In an essay in the June issue of the Space Foundation newsletter Spacewatch, Space Foundation president and CEO Elliot Pulham says it’s time to give former NASA administrator Dan Goldin credit for “rebuilding NASA’s Mars exploration strategy” after the failures of two Mars missions in 1999. Pulham writes: “By the late 1990s, Goldin had inherited a flawed and discredited Mars exploration architecture that had produced a string of embarrassing disasters.” That assessment is probably surprising to many who blamed an overzealous implementation of Goldin’s “faster better cheaper” philosophy for the failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. It is a stretch to claim that Goldin “inherited” the Mars exploration program in the late 1990s, since he became NASA administrator in 1992; the only Mars mission failure that one can credibly say that he inherited was Mars Observer, back in 1993.
Goldin, Pulham writes, deserves credit for shaping the Mars Exploration Rovers program, including winning the necessary funds and doing the “political ‘blocking and tackling’ of building inside-the-beltway support” for it and later Mars missions. This enabled the rovers to become “what is arguably the most successful planetary surface robotic mission in NASA’s 50-year history.” That’s true (except for the 50-year-old part; NASA won’t turn 50 until 2008), although the rovers don’t have much competition in the “planetary surface robotic mission” category: the Surveyor lunar landers in the 1960s; the Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, and Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2 missions to Mars; and perhaps the Pioneer Venus probes (since one of the probes survived for about an hour after landing) and NEAR Shoemaker (which touched down on the asteroid Eros near the end of its mission).
Incidentally, if you’re curious what Dan Goldin is up to these days, Red Herring magazine has a very brief (three questions) interview with “Dr.” Goldin (when did he earn a doctorate?), who is now focused on the development of “biologically inspired computers and robots” at a startup company, Intellisis.
Okay, I’ll go first.
Will the Goldin years never end?
This is a confusing and rather confused article and I don’t know how Pulham developed his understanding of the Mars exploration program, or of Goldin.
Goldin inherited a flawed agency–not just a flawed Mars exploration architecture (remember that his predecessor was fired). The most immediate problems were the space station program, but also a planetary exploration program that by the early 1990s was producing almost nothing. The agency had only very large planetary exploration missions on its plate–Mars Observer, Cassini, and CRAF (Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby–the latter two were usually referred to as CRAF-Cassini because they were going to use similar spacecraft in order to achieve probably nonexistent savings).
Goldin saved the space station program by bringing the Russians onboard. He attempted, and failed, to reform the human spaceflight program and make it more cost effective.
But clearly his biggest success was implementing the “faster cheaper better” philosophy for planetary exploration (he also applied it to earth science and astrophysics missions, which I won’t discuss here). Goldin did this after Mars Observer died.
Keep in mind that Mars Observer was the first Mars mission in 17 years. It was also very expensive. Those two facts were intimately linked (the longer NASA went without a Mars mission, the more instruments the scientists loaded onto the spacecraft).
And it is also important to give credit where it is due–FCB in its modern incarnation can be traced to Michael Griffin and Pete Worden in the latter 1980s in the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). (Caveat: I don’t think that Griffin and Worden truly invented the idea, because low cost, innovative missions have existed in some form for a long time. See for instance the Naval Research Lab’s programs.)
After Mars Observer failed, Goldin started a wholesale revision of planetary space exploration, implementing FBC which then led to a whole fleet of lower cost space missions. Whereas Mars Observer cost something like $1 billion (somebody can check the figures for me), Goldin dictated that future missions would come in at $250 million or less. This then led to a number of missions. I don’t have time to compile a list, but off the top of my head I can think of:
Deep Space-1
NEAR
Pathfinder/Sojourner
CONTOUR (failure)
Mars Global Surveyor
Genesis (partial failure)
Stardust
Mars Odyssey
Deep Impact
Mars Climate Orbiter (failure)
Mars Polar Lander (failure, along with Deep Space 3 & 4, I believe)
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
(MRO possibly started after Goldin left)
Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander (canceled, now revived as Phoenix)
What happened is that Goldin became over-enthusiastic about FBC and pushed for missions to operate on smaller budgets than the early attempts. MCO and MPL both had less money than earlier projects and less money than their managers expected. They then cut things that they should not have cut, such as testing and quality assurance.
When they failed, Goldin took full responsibility for the failures and stated that he had “pushed too hard” for cheaper missions and that future missions would have more money to conduct testing and quality assurance (mission and quality assurance or M&QA).
The MER missions (Spirit and Opportunity) were not really faster cheaper better by the old definition. They were faster and better in a relative sense, but Goldin stated that they would have more money to spend on M&QA. I believe that each rover cost $350 million or so, or about $100 million more apiece than the earlier FCB cost cap.
Now rather weirdly, the MCO and MPL failures have been interpreted as “the end of faster cheaper better” and “proof that the concept was flawed.” But that is untrue, and one suspects that the people who make this claim do so out of personal dislike for Goldin rather than an objective reading of the history. Note that after those failures, NASA increased funding for small missions, but notably did NOT return to the very large (and scarce) planetary exploration missions of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Note also that after NASA increased the funding slightly, there followed a string of impressive successes. (This should come with at least a footnote. Genesis was only partially successful, and the MER rovers owe a good part of their success to luck. They could have failed. The project team admitted after the landings that they should have done the programs differently, and planned to change their approach in the future.) So FCB was modified after the two Mars failures, but it was never abandoned. It is more accurate to say that the two Mars failures demonstrated the limits of FCB as a management philosophy, not that it was a bad philosophy.
Now the situation is still more complicated, because after Goldin put the agency on a leaner diet when it came to planetary missions, external advisory groups pushed for a more balanced mix of small, medium, and “flagship” missions. New Horizons, speeding toward Pluto, is a medium class mission (one that Goldin opposed because of the expense).
Nobody uses the term “faster cheaper better” at NASA these days, but they are still following many of its tenets–missions are “faster” (count them–three Mars missions between 1975 and 1995, one of them a failure, compared to seven Mars missions between 1996 and 2006, two of them failures), they are “cheaper” (no mission in the past decade has cost as much as Mars Observer or Cassini), and they are arguably “better,” if you define better as the ability to gather knowledge and learn from it and build upon it within the span of a typical scientist’s career.
So if you want to measure Goldin’s legacy, one way is to add up all the planetary missions launched and/or started because of his leadership and compare them to all of the planetary missions launched in the two decades before he arrived at NASA.
Dwayne
Good synopis. Your ending echos something that an engineer friend of mine (and old Apollo guy) said to me about FCB.
You can have any two of the three (Faster, Better, Cheaper) and it will work. That seems to be where NASA is today on the exploration side. However, as APL and Ames, and Al Binder (and Pete Worden), it can be done for less money.
I remember that Goldin killed our Lunar Resource Mapper in 1993 in favor of Prospector because he wanted to show everyone that it could be done cheaper. However, he never mentioned the years of volunteer work that went into prospector before it was selected as the first discovery mission. I have the original RFP from 1989 (I helped write it) and what flew in 1998 was almost the same bird.
Dennis
“Your ending echos something that an engineer friend of mine (and old Apollo guy) said to me about FCB.”
“You can have any two of the three (Faster, Better, Cheaper) and it will work.”
That’s an old saying and I believe that it is wrong. I think that you CAN have all three. However, that is dependent upon how you define “better.”
One way to look at it is that FxC=B (faster x cheaper = better). The reasoning here is that faster missions and cheaper missions results in _more_ missions and greater ability to learn. The situation during the 1980s (it really started at the end of the 1970s) was such that missions became so scarce that it impacted the scientific community in several ways. One impact was that it drove people out of the field, or prevented them from entering the field. Why get a Ph.D. in planetary geology if you have no hope of gathering data before you write your dissertation? Doing missions faster and cheaper thus produced better results for the scientific workforce in both quality and quantity.
And another definition of “better” is more returns and positive press for NASA. Keep in mind that today the most commonly positive news about NASA concerns its small spacecraft. Deep Impact, Spirit and Opportunity, even Stardust have all created an image of an agency that is constantly doing new and exciting things in the realm of planetary exploration. How much positive press did the planetary exploration program generate in the entire 1980s? (The Voyagers were a big hit, but were leftover from the previous decade. Other than that, NASA had Magellan.)
Then there is the complicated issue of what scientists call “discovery.” I don’t fully understand their concept of it, but it basically boils down to learning entirely new things. The more missions you launch, the more places you visit, the more discoveries you are likely to make. And if missions are cheaper and faster, then you can adapt the next mission based upon the findings you make on this one. This is clearly true for the Mars spacecraft, where MER was altered based upon Pathfinder data, and where the big Mars Research Laboratory has been designed based upon scientific results from MER.
(Now the MCO and MPL failures were not only demonstrations that you can cut too much money–“too cheap”–but also that you can go “too fast.” One of the criticisms after those failures was that NASA was launching missions so quickly (Goldin wanted an average of one Mars mission a year) that they failed to learn from each mission before launching the next. They backed off of that and are now launching fewer missions.
Whereas some people see the MCO and MPL failures as examples of terrible mistakes, I tend to view them as the inevitable calibration of the design and management philosophy that Goldin adopted. He forced the agency to get out of its massive, expensive, and rare missions and got them doing smaller and quicker missions, but the agency did not know how cheap and how fast they could do this. They had to learn that there were limits. They did, and they recovered.
“I remember that Goldin killed our Lunar Resource Mapper in 1993 in favor of Prospector because he wanted to show everyone that it could be done cheaper. However, he never mentioned the years of volunteer work that went into prospector before it was selected as the first discovery mission. I have the original RFP from 1989 (I helped write it) and what flew in 1998 was almost the same bird.”
However, I think that in his defense he needed an early win. He needed a demonstration proof that FCB was possible. And it is worth noting that Worden was actually pushing for even _cheaper_ missions at this time. Although it has been lost in the annals of time (actually, it’s simply due to the fact that there is nobody writing a history of NASA reform under Goldin, or of FCB) there was an early fight in NASA over FCB that was not simply over whether or not to do it, but over how much to do it. There were dinosaurs defending the big expensive missions (like CRAF), but then there was Worden and a few others on the outside claiming that Goldin’s concept of missions for $200-$250 million was still too expensive. You can find some evidence of this in contemporary media from the early 1990s. Lunar Prospector in some ways was similar to Pathfinder–limited science return, but done for “political” reasons, meaning done as a demonstration proof that FCB was feasible. But it’s worth noting that demonstration proofs were a common part of the whole FCB approach. For instance, some of the Delta SDIO missions in the 1980s, as well as DC-X and even Clementine achieved relatively little, but prooved that you did not need to spend a billion dollars and take seven years to build a spacecraft.
Have you ever actually designed space hardware Dwayne?
Just curious.
I liked to echo some of Dwayne points on FBC. FBC as a concept is sound and is being pushed in other areas under different names. I just finished reading James Wertz article in the current issue of Space Times (the AAS journal) on responsive space and i see many of the tenets here echoed in the need for cheap, fast and reliable spacecraft.
There is a large need here to build spacecraft in a much cheaper way and not load a god aweful amount of instruments on each bird. Would you rather wait 10 years to fly a s/c with 10 instruments or 12 months and fly a bird with 1 or 2? Just think, grad students could actually build, fly and gather science data before they finish their PhD!
Anyhow, I know this is slightly veering from Dwayne and the original articles points but I do credit Goldin with pushing NASA in the right direction. The 80s was abysmal for space science. Under Goldin’s tenure we were once again launching at fairly quick pace.
I fully agree with most of Mr. Day’s analysis. Abrasive as he was, I think Mr. Goldin gets a bum rap. He said up front that the FBC strategy would result in greater risk of failure, but there can be little doubt that the total science return has been much higher than it would have been without FBC (albeit, in general closer to the home world).
I see the VSE as a continuation of this strategy. Mr. O’Keefe, et al, tried to figure out a way to get quick results in human spaceflight while not going much over NASA’s current budgets — and the result with the Constellation concept. If FBC has worked in automated spaceflight, maybe it will work in the human realm, too.
— Donald
People also tend to forget that First Lunar Outpost was one of the first FBC missions, at least conceptually, based on Griffin’s assumption that Congress would fund SEI, if only he could get the price tag down.
> “Your ending echos something that an engineer friend of mine (and old
> Apollo guy) said to me about FCB.”
> “You can have any two of the three (Faster, Better, Cheaper) and it will work.”
“‘Faster, better, cheaper, pick any two’? That’s the Old Guard talking. Do things right and you get all three automatically.” — Henry Spenser
And yes, Keith, Henry has built real space hardware.
Project Clementine did all three, successfully. So did Lunar Prospector (which, to Dennis’s eternal consternation, was successful).
Both Clementine and Lunar Prospector were significantly cheaper than NASA’s current crop of missions which (despite Dwayne’s spin) have been growing more and more expensive. The Discovery program price cap — NASA’s definition of a low-cost mission — is steadily increasing. The budget for Goddard’s lunar orbiter is $540 million, about 8 times the cost of Lunar Prospector (more if we account for inflation). It’s also five times the cost of a Soyuz flight around the Moon.
Faster, better, cheaper programs are done all the time in aviation. The P-38 Lightning. The P-51 Mustang. The F-80 Shooting Star and F-104 Starfighter. The U-2 spyplane. The A-12/SR-71 Blackbird. Ares. Proteus. Global Flyer. SpaceShip One.
Even Gemini was a better, faster, cheaper approach. Gemini development began after Apollo, but Gemini flew first and cost less. Gemini also had the capability to fly lunar missions, a fact that’s been largely suppressed today. The “old Apollo guys” killed it, because it was a threat to Apollo. Pete Conrad fought them right up until the end but was only able to salvage one high-altitude flight (Gemini 11).
The blind veneration of the “old Apollo guys” has done more to retard space development than any other factor.
WRT “And yes, Keith, Henry has built real space hardware.”
Read my post, Ed. I asked Dwayne that question – not Henry.
Ed
You are just turning into a nut these days where I am concerned.
My consternation that prospector was successful?
As one of the founding members of the team I am eternally estatic that prospector was successful.
However, the truth be know is that the Gamma Ray device that was flown was barely able to get the data about the water and as a result there is still a lot of controversy over the extent of the water.
The Lunar Resource Mapper, which was the only mission funded under SEI (and the Democrats took the money back in a recission after the budget was passed), would have had a much better instrument.
The cost of that mission was $151M which is about twice that of Prospector. How much would a definitive data set been worth?
Making irrelevant comparisons between Soyuz and the LRO is just like you Ed.
Even with that I totally agree that LRO is a bloated piece of meat.
Dennis
> the truth be know is that the Gamma Ray device that was flown was barely
> able to get the data about the water
Outside of NASA, most people buy tools that are “barely able” to do the job, not the most expensive tools they can imagine building.
If Lunar Prospector had been an all-singing, all-dancing space probe, it would never have been built. Satellites that are not built are not able to return any data. That’s something you overlook in constantly whining about how better Lunar Resource Mapper would have been.
> there is still a lot of controversy over the extent of the water.
Controversy that will be quickly settled when humans get there. And if humans don’t get to go, it makes little difference how much water is there.
> Making irrelevant comparisons between Soyuz and the LRO is just like you Ed.
So, even when sending humans is cheaper than sending robots, that’s irrelevant? Even though the President says VSE is about human exploration, robots still come first? Thank you for that acknowledgement, Dennis.
I would disagree, Ed, that most people buy only the most barely adequate (i.e. cheapest) tool possible for most tasks. Those with sufficient capital, or the means to amass such, will often make an effort to get the right tool for the job, even if it means paying more.
That’s why I would buy a Craftsman [tm] hammer over a 99 Cent store hammer. The -value- of the Craftsman is much higher than that of the alternative, though whether that value is fully priced into the product is between the buyer and seller.
I think Dennis is right. Perhaps a much better data set that would have, in theory, answered many of the extant questions we now have would have been worth the extra cost. That’s why I’m a bit concerned about the first probe back to the Moon. It may be too much of a slap-dash affair as a quick response to the VSE. (Look, we’re going to get Z number of datasets back and expect Y number of papers!)
> Perhaps a much better data set that would have, in theory, answered many of the extant questions we now have
The questions we *now* have — that’s the key word. Every time scientists get new data, they think up new questions.
Do you need proof of that? NASA now says it needs to send eight satellites and rover robots to the Moon, before it can send humans. Even though it did that 35 years ago.
Do you think we need to answer every question about the Moon before humans can go there?
Or just the ice question? If that’s the case, what happens if the satellite finds there’s no ice? Forget about ever sending humans to the Moon? Or go ahead, anyway? And if you’re going either way, why do you need to wait for all those satellites and rovers when they won’t change the decision?
Or just the ice question? If that’s the case, what happens if the satellite finds there’s no ice? Forget about ever sending humans to the Moon? Or go ahead, anyway? And if you’re going either way, why do you need to wait for all those satellites and rovers when they won’t change the decision?
*****************
Answering the “water question” is a crucial element of anyone’s return or first go at the Moon. It sets the parameters for any lunar base in that the ISRU requirements can swing wildly with the amount of water available. This also impacts the logistics train, which is the most expensive portion of any lunar base or campaign.
For example, the lower value for water is about 300 million tons in a very dispersed (~1% by volume) form. The high value term is 10 billion tons with some of it in pure ice form.
These two extremes (and some of this can be hydrocarbons rather than h2O) result in dramatically different strategies and resultant costs for acquisition. I would postulate that because of the extremely cold conditions that if the resource is dispersed and mainly hydrocarbon that it may not be worth tapping.
This is a huge difference and if we had a better data set then these questions could have been settled and we would be a lot farther along with planning for a lunar return.
So yes Ed these satellites will impact the cost and the architecture for any lunar development.
Dennis
Ken
Let me give you an example of the difference between the two instruments.
The Prospector instrument was able to find indications of reduced neutron flux which is an indicator of water as the neutrons are absorbed and not reflected or re-emitted as they would be from hitting rocks.
Do a google on the Gamma Ray instrument for the Mars Odyssey mission. It was able to map the extent of the water on mars to a few meters in depth and get very good data on the density of the water found. This is the SAME instrument that we would have flown on the Lunar Resource Mapper mission as Bill Boynton was the PI for our lunar mission as well as the Mars mission.
I applaud Al Binder for his hard work but Prospector just could not afford the better instrument. We went round and round this issue in the early days of the effort.
Also, if it had not been for all of the volunteer work Prospector would have probably cost $10-30M dollars more.
Dennis
I do not think any strategy for returning to Earth’s moon should be fully dependent on polar water, even if it exists. Oxygen is readily available from the regolith, and should be used whether water is available or not. That provides maximum flexibility at little if any increased cost. Within the polar craters, any water is likely to be a widely scattered, relatively scarce resource, and an alternative plan should be in place even if its existance is proven.
I agree with Ed’s opinion that we should not waste a lot of money on automated probes of Earth’s moon. The automated science budget is better spent where we can’t send astronauts in the foreseeable future, and we know enough about Earth’s moon to return. We should be returning astronauts at the lowest possible up-front cost, and that is best achieved by not spending our limited funds on an open-ended series of half-billion dollar orbiters.
— Donald
Don
I have to disagree here. The dependency on water is directly proportional to its amount. If it is 300m tons it is one thing, if it is 10 billion tons it is quite another and it does change the economics of lunar development if the high end is there. How do we definitively determine this? By flying a high spectral resolution gamma ray spectrometer.
Also, we need a good radar map of the Moon that has sufficient power to determine whether or not there are any impacted NiFe objects there that can be harvested. This again will make a major impact on lunar development. If a several trillion dollar object is found it would be very nice for the future.
To return astronauts to the Moon without understanding the resource potential we waste far more time and money than by a well thought out and relatively cheap campaign to identify critical lunar resources and then direct our efforts there.
Dennis
Dennis, to wait until “we know enough about the moon” will have the same net affect as saying “develop the correct reusable technology first” — we’ll spend all of our time and money packing and never actually get out the door.
Also, I’m not certain how much difference polar hydrogen will make. Oxygen should be relatively easy to separate from known sources (e.g., the Apollo-17 landing site). Hydrogen, whatever its total amount on the moon, should be relatively cheap to transport from elsewhere and I strongly suspect it will prove to be widely distributed in the polar regolith and hard to mine. I see Oxygen is the key resource and Hydrogen as a nice-to-have.
Also again, the types of orbiters that can precisely locate and quantify lunar hydrogen and Ni/Fi asteroids buried on the moon should be within the reach of private industry. If NASA were truly and convincingly committed to a large and early presence on the moon, the agency should be able state a requirement for this type of data, and let industry find it in return for mining rights. That would free up the money NASA would otherwise spend flying probes to the moon for scientists to continue to fly where we won’t be sending astronauts anytime soon. And, the best way to sound convincing about going to the moon is to actually go there, as quickly-and-dirty as we can manage it.
I have to say that I am very discouraged by how much the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is costing. Fairly or not, I can’t help seeing this as largely wasted money that is only delaying our return.
— Donald
Don
NASA GSFC is going to waste the LRO money no matter what you or I or anyone else is going to say.
Please provide proof of any sort that hydrogen is going to be cheaper to obtain from other sources than from pure ice (which is the high end claim) locally derived. For the low end I agree with you but that is the question that needs to be answered.
Remote sensing missions are not going to slow down the VSE or the human return as the human return in NASA’s plan is not for another decade. We can fly many missions to the Moon in that timeframe, whether privately or publically financed.
NASA has not even begun to figure out what they are going to do on the Moon and good data on resources is an absolute must if their efforts are not to be wasted. For the price of one NASA VSE lunar misison you could by a dozen orbiters and landers. Worst case it would be worth a six month delay in order to get data that makes the trip worth it and not just Apollo redux.
Dennis
Dennis,
Ship the (low-mass) hydrogen from Earth. Later on, use residual fuel in transfer vehicle tanks and scavanged from waste water. Methane / oxygen rockets will usually have more fuel than they need, and I think it would be relatively easy to scavange hydrogen from left over methane. Bake it from the regolith as you obtain the oxygen. Sure, it _may_ be easier to get it from polar water, but we shouldn’t wait to find out. And, if the polar water isn’t there, or is too hard to mine, we’ll need these skills anyway when we reach for the asteroids.
For the price of one NASA VSE lunar misison you could by a dozen orbiters and landers.
Maybe. My understanding is that NASA’s guess for the incremental cost of a flight using the VSE infrastructure is circa $2 billion. If that is even in the ball-park, you cannot fly many half-billion dollar LROs for the cost of an operational lunar flight.
If it were my say, the money NASA plans to spend on probes would be spent restoring the methane rocket engine as the primary engine; developing a (preferably portable) method of separating oxygen from regolith; and flying the first crew to experiment with that. Crews headed for a polar station will spend time in polar orbit before landing and they can do survey work for follow-on missions, much as was done during Apollo, where each mission tried to conduct detailed observations of the site for the next landing.
human return as the human return in NASA’s plan is not for another decade.
I see this as a key political, technical, and economic weakness in the VSE, and probably what will kill the project.
— Donald
{I see this as a key political, technical, and economic weakness in the VSE, and probably what will kill the project.}
Donald,
I have to disagree.
The Aldridge Commission was right when they stated that if the VSE dies, it will die because it is not “affordable” or “sustainable”.
Complaining that an unsustainable and unaffordable program is taking “too long” misses the point.
– Al
Don
While I agree with shipping the hydrogen from the Earth in the case of the lower end estimate of water, it will be cheaper to grab it insitu if it is on he high end of the estimate.
I also agree with Paul Spudis that a lunar polar base is of the greatest necessity and utility over an equatorial site. This is especially true if there is a lot of water.
The scavenging that you talk about is not going to provide a lot of fuel for “hopping” over the lunar surface. It takes as much fuel to do a suborbital hop as it does to go to orbit and we really need to have freedom of movement on the Moon.
If the hydrogen is on the low end of the estimate then it will make more sense to use powdered magnesium derived from the ISRU process along with LOX as a fuel rather than to ship hydrogen from the Earth.
Again, all of these ideas are heavily dependent on the amount of hydrogen that is native to the Moon, which means that we need better data!!
By the way a little birdie has told me that the LRO GRS is not really that good of resolution either.
As for the cost of spacecraft, those do need to come down but it will have to come from outside of the existing system. The thing that is going on now is a rush to cut up the pork, not put the pig on a diet.
Dennis
> Answering the “water question” is a crucial element of anyone’s return or first go at the Moon.
Obviously, it was not crucial to NASA’s first go at the Moon.
> So yes Ed these satellites will impact the cost and the architecture for any lunar development.
How will they do that when the architecture has already been determined, Dennis?
> Remote sensing missions are not going to slow down the VSE or the human return as the
> human return in NASA’s plan is not for another decade.
Because NASA chooses not to go to the Moon in this decade, Dennis. If NASA wanted to, it could buy a Soyuz and send astronauts to the Moon right now — you acknowledged as much in your book.
> We can fly many missions to the Moon in that timeframe, whether privately or publically financed.
No one is denying that, Dennis. The question is, should people be able to go?
NASA wants to send robots instead of humans, even when human missions would be cheaper. Mike Griffin has said repeatedly that VSE is about exploration, not just science, but right from the start, exploration is taking a back seat. Forty years after Apollo, NASA argues that it does not know enough to land a human on the Moon.
> Also, we need a good radar map of the Moon that has sufficient power to determine whether
> or not there are any impacted NiFe objects there that can be harvested.
Do you think that could never be done once humans are there?
We haven’t located every NiFe meteroite on Earth yet. You’re saying we need better data about the Moon than we have about the Earth, before any human being can go?
I find myself in another rare moment of complete agreement with Ed. (You’ve got to stop doing this to me!) On this one, he is correct.
— Donald
Al: The Aldridge Commission was right when they stated that if the VSE dies, it will die because it is not “affordable” or “sustainable”. Complaining that an unsustainable and unaffordable program is taking “too long” misses the point.
Affordable will come best by doing it. Affordable will not come by staying at home trying to develop better technology without experience. (We’ve tried that route for decades and it hasn’t worked.) Taking too long is far more likely to prove fatal in the short term than is high costs. We have a rare moment of national political concensus on the way forward: who knows how long that will last? We’ve got to achieve something meaningful and measurable in human space exploration during this window — or the nation will start to wonder again why they are paying billions of dollars, not for golf balls and rocks on the moon, but for nothing — technological play pens that lead to more technology but not an actual measurable achievement.
Look to the Space Station for a model. The Station itself is outrageously expensive and late — yet it is keeping launch vehicles in business and thus lowering costs for everyone, and if COTS succeeds in further lowering costs, the Space Station’s needs will be responsible.
The same can happen on the moon. Put a base there that you have to supply, day in and day out, and you’ve got a market for new technology transportation that can be commercialized. Don’t go there, and you have nothing at all.
— Donald
Dennis,
all of these ideas are heavily dependent on the amount of hydrogen that is native to the Moon, which means that we need better data!!
Agreed, but none of them are dependent whether you should get that data while you are sending humans to Earth’s moon, or before you try to go.
— Donald
Don
When agreeing with Ed (which I do on occasion) one must always examine ones premeses.
If we are going to have a rational development of the Moon, we need this data as a precursor to human development because the cost, and architecture of the effort can be dramatically shifted by that data.
That is just simple engineering logic. Ed making statements about knowing where Earth’s NiFe impactors are notwithstanding.
Ed, as you, are just wrong about this one.
Dennis
Dennis,
Water ice would be nice. Very nice. But, the absence of water ice is not sufficient grounds NOT to develop the Moon. LO2 is available pretty much everywhere while water may not be available adjacent to promising NiFe lunar impact sites. Michael Duke, as I recall, has also suggested that H2 and CO2 can be harvested from ordinary regolith using the proposed He3 collection techniques. No polar ice needed.
O2 is ~ 89% by mass of the H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O equation. Its ~ 80% by mass of a CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O equation. But of course you know that. LO2 extraction gets you 80% + of the ISRU leverage and can be deployed anywhere on Luna, not merely where the ice is.
We can and should begin prospecting for promising PGM sites long before we have the infrastructure needed to extract polar water. Indeed under the current Outer Space Treaty of 1967, if a competitor were to set up shop smack dab on top of a promising PGM impact site CURRENT international and space law gives them the right to operate without interference so long as they maintain active operations.
Shipping 11% of your fuel mass by r-LSAM seems a small penalty for being first on the ground for the promising PGM sites.
Bill
At no point have I advocated AT ALL that if there is no water ice that the development of the Moon is untenable.
I have very carefully chosen my words here and it would be better to read them rather than read into them a bias. What I have been saying in this thread is that the amount of water (or other resources for that matter) will dramatically INFLUENCE HOW the development will go forward, not preclude it.
What I have said on many occasion is that said if there is:
A: Lower end estimate of water ice ( 300M tons 1% purity) that:
It probably is not worth dealing with due to the complexity of trying to dig up a very diffuse resource and that we should focus our efforts on pretty much the path that you are talking about.
B: At the higher end estimate of water ice (10 billion tons)
Then it makes a heck of a lot of sense to do the work that needs to be done AFTER the initial work with vapor phase pyrolosis or maybe carbothermal has begun the process of ISRU development. Water ice in pure or nearly pure form would be an incredible asset in the higher range estimates. That can be used for fuel, shielding, further ISRU development (hydrogen reduction of metals)
Bill I agree with the prospecting for PGM’s.
It has been my entire argument in this thread that we simply do not know enough about the Moon and that some remote sensing is necessary to gain that information, possibly including landers as there is a wide variance in metal quality in NiFe objects for example.
Without this remote sensing knowledge human prospecting will be about as valuable as it was when an old coot with a donky walked around with a dousing rod looking for gold.
Unfortunately many of the robotics guys are overpromising on what robots can do to obtain the water if it is in diffuse form. That is going to be one heck of a difficult job and I would rather (if the low end is correct) to ignore the water as you postulate.
Dennis
Dennis,
Then it makes a heck of a lot of sense to do the work that needs to be done AFTER the initial work with vapor phase pyrolosis or maybe carbothermal has begun the process of ISRU development. Water ice in pure or nearly pure form would be an incredible asset in the higher range estimates. That can be used for fuel, shielding, further ISRU development (hydrogen reduction of metals)
Absoutely no disagreement from me on this. Oxygen ASAP and water ASAP thereafter.
And, I agree we cannot possibly do enough remote sensing from low lunar orbit, so long as that is not asserted as a reason to delay human missions.
On that point, if the potential recovery of PGM is confirmed then 100% private sector (proprietary) lunar surface imagery acquired without government financing way well be cost justified to assist various competitors in knowing where to land.
= = =
I have mixed ethical feelings about the following point: Given the very “thin” rhodium market (for example) proprietary data gleaned from a 100% private sector sample return might be selectively released in connection with a commodities speculation scheme (buying and selling short positions) in order to pay for the mission.
I do not necessarily advocate such a scheme (its very possibly illegal) but the idea will surely occur to others as well.
A note of clarification: I, too, am not opposed to further orbital reconnaissance of Earth’s moon, so long as it is cheap and it does not come out of money that can be used to send a human crew. However, I just read that current estimates for the lander to follow the half-billion dollar LRO is circa $1 billion. Spending one billion dollars to send a rover when you can send a far, far more capable human mission for only twice that much money a decade later is a unconscionable waste of money.
If we’re going to pay to send people to the moon, let people do the work. They’re far better at almost any task than any conceivable robot.
Dennis, I have argued that if we wait for the perfect transportation system, we will never go. It is also true that if we wait for perfect knowledge of Earth’s moon, or the most efficient architecture, we will also never go. We need to go with the knowledge, skills, and technology we have now. If we go intending to stay, there will always be second, third, and fourth generations both of transportation and architecture. And, I believe we are far more likely to stay if we actually go, than if we continue to play at going with endless automated probes and engineering studies seeking the most optomized method to achieve what we already know how to do.
— Donald
> I just read that current estimates for the lander to follow the half-
>billion dollar LRO is circa $1 billion. Spending one billion dollars
> to send a rover when you can send a far, far more capable human mission
> for only twice that much money a decade later is a unconscionable waste
> of money.
“Twice as much money”? “A decade later”?
Donald, we could send a human mission for *half* as much money a decade *earlier*.
In 1961, NASA could send a man to the Moon in less than a decade. In 2006, NASA thinks we “don’t have enough data” to send humans to the Moon in this decade.
As for the statement that “it does not come out of money that can be used to send a human crew,” of course it does. The US government does not have an infinite supply of money. Every dollar comes out of the same finite budget.
In 1961, we had the technology to build low-cost reusable launch vehicles. In 2006, NASA thinks we “don’t have the technology” to build reusable vehicles in the next 40 years.
No matter how much data or technology we have, it’s never enough. Not when you’re asking people who make their living collecting data and developing technology. It isn’t good enough that we can build reusable vehicles and go to the Moon with the technology and data we have now. We must have perfect technology and perfect data sets before we can even begin! Remember, “better is the enemy of good enough,” so anything that’s good enough must be rejected.
> Unfortunately many of the robotics guys are overpromising on what robots
> can do to obtain the water if it is in diffuse form. That is going to be one
> heck of a difficult job and I would rather (if the low end is correct) to
> ignore the water as you postulate.
If it’s too difficult for robots, just ignore it?
I wonder what the unmanned space guys want with water, anyway. What did Robbie the Robot say about water? “I rarely use it myself. It promotes corrosion”?
Remember, “better is the enemy of good enough,” so anything that’s good enough must be rejected.
Edward, we may disagree about what, exactly, “good enough” means, but I fully agree with the statement.
— Donald
Donald
I am hearing that Horowitz rejected the $1b price tag and told them to drop it by half.
Also, MSFC is using the lander as a precursor design to the LSAM.
If you think that it is easier for a human to work in 20-30 degree kelvin weather than a robot? You really need to think about materials properties as well as power requirements before you make statements that it would be easier for humans to mine water on the Moon. Heck, here on the earth machines do 95% of the mining work now.
Where have I advocated the perfect transportation system? I don’t like the ESAS architecture but I am not lobbying against it, just pointing out that for something that is more than Apollo II that the architecture needs supplimental systems that can do more than put 35,000 lbs on the Moon for $2 billion dollars for four days.
Donald you need to differentiate between valid engineering critical analysis and criticism for the sake of criticism.
Dennis
Okay, Dinnis, Also, MSFC is using the lander as a precursor design to the LSAM, I was not aware of this and it drastically changes my opinion. Good for them.
Heck, here on the earth machines do 95% of the mining work now.
This may be true of open pit mining, but, as recent headlines have shown, no one is likely to be automating deep-mining (in tunnels) anytime soon. And, I would be very surprised if anyone were automating the initial ground surveys that locate minable materials — which is what we’re talking about.
I am sorry that you feel I am being critical for the sake of criticism. That is not at all my intent. I truly feel that the space development is on a wrong course: we are wasting too much money on trying to automate inherently difficult-to-automate tasks, when it would be far cheaper to send engineers who can do these tasks casually — even with all the baggage they require. I may well be wrong, but I might not be. I think I am making valid points that should be taken more seriously than most people seem prepared to take them.
Read David Hartland’s book. The Apollo astronauts casually did things that no one is going to automate in any of our lifetimes no matter how much money you throw at it.
— Donald
> I am hearing that Horowitz rejected the $1b price tag and told them to drop it by half.
> Also, MSFC is using the lander as a precursor design to the LSAM.
Interesting spin, Dennis. Actually, what Horowitz did was to take the program away from NASA Ames and give it to MSFC, using the “lander as a precursor design” as an excise. This shortly after the new Ames director said he wanted to find a way to let private enterprise do a lunar missions (which, on alternate days of the way, you say you support).
> If you think that it is easier for a human to work in 20-30 degree kelvin weather than a robot? You
> really need to think about materials properties
People thought about materials properties 40 years ago, Dennis. You just keep repeating the same anti-manned space arguments we’ve heard for 40 years.
> Heck, here on the earth machines do 95% of the mining work now.
Yes, just as computers do 95% of the work of flying an F-16 or 777. There’s a big difference between 95% and 100%, Dennis. Here on Earth, we automate those processes that make sense to automate. The choice is not really “humans vs machines,” it’s humans *and* machines, working together, vs. trying to remove every last human just so you can spend more money on robots.
> Where have I advocated the perfect transportation system?
Read anything you’ve written for the last 10 years, Dennis. You consistently argue that we need to wait for NASA to develop some perfect technology (scramjets, nuclear engines, laser propulsion) instead of building reusable vehicles with the technology we have now.
Donald
The vast majority of coal mined underground is by the long-wall method that is almost completely automated.
Here is a reference.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energy_fungames/energyant_trips/coalvisit.html
This is from the website
Fully 80% of the mine’s output comes from the use of the long wall mining technique. In long wall mining a block of coal 850 feet wide and over 2 miles long is cut. This is done by cutting two parallel 2 to 2½ mile long tunnels, about 850 feet apart into the coal seam. These two tunnels are then connected by a third tunnel at the back of the block. All of this is done by conventional mining methods and this is where the remaining 20% of the mine’s output comes from. It is at this point, once the two parallel tunnels have been connected that the actual long wall mining begins. The long wall mining machinery is then brought into this third tunnel at the back of the block of coal. The long wall mining machinery has three main parts to it: the shearer, the conveyor and the ‘armor plating’. The armor plating provides the roof support so that the miners can have a relatively ‘safe’ place to work under.
**********
I agree with you that humans are valuable in-situ. However, the productivity of those astronauts will be multipled several times by an effective campaign of remote sensing.
Dennis
Ed
As usual you are simply wrong. To say that we have any clue about how to effectively operate in 20-30 degree kelvin environment just illustrates your disconnect from the reality of the engineering challanges of equaipment design for that purpose.
Dennis
> To say that we have any clue about how to effectively operate in 20-30
> degree kelvin environment just illustrates your disconnect from the reality
> of the engineering challanges of equaipment design for that purpose.
Peace, Dennis. I don’t remember saying you had a clue but if I did, I apologize.
Humans will not operate in 20-30 Kelvin, Dennis. They’ll use heaters, which may not be as sexy as cryogenic robots, but will probably be a lot cheaper.
A few weeks ago, you were saying ESAS was a crock of $@#/ and everything should done privately. Now, you’re back to saying NASA’s $@#/ doesn’t stink. It’s funny how you vacillate back and forth.
> I agree with you that humans are valuable in-situ. However, the productivity
> of those astronauts will be multipled several times by an effective campaign
> of remote sensing.
That’s why NASA did remote sensing prior to Apollo, Dennis. And *during* Apollo. (There’s no reason why manned spacecraft can’t do remote sensing.)
No one is saying there shouldn’t be remote sensing, Dennis. That’s another red herring. Buting sending humans to the Moon won’t make it impossible to do remote sensing. It will make it easier.
NASA has much more remote-sensing data on the Moon today than it did when Apollo 11 landed. Saying we need to collect data for another 12 years before humans can go to the Moon is nonsense.
Dennis: This is done by cutting two parallel 2 to 2½ mile long tunnels, about 850 feet apart into the coal seam. These two tunnels are then connected by a third tunnel at the back of the block. ALL OF THIS IS DONE BY CONVENTIONAL MINING METHODS.
I rest my case.
(However, that was an interesting description of modern mining techniques. Thanks for posting it.)
— Donald
Donald
The mining on the Moon will be akin to open pit mining on the earth which is almost completely automated. I have been to several conferences on this and even the trucks that carry the materials out are driven by computer and GPS.
Ed completely underestimates the difficulties of obtaining the water, especially in dilute form, on the lunar surface. That comes from working too long at Microsoft.
Dennis
> The mining on the Moon will be akin to open pit mining on the earth which is almost completely automated
Funny. I remember trying to explain to Dennis Wingo why open-pit mining was preferable to tunnel mining.
As usual, the great Wingo told me I know nothing. Open-pit mining was Politically Incorrect because it would “deface the Moon.:”
He even pointed to a cartoon, which he wanted to include in his book, as proof that strip mining would “ruin” the Moon.
> I have been to several conferences on this and even the trucks that carry the materials out are driven by computer and GPS.
What they didn’t tell you was that there’s a human operating that computer and GPS.
Thanks for these posts, Dennis. They provide clear insight into the anti-human spaceflight mentaility at MSFC.
Laf
I did include a picture of that as the consequence of trying to mine enough Helium 3 to power the earth and that missions to Neptune would provide far more He3 than the Moon ever would. Also this would help to provide a market for nuclear thermal propulsion. I pointed out that there would be a lot of opposition to this type of mining and that it would be better to do it other ways, ways that truly open up a vastly larger resource and open the entire solar system to development. Oh by the way there is enough He3 on Neptune to power our civilization at a much higher rate of energy usage than today. Therefore the approach that John Lewis (I got it from his Mining the Sky) proposed is a much better one for all of us.
Actually these days the computer is an embedded system that is autonomous and the GPS provides the tracking and navigation for that embedded computer.
MIke Duke has been doing a lot of work in this area at, of all places, JSC. In the development of the solar system it will be a mixture of humans and robots. Today on the earth this is also the norm in manufacturing.
Dennis
> I did include a picture of that as the consequence of trying to mine enough Helium 3 to power the earth
> and that missions to Neptune would provide far more He3 than the Moon ever would. Also this would help
> to provide a market for nuclear thermal propulsion.
So, you think environmentalists will object to digging craters in the Moon, but they’ll have no problem with launching nuclear thermal rockets???
> Therefore the approach that John Lewis (I got it from his Mining the Sky) proposed is a much better one for all of us.
John Lewis did NOT propose that it was possible to mine the Moon or Neptune with current launch costs, Dennis.
“Mining the Sky” contains numerous references to the need to reduce launch costs, as does Lewis’s “Space Resources.”
He doesn’t just ignore economics and chant “launch costs are an issue.”
> MIke Duke has been doing a lot of work in this area at, of all places, JSC. In the development
> of the solar system it will be a mixture of humans and robots. Today on the earth this is also
> the norm in manufacturing.
That’s just what we’ve been telling you, Dennis. Human spaceflight does not mean we won’t be taking machines with us. It doesn’t mean you can’t do your science experiments. That idea is a canard invented by the “unmanned space” lobby.