Expanding Beyond Earth: Others Seek To Lead While We Drag Our Feet
The final frontier: Making life thrive on Mars, Deccan Chronicles
“For Indian scientists who are designing gadgets to probe the surface and sub-surface of the red planet, the results hint at the need to scrounge for toxic chemicals that could hinder efforts to establish a sustainable agricultural system 400 million km away! Buoyed by the success of Mangalyaan-I (Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM), the top brass at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has the best of brains from laboratories across the country (unlike MOM which was designed by in-house experts of the space agency) to pool in their brilliance for assembling unique gadgets to scoop up Martian soil and scan every grain for chemicals and minerals of all kinds and hues. These studies are intended to throw light on evolution of planets, how life commenced in our solar system, and the interplay between geological and possible biological history of the solar system as well.”
Exploring the lunar far side: China wants to grow plants and insects on the moon, International Business Times
“Other than equipment to study the geological conditions of the region, the Chang’e 4 lander will also carry a container filled with seeds and insects. The container, which will be made from aluminium alloy, will demonstrate the growing process of plants and animals on the moon. “The container will send potatoes, arabidopsis seeds and silkworm eggs to the surface of the moon. The eggs will hatch into silkworms, which can produce carbon dioxide, while the potatoes and seeds emit oxygen through photosynthesis. Together, they can establish a simple ecosystem on the moon,” Zhang Yuanxun, chief designer of the container, reportedly told local media last year. The container will be equipped with a layer of insulation to protect its contents from extreme temperatures. It will also be fitted with light pipes to ensure the growth of the plants and insects inside, while specially-designed batteries with high energy density will also be installed to provide a consistent energy supply.”
Keith’s note: While NASA drags its feet with regard to the notion of establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon and/or Mars, nations like China and India are wasting no time taking the lead. What is it about the Moon and Mars that excites these (and other) nations so much? Why can’t we make up our mind where/how/when to go – and then stay focused on a plan? Meanwhile we happily build huge expensive rockets that are chronically late with no money for payloads to fly on them. [Larger image (Pat Rawlings/NASA)]
And then there’s this effort in Ukraine. Even in the face of everything falling apart, the dream of exploring the universe cannot be smothered. Countries scrambling just to stay functional seem to be more intent and focused than we are here in the U.S. with all of our resources. NASA and aerospace contractors spend lots of money on pointless bling that they give to each other at fancy conferences. Imagine what could be done with that money if was used for something like this:
Ukraine’s Lofty Ambitions, Fallen to Earth, NY Times
“Ukraine was once a vital part of the Soviet space program, home to many research institutes and rocket factories. Now, wracked by war and shaken by political upheaval, the nation struggles to hold on to its scientific traditions. On a recent visit, I was struck by the determination of researchers stripped of the resources taken for granted in the West. The biologist still tending a jar filled with bacteria once destined for space. The retiree holding together a small astronomy museum in Kiev with spare parts and pluck. From black garbage bags and duct tape, Tatiana Kovalchuk-Skorokhodnik, of the Ukrainian Space Agency, has built a mobile “planetarium” for children. With holes pricked in the makeshift dome, she has reconstructed the starry night skies above Ukraine.”
Keith’s update: Meanwhile the UAE is recruiting astronauts.
UAE Astronaut Programme, Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre
“The UAE Astronaut Programme is now accepting applications from all Emiratis. Apply to become an astronaut today, and carry the pride of the nation as you make history and become the first UAE national to go to space. … The Emirati astronauts will be team members of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, and will join with the centre in advancing the UAE’s position as a leading scientific and space nation. … The UAE has great ambition in space, and our astronauts will play a significant role in our quest to reach our objectives. This is your opportunity to be a part of one of a historic mission for the nation.”
You worry too much, Keith.
I think Commercial Space will drag the U.S. and NASA, kicking and screaming if necessary, to both Luna and Mars in near parallel and sooner than those other efforts that you mentioned can materialize.
Further…and I’ve said this before…ANY Mars effort, by anyone, carries a 4x multiplier for success if they partner with NASA. NASA does not need, Congressional funding or Presidential permission to do that so long as the partnering country is on our “Nice Nation” list.
I agree. SpaceX and Blue Origin are starting to hit their stride. Other firms are also coming up. As long as Congress doesn’t pass laws to restrict space commerce, or the U.S. does something stupid like sign the Moon Agreement, America Free Enterprise will open the Solar System as it opened the American frontier.
Its not that I do not have confidence in Blue, SpaceX or other companies. I do. Rather, I fear that our country is losing its mojo when it comes to space.
The problem is NASA has been unable to move beyond the Project Apollo model and everyone looks to NASA as the beginning and end of civilian space policy. Hopefully one of the roles of the new Space Council will be to spread the work and goals among a broader base.
For example, the return to the Moon should be given to a public-private partnership with the flexibility NASA does not have to leverage space commerce and foreign partners as part of it.
There’s no business model without a customer, and no customer without an affordable price. New bsiness arragemebs are important, i.e. NASA has no way to sell tickets to tourists (although the national parks have no difficulty doing so) but they could write a contract with Bigelow allowing it to use the ISS expansion module as a motel room. However even SpaceX and Blue depend on NASA to finance the leaps in tech they need to lower the cost to orbit. That’s why it was a mistake for NASA to block development of the Dragon propulsive landing system.
And as a business model, it is doubtful that prices will be low enough to gain the mass momentum necessary to push expansion to any significant level. How many years has it been now since a paying customer went to ISS?
Every single time an American boards ISS from Soyuz.
Glad to see at least someone is making money in space.
Since the Shuttle shut down the Russians can get $60M a seat from the US and sell all their seats, so there has been no room for tourists. Once Commercial Crew is in operation that may change. I agree cost must be lowered further, and NASA should be funding Sx, Boeing and Big Blue to test the necessary technology. Like propulsive landing.
That is exactly why you need a new government entity whose focus is the economic development of the Moon, not just lunar science. It would have the flexibility to do those types of contracts and provide bridge financing as needed. It will also sponsor economic focused lunar research using partnerships.
The Google X Prize teams would be a good place to start, offering RFP that would be enough to cover their actual business model without the prize money. Of course unlike the X-Prize they would get all the revenues from media rights.
Usually a government entity cannot directly finance for-profit projects like tourism or business development. That’s why Space Florida has been critical in arranging leases of the Cape and KSC launch pads and land for the Blur origin factory. Possibly Space Florida or Bigelow could run a tourism business on the ISS.
A government corporation is able to do anything Congress charters it to do. Comsat was traded on the New York Stock Exchange. There are other examples like BPA. And don’t forget the granddaddy of them all, the transcontinental telegraph and railroad.
Yes, but actual government agencies are more limited than government chartered companies. I also suspect there are restrictions on chartered companies using or being given assets owned by actual government agencies. It’s nothing a few good lawyers couldn’t work out, but there are some potential snags.
Yes, but the limitations are not Constitutional, merely based on laws Congress has created, which may be adjusted by Congress. The key will be the actual wording of the Act that creates it.
It would be in keeping with the tradition of Congress creating innovative ways to make America better like the Acts that created the National Park Service, National Science Foundation, Land Grant Colleges, Transcontinental Telegraph and Railways… It could be a legacy of this Congress folks will remember long after the bickering has been forgotten.
Has interest in space-based science fiction waned? I don’t think it has. It has grown.
The difference is *crewed* space flight. Robots aren’t exciting enough, and neither really is the ISS (fault CASIS and NASA PR for that last part). In SciFi *people* travel in space and do new things to which *people* can relate. When we are doing that again then the interest will return. BTW, we’ve been away from Luna long enough, and have enough new ways to go and new things to do there, that that counts too. 😉
And this time around it isn’t just for NASA and the military industrial complex anymore. That is why there will be a lot of tears shed when FH launches…however it goes…and if the flight is fully nominal, then I expect that the combined cheers of everyone watching the event (particularly those of us who know all that it can mean) will be as loud as those Merlin engines.
And then what? What magical thing happens if “people are interested”?
This is the underpants-gnomes business model for space.
Step 1: Get the public interested in space.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Amazing SF future!
Is the average person interested in trucking? In container shipping? In mining or agriculture? In textile manufacturing, in plastics moulding, in ore processing?
Why should the average person be interested in space? Unless it affects them personally, or they are giant nerds.
I’d be the first to jump on this bandwagon but for one thing: nobody ever lines up to watch a truck driver.
But put a crew on top of a rocket and send it to Luna or Mars and it’s a different deal. ISS, even.
I’ll add this: there is no real reason for people to go to space other than we should/could fulfill our destiny. That’s goofy talk, to some, but it also is the real reason we do this stuff. Waiting around for a ‘market’, as some claim is necessary, means a damn long wait, and for a simple reason: there are no beavers in space. We will go because a few human beings will feel a stir in their hearts and will do whatever it takes to make it happen.
Some here have taken me to task on this issue, claiming my knowledge of current space markets is shallow. Maybe. But it is also the case that the only thing anybody makes money in space doing has to do with positional advantage— meaning, a good spot to see Earth.
There’s a future living in space, a future learning in situ ore extraction and high-level manufacturing that serves space colonies of some unknown sort. But there is also, as the chemists like to say, a huge heat of reaction needed to get the whole thing going.
And most of the resistance is from the market-types claiming that some ‘market’ will get un into space.
Right.
Warning: stupidly long post.
You’ve never been to a truck-pull?
But seriously, Michael, I’m not saying that getting some people interested in space is a bad or pointless thing. Seeing Apollo as children inspired many scientists and engineers. Seeing Sputnik “inspired” the US President to expand US science/engineering education and to start NASA.
But we know exactly how fickle any broader interest is. A few nerdlings were inspired, but the “public” were bored with the moon race by Apollo 12. TV networks had stopped doing the live crosses by Apollo 13 (pre-accident), because more people complained about the cross interrupting regular programs than complained about missing the cross.
STS-1 had interest. STS-2 didn’t. Today, most Americans don’t even realise that the US has astronauts on ISS. Or the ISS.
Even with all of the “public interest” SpaceX receives, that doesn’t pay their bills. The people whose “interest” matters are those who fund (govt or private), those who work or will work on the technology, and customers.
There is a belief amongst many space advocates, especially at NASA and the primary contractors, that “public interest” will somehow magically lead to the SF future we were all promised back in the ’60s. But NASA has spent every year since Apollo trying to maintain the “public interest” in space flight. It does ISS astronaut live crosses to schools, has god knows how much kid-level PR material on-line. And yet… Compare “public interest” in ISS or the Shuttle before it — actual humans living and working in space — with “public interest” in SpaceX landing its first unmanned rocket on a boat. Or compare the interest in ongoing manned spaceflight with that early interest Curiosity and New Horizons.
Novelty.
And novelty ends. The public will not care about the second manned lunar landing. The second week of a manned Mars mission. The second commercial-crew crew. The public were never interested in SLS. They might perk up for the first SLS launch, then will ignore every one thereafter, including manned flights. (Which will be boring by then, thanks to five years of commercial-crew flights.)
Outside of our community, they’ve already stopped paying attention to SpaceX launches and landings, and won’t until FH, then will stop caring about FH, until Dragon 2, then will once again stop caring about US manned launches… etc etc.
“Public interest” is not sustainable. It doesn’t lead to further development. It doesn’t lead to a continuous expansion into space.
This is not just about some mindless “market vs government” thing, like TLM and others can’t see beyond, that’s just as stupid as believing in “public interest” as the magic formula. We need government spending to enable space travel, to help develop the blue-sky (haha) technology that leads to Merlin engines and Bigelow modules and so on. And we need government funding for scientific research, especially through universities. But sustainable human presence in space will only happen if there is a sustainable value. That requires some kind of market value in space. Some kind of industry that delivers value beyond “public interest”.
The job of government, then, is to get us to that point. To enable industry to find its market. Anything else is just wasting money on stunts.
Aside: I wouldn’t say “most of the resistance” is from market obsessives like TLM. They are a tiny part of the problem. Most of the problem is ageing politicians who want to repeat the feeling they had as children during Apollo, regardless that doing so strangles any meaningful development, and will inevitably lead to another 50 years of stagnation when they and the public gets bored and moves on to the next shiny thing.
Like the Boomer-politicians with Apollo, Musk is similarly mindlessly obsessed with Mars colonisation (like Zubrin, who seems to have been Musk’s inspiration.) But unlike Zubrin, Musk knows that the path to Mars is through drastically lowering the cost of getting to and working in space. Nothing else will make space travel sustainable.
Which is why, in spite of 100% disagreeing with Musk’s entire two-planet philosophy, I’m still a drooling SpaceX fanboi. Musk is paving a road to the wrong destination, but he’s building it in a way that will enable anyone else to be able to afford to use it, thus letting them branch off to their own destinations. [And again, it’s not “govt vs private”, it’s because Musk seems to be the only one who a) gets the importance of lowering costs, and b) is in a position to do something about it. I’d be more than happy if Congress pointed NASA at the same goal, if they realised that every dollar spent building a road no-one else can use (and even NASA can’t really afford to use) is a dollar wasted.]
I’m almost tempted to agree with you…except in a case where so many of those firsts are cram-jammed together into a two or three year period…
What was that thing in the sky in California last month…and what does it have to do with that InReach device I keep in my backpack and my Internet access when I fly?
A new crewed capsule to take folks to the space station?
What? A nother capsule to take folks to the space station? Why do we need two?
Oh, and NASA has a crewed Space Station? Who knew?
What? A car? To Mars?
What? A new heavy rocket? What do we need one of those for if NASA is building one? BTW, where is it? They’ve been building it for quite a while haven’t they? When do we get to see it fly?
What is this Google race to the Moon thing that’s happening right after the Olympics? Are the two connected?
What? Lady Gaga is going to Venus?
Ok, I was kidding on that last one. 😉
Crewed space-flight is the builder of nerds. But you are right, it takes lots of firsts.
I wasn’t really that interested in the Internet back in 1982. Now it pains me just to turn off my phone to go swimming. It had to grow enough to shoe-horn itself into my space. I think New Space will grow to become this country’s GDP…it can’t do that without touching a few people along the way.
But, as with the internet, public interest doesn’t come first. The general public were the last people to get or care about internet access. Therefore public interest didn’t matter until the internet was fully established.
Too many people think it’s important to have stunts (like Apollo Redux) to “create public interest”, and that that is the key to, say, increasing space funding, which they believe is the only key to… whatever they personally want to see happen in space. But the path to anything long-term in space doesn’t pass through “getting the public interested”, and it doesn’t pass through “making space even more expensive to access”. Some activities in space will reach pop-consciousness, most won’t. It it doesn’t matter one iota.
I could say that the Internet couldn’t become fully developed until more folks were using it and thus finding things to do with it. Interest is the left leg and innovation is the right leg in the jog up the stairs.
Warning: Stupidly short response 🙂
Actually interest doesnt matter too much. The annual $20B± is a sufficient amount to open the stars if carefully shepherded.
And don’t be too hard on our friend Herr Professor. He means well. I think 🙂
Exactly! Both comsats and weather satellites are good examples. Both had a brief period when the public had a dim awareness they existed somehow (live via satellite!), but now no one cares. They just take it for granted when you do FaceTime to someone in Australia it will work and you will see a cloud cover map when you use the weather app on your phone. And that is how it should be.
There will also come the day when folks won’t notice the PGM in their new device came from the Moon or some similar good from space. Folks who think space resources are too expensive to use on Earth forget we are at the bottom of a deep gravity well. It’s why primitive societies had their first introduction to Iron via meteorites that were mostly Iron.
My wife’s new iWatch is water proof. Takes calls and texts while swimming.
How it can log different strokes we can’t figure out.
You must have lived in a different past or studied a different past than I have. There was one brief crescendo of increased US public awareness, interest and excitement about human space flight around the time of Apollo 11. Before Apollo 11 there was little interest and polls routinely showed the public was against the expenditures for the Apollo Program. At the time of Apollo 11, briefly the polls went about 50% being supportive. In fact Congress and the President began shutting Apollo down in 1966, 3 years before Apollo 11. There was not a lot of interest at any time since Apollo 11. Little brief blips of interest at the time of the accidents and at the time that a new vehicle came on line. In fact owing to the fact there is no serious interest and no defined ROI the President (Johnson and then Nixon) and Congress agreed that NASA’s civilian human space flight budget is constrained to less than 1/2 of 1% of the Federal Budget. They felt this was a reasonable level that would allow the program to continue with little likelihood that the funds would be moved elsewhere. NASA should focus its resources on R&D. NASA should focus on informing the public about current capabilities and future prospects-at this it has done a really poor job especially in the last two decades. When it comes to expanding the commercial base, public transportation, and hoping for vast new expenditures to cover increasing cost of human space missions, 50 years of experience have shown this will not happen. Commercial interests and the public are going to have to pay their own way.
Someone has to be the Portugal of space exploration. And we are not immune to such luck.
Or, perhaps, the French. France had extensive possessions in North America before England had any worth mentioning. But I’m typing this in North America and in English.
In 2017 the United States lead the world in launches, largely thanks to SpaceX. 29 successful launches, no failures. Russia came in second with 20 (successful) launches. Just because other nations are working on space programs, does not mean the U.S. has “lost its mojo”. I don’t understand why you think the country is losing its mojo, but I’ll keep reading NasaWatch to learn more.
Correct. It’s the same sort of ‘lost mojo’ thinking that resulted in the election of a laughable President who wants to ‘make us great again’.
We already are, and have been, and will be.
Keith, I think it’s important to remember that SpaceX, Blue, Sierra, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA etc are all part of our country. Our country hasn’t lost space mojo – if you think so, watch the videos of the new Glenn landing or the Falcon Heavy at the pad. I don’t even know that NASA has lost it’s mojo – every one of the providers I listed have a relationship (financial and otherwise) with NASA.
I believe the country has a space leadership and policy gap, but the rate of innovation is increasing and things will change much more rapidly in the next 10 years than the last 10. We may not have a President Kennedy daring us to touch the moon, but we’re very close to a lot of cool space achievements (including a $200K sports car anyone can have if they just retrieve it from a Mars transfer orbit).
I think you mean to suggest that one should watch videos of Blue Origin’s New Shepard land. New Glenn has yet to be built and flown.
My mistake – you’re completely correct. I should pay attention to more than the flames when I watch video clips!
I don’t put much faith in NASA anymore to be honest. I think its best days are behind it. The future must lie with commercial space, and with those key thinkers in the private sector who have the vision and drive to actually set out ambitious goals and then go achieve them. NASA will waste more time and money with SLS and with Orion, to try to recreate Apollo, whilst seemingly ignoring the reality that the political environment now is completely different from the 1960s, and the money and political support from government is simply not there anymore.
I’d also argue that NASA is setting the wrong goals for the present day. Rather than massive taxpayer expense for a ‘flags and footprints’ mission to Mars in some distant future, they should be focusing on establishing a permanent, self sustaining human presence off-Earth, on the Moon and in Cislunar space, to exploit space resources in that higher ground. Trump’s space policy is a step in the right direction, but will it put money and substance behind the rhetoric?
If the US wants to really compete and establish a permanent human presence off-Earth, and make humanity a multiplanet, space-faring species, then the future is with the private sector. I grow more convinced of that each day.
“NASA will waste more time and money on SLS…”
Ever wonder who generated the NASA Internal Study that arrived at quite a different result than ESAS? Who appointed the ‘leaders’ who confirmed “the main focus within NASA is unfortunately on the Moon”?
Ever wonder why using Apollo redux hardware resulted in the Incredibly Expendable Architecture? Why Max Faget of NASA stated decades ago that “we really need to get behind a reuseable lower stage”?
Ever wonder who cancelled Constellation while Garver said SLS should not be built? Ever wonder who announced a new space policy a day before a special election?
Ever wonder why folks only care about building and operating old, expensive technology? Wonder who at NASA stated that “solids were a major mistake? Who ‘Hatched’ the idea that NASA solids remain on the HLV after Nixon added solids to the shuttle originally? Ever wonder why solids would be added a crewed launch vehicle when they increase several mT of Launch Abort System mass and create uncommon configurations increasing certification costs and preventing LV improvements?
Ever wonder who in the private sector will spend billions to head to the moon or Mars with their new found tax cuts?
Ever wonder why pinocchios cry wolf? To infinity and beyond…infinity is the time scale.
Garver is nobody’s fool. When she was Deputy she had to toe the line on SLS, she was given no choice. Now she can tell it like it is.
Your point about having ‘faith’ in NASA would be agreeable, at least to me, if one substituted for NASA the words ‘NASA Leadership’, or ‘Congressional leadership’. There’s no reason to conclude that the capabilities presented by thousands of capable scientists and engineers has diminished in any way.
What resources are you thinking about here? The implicit ‘positional resource’— that is, observational opportunities afforded by occupying certain neighborhoods- is clear.
What else?
I don’t put much faith in Congress anymore. They are hell bent on funding the fully expendable SLS when the private US space launch industry is starting to switch to partially reusable launch vehicles.
If Falcon Heavy is successful, the US will have a launch vehicle which reuses the boosters and core first stage which no doubt is most of the cost of manufacturing a new Falcon Heavy (27 out of 28 Merlin engines can be reused).
Also, the US has Blue Origin getting ready to start building and test flying New Glenn, whose first stage should be reusable.
Instead of wasting money on SLS, Congress should be funding technological developments which US launch companies can use to make their vehicles more easily reused.
Re your last graf: that is EXACTLY what Congress has been doing. NASA develops all sorts of things. Imagine a pile of tech breakthroughs on the floor over there- Elon walk in, kicks stuff around, uses what he can.
That is very close to how SX got to space.
Yes, which is what NASA should be doing, not building and operating SLS/Orion. Give that responsibility over to private industry. Just make sure you have common interfaces so NASA can use launch vehicles and capsules from multiple providers.
In other words, go to commercial HLV in conjunction with commercial crew for beyond LEO missions. The competition will provide added incentive to incorporate new cost saving technologies into the designs.
The same thing could even be done with manned lunar landers (just test them unmanned first). We’ve had so many VTVL demonstrators over the years that have proven that landing with today’s sensors, computers, and control systems isn’t nearly as hard as it was when we did it with 1960’s era technology.
Especially as any human landing would be preceded by a robotic one to check out the site and provide support for it.
Agreed. At the very least, you want to find a safe place to land. The Apollo missions took a fairly big risk since areas that looked good, from the pictures gathered from the unmanned lunar orbiter program, weren’t necessarily safe. For example, Armstrong had to manually maneuver the LEM away from the boulder field that was their originally targeted landing spot.
Even better would be a rover that could prepare a landing area.
Or a few build a habitat for them 🙂
I have long said that the next human landing will be televised live by a robot on site. The craft will be guided to a precise landing by beacons the robots placed on surface and tested with repeated cargo landings so it will be easy to program the cameras to follow it.
Then after making their cermonial foot prints the crew will walk to a near by habitat for a hot shower and a cooked meal, all provided by cargo landers and construction robots. No more camping out in the LEM like the old days 🙂
This argument makes sense, now, because we have the experience of SX et. al. This wasn’t the case before around 2004. In this regard I give NASA a bit of a break as they started down the traditional (then) road of in-house rocketry and hardware.
Things have changed. And yes, NASA is left with a white elephant and a history book of questionable HSF management, but remember how we got here.
I disagree. Even in 2004 ULA was telling NASA that they could develop larger versions of Atlas and Delta, if needed. That would have been cheaper than NASA developing their own launcher using “shuttle derived” hardware. Going “commercial” early would have been better than Ares/SLS.
Not to mention NASA’s own internal studies into using multi-launch architecture and depots to not only lower the cost of development, but enable much greater mission flexibility. All suppressed by Griffin and co.
Developing depot technology would have certainly cost a hell of a lot less than the money spent on Ares/SLS. And it would have provided a far more flexible space transportation system. At the time, one touted advantage was that you could use lift capacity of “start-ups” to bring fuel and oxidizer to the depots. This would not risk high value payloads on “risky” new launch vehicles. And NASA would have only have paid for delivery of fuel and oxidizer. This would have helped spur innovation in new launch vehicles.
The above would have been akin to the era when the US Government paid for Air Mail delivery. It provided a steady market that the still young aircraft industry could depend upon. But, Griffin ignored this history and instead chose to repeat the Saturn approach (Ares I and Ares V instead of Saturn I and Saturn V). Even the names smacked of repeating that historical launch architecture.
I’m not sure NASA would consider fuel and oxidizer launches to a depot in that light. A best, a launch failure would be a risk to the _schedule_ for a high-priority, human spaceflight mission. (And, inevitable, blowing the schedule creates a risk of budget overruns.) Risk posture is as much about avoiding visible, embarrassing failures as the actual safety of astronauts.
You mitigate that risk by sizing the depots accordingly (e.g. 2x the capacity needed) and by having more than one depot. Two LEO depots would be o.k., while three LEO depots would be even better. Multiple redundancy in the transportation system is how you mitigate risk.
Launching everything you need for a mission on one big HLV is the antitheses of this. Losing an SLS launch will be devastating for whatever program its used for.
And a Falcon 9 can complete its primary mission with one engine out. That’s fault tolerance. But look at all the bad press they got, over the one launch where they did have an engine out. Quite a number of people in the field think fault tolerance means tolerating failure, and that that’s inherently the wrong approach.
You’re right. Laymen generally don’t understand the engineering phrase “fault tolerance”, even though it makes their every day lives better. For example, fault tolerance in computer servers insures that services like Twitter stay up and running even when one of their thousands of servers goes down “hard”.
I yield on this point, although I imagine the ‘upgrades’ to Delta/Atlas might have consumed the same amount of money.
Possibly, but doubtful. Larger EELV’s would likely have used existing engines since they were a known quantity. So a larger vehicle would have needed bigger tanks, more engines, and all the ground infrastructure needed for a larger vehicle (could have reused both of the two former shuttle pads if we had gone this route). This would have saved time and money since new engines are almost always the “long pole” in new vehicle development.
Instead NASA developed, then shelved, the J-2X instead of using the perfectly suitable RL-10 from the start. Also, NASA is paying to develop an “expendable” version of the SSME, which wouldn’t have been needed either. Plus no 5 segment SRB would have been needed to be developed. That’s absolutely several billion dollars and many years of engine development that would never have been spent.
Also, this doesn’t include the upgraded boosters (likely more solids) needed for the future heavier lift version of SLS. Even more engine development money planned for SLS.
Eww, no.
AIUI, the “larger” EELV’s were the triple-core heavy variants of Delta/Atlas. Only Delta IVH was developed (for heavy national security payloads.) Atlas VH was not.
Hence the only cost would have been certifying Atlas for manned launches, and maybe (optionally) paying to triple-core Atlas.
That said: It wouldn’t have shocked me if (upon choosing this path), NASA, Congress and the Primes managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and added hideously expensive new EELV development under the guise of “using existing systems”.
But that would have been an example of the cretinous thinking that created Ares and SLS, and which — as Michael notes — would have ended up costing as much and delaying as long as Ares/SLS; not a flaw in the depot model itself.
[Similarly, back then, ULA/LM/AJR/DoD were in a decade-long four-way breath-holding contest to get one of the others to pay to deliver their promised domestic version of the RD-180, because none of them had any intention of paying for it themselves. I’m sure everyone would have grinned like monkeys if NASA had said, “Do you guys have any proposals for…”
Although even that shouldn’t have gone much over $2b total, including recert of Atlas V. But allowing it would have been the “camel’s nose” for ULA to push a new EELV (like Vulcan, but entirely NASA funded) to replace both Atlas and Delta, based around the “new” engine.]
As it turns out, and nobody could have known, we now have an incipient stable of reusable boosters, the realization of a dream that nobody in 2005 would have even hoped.
I don’t look on NASA with such a jaundiced eye. They are the ones facilitating the development of New Space as a pseudo-spinoffs thing. That goes for COTS and CCDev for close orbit and now NextStep for deep space. They are cutting Government will out of the timeline precisely for the reasons we have been discussing.
All of these companies (except for Blue Origin so far) are NASA partners at some level and are being helped along at a level that Congress is too complacent to micro-manage. I think by the end of this year or the next political will will no longer be in a position to govern the priorities or the timeline because NASA will have pushed these companies all the way over the fence and they’ll run away and mingle with the population at such a speed that SLS can’t catch them. 😉
I think the NASA scientists and engineers are perfectly capable of conducting whatever jobs are laid in front of them. The role of government is R&D of systems or capabilities for which there is not yet a commercial need. NASA should not be routinely operating rockets or spaceships unless there is something fundamentally new and not yet known about their operation. Government, including NASA, is entirely too ineffective and inefficient when it comes to routine operations of anything. NASA management has no cause to be efficient. As far as the development of ‘new space’ technologies and capabilities, NASA had little to do with their technologies, only with providing a customer and cash to sponsor commercial development, and much of that was by chance, not by plan. NASA and government has some appropriate roles. Establishing standards; developing and implementing regulations; defining a national strategy and plan. But the idea of NASA operating anything on a routine basis, including a Shuttle or SLS or Orion, or a continuing series of passenger flights to orbit, or to the Moon or Mars; its time to recognize these notions do not work.
It tugs at my heart strings to read about Ukraine.
Here in Evanston Wyoming where I live, right on our little four block long old Main Street, is the office of the Jamaican Bobsled Team. At least it used to be, I don’t know if it still is…I’ll drive by and check today.
My point is that it is my hope that Dragon V2 and FH will bring the price of crewed spaceflight down to within reach of countries like Ukraine. How many countries will start their own crewed space programs in a world of $100k seats on Dragon? $50k? $25k?
I agree, like any other “luxury” service, the market for human spaceflight has very high demand elasticity depending on price. Just brining the cost below $1M per seat to LEO might yield a sustainable market.
Having a dream and goal, on paper, is nice. But given the financial realities, the environment and, population, social and resource pressures facing the human species over the next 40 years, dreams will pass by the wayside without the highest, singular level of dedication to a specific, sustainable goal. A set of behavior patterns our societies on the whole are not good at engaging in. And any gains also assume that we don’t unluckily experience either a single massive or series of smaller natural disasters, that will drain resources for decades or worse. In 1966 the population on Earth was 3 billion and we are shortly heading to 10 billion, and few seem to take their heads out of the clouds to recognize and plan accordingly.
Remember when the world was going to collapse at 6 billion without planning? At 7 billion? And yet without planning not only is the population being accommodated, but real gains are being made against proverty.
Indeed, it’s now recognized by many the real barrier to eliminating proverty is not lack of resources or technology, but central planning by governments like Venezuela. It’s criminal how in less then 20 years central planning took one of the richest nations in Latin America and made it a basket case.
I often wonder if part of the problem with NASA is its obsession with planning. They have made an art form out of paralysis by analysis.
I’ll tell you what’s criminal: allowing a very small part of our population to control a huge amount of our wealth while millions die of hunger or disease or saddled with a lifetime of tuition debt.
In addition to the good discussion here, I can’t help but wonder if some of the problem is also our short-attention-span US culture: folks who don’t bother to research beyond a page 3 headline, to find out that real space exploration is not like an hour episode of Star Trek, that it will take lots of time, a moderate amount of money (but not 1/3 of the federal budget like some polled people think), and lots of engineering effort to establish viable colonies on the moon. This is a marathon (and very likely an ultramarathon), not a 50 yard sprint.
And don’t get me started on what it would take to do the same thing on Mars…….
No other entity on the planet is anywhere near the United States’ space capabilities.
Not even close. And I’ll add this: our inability to perform an accurate and dispassionate self-evaluation has resulted in a national malaise in the midst of stunning plenty. It is driven by self-serving politicians whipping up the sense the somehow we are ‘behind’.
Our seeming stumbling has nothing to do with capability and everything to do with appalling leadership. Nothing more than that.
Nor our economic strength. I notice those who are predicting China to be the world’s largest economy have move the time it overtakes the U.S. another decade into the future, something they have been doing since the first predictions were made in the 1990’s. Remember when it was suppose to replace the U.S. economy in 2011?
There are a number of measures, and China is no longer growing at double digits, but as Stiglitz points out when one looks at total purchasing power China is already ahead, and though its growth is down to about 6% per year, that is still a bit faster than ours and likely to remain so.
https://www.vanityfair.com/…
There are certainly measures like total and per capital GDP where the US remains well ahead, but when I talk to my Chinese friends about it, the astounding thing is how far they have come. I would not underestimate China as a nation or a people.
The problem with using the PPP is that its based on an exchange rate that is not allowed to float. A better measure is per capita GDP. The U.S. is 8th at $57,294 while China is 75th at $8,261. In terms of nominal GDP the U.S. 2016 GDP of 18.562 billion is larger than China (11.392 billion), Japan (4,730 billion) and India (2,251 billion) combined.
http://statisticstimes.com/…
BTW it should be noted that the above is all based on accepting the numbers China reports as accurate. Most economists expect they are not.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/…
Returning this to space, China is promising to launch over 40 payloads next year.
https://gbtimes.com/china-t…
This is almost double their peak of 22 in 2016.
I have long observed the Chinese space program. It is far from perfect, but they have a slow but solid record of advancement and (IMO) a very practical outlook. They have absolutely no interest in a new Moon Race. If they lost they would look incompetent. If they won, they would irritate thier biggest customer. Thier space economy is currently constrained by US economic barriers, and thier goal is to establish stable ties with the EU, Russia, and the rest of the world that will expand their customer base.
China has immense problems (pollution, urban sprawl, population (high because of its historical birth rate, aging because of the one-child policy), the perennial conflict between idealism with its inefficiency and pragmatism with its corruption. But China has made phenominal advances in per capita GDP, technology, standard of living, and trade over the past 50 years. I would not underestimate them.
Chinese launch cadence (I read somewhere) is achieved through the use of multiple launch sites, but SpaceX is ramping up to match them. They currently launch from 2, on Monday they will reopen a third when they launch Zuma? Texas would make four. I read they are working on leasing a pad outside the U.S. to make five.
Possibly but SpaceX can turn around a pad very quickly; the big need in Florida was for a separate pad tosupport the different needs of human spaceflight, and of course for resilience in the event of another contingency, or for periods when one pad is being modified.
China’s new facility at Wenchang likewise has multiple pads and relatively quick turnaround capability.
Ya, we were 2% post-recession, 3% now. Trump wants 4%.
The US launches a third of the world’s space launches. More than a third of the overall tonnage to space.
And SpaceX is responsible for nearly 2/3rds of that.
Yet the people screeching about “American leadership in space” are the same people trying to undermine SpaceX.
So…the Indians are working on a scooper, and the Russians have a ‘planetarium’ built with black garbage bags. The Americans are arguing over SLS vs.Falcon Heavy vs. Falcon 9 vs. Blue Origin. Meanwhile there’s a big discussion over Mars or Luna first, both targets being within short-term capabilities of the USA.
Right. Totally the same thing.
I know this wasn’t the focus of the story, but the notes about the Indian program with the ecosystem container interested me. We trip over ourselves to make sure no microbe makes it into space with our rovers, and the Indians and farming. Does anyone know more about that experiment? Is the experiment open to the environment, or is it a closed system that just happens to be transported to the moon.
Not that I mind either way – if we’re going to terra-form Mars, and asteroid, or anywhere else to support Humans, we need to send microbes there for a few millennia to produce viable soil, oxygen etc.
China is the one sending a bio-payload to the Moon.
Keith: You are often rightly critical of the self-appointed space groups in the US who issue unrealistic and inflated claims about the future. Should you not apply the same skepticism toward these similar-sounding statements from other countries?
Well, since Keith referenced a story on the Indian Mars Orbital Mission, I’ve got to say it was advertised as an engineering test and that’s exactly what it seems to be. It got to Mars, and into orbit, and did so at an amazingly low cost (compared to NASA missions.) But other than that, it doesn’t look like it has done very much. It caries a few scientific instruments, but it doesn’t seem to have produced any significant scientific results.
In contrast, the UAE Mars mission (in development and planned for a 2020 launch) does seem to be shaping up as a significant scientific mission. It is focused on the martian atmosphere, which has received relatively little attention from past missions, so that helps. At the same time, I have to say that the UAE missions is more of an international collaboration and less of an entirely home-grown project than the press releases imply.
They reached Mars orbit successfully. For someone that is not partnered with NASA that is huge for a first success. They can get real on their next one.
I am trying and failing to remember (or look up) a quote from a science fiction writer. Something to the effect that “yankee know-how” is not required to build cities in space, and that the builders may very well speak Hindu or Mandarin rather than English. Does that ring any bells with anyone?
No. But if I had to guess I’d go with Clarke.
Variation: I recall Asimov wrote that his immigrant father didn’t come from a nation with a proud ship-building tradition, he just bought a ticket.
Has anyone watched the SF movie ‘Valerian’? It is, in totality, totally awful. But the opening scenes show a succession of folks interested in space travel that’s quite good.
And the movie is an entertaining vision as well with stunning CGI.