tug. How much of an HLV's burden would be relieved by that?

These things don't require more spending, but better direction with the spending we are doing.

"Maybe a Falcon 9 can be used to refuel a space-tug. How much of an HLV's burden would be relieved by that?"

As a first approximation, an efficient rocket stage might consist of 90% propellant. An HLV's burden would therefore be relieved by 10%. That doesn't include overhead associated with propellant transfer. TANSTAAFL

Correction, should be: "The SpaceX counterparts for LEO..."

Continue development of the Orion spacecraft for both LEO & BEO operations, and start the immediate development of the heavy lift vehicle that is evolvable to 130 metric tons. I have often thought that most of the politicians in general were very comfortable with the shuttle because it employed a lot of people from a lot of congressional districts, and no matter how much money you spent on it…it really couldn't go any place. (Quote)

Another shuttle hating spam canner. Get it through your thick skull...

1) The Shuttle was never designed to go anywhere but LEO. It asset is to assemble and maintain things in LEO. If you think the Shuttle is expensive, your "Heavy :ift" will make the shuttle look cheap.

2) Orion is a retro spam can. A vain attempt to re live past glories and an obsolete method of flight.

3) True sustainable exploration will involve a next generation shuttle that lives up to the promise of the original. This one is the DC-1 of space. It took the third try (DC-3) to make commercial aviation viable. It will take at least 2 to three such trys for a shuttle. This suttle will then service a true spacecraft, not some retro spam can.

4) Rockets to Mars is a fallacy. Until a viable shuttle comes along able to service a true spacecraft, we are going nowhere.

5) The money isn't there. With a trillion dollar deficit and a 13 trillion dollar debt, e are not going to throw away money on ultra large rockets you throw away every flight. Your crys for us taxpayers to keep our mouths shut and checkbook open in order so that you can re create obsolete rockets to re live glories of the past are falling on deaf ears.

While I appreciate that these liberal papers frequently have not been supportive of human space flight programs, the facts are pretty clear that based on the $19 billion budget, the ideas now being discussed cannot all be implemented.

NASA needs to change is modus operandi. There are basic problems.

First and foremost is that there is no NASA human space flight leadership.

Leaders are people who would have a plan and who would know the direction in which to head and who would have a strategy for what they are trying to accomplish. There are a great many very senior ranking people and most have no practical experience, no strategy, no direction, no plan and they are unwilling to offer any recommendations for changes, assuming they had any.

Most of the higher level NASA managers, seem to have little or no credible experience. They've not worked prior programs; they've never produced anything themselves; all they've ever done is to purchase their support from contractors. This causes problems because now you have contractors trying to produce being hindered by people who often have no clue of what it takes to do the job.

"Orion is a retro spam can. A vain attempt to re live past glories and an obsolete method of flight."

The "retro Spam can" you call Apollo (specifically the CSM) represented a successful exercise in addressing the physical challenges of lunar flight. It was a particularly disciplined exercise given the payload constraints of the Saturn V.

Now, the last time I checked the physics of flying to the moon remain the same. The ideal rocket equation is unchanged. We still face payload constraints in one form or another. Finally, to this observer it seems extremely unlikely that, for safety reasons, a mission beyond LEO would depart without a form of assured crew return (same principle as keeping a Soyuz at ISS).

So, no matter what sort of overall mission architecture it is that you're considering (and what that is isn't readily apparent to me), I contend that a spacecraft capable of providing direct return of the crew to the earth's surface will end up a part of that architecture as a precondition to crew safety. And, as in Apollo, constraints will drive it to as mass-efficient a configuration as possible. I don't know or particularly care if it's Orion or something else, but I will tell you it will likely have a hypersonic L/D of at least 0.3 for a controlled "double dip entry", a relatively familiar capsule shape, and parachute recovery.

FWIW, DARPA's demonstrated autonomous on-orbit propellant transfer.

http://www.darpa.mil/orbitalexpress/

They even have a video of the satellite doing an inspection of the other satellite on orbit. Then it changes the batteries and tops off the fuel tanks.

This would certainly jive with the idea of a nuclear vessel; no using a bi-propellant rocket would definitely cut the transfer overhead.

I think.

Why should a trip to the Moon have to begin or end on Earth? Shouldn't we take advantage of the ISS or something similar? As Heinlein pointed out years ago, if you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in our solar system.

MrPeabody: "I contend that a spacecraft capable of providing direct return of the crew to the earth's surface will end up a part of that architecture as a precondition to crew safety."
You may be right, many people feel that way, but not all, including at least one Apollo astronaut, Buzz Aldrin.
But just wait until we loose a return BEO capsule to something like: critical angle failure; parachute failure; drowning, e.g., Gus Grissom, and there was a cosmonaut who went thru the ice and just barely saved himself; uncontrollable landing location, e.g., some cosmonauts once had to fight off wolves in the wild; bad landing weather--fast-return gives little leeway for delaying a landing like the Shuttle, which sometimes remains in orbit for days longer as needed; under or overshooting, i.e., Mercury 7 was off by 400km.

There may be a solution to some of the above dangers: http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/025orioncopter.html
I can't judge the feasibility of this guy's idea, but it's probably worth considering.

But maybe the ideal solution of the future is a lifting body capable of withstanding fast-return reentry forces.

Be careful what you wish for,

You people keep crying that you want this AND you want that. There is nothing anywhere that says we have to do ANY of this HSF stuff.

Yeah it's nice and I love it too but the fact is money is tight and it just isn't truly necessary.

Preeminence in space? Yes that's important--but it's military preeminence in space that is really important--NASA HSF is a luxury!

You wanna cut something out in trade for your precious HSF?

How about a field center? That's what it may cost.

It's going to happen sooner or later--NASA cannot sustain 9 field centers it just can't. This isn't the 70's kids-the space race is over and not likely to be repeated.

NASA does not have enough work to support 9 field centers but it really doesn't matter because NASA has turned into a jobs program anyway so don't worry they won't cut a field center for a while.

I don't see a man on mars until 2100

Spiff......Out

"as in Apollo, constraints will drive it to as mass-efficient a configuration as possible."

This was Orion's first mistake. That it is too large and too massive; that it cannot be launched on any existing rockets and required a totally new rocket development. Many people now are talking about continuing on Orion so it will be ready to fly in 2014. Even if that is possible, what is it going to launch on? Maybe the new as yet undefined heavy lift which won't be ready until 2016 or 2017?

"for safety reasons, a mission beyond LEO would depart without a form of assured crew return"

I do not think this is true. It should be debated but I see no reason you need to be carrying that kind of mass on a multi-month journey if the architecture has been defined so that using an advanced propulsion system you can go into an earth orbit and rendezvous with a return ship, probably at the ISS. The Apollo LM did not carry a return capsule down to the surface of the moon.

So too is a biplane. That does not mean we need to return to an obsolete way of doing things. Apollo was too expensive to operate on a routine basis. It was never designed to. As long as you expend a 300+ foot rocket to get a capsule anywhere, you do not have a sustainable system. A direct return capability might be nice, but it still doesnt justify your retro spam can set up. You are not going back to the Moon to stay by expending mega sized rocket and littering the lunar landscape with expended decent stages. Nothing will happen until a shuttle works as designed. Until then, we are going nowhere.

Do away with HSF? Obama tried something that only looked like that and got his proverbial head handed to him. Whose going to step up to that proposal now?

MrPeabody: "An HLV's burden would therefore be relieved by 10%."
Sorry, but I can't quite model your 10% breakdown in my mind, but you probably have a context that you can see it in. I may not have asked the question right (or asked the right question).
As I picture it, using a 90/10 rule:
-The fuel the HLV would use in, say, a trans-lunar-injection burn, would actually be considered payload in the launch-to-orbit phase. So you would need 9x that tli fuel to orbit that tli fuel, plus some extra support structure, and fuel for that.
-Without that tli stuff, you're only orbiting an Altair (just for instance).
-The point is that we don't need an HLV on an Ares V scale, at least not now.

I know a space-tug is not a free lunch. That's why I brought up the factor of the Falcon 9 launch in the first place.
Remember, the context is how much do we really need to do for BEO.

Self: "Whose going to step up to that proposal now?"
Sorry, that should be "Who's...".

So what happens if this "advanced propulsion system" fails before or during the EOI burn? In such a circumstance, an assured return capability using a capsule on a ballistic re-entry would be grately preferrable to an orbit that might not come close to the Earth again for a few hundred years.

Now, I know that an unplanned re-entry has its own, unique hazards, some have been mentioned earlier in this thread. However, it at least would increase the chances of the crew's survival from 'zero' to 'slight'. I know which option I would select.

The example of the LM is somewhat misleading. It didn't carry its Earth return vehicle with it to the surface, it's true. However it did carry it all the way to the Moon and the crew flew it back home. Thus, lunar surface and ascent were the only times when the return vehicle wasn't easily availble. Overall, the Apollo CSM managed to cover quite a few bases in the 'assured return' game.

Is Orion ideal? No. I, for one, would have preferred a lot more reusability, even if only the Dragon philosophy of including as much of the service module systems in the capsule as possible. Unfortunately, the very real truth is that there is not the money or the time to design and build an ideal vehicle before Congress loses intereset and de-funds the entire program. NASA is just going to have to make do with what it has.

This has got me thinking.

Having a ballistic capsule for reentry in event of a bad burn is a fantastic idea of course.

Having reusable systems that stay in space is also great, and these capsules do have downsides when landing, and might not be reusable. It is also a very large, expensive beast to launch.

So howabout the administration's proposal to have it as a strictly return vehicle?

I propose this: it is launched unmanned, stays in space. Any leaked volatiles are reloaded for a mission, and it only comes home in an emergency.

We'd build a handful of them as emergency escape systems only.

Then we access the vessel using a mass produced, cheap and maybe reusable capsule like Dragon or a hypothetical spaceplane.

Benefits have been discussed before. Launching Orion without people means you don't need a human-rated LV, just a COTS 'heavy' launcher.

It would otherwise do what it was designed to; operate as a command module and, if necessary, do a high speed entry.

We'd only need to build a handful of them over a long period of time. It would be reusable because we wouldn't land them.

Ben the Space Brit: "...an assured return capability using a capsule on a ballistic re-entry would be grately preferable..."
The assured reentry is definitely a popular preference which is not going to go away apparently.
There is another option, a compromise, which might be an improved, if slightly more expensive method:
-The capsule comes back on an assured reentry course, but with the intended procedure of slowing down to orbit. If the slowdown fails, there is still an inevitable intersection with the earth for assured landing.
-If the Earth orbit insertion succeeds, there is a rendezvous with a lifting body lander, and the astronauts transfer to it and land.
-There may be issues with a failed, partial slowdown, however. That's the main drawback that I can think of.

In this case the Orion might live in space and be reused, or it might land separately.
The added expense could be offset by the saving on capsule recovery from who-knows-where, and from the possible reuse of the Orion and its service module.

Cost of the equipment saved by reusability pales in comparison to the cost of putting it in space, especially for a lunar mission.
Doubly so if, out of safety concerns, you're going to have to strip the CSM bolt for bolt and rebuild it anyway.

I think the crux of the matter is that (after the shuttle experience) many people felt that making a reusable spaceship part of an affordable operation is just not possible with current technology.
So to keep exploring we would have to come to terms with the fact that it has to happen on a single use system.

Since we're going to spend a boatload on whatever we get, the focus should be on how much equipment we can take up and how much stuff we can bring back.
A box of used hoses, pumps and filters just isn't worth as much as a box of moon rocks.

An emergency re entry system is not out of the question, but to make a capsule splashing down in the Ocean after throwing away an entire spacecraft routine is like a fighter pilot using his ejection seat for routine landings.

Not so. Only American mismanagement makes re use "Too expensive". Add to that an industrial complex that wants to sell you a new rocket every time you fly and yes, they will make it look as though re use is too expensive. Fact: The Shuttle has made more flights, placed more cargo in orbit, and flown more Astronauts than all of the Retro spam cans that have ever flown from all nations. There is no way you could have gotten 130 Saturn 5 flights, you will NEVER be able to fund 130 Ares 1 flights let alone Ares 5. For what the Shuttle does, it is inexpensive.
Ares 1 has proven to cost over twice the flight of a Shuttle with none of its cargo and only half the crew capacity. Nobody has even begun to calculate the cost of an Ares 5. Until we achieve the original promise of the Shuttle, we are going nowhere. Any plan based on returning to retro spam cans will meet the same fate as Apollo. Too expensive.

The key, in line with the original Challenger recommendation to separate crew from cargo, and in line with the architecture adopted early for ISS, is to optimize systems for their intended purposes.

The type of system required to launch or return crews, particularly from long duration and planetary missions is not the same system required for deep space long duration trans planetary cruise and its not the same system as required for descent and landing on other planets.

Orion's mistake was that it was not optimized for launch or landing, and it was not optimized for ISS or lunar missions, and it was not optimized for planetary missions. Someone mistakenly took the backwards approach of "lets build it as big as we can so that we can accommodate other unforeseen uses". Now it does nothing well, and its really too large even to launch with the current stable of launch vehicles and its too massive to do anything other than land it in the ocean and throw it away.

If the goal is an inexpensive launch and landing vehicle, build it as small, as light, and as inexpensively as possible to do the intended job. If you need additional mission modules for long duration, deep space, aero-braking...build them when you need them to suit the intended purpose.

I am not sure why you think moon rocks are a valuable thing to be returning. We have a lot of moon rocks on earth now that only a very few people have interest in researching. If you had the long duration labs on the moon, place the equipment there that permits the astronauts to do in situ research. Do you think we'll be making jewelry out of them or maybe just selling the rocks to the highest bidder?

I am not sure why you think moon rocks are a valuable thing to be returning. We have a lot of moon rocks on earth now that only a very few people have interest in researching. If you had the long duration labs on the moon, place the equipment there that permits the astronauts to do in situ research. Do you think we'll be making jewelry out of them or maybe just selling the rocks to the highest bidder?

Maybe if we gave the astronauts the right research tools they would actually have something to do when they got there?

BernieEOD: "...to make a capsule splashing down in the Ocean after throwing away an entire spacecraft routine..."
If you're talking about my transfer proposal above, I'm not sure how a capsule splashes down routinely, or a spacecraft gets thrown away. In my proposal the ballistic capsule from BEO slows down and stays in orbit. The transfer lifting body lands on a runway.
Only in an emergency would the capsule splash down, and the lifting body would then stay in orbit, unused.

What you've described reads more like the current Orion proposal. Am I missing something?

Moon rocks, experiments, samples, they are all more valuable than used plumbing pieces.

We may be able to make a reusable capsule, but if the cost of refurbishing the thing is anywhere near equivalent to the cost of a brand new one then why waste return cargo space on used equipment?
The staff and equipment for this process would be better spent on the production line.

We can get by with disposable spacecraft if we simply accept them as a fact of life and plan accordingly.

That puts us on the same page. The Bensen Space Dream Chaser based on the HL-20 would appear to be the best choice for ground to LEO and back. Modify the Orion or Dragon as an LEO /BLEO workhorse serviced by the ISS. The capsule re entry feature only used as an emergency escape system.
The Shuttle was the first. As such, it was not going to meet the lofty goals set for it any more than the DC-1 met the goals of commercial air. We need to stay the course and build a 2nd generation shuttle.
Until we have the reliable and less expensive space transportation system the Shuttle was meant to be, we are going nowhere. The advocates of Orion insist that a reliable shuttle cant be built and that we need to just fork up the money and go into space the same way we did 30 years ago. Not going to happen! Apollo was canceled because it was too expensive to buy a new Mega rocket every time you fly. The Ares 1 and 5 will suffer the same fate.

Regardless of reusable or not, smaller, simpler means less expensive whether to build more or to refurbish.