NASA’s current predicament—being required to spend money during the ongoing series of continuing resolutions on elements of Constellation effectively canceled by the NASA authorization act—has gotten the attention of one member of Congress, but with the potential for undesired consequences for the space agency. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, guest host Harry Smith asked Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) how much spending could be cut over the next couple of years. Issa’s response (from page 15 of the transcript):
I’m looking at about two hundred billion. As the amount that we can either identify and eliminate the waste or at least begin the process and I’ll give you one that’s pretty easy. It’s been in the papers. In the last days of last congress they funded five hundred million dollars for a rocket program at NASA that’s already been shut down. That can’t be too hard to undo.
The potential problem for NASA is that Issa and like-minded fellow members of Congress could see that spending not as an artifact of FY10 appropriations language that needs to be updated to allow the agency to instead fund other programs, like the new heavy-lift Space Launch System included in the authorization act, but as waste to simply be cut entirely.
And so the after effects of Obamaspace continue to roil.
Rep. Issa said:
In the last days of last congress they funded five hundred million dollars for a rocket program at NASA that’s already been shut down. That can’t be too hard to undo.
Mr. Issa, meet Senator Shelby.
If they only realized what is in the paper is not gospel
and the paper gets it wrong constantly. Those who work on the
program know that it is being spent for work that will be part of
the new heavy lift. Modifying pads, firing rooms, infrastructure
type work and jobs that will be needed for SLS. That infrastructure
work takes time and is being worked now. So that when the rocket is
chosen for heavy lift the infrastructure will be there to support
it. The work that is being done now is not rocket design specific.
It is general enough to accomodate whatever heavy lift is chosen by
NASA. Can’t always believe the papers!!!
“And so the after effects of Obamaspace continue to roil.”
So a stipulation put into the 2010 budget by a republican
congressman under protest from democrat to protect a bloated and
dysfunctional rocket program is Obama’s fault? Republican’s
refusing to accept anything in the new budget is Obama’s fault?
Some things, yes, but everything? Failure to tack on even a minor
adjustment to avoid wasting half a billion dollars is Obama’s
fault? I’m sorry, but THIS debacle is squarely a republican
congressional issue and is only tangentially related to NASA’s
direction change. They have had almost a year to pick a side and
stick to it, but instead they’re happy to keep nonsensical
legislative action and blow another half billion just to look like
they’re being tough on Obama. You don’t have to accept FY2011 whole
cloth to free up that half billion. You don’t have to accept FY2011
while cloth to tack on a clarification to NASA’s portion of the CR.
You don’t even have to increase the NASA budget to FY2011 levels in
the CR, you can keep it the same. But apparently wasting 500
million is a better plan cause we don’t like Obama. Yes, that’s
Obama’s fault.
Isn’t it obvious yet that the dysfunctional relationships,
aspects of our wonderful form of government, between WH, Congress,
NASA, OMB, make it IMPOSSIBLE, for HSF spaceflight hardware
developments to ever happen on time and on budget? And the robotic
side has felt the trauma as well – witness JWST debacle. Time to
end NASA HSF development efforts.
“And so the after effects of Obamaspace continue to roil.”
The White House (under any President) does not write NASA’s
authorization bills. The White House (under any President) does not
write NASA’s appropriations bills. The White House (under any
President) is not responsible for ensuring that authorization bill
language and appropriations bill language are coordinated and
consistent. The White House (under any President) is not
responsible for ensuring that new appropriations bills are passed
in a timely manner. The White House (under any President) is not
responsible for bad earmarks in NASA appropriations bills. These
are all congressional responsibilities. Congress is at fault, not
the White House Either learn how the the US system of government
works or don’t post here. You’re wasting everyone’s time.
Ugh…
It is general enough to accomodate whatever heavy
lift is chosen by NASA. Not if it doesn’t operate out of
KSC.
Sb023 wrote @ January 2nd, 2011 at 8:27
pm That is of course assuming that a heavy-lift vehicle
will ever fly, or even be built, within some sort of reasonable
time and budget. You’ll find that a lot of people don’t have quite
your level of confidence regarding this issue, or even agree that
NASA needs to build a HLV in the first place. Note that I,
personnally, am also very doubtful regarding your claim that the
work being done would benefit any potential HLV contender equally,
in ligh of the ongoing costly development of 5-segment SRM and
Ares-specific infrastructure etc.
Sb023 said “…that it is being spent for work that will be
part of the new heavy lift. ” Surely you meant “that might be part
of the new heavy lift” after all the new HLV hasn’t been selected
yet. Who knows, they might choose a sensible design this time. Or
alternatively the whole program could still get cut…
To be perfectly honest I hope they DO just cut the whole
HLV for right now anyways. Don’t get me wrong, I want NASA to get
as much budget as they can overall, but throwing money at a new
government run launch infrastructure at this time is probably not
the best use for it and if something has got to go than I say we
take a look at the elephant in the room. I would like to see us
delay such a program for at least two years and see what the
commercial sector has to offer for ISS resupply and taxi services,
while at the same time reassessing exactly what we need for the
next generation in human space exploration which I hope to be
affordable and sustainable. The only short term uses for a HLV
would be LEO missions to the ISS, and that is currently only funded
to 2020(ESA funds pending). The HLV will be ready by 2016 at best,
probably more like 2018. That gives us only 2-4 years of ISS
missions before we start using it for anything else. SpaceX is
scheduled to complete its final COTS demo this year and begin it’s
$1.6B ISS resupply contract. Since that same module (Dragon) can be
configured for crew, how long could it be before crew
transportation will be sanctioned? I think it’s safe to say that it
would be before 2016, when the HLV is expected by. If by 2013 it
looks doubtful that commercial crew can come through, then we start
building towards a launch infrastructure to be completed by 2018
(although spreading the cost out to 2020 wouldn’t be a bad idea),
just two years later. So we get Russia to give our astronauts a
lift for two extra years (remember, this is assuming the commercial
hasn’t pulled through) before we build a shiny new launch
infrastructure that we spent an extra two years making sure we
actually needed. Then we can use it for either a NEO mission or to
launch and service (if commercial somehow STILL isn’t ready) the
successor to the ISS, before progressing to a Mars mission another
decade later at least. In the mean time that money can be used on
R&D into the technologies we already know we’ll need for a
mission to Mars, like closed loop life support systems and
mitigating the effects of long term exposure to micro gravity and
the rest of the solar system’s environmental conditions. We can
also take the time to investigate improvements and alternatives to
rocket technology before we establish any designs or
infrastructure. For example, with the discovery of Trinitramide,
our payloads are likely to become quadruple what they are now! The
legislation currently asks that the new launch system be able to
carry up to 100 ton payloads. With Trinitramide we could do that
with a rocket the size of one that would lift 25 tons using today’s
rocket fuels, such as Ares I, Delta IV-Heavy, and even SpaceX’s
Falcon 9. I’m just hoping the Trinitramide doesn’t cost x4 as much
as current fuels or else the bottom line won’t be improved that
much really.
Major Tom wrote @ January 2nd, 2011 at 10:39 pm
Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for?
@James T:
Why?
.
I’ve seen claims of 20 to 30 percent increases in efficiency, which translates optimistically to a 40 to 60 percent increase in payload mass. Not 400 percent.
Issa is a bit player in the spending reform debate. Need someone to hassle the EPA or Attorney General? Issa is man. For appropriations he is powerless. For the third time in the last year the congress will debate the future course of NASA while the agency continues to atrophy. We can only hope the new house leadership will revive its mission.
Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for?
Honest introspection is something the democrat leadership is incapable of.
James T wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 2:41 am [To be perfectly honest I hope they DO just cut the whole HLV for right now anyways. Don’t get me wrong, I want NASA to get as much budget as they can overall, but throwing money at a new government run launch infrastructure at this time is probably not the best use for it and if something has got to go than I say we take a look at the elephant in the room. I would like to see us delay such a program for at least two years and see what the commercial sector has to offer for ISS resupply and taxi services, while at the same time reassessing exactly what we need for the next generation in human space exploration which I hope to be affordable and sustainable….]
James T. (is that T for Tiberius?) NASA is overrun with white elephants. NASA needs to clean up their paddock by shooing all these elephants back to their respective family herds. NASA should be pushing U.S. excellence in space by making their mission objective — the creation of a sustainable, extensible transportation network using resources found in space, starting on the Moon.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 7:43 am
Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for?
Excellent question, but I would not hold my breath and stand on one foot waiting for an answer.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 7:43 am
Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for…
I write:
the develoopment and execution of commercial space.
People like you tend to think of space policy as government programs…what is the government doing to empower itself to do more things…
the change in policy is empowering the private sector.
And thats good nee excellent policy
Robert G. Oler
Mark R. Whittington wrote @ January 2nd, 2011 at 7:15 pm
“And so the after effects of Obamaspace continue to roil.”
goofy
The only people keeping Cx infrastructure alive are (mostly) members of the GOP who cannot live without their pork projects.
Blaming Obama for their actions is to say that folks like Shelby are simply not responsible for their own actions…A GOP theory of “please please stop me before I spend more on pork”.
Your party has a lot to be proud of
(lol)
Robert G. Oler
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 2nd, 2011 at 10:58 pm
someone posted
It is general enough to accomodate whatever heavy
lift is chosen by NASA.
you replied
Not if it doesn’t operate out of
KSC…
and that is a key point. While it is likely that there will be KSC heavy lift it is not a given and even if it were the money spent might not be all that useful because it might have nothing to do with the heavy lift that matures through product development.
Still headed out to CA in Feb…so we can have that man hug!
Happy New Year Rand
Robert G. Oler
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 9:02 am [People like you tend to think of space policy as government programs…what is the government doing to empower itself to do more things…]
There you go again Robert, defining people. You have no basis to state “people like you tend to think of space policy as government programs…”
You are flat wrong in your assessment but that won’t stop you from repeating it.
I’m just hoping the Trinitramide doesn’t cost x4 as much
as current fuels or else the bottom line won’t be improved that
much really.
Even assuming that this propellant is practical (unlikely), fuel costs are an insignificant factor in launch costs.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 7:43 am
Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for…
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 9:02 am
the develoopment and execution of commercial space.
What success commercial space has had (the two successful Falcon 9 flights) was begun under the (by you hated) Bush/Griffin policy. I have no idea what commercial space’s chances of success currently are, but they are less than they would have been; were it not for the bungled role out of ObamaSopace.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Just curious….What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for?”
My take on it is that Congress has pretty much hamstrung the administration. The administration provided Congress with one clear and cogent plan for the future development of space exploration, and Congress won’t allow this plan to begin, nor any other. I guess the White House has to take responsibility for underestimating the irresponsibility of Congress in this regard. They have to take responsibility for trying to form an implementable plan after Congress finishes their cat fighting over funding allocations and their laughable design of heavy lift vehicles. The White House clearly has to take a lot of responsibility for picking up all the pieces, but the pieces haven’t stopped falling just yet.
“What part of NASA’s present situation will this White House/president/administration take responsibility for?”
If by “present situation” you mean the mismatch between NASA’s 2010 Authorization Act that kills Constellation and the Constellation language that Shelby inserted in the FY 2010 Omnibus Appropriations Act, which is still in effect because Congress hasn’t passed a new appropriations bill or relevant CR language, I fail to see how the White House is responsible. Congress legislates. The White House does not. The White House can only reject (veto) legislation. It cannot create legislation. This is basic separation of powers, a fundamental principle enshrined in the US Constitution under which the US federal government has operated for 230+ years now that everyone should have learned in their middle school civics class. If people don’t understand this, then they shouldn’t be wasting this or any other policy forum’s time.
If by “present situation” you mean what do I personally think the White House has done wrong, I can think of several things off the top of my head:
Orion CRV — It was a major blunder to have the President announce at KSC that Orion would serve as the ISS CRV. The Augustine Committee report warned in black and white about Orion’s high operational costs. Replacing ~$60 million Soyuz flights that are available now with ~$1 billion Orion flights that wouldn’t be available until 2013+ makes no fiscal or programmatic sense whatsoever. The domestic CRV function should be competed. If LockMart wants to bid Orion or some variant thereof, let them do so. If they don’t or a LockMart Orion variant doesn’t win, then Orion dies. Let competition, not workforce/vote protectionism, find the best and most cost effective solution.
MPCV Definition/Budget in 2010 Authorization Act — The President should not have signed the 2010 NASA Authorization Act given the huge disparity between how the MPCV is defined in the Act (more capability than Orion, faster schedule than Orion, use Orion contracts/workforce) and the MPCV budget in the Act (40% cut versus the old Orion budget in the first year alone). MPCV is now legislatively set up for failure right out of the gates. Either someone in the White House wasn’t paying attention, or they should have fought earlier and harder on this issue.
SLS Definition/Budget — The President should not have signed the 2010 NASA Authorization Act given the specificity with which SLS is defined in the Act (specific HLV performance to orbit, use of Ares/Shuttle contracts/workforce, much earlier IOC than Ares V but with much less budget). The White House should not let the legislators undertake executive branch (NASA) duties in the definition of launch vehicles (or any other substantively technical issue). In the absence of any technology development to lower costs and competition or at least substantive design flexibility to make intelligent trades, NASA may end up spending billions and billions of taxpayer dollars building an HLV over the next few years that no one needs for the next 15 years (at least) — an HLV that will be way more expensive to operate than necessary when it is finally needed — and many more billions and billions of dollars keeping this HLV’s workforce and infrastructure intact until it is needed sometime in the 2020s or later. The same albatross that has weighed down NASA’s human space flight program budgetarily and crippled human space exploration efforts for decades is now legislatively directed to do so for the next decade or two. Either someone in the White House wasn’t paying attention or they should have fought harder, earlier, on this issue.
There’s more, but those are the big three.
FWIW…
“NASA is just making excuses and continuing to drag its feet, just as it has done for the past two years under the Obama administration,†Jonathan Graffeo told the paper. “The Shelby language is unambiguous and sends a clear message to NASA: Use the money Congress appropriates as intended – to build a rocket that will maintain our leadership in space.â€
This is an ATK PR “message”. I’m sure that a simple word search will find it being parroted by others, and I look for them to use it in the future.
This mess reminds me of the MX. Vital to national security, until they decided to base it on rail cars in Utah, whereupon it died a quiet death.
Clearly, Utah needs a launch port in addition to its solid motor facility, so that Bob Zubrin’s nuclear one time use Mars payloads can be safely launched by the Ares 5.
Can we just get on with Direct now, as Senator Nelson requested?
And drop the idea of one time use nuclear manned Mars spacecraft?
Swim faster, Flipper, faster!
Joe wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 10:23 am
“What success commercial space has had (the two successful Falcon 9 flights)”
So you define the commercial space industry as being constituted by one company? Weird.
“I have no idea what commercial space’s chances of success currently are, but they are less than they would have been; were it not for the bungled role out of ObamaSopace.”
So it would have had more chance for success under Bush/Griffin? Or maybe you mean that if Obama had not pushed Congress to fund commercial crew they would have funded it even more?
You’re not making a lot of sense…
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 9:31 am
“There you go again Robert, defining people. You have no basis to state “people like you tend to think of space policy as government programs…—
lol…when the folks who are good at labeling everyone else…get labeled they dont like it.
You (and I) are known by many things, but in our politics and policy we are known well by our writings…at least that they are the things we advocate with enough conviction to put them on a more or less permanent medium….and both you and I have gotten enough on paper or on the nets to have a “political trail”.
My beliefs have long argued for the end of government run government executed programs that have little or no value to their cost. If this were 1982 then I would have argued something vastly different…more along the lines you advocate…but long ago I grew up and recognized that the only thing large government programs did for the US was spend a lot of amounts of money at NASA for not a lot of value.
The space station project in the 80’s was not about a space station, but about cementing NASA’s hold on human spaceflight…and it is one of the reasons that a space station we should have had for under 20 billion is a 100-XXX more monstrosity.
In the end I have come to find out that the 1980’s Robert Oler was wrong and folks like Ed Boland were correct…and that the 2011 version of people like you and Paul who advocate programs (like Pauls return to the Moon) which start by spending a lot of money on things which could be done far cheaper from Earth…is nothing more then a 1980’s space station effort.
Now you might not see that and may honorably disagree with my conclusions…but what you and Paul and Whittington and all the other hangers on for a government program are advocating is your own little (or big) version of the space station….and since it no longer makes any sense you have come up with the fake crisis of the Chinese or your embrace of “American exceptional ism” or some bizarre hared of Obama…to justify them.
In July of 1999 I wrote and Rich Kolker edited and Mark Whittington asked to be on a piece in The Weekly STandard which argued for the end of big government for government space and more or less what we are getting with Obama’s emphasis on the development of private infrastructure.
You are still banging the drum for yet another big government program.
Tell me something simple. When does the US get the value for the dollars that Paul wants to spend? and How…
you are a big government space program person…you just want your program.
Robert G. Oler
Doug Lassiter wrote:
My take on it is that Congress has pretty much hamstrung the administration. The administration provided Congress with one clear and cogent plan for the future development of space exploration
Strange that a friendly congress would contest Obama over NASA when they supported his wacky policies in so many other areas. My reading is that Obama’s NASA proposal was so clearly destructive that even his die hard supporters had to baulk. I agree with Whittington in that he administration has permanently lost any influence in NASA policy.
@Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 11:49 am
“If LockMart wants to bid Orion or some variant thereof, let them do so.”
I believe that this is not legal since most of the work on Orion has already been paid for by the government. I cannot see how it would be fair competition to the other teams. I think LockMart is pushing real hard for MPCV and other nonsense because they know that. Because they know that they will not be able to participate in a commercial competition with their current Orion team. They would have to firewall the two programs. In addition whatever design they have that is not Orion they will most likely not be able to compete without others approval. For example, LockMart was teaming with NGC on OSP. So all the designs they have from that era are probably not useful unless they agree to something with NGC. This time LockMart is in a lose-lose situation. As I said some time ago, some time to win you need to lose and conversely. The strange world of government procurement… Or tough luck.
“MPCV is now legislatively set up for failure right out of the gates. Either someone in the White House wasn’t paying attention, or they should have fought earlier and harder on this issue.”
“SLS Definition/Budget — ”
For the MPCV see my comment about Orion above. Same thing. For SLS, and it applies as well to MPCV I believe the WH is paying attention, it only is a political move. They cannot be seen as sending people to the unemployment office. Ending SLS, HLV or MPCV would exactly do that. On the other hand, continuing an underfunded program will let people work on the program, not accomplishing anything until the people move on to new programs. For the space workforce some of them will be absorbed by the “commercials”, some will be lost by attrition (e.g. retirement), others well tough luck but there won’t be that many is a few years from now. I already said a long time ago that a zombie Ares V program will survive just for that and it is exactly what is going on. This really is when people should say that NASA budget only is a fraction of a percent of our national budget. And that is why it is not such a big deal overall. If and when CCDev becomes a real operational program then a lot of the Ares I/V and Orion issues will be moot since most every one will NOT be working on them.
And that’s my crystal ball of the day.
Happy New Year!
James T wrote:
“while at the same time reassessing exactly what we need for the next generation in human space exploration which I hope to be affordable and sustainable.”
NASA’s human spaceflight can be defined by three “programs”. Apollo, space shuttle and the ISS. During this history there has always been advocates/pundits that went against the grain of these programs denouncing them as to expensive and unsustainable. From it’s inception NASA has never been about that. By inserting NASA centers and other work into as many districts as possible means from the onset of the space “program” there were people who knew the choices were unsustainable.
Once that system was installed and NASA given the National monopoly on spaceflight there could never be cheap, innovative and sustainablity. It was never about spaceflight after that it was about feeding the beast and keeping it fed.
Where, in the history of monopolies, do they worry about price/costs, or about innovation. A recent example is the monopoly on oil that the Iraq government had. We were astounded at how old and broken down the infrastructure was there. Why didn’t they invest and innovate? Because it was a monopoly and they didn’t have to. Look at the old, obsolete and broken down infrastructure at NASA, guess why? They didn’t have to, all they have to do is keep the train (space shuttle) running. Doesn’t matter it was old and obsolete and falling apart as long as the pork is flowing everything is fine.
Now unless someone takes a stick to NASA do you honestly believe we are going to get cheap? Sustainablity? Innovative? Do not look to a monopoly for those because it ain’t happenin’. Until that gets broken up NASA, and congress will do what ever it takes to protect that monopoly.
Hell just look at:
“Shelby certainly has a flair for the dramatic when it comes to extracting pork money for defense contractors in his state. In a “nearly unprecedented†move in February, Shelby placed a blanket hold on every single presidential nominees being considered by the Senate — more than 70 in total, including “top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon†— in order to pressure to Obama administration to do the bidding of Northrop Grumman on a $40 billion contract for which they were being considered.â€
That is what a member of congress will do to protect their monopoly. What is good for the country… isn’t even a freakin’ issue.
Sen. Shelby’s Pork Lust Forces NASA To Spend $500 Million On Canceled Rocket Program
So until commercial space becomes a reality and finally NASA loses it’s monopoly power do not even bother to look to them for cheap, innovative or sustainable. It has never been what NASA was about.
Space is a PLACE not a program! We have to break the mold and stop defining a way forward as a space program.
“NASA is overrun with white elephants. NASA needs to clean up their paddock by shooing all these elephants back to their respective family herds.”
Like what? Specifically? Name five, explain why they’re white elephants, provide their budgets, and describe what you would do to fix them or how you would redirect their funding.
If NASA is so “overrun with white elephants”, providing a handful of concrete examples should be very easy for you.
“the creation of a sustainable, extensible transportation network using resources found in space starting on the Moon.”
Why? The bottomline for the latest study is that it would cost $88 billion — with a “B” — to put in place a lunar infrastructure to produce a lousy 150mT of water per year 16 (sixteen!) years from now.
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/12/21/can-we-afford-to-return-to-the-moon/
Why on god’s green Earth would anyone spend that much money and wait that long for water that they can buy for practically nothing on Earth and launch to space now for a fraction of that cost.
An existing Delta IV Heavy puts 13mT in GTO. Assuming only 10mT can go to the water payload and a cost of $300 million per Delta IV Heavy launch, we could put 150mT of water in GEO with 15 launches at a total cost of $4.5 billion.
Over 16 years, we could put 2,400mT of water in space before the _first_ metric ton of water is delivered operationally from the lunar surface. And it would cost $72 billion, a savings of $16 billion vice the $88 billion lunar approach.
I’m all for exploring the potential of lunar and other extraterrestrial
resources. Given recent discoveries, there are robotic precursors and technology demonstrations that make a lot of sense to pursue at the ~$10-100Mx level. Things that the White House’s FY11 budget for NASA proposed to do (see the Teleoperated Lunar Lander on slide 14 of this presentation):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457443main_EEWS_ExplorationsPrecursorRoboticMissions.pdf
Or that NASA is already doing under this White House:
http://www.xprize.org/media-center/press-release/nasa-embraces-commercial-lunar-explorers-and-becomes-customer-of-google-l
But the huge, tens of billions of dollar infrastructure costs and multi-decade time to market of existing lunar ISRU concepts are uneconomic and uncompetitive at best and unrealistic scifi at worst. A lot, lot more work needs to be done before they can become the baseline or goal for a human space effort.
FWIW…
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 8:02 am
“I’ve seen claims of 20 to 30 percent increases in efficiency, which translates optimistically to a 40 to 60 percent increase in payload mass. Not 400 percent.”
Every article I’ve read on the subject suggests that rocket scientists have a rule of thumb that for every 10% increase in fuel efficiency the payload is doubled. So 20%-30% percent increase in efficiency equates to x4-x8 payload. Article Here.
.
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 9:54 am
“Even assuming that this propellant is practical (unlikely), fuel costs are an insignificant factor in launch costs.”
I agree that my comment was a little short sighted. The way I probably should have phrased it is “I just hope that the rockets that use it don’t cost x4 as much to launch or else the bottom line won’t change that much.” At the end of the day we’re looking for a lower $/kg of payload launched.
The Ares I could carry at least 25 tons. A similar sized rocket taking advantage of this new fuel would carry at least 100 tons, the amount prescribed for the HLV according to the legislature. So compare the cost of building an Ares 1 size rocket to building the HLV and there is your savings on just rocket construction costs for a 100 ton payload.
But construction alone isn’t the only savings either. Larger crafts require more safety inspections and a larger launch platform and what have you, so we’re looking at significant reductions in labor and required infrastructure for a given amount of payload capacity. Not to mention the savings in the logistical costs of transporting hardware and fuel. Rockets that use multiple stages also carry considerable additional costs due the increased amount of hardware and inspections needed for those system. Reducing the number of stages needed to launch a given payload would be very attractive.
A push for reusable systems spreads construction costs of the rocket and launch infrastructure across multiple missions, but the costs of fuel, inspections, and mission control staffing continue throughout the system’s life cycle, so a lower cost of fuel and inspections per payload should hardly be considered “insignificant.” The more reusable the system, the more of an impact the cost of the fuel itself has on the cost of the overall system. Not sure what impact there would be on mission control staffing.
So even if the fuel cost itself is insignificant to the total cost of current systems, the increase in payload efficiency has cost benefits that reach beyond just the cost of the fuel.
“Strange that a friendly congress would contest Obama over NASA when they supported his wacky policies in so many other areas. My reading is that Obama’s NASA proposal was so clearly destructive that even his die hard supporters had to baulk.”
Sure, it had nothing to do with parochial politics taking precedence over national concerns. Nothing about jobs and votes in certain states and districts. Congress clearly based its decisions on finding the most effective and efficient path forward for the nation’s collective civil human space flight efforts — especially the part where they put design solutions and workforce and contract preferences in law.
[rolls eyes]
“I agree with Whittington in that he administration has permanently lost any influence in NASA policy.”
Yes, now that the FY 2010 NASA Authorization Act has added funding to Ares I and Orion, fully funded Altair and Ares V, and zeroed out commercial crew and exploration technology, it’s clear that the White House has no influence on NASA policy.
[rolls eyes]
Sigh…
@amightywind wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 12:59 pm
“Strange that a friendly congress would contest Obama over NASA when they supported his wacky policies in so many other areas. My reading is that Obama’s NASA proposal was so clearly destructive that even his die hard supporters had to baulk. I agree with Whittington in that he administration has permanently lost any influence in NASA policy.”
You seem to have a very naive and overly simplistic vision of Congress. Congress did not support all the WH initiatives. Let me remind you that Obama wanted a public option for health insurance and that the idiots in Congress who called themselves Democrats and act like the worst Republicans didi not support him. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32718713/ns/politics-white_house/
And it only is an example of Congress stupidity, especially Democratic Congress if there is such a thing.
If Obama gets a second term, granted a big if, I sure hope he’ll act the way people in the US who voted for him. Despite all the progress so far it is not perceived as such because people wanted CHANGE not change. If Obama eventually fails, this term or the next, watch for a Palin-like candidate to win next time. Then we’ll go down faster than now and you’ll go down chanting the merit of Constellation like a camarillo hypnotized by the beams of the vehicle about to hit.
Edit: armadillo not camarillo… Oh well…
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 12:12 pm
“So you define the commercial space industry as being constituted by one company? Weird.â€
No, I am stating that the only successful test flights have (to date) been performed by Space X and they are the two Falcon 9 flights. Additionally any other less noted successes you might wish to list also came under the Bush/Griffin plan. The Obama Administrations first attempt to alter that plan was the FY2011 budget and it did not pass the Congress (still overwhelmingly controlled by Obamas own party). Therefore, no significant amount of money has been allocated to commercial space by the Obama Administration that was not intended under the original plan (unless you would like to argue that the administration has been misappropriating funds). Those are statements of verifiable apolitical fact. You can love, hate, or be indifferent to Obama and they are still true.
“So it would have had more chance for success under Bush/Griffin? Or maybe you mean that if Obama had not pushed Congress to fund commercial crew they would have funded it even more?â€
The fact that commercial cargo has come as far as it has as it has is testimony to that fact. What the Obama Plan has done is generate a hostile adversarial relationship between commercial and government which did not previously exist (at least on the government side). How much this artificial conflict will harm both sides remains to be seen.
“You’re not making a lot of sense…â€
And earlier you said “Weirdâ€. I think I will leave the Elementary School Yard name calling to you (since you are so good at it).
“I believe that this is not legal since most of the work on Orion has already been paid for by the government. I cannot see how it would be fair competition to the other teams.”
It’s arguably not fair if you’re a company trying to break into a certain market, but it’s not against the law. It’s simply not practical or desirable to exclude certain performers from a solicitation because they’ve done work for the government in the past in a related area.
Using that logic, ATK couldn’t bid for 5-segment SRB work because they’ve done 4-segment SRB work for decades now. Regardless of whether SRBs are a good deal for SLS, if SLS is going to use SRBs, the last thing I’d want to do is exclude ATK from the competition. They have the relevant expertise and infrastructure.
And where do we draw the line? Can Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne not bid for SLS liquid engines because they build liquid engines for Shuttle? For other federal agencies (EELV)? Because the old, parent companies built liquid engines for Saturn V? Etc.
The key is to have a competition to begin with (don’t sole-source like on Ares I) and make it as open as possible. As soon as you start excluding certain performers because of experience or lack thereof, you’re cutting yourself off from certain innovations and savings. Let the work and the proposal speak for itself. An upstart company may bring a new approach while an established contractor may point out landmines before they blow up in your face. You want to hear both in a competition.
“I think LockMart is pushing real hard for MPCV and other nonsense because they know that. Because they know that they will not be able to participate in a commercial competition with their current Orion team.”
No, they’re pushing Orion for MPCV because it’s a bird in the hand (why compete if the government will hand you a monopoly), and it’s likely a fatter bird than the alternative (a much slimmer LockMart MPCV, whether based on Orion or something else).
“This time LockMart is in a lose-lose situation.”
Not really. If they’re smart, they’ll play both options — pushing Orion as far as possible for MPCV (or CRV or whatever) while doing their homework on a more cost-effective alternative if the NASA decides to go the competition route and doesn’t hand Orion a monopoly on MPCV (or CRV or whatever).
The key is whether the government is smart enough not to hand out an uncompeted monopoly — especially to a vehicle that independent reviews have found to be worrisomely expensive — in the first place.
“For SLS, and it applies as well to MPCV I believe the WH is paying attention, it only is a political move. They cannot be seen as sending people to the unemployment office.”
I have no special insights, but I don’t think the White House has ever been particularly worried about the political impact of NASA and related contractor employment. If they were, then NASA’s FY11 budget proposal way back in February of last year would have been radically different in the first place.
Assuming the White House didn’t just take their eye off the ball on the negotiations for the FY10 NASA Authorization Act (possible given what happened to the VSE under the Bush II Administration), I’d guess that NASA is such a low enough priority that they simply didn’t want to waste anymore time on FY10 negotiations details once a few key building blocks (commercial crew, technology, accelerated HLV) were in place. Not a big enough return for the effort.
“I already said a long time ago that a zombie Ares V program will survive just for that and it is exactly what is going on.”
The saving grace in the 2010 Authorization Act is that, while it inappropriately expresses a lot of design preferences in legislation, it gives NASA a lot of leeway if those preferences are not practical. With just a little spine, NASA can pursue a much more efficient EELV- or Falcon-based HLV within the Act’s language. And with a lot of spine, NASA could push off the design decision into future years until something closes and can be practical for the budget/requirements/schedule specified in the Act. It may be that, rather than fighting the nitpicks in the FY10 NASA Authorization Act, the White House is saving its powder for these future battles, assuming NASA will need the help.
FWIW…
@ James T wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 1:25 pm
“The Ares I could carry at least 25 tons.”
No it cannot “carry” at least 25 tons. Without a 2nd stage the Ares-I 5-segment booster is a suborbital vehicle at best. “Carry” does not mean anything. Sorry.
@ Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 1:18 pm
“Why on god’s green Earth would anyone spend that much money and wait that long for water that they can buy for practically nothing on Earth and launch to space now for a fraction of that cost.”
Ever watched this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999 ? Talk about white elephant… Not every one only is a Star Trek fan you know? So much Sci-Fi so little time.
Issa’s a complete nutjob, so I won’t be very keen on seeing him decide what parts of NASA need cutting and which should remain.
@ Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Well there are very strict rules as to how you can allocate government cash to any given program. Do these rules apply here? I don’t know for sure.
“Using that logic, ATK couldn’t bid for 5-segment SRB work because they’ve done 4-segment SRB work for decades now.”
Remember that ATK was given a sole-source contract. Such a contract can be given if and only if no one else can do the job. Following ESAS it was shown that we needed a solid booster, whether this makes sense or not. Therefore ATK’s contract.
“As soon as you start excluding certain performers because of experience or lack thereof, you’re cutting yourself off from certain innovations and savings.”
I am not saying we should exclude LockMart. I am saying that their Orion program team will most likely, by law, have to be firewalled from a CCDev effort. They will not be allowed to use any Orion development material for another effort if it is during a competition for an award. Once all is said and done then rules change. Not during compete time.
Take Boeing for example. Their CST-100 seems to be a larger Apollo. I haven’t seen the detail of the vehicle but I would bet that none of the subsystems can be traced to CEV. Or they might say for example “we will use NASA’s AVCOAT” for our heat-shield and they would have to “price” it using a BAA or something like that. In any case I am pretty sure they would not be allowed to use any development they made during say CEV or OSP with federal cash to write up their CCDev proposal. The key is whether they use internal, Boeing M&S funds or whether they try to use other federal funds. And it is probably true for any competitor.
Again the lose-lose for LockMart is because I am almost certain they will have to firewall the two programs, commercial and Orion. It’ll b very difficult to find the human resources to do both. They will not be able to use any IRAD cash they used for Orion towards a commercial vehicle. That is a very significant loss I am pretty sure.
The NASA-FY11 was what they most wanted I am sure. But if you’ve been in a management position I am sure you’ve seen things where people ask $2M when they know for sure the budget will only be approved for half. Therefore they plan for $1M and ask for $2M. Ethical? Another debate.
I do agree with NASA’s spot on the priority list for this WH or any WH.
I do hope NASA has the leeway AND the spine. But I think they are victim of the system also. And Congress is not a good partner for NASA. It will be difficult to byte the hand that feeds you, i.e. Congress. NASA cannot rely only on the WH veto to anything.
In the end we’ll see how politically savvy is the NASA leadership. It all comes down to that.
“For example, with the discovery of Trinitramide, our payloads are likely to become quadruple what they are now! The legislation currently asks that the new launch system be able to carry up to 100 ton payloads. With Trinitramide we could do that with a rocket the size of one that would lift 25 tons using today’s rocket fuels, such as Ares I, Delta IV-Heavy, and even SpaceX’s Falcon 9. I’m just hoping the Trinitramide doesn’t cost x4 as much as current fuels or else the bottom line won’t be improved that
much really.”
If your goal is to simplify heavy lift vehicles and cut their costs by factors of two to five — such as getting the same performance out of a single-stick ELV as we get out of a triple-stick — there are easier ways to do that than trying to figure out how to produce, store, and fire exotic fuels. For example, Aerojet has gotten 40%+ increases in sea-level thrust using thrust-augmented nozzles in small engine tests.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA454615&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Scale that up and you can drop a booster or two from your HLV stack. This and things like high thrust expander cycles, aerospikes, etc. are the things we should pursuing for a few years before making a decision on an HLV that just rearranges the same decades-old and very expensive pieces of the Shuttle stack.
FWIW…
Joe wrote:
“What the Obama Plan has done is generate a hostile adversarial relationship between commercial and government which did not previously exist (at least on the government side).”
The National monopoly for human spaceflight, NASA, and the congressional people whose districts gained the most pork, have ALWAYS been against commercial operations that would displace their porkfest. NASA’s mandate was changed in 1984 by President Reagan, remember him? “Government IS the problem”. Where is the commercial highway to space that Reagan talked about? 26 years and we are still waiting for the government roadblocks to come down. Think about it, NASA just finally finished the commercial requirements for certification. Hell even the Dept of Transportation and the FAA has moved faster than the glacier pace of NASA. COTS is only a couple years old and that was supposed to include COTS-D, which of course was never funded, gosh, we couldn’t be letting a commercial firm show up NASA’s traditional porkfest called Constellation which was supposed to close the gap.
You can go back and look at old threads on this very blog and read posters comments predicting that NASA was never going to close the gap with cost plus contracts that were being doled out.
NASA is a monopoly and monopsony and until you realize and accept that you will never understand that there has always been this adversarial relationship with commercial. As long as NASA could sell the Nation on the myth that space is extremely dangerous and expensive and therefore only NASA can do it there was never truely a threat from commercial launch companies. Hell they knew what side of the bread was buttered and by who. You don’t playball the NASA way and you were dead in the water. What commercial firm, until SpaceX, was ever a threat to the NASA way of doing business? Now the Nation is slowly waking up from the myth and finding that yes, although space is hard and expensive, it is doable by many commercial firms and at prices far below the numbers we have been sold for so many decades.
That is why I believe the 88 billion dollar plan by Spudis is and should be DOA. It is just another space “program” and is the last thing we need if we truely want to open up a commercial space economy.
“The Obama Administrations first attempt to alter that plan was the FY2011 budget and it did not pass the Congress…”
That’s simply not true. The NASA 2010 Authorization Act includes $612 million for commercial crew and cargo in FY 2011 alone. Anyone can read it here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/nasa_auth_act_2010.pdf
“Therefore, no significant amount of money has been allocated to commercial space by the Obama Administration that was not intended under the original plan”
That’s also not true. Under the current Administration, NASA received $50 million via the Recovery Act for the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. You can read about the awards here:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/partners/ccdev_info.html
And you can see some of the hardware that’s been built under these awards (as of the 9-month mark) in this PDF (10MB download):
http://www.commercialspaceflight.org/Other%20Content/High-Resolution%20Version%20-%20CCDev%20Significant%20Hardware%20Milestones%20Reached%20-%20Nov%208%202010.pdf
NASA is also currently holding a second competition (under the current Administration) for the next $200 million in CCDev funding:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=0ed5e1cca1c5af554c4967f969b7324b&tab=core&_cview=1
And you can read about some of the submissions to CCDev Round 2 here:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32277
Or here:
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101214-orbital-unveils-supplier-ccdev2.html
Or here:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/jsp_includes/articlePrint.jsp?storyID=news/asd/2010/12/17/05.xml&headLine=Virgin%20Galactic%20Joins%20Two%20CCDev%20Teams
Combined, that $250 million nearly equals the $278 million COTS award that was made to SpaceX under the last (Bush II) Administration, which has resulted in two successful Falcon 9 launches and a successful Dragon test flight. That’t a very significant amount of funding.
“Those are statements of verifiable apolitical fact. You can love, hate, or be indifferent to Obama and they are still true.”
I don’t care whether you love or hate the President, but verify that your statements are factual before making claims here. You waste other people’s time having to correct you when you don’t.
“What the Obama Plan has done is generate a hostile adversarial relationship between commercial and government…”
The White House _is_ part of the “government”. It’s hard to see how committing $250 million to date and requesting and obtaining another $612 million to develop commercial cargo and crew systems and services that the government desperately needs in the wake of Constellation’s implosion is going to create a “hostile adversarial relationship” with the commercial sector. The government is becoming a customer for these capabilities. That’s good news to any company that aspires to provide such capabilities.
The only “adversarial relationship” is between certain members of Congress, particularly in Alabama and Utah, trying to protect Ares I jobs/votes from lower cost and more technically competent competitors. Those members of Congress represent only a fraction of the “government”.
C’mon, let’s think before we post.
FWIW…
Vladislaw wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Very angry diatribe with a lot of references to pork, porkfest, assumptions that people (admittedly slow moving bureaucrats) are involved in some conspiracy (with, of course, no supporting evidence for that charge other than that other people on this site have said so) etc. etc. etc.
All this when the commercial cargo part of the commercial space effort is after (as you say yourself) a very few years of government subsidy beginning to show signs of success.
If you really represent the “commercial space†side (and I hope you do not). Are you trying to make my point?
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Robert you consistently say I am against commercial.
I appreciate your long reply but I was making a simple statement, about how you repeatedly define me as someone who wants big government programs at the expense of a commercial market.
That is just plain false.
You go on to give your laundry list of likes, dislikes, villains and your epiphany about how the world works.
Let me tell you where I stand, just so you’ll know and don’t have to speculate.
I do believe in American exceptionalism. I want our country to be strong and prosperous. I believe that freedom and capitalism push technology and innovation. Space exploration and development is a natural fit for Americans who want freedom, who want to develop and use cutting edge technology to protect ourselves and our allies and improve our standard of living — people who believe in our hearts that everyone in the world should have a chance to live in freedom and realize their potential.
I believe that we as a species need to move outward from Earth and populate other worlds. And I believe it won’t happen unless government uses a miniscule piece of the trillions of dollars it takes in taxes to show that resource utilization can be done on the Moon. If it can be accomplished another way, great! But investors (who in the end will be taxed on their profits) need to have government demonstrate the potential. This isn’t a blind faith search for life on other worlds. Resource utilization is understood here on Earth and has the same potential for economic stimulus and technological advancement off-Earth.
If ISRU is shown to be possible on the Moon, many commercial concerns will be off to the races. And that does not mean that commercial won’t help us get to that point. Nor does it mean humans are launched straight-away to the Moon. VSE included commercial and precursor robotic missions. The Spudis-Lavoie Architecture is set in pieces and stages to encourage wide participation (commercial and international) using a flexible time frame.
The economic return on a sustainable, extensible infrastructure to lunar-cislunar will be an economic tsunami. I want our country to be in the forefront of this. It will give us a return on our money. It will not be another never-ending government social program that cruelly consumes human initiative under the guise of caring for their needs.
Generational, government social programs strip away people’s self respect and their ability to grow, and by doing so, all of humanity suffers from the loss of their potential.
Now I realize you see it differently Robert. (For those who want to read Robert’s views please re-read his post at 12:13.) But please give me the courtesy of not repeating that I am against commercial and want to expand government programs.
Regarding Bush/Griffin on commercial space, they have a solid C average. Yes, they did more tangible good for comspace than prior administrations, but after a brief sprint out the door, the COTS program hit a wall and remained largely the same for some time afterwards. We got a commercial cargo program, but only years later did any competing companies actually win a launch contract. COTS-D was never even a serious proposal. And as soon as Griffin picked Cx, almost no thought was given to COTS except to redistribute funds from the now defunct RPKistler to OSC. RPK even cited specific concerns from their potential investors related directly to NASA’s lack of any commitment to paid cargo services.
I’m glad Bush put in a stipulation in the VSE supporting comspace as the primary way forward. I’m just disappointed that as a policy it didn’t make it past the end of his speech. I hold out hope that if we get a few false start funding scraps from NASA (COTS, CCDev, etc) a few companies will be able to shoestring together the budget to build some kind of industry and we can finally get past the big promises and no follow through we’ve seen for the past almost 3 dacades in space.
“Ever watched this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999 ?”
No, but based on this description:
“Mankind had been storing its nuclear waste in vast disposal sites on the far side of the Moon. The accumulated waste reaches critical mass and, on 13 September 1999, detonates in a massive thermonuclear explosion, initiated by a build-up of an unknown form of magnetic radiation. The force of the blast propels the Moon like an enormous booster rocket, hurling it out of Earth orbit and into deep space at colossal speed…”
I don’t think I’ll be ordering the DVD collection anytime soon.
“Not every one only is a Star Trek fan you know? So much Sci-Fi so little time.”
It sure as heck beats Star Wars, but Star Trek is still too out there for me. I like Clarke and the 2010 et al. novels and films the best personally. I’m not much of a scifi novel reader, but I was turned onto some old (Traveller) and new (Eclipse Phase) hard scifi/space backgrounds that have shown up in games but not novels or movies. They beat everything else in my experience so far, FWIW.
” I hold out hope that if we get a few false start funding scraps from NASA (COTS, CCDev, etc)”
Let’s finish that thought. I ultimately hope CCDev turns into more than a once-off table scrap program like COTS. Ideally I’d like to see at least three companies get something to orbit on it. But I’ve watched the political game enough to have become too cynical to believe it will happen as stated. I fully expect some sort of scale back or even shut down of CCDev especially given the cut, cut, cut atmosphere in the new congress.
Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:04 pm
“That’s simply not true. The NASA 2010 Authorization Act includes $612 million for commercial crew and cargo in FY 2011 alone. Anyone can read it here:â€
That authorization bill was part of congressional action and had nothing to do with the Obama “revamp†of space policy.
“That’s also not true. Under the current Administration, NASA received $50 million via the Recovery Act for the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. You can read about the awards here:â€
Wow, a whole $50 Million (most of which has still not been spent). You sure got me there.
“And you can see some of the hardware that’s been built under these awards (as of the 9-month mark) in this PDF (10MB download):â€
Nice mockups (really I have worked on building such myself).
“NASA is also currently holding a second competition (under the current Administration) for the next $200 million in CCDev funding:â€
Ahhh, possible future work if the money ever becomes available. I thought we were talking about actual accomplishments
“The White House _is_ part of the “governmentâ€. It’s hard to see how committing $250 million to dateâ€
By you own accounting at most $50 Million of this (from the stimulus bill) was not intended under the original plan.
“The only “adversarial relationship†is between certain members of Congress, particularly in Alabama and Utah, trying to protect Ares I jobs/votes from lower cost and more technically competent competitors. Those members of Congress represent only a fraction of the “governmentâ€.â€
Again attack on people’s integrity as a substitute for evidence. Here is a hint, a lot of Congressmen and Senators (not from your current list of vilified states) voted against Obama Space.
“C’mon, let’s think before we post.â€
I agree and suggest in the future you try it.
“FWIW…â€
Indeed.
@ Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Actually the first series of Space_1999 is not bad for a TV Sci-Fi product, then it went crazy. I mean really crazy.
I haven’t been able to read much in a long time now. There is one series though that may be of interest it is the Red/Green/Blue Mars books about terraforming Mars etc. I never was able to find the time and finish the trilogy but it is based on “reasonable” science that I think the Clarke stuff is good at too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
The problem is the people who do not make the difference between entertainment and actuality. I will admit this is harsh and that some time Sci-Fi inspires us, e.g. Jules Verne, in a very entertaining way. Then there is those who dream out what government does or does not do… Sci-Fi comes in many different forms I suppose.
Star Trek to me is the depiction of a yearning but also a reflection on what our societies were going through during the Cold War, as far as TV series go. It was new and advanced at the time but its breath is long gone. Suffice to watch the following series that do not bring anything new, only better CG effects. Most movies I know haven’t been able to capture the advances of the Internet and the potential future, maybe Minority Report in some way? And others by Philip K. Dick. Anyway. A little
removed from the topic but not that much.
Star Wars only is a Sci-Fi western movie and should be taken as such. Nothing else. I enjoyed the first 3 episodes (still do) and the others were too infantile for me. A reflection on the audience from 1977 till today?
Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 1:18 pm [ quoting Anne Spudis]“the creation of a sustainable, extensible transportation network using resources found in space starting on the Moon.†[close quote]
[Major Tom] Why? The bottomline for the latest study is that it would cost $88 billion — with a “B†— to put in place a lunar infrastructure to produce a lousy 150mT of water per year 16 (sixteen!) years from now.
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/12/21/can-we-afford-to-return-to-the-moon/
Why on god’s green Earth would anyone spend that much money and wait that long for water that they can buy for practically nothing on Earth and launch to space now for a fraction of that cost. [end Major Tom quote]
The answer:
We will have a sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere in cislunar space, on the Moon and beyond. We will have return on our investment. We will have conquered the tyranny of the rocket equation. We will have opened up space for all takers. There will be profits to be made, economies to expand and discoveries for those who choose to try.
cut it now or later, there won’t be a SLS. china isn’t like russia, they aren’t morons and they aren’t 100% corrupt. the next cold war won’t go like the last one.
“We will have a sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere in cislunar space, on the Moon and beyond.”
The moon still has gravity. It’s lower than Earth, to be sure, but it’s not insignificant. Any water produced on the Moon will likely never go anywhere other than the base 50 feet away from it. It will in no way support anything cislunar or beyond. Sinking something into a gravity well is a very poor way to send it beyond said gravity well. The only thing to be gained by a lunar outpost would be possible technology advances toward bases elsewhere. I’m not entirely decided on that one, but from what I’ve read, the Moon is different enough to not really act as any kind of analogue for Mars.
A base on the moon doesn’t pay off much toward the world beyond. Such a project needs to justify itself because no other missions justify it. And to sustain a permanent base on the Moon is to tie up resources long-term toward one specific project, similar to the ISS issue. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do it, but we need to start looking at each possible mission not as a rung of a ladder, but as a piece of the budgetary pie. I don’t think we’ll see the budget for a permanent Moon base AND a trip beyond anytime soon.
“That is why I believe the 88 billion dollar plan by Spudis is and should be DOA.”
If you were really serious about this, you’d start with a realistic level of investment — something comparable to setting up a terrestrial mining operation. I’d say no more than $5-10 billion. A modern aluminum facility (for example) costs around $11 billion these days:
http://www.mining-journal.com/production-and-markets/aluminum-output-withering-in-europe-on-power-costs
While an iron mine (for example) goes for around $4 billion:
http://www.phongpo.com/2010/10/08/core-mining-iron-mine-in-the-congo-republic-could-cost-4-billion-says-ceo/
So you’d back out how much water this lunar facility would have to produce and deliver to some spacecraft (assuming they need it) in GEO or LEO to pay back the original investment in a reasonable amount of time. You’d do this by assuming a price per unit of H2/LOX that covers your operations costs. That price has to be below what it would cost to just launch the water from Earth, otherwise it makes no sense to produce/deliver the water at/from the Moon. If you were government-funded, the difference between the price of lunar water and the price of water launched from Earth would be the savings to the government that would amortize the $5-10B cost of getting the operation started. If you were commercially funded, you would have add some very hefty borrowing interest given the risks and some profit to the per unit lunar water price to pay back the investors who plunked down the $5-10B. Hopefully that’s still below the price of water launched from Earth or you’ll have no market.
Once you have those numbers, then you can begin to crunch the technical variations to see if there’s a solution that closes. I don’t know of any that does, and the $88 billion study, which actually leveraged a lot of existing launch infrastructure, shows that we’re probably off by an order of magnitude or so from the knowledge and technology needed. My instinct (FWIW) is that four things have to happen before such a case could be made:
1) Identify very highly concentrated deposits of surface/near-surface ice. It’s just not affordable to emplace even a significant fraction of the lunar equivalent of a terrestrial strip-mining operation or other large area mining operation necessary to tease out grains of ice by processing through hectares and hectares and tons and tons of regolith.
2) Find extraction process(es) with much higher efficiencies (per unit mass/power/$ and maybe volume) than any terrestrial process. Given the $5-10B infrastructure costs and the fact that the terrestrial competition will be able to deliver ~10mT of propellant to GEO for $300M or less, you’re going have to produce a lot of propellent to pay back those infrastructure costs within relatively thin margins. Your margin per unit of propellant is going to be limited, so you’re going to have to make it up in large volumes. (Hopefully there’s a market than needs this much in-space propellant by then.) I don’t know if that means microfluidic, nano, or other technologies, but just applying existing terrestrial industrial processes ain’t going to cut it.
3) Make those processes fully automated/telerobotic, including deployment. In situ humans can’t be part of the loop — they cost too much. Just two to four lunar crew rotations using Constellation as a baseline would blow the $5-10 billion development budget. The challenge is probably not so much the automation or telerobotics per se (although we don’t have those yet, either), but getting the machinery to operate for long periods of time without breakdowns or to otherwise minimize service interruptions/costs that far from home in that tough thermal and dust environment.
4) Leverage a lower-cost and more capable space transportation infrastructure. Even if 1-3 work out, the case probably still can’t close if it requires lots of ~$300M EELV-equivalent launches and/or the development of a new in-space tug, on top of whatever lunar lander(s) are needed. Until ETO costs are substantially lower (or you can fit the infrastructure into just a couple launches) and/or you can leverage some existing in-space transportation infrastructure — and thus only have to carry the development costs of your landers — the transportation just eats up too much of the $5-10B budget.
For these reasons, I think we’ll be shipping water and large amounts of propellant from Earth to space long before it’s shipped from the lunar surface (if ever). In fact, the existence of an infrastructure for the former that you can leverage at little cost is arguably necessary before the latter can become economical.
FWIW…
@ Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:06 pm
“We will have a sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere in cislunar space, on the Moon and beyond. ”
Can you demonstrate this statement?
“We will have return on our investment. ”
How? And how long will it take? Would you bet your own revenues from now on that the $88B will not turn into $150B or more? How can you be so sure of the price tag of your little adventure?
“We will have opened up space for all takers.”
Nope. COTS and CCDev can do that for a lot less cash.
“There will be profits to be made, economies to expand and discoveries for those who choose to try.”
This is the stuff of dreamers. How do you make profit if you cannot be sure of the price tag of what you propose. Again watch Constellation. In no way you can you ascertain the cost you made up. No one can. Until the day we have “low” cost access to space and a routine access using some infrastructure all your numbers are worth nothing. How difficult is that to understand?
Joe wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:30 pm
“All this when the commercial cargo part of the commercial space effort is after (as you say yourself) a very few years of government subsidy beginning to show signs of success.”
Definition of the word SUBSIDY:
“a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive”
In the words of Inigo Montoya: “I do not think it means what you think it means”
Here is how NASA describes things:
“NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program is investing financial and technical resources to stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate safe, reliable, and cost-effective space transportation capabilities. ”
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are not being paid to keep their prices artificially low, they are being paid to create NASA specific capabilities. If you consider that a subsidy, then ATK, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and others are getting far bigger subsidies that either SpaceX or OSC. But it’s not a subsidy.
Regarding the timeframe that both companies are accomplishing their tasks in, I’m sure we would all want the milestone schedules to be completed at a faster rate, but I think it’s more important that they actually complete the milestones, which means they are more likely to ultimately succeed. Keep in mind too that the COTS/CRS program only pays for completed milestones, so the companies are incentivized to do things right, not stretch out the program like on Constellation.
If you’re arguing that Bush/Griffin should be lauded for the COTS/CRS program, then I’m OK with that, and I have stated that it’s one of the few good things out of the Griffin era. Who knows if he would view it that way, especially after the Constellation program debacle, but sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
In any case, the commercial cargo/crew genie is out of the bottle, and it will be hard for the Utah & Alabama Senators to bottle it up in Congress. Even with the modest amount of program funds NASA will get, commercial crew will be able to do far more in a far shorter period of time than anything NASA can do with Orion/SLS.
There is a paradigm shift starting, and I predict that by 2013 Congress will let NASA fully fund at least two commercial crew providers, resulting in an overall savings to NASA. The times they are a-changin…
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Robert you consistently say I am against commercial. ….
not so much. What I say and said in the post you responded to is that you are for big government programs that have nothing to do with commercial. What you (and Paul…and when I say “you” I mean the both of you) want is YOUR government program and to justify that you both come up with reasons that are so far removed from reality that they are like a Giraffe claming that it is just a special form of a camel.
Your post addresses three points…and I’ll respond to each.
“If ISRU is shown to be possible on the Moon, many commercial concerns will be off to the races.”
there is NOTHING to support that viewpoint, other then you all hoping it does.
As long as resource utilization n the Moon cost more then simply bringing things up from EArth…then there is no chance that some commercial company will give ISRU a try. There is no way that the Moon’s resources particularly in water (Wingo goes about it with PGM’s and that “might” be different) will for the time being be cheaper then bring H and O up from the earth…now the Spudis theory is that government “sinks” a lot of the cost…
but that is just another government subsidized program. In the 80’s all sorts of claims were made building a space station and then BANG all sorts of commercial efforts would follow…but right now doing business with government on the space station is so expensive…well we are back to the notion that if it can be done cheaper somewhere else, that is where commercial will be.
So we get to point two which is that you and others wrap all this in “American Exceptionalism.”. But like most members of the right wing of the GOP you and others have taken a phrase out of American history and redefined its meaning. It has become a cover now for “Might makes right”…and that flows from Iraq to spending money we dont have (and have to borrow) on things whose billing is far more then their reality. Just as the Iraq war was never going to pay for itself, there is not a chance that we spend the tens of billions on Lunar resource use…and get something that eventually pays for it.
and spending money we dont have on projects that dont have any value for the cost, money we have to borrow does not makes us stronger wheather it is spending in space or in the Iraqi desert. It may look great and look like we are “big and tough” but in the end it does not advance either the cause of freedom or of the American people…and wasted money is wasted money no matter if it is 100 dollars or 100 billion.
Finally the line ” It will not be another never-ending government social program that cruelly consumes human initiative under the guise of caring for their needs.”
yet that is EXACTLY what the HSF programs in The Republic have done since Apollo and there is zero hint in Paul’s plan that it would be any different. Cx is a product of a program that consumes human initiative under the guise of caring for their needs.
Every “not NASA” plan for a space station was squelched by NASA…every notion of how to go back to the Moon “cheaper” was sucked down by Griffin redoing Apollo…Whenever the notion is that government “will do” something no matter what the cost…then its a make work program that has nothing to do with innovation.
Government spending on HSF is now just as non innovative as any federal social program. And at least the social programs keep people alive…the social program known as Cx spent 1/2 billion on a test flight that proved nothing in terms of the cost…
The right wing will blow itself up over a woman who has kids on welfare…but has no problem with an F-35 program, or a Cx program that has spent almost as much money…and has wasted dollars left and right…because “it helps keep us free”.
We do disagree. I dont see the need for the US to do things just to prove we can do them. I was against Cx for the same reason I was against the Iraq war…neither had a purpose that came anywhere near the cost of the endeavor.
you can repeat to yourself all you want “the Chinese are going to get their first”…and yet that wont make it accurate…all it shows is like those who thought Saddam was going to attack the US…you are governed more by your fears, then reality.
You like big government programs. You just like the ones you like….and dont like the ones you dont like.
In the End I will be correct. SpaceX and others will change HSF for the better and make it an economic engine in The Republic not a drain. Just like I was correct about the Iraq war…and everyone who was for it, was wrong.
Robert G. Oler
@James T:
That claim doesn’t even begin to make sense. Nonlinear gains in exhaust velocity from linear increases in propellant efficiency?
Your payload mass should vary with efficiency (k) as such:
m ~ e^-(1/k)
Consequently, a ten percent increase in efficiency should permit a 9 percent increase in payload capacity for a constant delta-v budget and propellant mass. 20 percent improvement in efficiency? 18 percent more payload capacity.
@Anne Spudis
We will have a sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere in cislunar space, on the Moon and beyond.
Show me the proof that this will happen. Would Congress guarantee funding? I don’t believe it can’t happen with a big government program or with a monopoly or with a single country. This would cost more than Apollo with the traditional approach. Constellation is proof, it was the biggest opportunity for our government to create that infrastructure since Apollo which was cancelled. Tomorrow marks the cancellation of the Saturn V rocket.
Constellation wasn’t one failure, it was many failures at every level. Augustine said that POR was doable but Congress would need to put up the money, they won’t. He also said it wasn’t in the best interest at NASA to replace it with another program unless it was significantly different and offered significant advantages. So is this wrong or what? How can the status quot get us an infrastructure? Speaking of Sci-Fi, there has been a lot of good plans put out there over the years but will Congress go along with any of them?
We’re at a point now where the U.S. government spends 43 cents of every dollar it spends and the debt ceiling is fast approaching. The civilian space agency best plan on building a GP spacecraft (Orion) and get it flying a top existing LVs through the Age of Austerity. (NASA’s only ral chance for long term survival is to get itself tucked ‘safely’ under the wing of the DoD.) Everything else is a waste of time and resources. Because the budget ax is gonna swing their way very hard and NASA is a clerar target. A visit to Issa’s own district would give you a sense of what he ‘represents’ -calling this WH the most ‘corrrupt’ ever, yet his own constituency is a sad story of dour economic decay. It’s a picture of contrasts in the extreme- expanses of abject middle and lower middle class poverty dotted with clusters of wealthy gated communities, where unemployment hovers at 12% and illegal aliens swarm unchecked across the border every night.
@ Vladislaw
I’ll agree that the only true way for human space exploration to become routine and sustainable is for the commercial sector to be able to provide it and end the government monopoly. Yes, there is a lot of big money and bureaucracy in the way that doesn’t have strong motivations for “game changing” developments but that is exactly what these new initiatives are trying to push back against. Investing in commercial development and pursuing technology for a 21st century exploration program are not, in my opinion, fruitless endeavors.
@ common sense wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 2:14 pm
“No it cannot “carry†at least 25 tons. Without a 2nd stage the Ares-I 5-segment booster is a suborbital vehicle at best. “Carry†does not mean anything. Sorry.”
Ates V Overview
Page 4 shows a comparison of the Space Shuttle, Ares I, Ares V, and Saturn V. Both The Space Shuttle and Ares 1 have a listed PAYLOAD CAPABILITY of 25 metric tons.
Robert G. Oler,
Can you explain the details on how this comment will work out?
SpaceX and others will change HSF for the better and make it an economic engine in The Republic not a drain.
I certainly see how SpaceX can save the taxpayers money, but I am curious how you would amplify your use of the term “economic engine” — spending fewer tax dollars is a good thing but not inherently productive from an economic perspective.
= = =
Also, wouldn’t the success of SpaceX in reducing launch costs will make the Spudis vision cheaper and easier to accomplish.
Why couldn’t a lunar program be run using SpaceX launch vehicles, if indeed they prove cheaper than alternatives?
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:44 pm
You’re not ‘against commerical’ anymore than this writer is. Commerical is its own worst enemy chiefly because the very limits of free market capitalism make any kind of viable commerical HSF exploration/exploitation program mimimal at best and unprofitable at worse in this era. The ‘brief’ history of rocket and space technologies has demonstrated this repeatedly. Look at how ‘commercial’ rocket development withered in the U.S. (Goddard depended on Guggenheim and the waning fame of Lindy for financing) during the Great Depression; yet was accelorated with government backing in fascist Germany as Vonm Braun got the Reichmarks and later, in socialist/communist Russia, as demonstrated by Sputnik and Vostok. Today even Soyuz remains a reliable STS. The wealthy West never has led the way in space- it has always been reactive, following along, playing catch-up; and the same pattern is emerging as the PRC ramps up for the 21st Century. Government funded ans managed space programs will expand the human presence in space– not profit-motivated commerical space projects because there’s just not enough ROI in this era.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:44 pm
“And I believe it won’t happen unless government uses a miniscule piece of the trillions of dollars it takes in taxes to show that resource utilization can be done on the Moon.”
If ISRU on the Moon makes so much financial sense, why does the government have to subsidize it? Oh, and if you read an earlier post of mine, I am using the word “subsidize” correctly.
“If ISRU is shown to be possible on the Moon, many commercial concerns will be off to the races.”
The government is not standing in their way, so why don’t they go do this now?
You keep making it a government problem that needs a government solution, but you have never shown the economic viability of ISRU on the Moon, so why would commercial firms rush in?
“The economic return on a sustainable, extensible infrastructure to lunar-cislunar will be an economic tsunami.”
So far all Paul Spudis has shown is how much money he would spend to make water on the Moon – not how much money we would save by making it there. And his plan focuses on the ISRU part, not the real transportation issues, so “extensible infrastructure” is a vast over statement.
Regarding the “economic tsunami”, such is the promise of many failed investments, so you’re going to have to be a little more substantial than “trust me”. How much demand is there? How much will water cost when delivered? When will the operation be profitable? The way you talk, these should be easy questions to answer.
I know you don’t like it when I say this, but the Spudis/Lavoie is really a business proposal to Congress – you want Congress to fund the program. But the proposal is missing certain key financial assumptions, so until they provide that, I doubt you’ll generate much interest.
@ James T wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:19 pm
“Both The Space Shuttle and Ares 1 have a listed PAYLOAD CAPABILITY of 25 metric tons.”
The 2nd stage of Ares I is bearing most of the grunt to access LEO, that and the service module. So an improvement of the 1st stage will not give you what you want unless for a vast improvement in performance which is yet another design of the 1st stage. Maybe I misunderstood you but you seem to equate Ares I with its first stage. If so you are wrong if not my apologies.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:54 pm
“Definition of the word SUBSIDY:
“a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitiveâ€
In the words of Inigo Montoya: “I do not think it means what you think it meansâ€â€
Not at all. Among the many inaccurate assumptions you insist on making is that I do not support commercial space activities. I do and consider the successful Falcon 9 launches a significant accomplishment. The money being given them to aid their development projects however is keeping their development costs (to them) lower than they otherwise would be. You can deal in this kind of sophistry (subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation – I can look up dictionary definitions of words also) if you choose, but it proves nothing.
“If you’re arguing that Bush/Griffin should be lauded for the COTS/CRS program, then I’m OK with that, and I have stated that it’s one of the few good things out of the Griffin era. Who knows if he would view it that way, especially after the Constellation program debacle, but sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.â€
Since I agree with the first sentence and the last sentence is just another “well maybe they did the right thing but they are still bad guys†argument. There is nothing constructive to say.
“Commerical is its own worst enemy chiefly because the very limits of free market capitalism make any kind of viable commerical HSF exploration/exploitation program mimimal at best and unprofitable at worse in this era.”
It’s been a while since I’ve taken a Macroeconomics course, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how capitalism works. The price of a good or service is a negotiation between what the buyer is willing to pay and what the seller is willing to charge. Certainly, there may be a situation where in order to remain profitable, a commercial company will have to price it’s HSF services so high as to be unaffordable. Since we’ve never had strictly commercial HSF access (Soyuz is a commercial rider on a government launch), we don’t actually know if that is the case. But given interest from several governments, Bigelow, and the backlog of Space Adventures participants, that doesn’t look to be the case.
The other issue at hand is that you assume that HSF is the commercial company’s only product. That was the paradigm 90’s and even a few ’00’s era commercial programs opperated under. And most did fail. But SpaceX, Orbital, Sierra Nevada, and Boeing all have other lines of business and they all are sufficient enough to keep their overall budget above water. In the business world they call it a ‘loss leader.’ and it’s the whole reason for the after Thanksgiving sales. Go ahead and ask WalMart if the model works.
I hold that if we get a capsule that can provide an actual commercial launch at SpaceX’s posted prices, or even slightly above, we could very well see HSF profitable enough on it’s own. That said, I don’t think anything beyond cislunar trips are likely for strictly commercial flights. But commercial companies could provide such a service for ‘soveriegn clients’ as Bigelow terms them. In short (too late), I don’t see any rich folks paying airfare for a trip to Mars anytime soon. But there’s enough corporate and personal demand for LEO or possibly cislunar and government demand for beyond to keep HSF profitable.
Joe wrote:
“Are you trying to make my point?”
Here is the point you made:
“What the Obama Plan has done is generate a hostile adversarial relationship between commercial and government which did not previously exist (at least on the government side).â€
You said President Obama created a hostile relationship, and prior to that non existed. You then predicated it on there was a hostile relationship but at least not on the government side, which means you are saying there is, in fact, a hostile relationship but the hostility was only coming from the commercial side and not the governments.
How many times did government, as represented by Shelby and Griffin, get hostile about the abilities of commercial firms? You know, when Shelby refered to Boeing, Lockheed, SpaceX, Orbital as hobby rocketeers. Even Griffin was far from flattering in committee meetings.
NASA has not embraced commercial launch until President Bush introduced the Vision for Space Exploration which called for NASA not to build any new launchers and to switch to commercial. If you think Congress and NASA was for that switch then why didn’t they actually fund it? The ex NASA administrator moved funding from COTS-D to fund constellation, a new launch system that was expressly stated was not supposed to happen. President Obama called for 6 billion over 5 years for commercial launch services for astronauts. I guess if President Obama had proposed not a single dime for commercial human spaceflight congress and NASA would have went back to loving commercial human spaceflight.
What I took away from your point was as long as no funding is going towards commercial there is no hostile environment but once funding is proposed a hostile environment gets created.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Shouldn’t COTS & CCDEV also been seen as a business proposal to Congress?
Isn’t any proposal that has the taxpayers writing the checks essentially a business proposal to Congress?
“That authorization bill”
It’s not a bill. It’s an act. It was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President.
Either learn how our system of government works or don’t post here.
“was part of congressional action and had nothing to do with the Obama ‘revamp’ of space policy.”
Sure it did. The White House budget request for NASA released last February covered FY 2011, FY 2012, FY 2013, FY 2014, and FY 2015. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act signed into law last October authorizes funding for NASA in FY 2011, FY 2012, and FY 2013. The former preceded the latter, the latter covers three of the same fiscal years as the former, and the latter incorporates all the key elements (kills Ares I, invests in commercial crew, invests in exploration technology, accelerates an HLV) found in the former.
Don’t waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of ignorance.
“Wow, a whole…”
Since when is a small input for a large output a bad thing? Are you saying that the only good civil human space flight programs are the ones that spends billions and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars? Why are you measuring inputs, instead of outputs?
Think before you post.
“$50 Million (most of which has still not been spent).”
As of September 30, 2010, the reciepts/expenditures from the CCDev contractors were (see http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/default.aspx):
Sierra Nevada $15.0M
Boeing $11.8M
ULA $ 6.0M
Paragon $ 1.2M
Blue Origin $ 1.1M
Total $35.1M
That’s 70% or “most” of the $50 million in CCDev Round 1 funding.
Don’t waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of ignorance.
“Nice mockups (really I have worked on building such myself).”
Sierra Nevada’s engine firings are not mockups.
Sierra Nevada’s composite pressure test aeroshells are not mockups.
Paragon’s EDUs are not mockups.
ULA’s EDS testbed is not a mockup.
Blue Origin’s composite pressure and drop test vessels are not mockups.
Boeing’s abort system hardware, base heat shield fabrication, avionics software integration, pressure vessel fabrication, landing system hardware, life support air revitalization system, and automated rendezvous and docking system are not mockups.
The only mockup in that entire document is the “Boeing Crew Module (CM) Mockup”.
Read and comprehend documents before you comment on them so you don’t waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of ignorance.
“Ahhh, possible future work if the money ever becomes available.”
It’s FY 2010 CR funding. It’s already available.
Either learn how our system of government works or don’t post here.
“By you own accounting at most $50 Million of this (from the stimulus bill) was not intended under the original plan.”
The White House requested $6 billion for commercial crew over FY2011, FY 2012, FY 2013, FY 2014, and FY 2015 in its FY 2011 budget request. You don’t think $250 million of FY 2010 commercial crew funding wasn’t part of that plan?
Really?
Think before you post.
“attack on people’s integrity as a substitute for evidence.”
What alternate reality are you writing from? The Ares I congressmen have repeatedly stated that this issue about jobs first and foremost. Heck, they’ve put it at the top of their press releases on the subject. Here’s one on Hatch’s website:
“Speaking to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, [Senator Orrin] Hatch said studies indicate ‘approximately 12,000 jobs will be lost when the Space Shuttle program ends next year and at least another 12,000 will lose their jobs if Project Constellation is terminated.'”
http://hatch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.View&PressRelease_id=2660ee53-1b78-be3e-e0c6-f5ff7e76b6a3
“Here is a hint, a lot of Congressmen and Senators (not from your current list of vilified states) voted against Obama Space.”
Are you kidding? The 2010 NASA Authorization Act passed the House by a 3 to 1 margin. That’s the same Act that provides $1.3 billion for commercial crew activities over FY 2011-2013, even more for commercial cargo, a similar amount for exploration technology development, and accelerates HLV. It’s the same Act that killed Ares I and Constellation.
Congress has voted overwhelmingly for the major elements of the White House’s FY 2011 budget request for NASA.
“I agree and suggest in the future you try it.”
I did and have. And I’ve backed it up with multiple specific figures, references, and links.
I can’t find a single substantive statement in your past couple posts that’s not an ignorant falsehood. Where are your factual, well-researched, and thought-out observations?
Doctor, heal thyself.
@ Bill White wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:03 pm
“Shouldn’t COTS & CCDEV also been seen as a business proposal to Congress?”
Nope. Not really. They are proposal to NASA. NASA has a mission to perform, Space Act, and COTS and CCDev are options to perform that mission. Congress should not be allowed to tell NASA how to do their job but rather to tell NASA the budget they have for their job. The WH according to the Space Act tells NASA what to do. If Congress does not like it then they can always defund NASA but in no way should they tell NASA how to do their job. When “managers” tell “engineers” how to do their job you can be sure the result is a failure. “Managers” tell “engineers” the budget they have to do their job. Simplistic but close.
“Isn’t any proposal that has the taxpayers writing the checks essentially a business proposal to Congress?”
Again, it is not a proposal to Congress but to NASA. We can split hair until chaos comes but if you always come back to saying Congress is in charge then what use do we have for an executive branch?
“We will have a sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere in cislunar space, on the Moon and beyond.”
No, you won’t have an infrastructure (sustainable or otherwise) for beyond. That plan doesn’t fund an interplanetary drive (chemical, nuclear, electric, or whatever) for Mars, for example. Or the habitation facilities necessary for 10+ month interplanetary trips.
“We will have return on our investment.”
Well then show me the RoI calculation. There’s not one in the paper.
“We will have conquered the tyranny of the rocket equation.”
By adding another gravity well to contend with? Really?
“We will have opened up space for all takers.”
How does putting 150mT of water in cislunar space, whether it’s from the Moon, Earth, or Alpha Centauri, open up space “for all takers”?
LH2 and LOX are cheap, vanishingly so compared to space hardware costs. Water even more so.
It’s the cost of the space hardware that prevents “all takers” from opening up space, not their propellants and consumables.
“There will be profits to be made, economies to expand”
Again, then show me the RoI calculations. If you’re making such declarative statements, you must have them.
Sigh…
The money being given them to aid their development projects however is keeping their development costs (to them) lower than they otherwise would be.
That doesn’t make it a subsidy. It is quite often the case that the first major customer for a needed product will underwrite part or all of its development, for which it gets in return earlier availability, price discounts relative to the rest of the market, or equity. In this case, the former is sufficient to justify NASA’s investment. If NASA were to prop up prices on an ongoing basis after the product when into service, that would be a subsidy, but that doesn’t seem to be the deal proposed.
As a similar example, XCOR has strategically taken money from DARPA and NASA (among other agencies) to develop technologies on a firm fixed price that those agencies perceived that they needed. As a consequence, XCOR’s costs of developing its own products will be reduced, but I don’t think that any economist would call that a subsidy.
I assume you’re talking about the economics of government subsidized space, rather than the financial situation of tasked agency. I’ll ask you, why does government subsidize anything?
Because
1. the upfront cost is high,
2. the reward is unclear, and
3. the return is distant.
1 and 3 are arguably the largest offenders (we know there’s a ton of crap up there in insane quantities that man would be a fool not to try and grab some of it someday).
That said, we’re already spending the overwhelming majority of NASA’s $20 billion on activities that have almost zero short, mid, or long term reward on the horizon. So why not reconfigure it to do something that much actually pay off someday? And not just playing Monopoly in LEO with Newspace–the private sector’s already just about caught up.
That’s where government comes in. Once again, we’re already spending $20 billion a year doing NOTHING of value whatsoever.
That’s besides the point. Spudis’ challenge wasn’t to show the cheapest way to make the Moon pay off, just a way that fell within the run-outs for NASA HSF.
Also besides the point. If you want to swap in better transportation, then do it.
Given the moribund demand for launch, you could be just as circumspect about the prospects for commercial transport to Earth orbit.
1. As much as it costs to source from Earth. Your margin is determined by your continuing costs, and last I checked Spudis calls for the government to at least initially guarantee the previous liability.
2. When sourcing water from Earth becomes profitable + how long it takes to recoup whatever liabilities is assumed by the end operator.
Put another way, we don’t know enough about future demand for space transportation to say when either Earth or lunar based operations become profitable. We also don’t know whether lunar ISRU can be done at a cost that, combined with lunar’s favorable gravity, will allow an operation to compete with an Earth-based one. Spudis proposes to find out.
Seriously, in what way is the paper a business proposal? The paper doesn’t even presuppose the basic elements of a possible ISRU market; instead, it proposes to discover what those elements are.
The only financial assumptions the paper needs to make concerns the cost of undertaking the schedule as proposed. And there you yield a hard number, $88 billion.
Bill White wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Hello Bill and greetings from Africa…things are great here (well not so much on the Ivory Coast…but maybe they will improve now that we are here …grin)
to answer your question(s).
What I have long thought (about two decades) was wrong with the notion of humans in space, is that there really is nothing that they do which actually justifies the cost of having them there…and fixing that is in my view a two edged problem.
First the cost to get to orbit have to be lowered…this is not only dollar cost but the “ground cost”…the cost to saddle up and fly something in space. NASA HSF to get the amateur radio set on the space station took about 1 million dollars. This is a standard off the shelf radio that had the modifications made similar to “Mir radio”…but the paperwork alone just mounted and mounted and mounted…and mostly it was goofy things which were like most of the rest of NASA HSF safety penny wise and pound foolish…meaning spend a lot of money and not get a lot of safety.
If the cost of doing things in space can in total come down and come down significantly, maybe not to airline cost or even “you and me” affordable cost…then I have enough faith in the American economic system that it will find something useful for humans to do in space…that will generate revenue.
A key part of that (in my view) is spending federal dollars (which have some notion of “they are going to be spent anyway”) to do things which help create that lowering of price point. We are as a nation going to keep people on the space station because of the notions of politics…and the money spent to keep them up there should in my view create private infrastructure UNLESS there is an overriding need for Federal infrastructure.
If we didnt have the space station, I would not argue to build it…I would (and did) argue for things like “ISF” where it would be owned and operated by some private concern with a federal “anchor tenant”…
At somepoint we might prove that space is simply to expensive and to limited for humans to have any real value there…and ISF if that was what it was going to prove would have proved it for far less money. But we have ISS so at least we should use it as an “anchor” customer to create private infrastructure.
Once that infrastructure gets going I BELIEVE that people in and out of government will find ways to use the lower price point access for innovative things for people to do in space…and that will continue the cycle (or the engine) of lowering cost.
SPUDIS plan doesnt do anything like that. It is 1) development of a product for which there is no demand for and 2) which there are cheaper alternatives for…all in hopes that something magical is discovered which eventually justifies the effort or makes it cost effective all under heavy NASA management.
This is just the argument for the space station redone on the Moon…
If cost points keep coming down and uses keep going up, I have no doubt that lunar resources will eventually be used…but the plan right now is a solution looking for a problem. This is why the “Chinese are going to take over the Moon” drum is beat all the time.
We have to get the cycle of price point dropping or we will never find out if there is anything of value to be done by humans in space. Maybe there is not…I think that there is..
Robert G. Oler
Another ignorant Republican from California that doesn’t realize that his state is one of the highest recipients of NASA dollars.
@Robert G. Oler
The Spudis plan would give us a reusable lunar lander that would utilize lunar water and solar energy resources. This could dramatically lower the cost of traveling to the Moon, one of the prime destinations for the emerging space tourism industry. Lunar water would also be a cheaper source of water and oxygen for the emerging commercial space station industry and as a source of fuel to more cheaply transport satellites from LEO to GEO.
The Spudis plan doesn’t make any sense only if you want the US to be a second rate country in space technology and in its overall economy.
Bill White wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:03 pm
“Shouldn’t COTS & CCDEV also been seen as a business proposal to Congress?
Isn’t any proposal that has the taxpayers writing the checks essentially a business proposal to Congress?”
Yes, it should be looked at as a business proposal. Will funding COTS & CCDev ultimately lower the amount of money NASA has to spend for certain needs, and/or provide additional services that are desired?
In the case of COTS/CRS, will the program result in a better overall value for supplying the ISS? Value can be measured as overall cost, dependability or even additional capabilities like down mass (cargo returned to Earth).
Without the CRS program, the U.S. would be dependent on it’s ISS partners for resupply after the Shuttle program ends, using the ESA ATV, JAXA HTV and Russian Progress. I don’t know how much HTV and Progress cost, but ATV is supposed to cost about $300M just for the vehicle, and Ariane V is somewhere around $120M, so it would cost $54,780/kg for the 7,667 kg of payload it can carry.
As a comparison, SpaceX/Dragon will cost NASA as little as $22,222/kg and add 3,000 kg of down mass capability. OSC/Cynus will initially be fairly expensive at $95,000/kg delivered to the ISS, and even though it will eventually provide 1,200 kg of down mass capability, I think part of the cost can be looked at as insurance/risk reduction in case one of the other providers fails.
CCDev is more of an investment in the future than something that provides immediate value, since none of the programs result in a service that can be used for lowering NASA’s overall expenditures. However they should result in technologies and knowledge that can be applied to lowering the cost of future space systems – that’s the hope in any case.
Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:12 pm
“It’s not a bill. It’s an act. It was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President.
Either learn how our system of government works or don’t post here.â€
Try the definition of sophistry again; this kind of word game is pointless. As for as your order not to post here I did not realize (and still don’t) that this is your website.
“Sure it did. The White House budget request for NASA released last February covered FY 2011, FY 2012, FY 2013, FY 2014, and FY 2015. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act signed into law last October authorizes funding for NASA in FY 2011, FY 2012, and FY 2013. The former preceded the latter, the latter covers three of the same fiscal years as the former, and the latter incorporates all the key elements (kills Ares I, invests in commercial crew, invests in exploration technology, accelerates an HLV) found in the former.
Don’t waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of ignorance.â€
And that budget request was made in line with the previous plan, as the Obama Administration said it was waiting to make changes for the results of the Augustine Comminsion.
Don’t you waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of your ignorance, which appears to know no bounds.
“Since when is a small input for a large output a bad thing? Are you saying that the only good civil human space flight programs are the ones that spends billions and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars? Why are you measuring inputs, instead of outputs?
Think before you post.â€
Never said it was, merely noted that $50 million spread among a number of contracts is not “earth shatteringâ€. By the way if you think the continuing string of personal insults is going “to get a rise out of me†you are wrong. If they merely make you feel good, well that is your problem.
“String of non mockups supposedly entirely funded by the stimulis funds.â€
And all these “non-mockups†were funded by that amont of money (right).
“Read and comprehend documents before you comment on them so you don’t waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of ignorance.”
See previous comment on insults (yawn).
The rest of your post is more of the same (including reverting to the inaccurate assumption that I am opposed to commercial space development) and I do not intend to turn this response into a book.
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Rand,
I understand your (politely phrased – and thank you for that) point, but development cost are usually amortized over early operations and that would reduce their operating costs for some period of time. You allude to discounts for the government yourself. So we could argue back and forth about whether or not the money the government is giving the commercial firms is a subsidy or not. That makes this whole discussion a game of Sophistry.
In my original post I did not use the term subsidy as a pejorative (in fact it was in a statement in which I was paying Space X a complement). That is what irritated me about “Major Tom†attempting to start that game.
Joe
@DCSCA
Commercial companies like Space X are their own worse enemies because they are obsessed with trying to integrate themselves with government as the essential provider of services for NASA and the US military instead of focusing on the private commercial benefits of manned space travel– which should be far more lucrative in the long run!
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:41 pm
“…we’re already spending the overwhelming majority of NASA’s $20 billion on activities that have almost zero short, mid, or long term reward on the horizon.”
Well I disagree, but nothing I say will change your mind about that – you have either read the NASA budget and discount the value of the expenditures, or you’re ignorant of what NASA is spending it’s budget on, and you prefer to be ignorant.
“Spudis proposes to find out.”
Spend $88B just to find out if water from the Moon is more expensive than water from Earth? A fifth grader could answer that question today – no. Until you have demand for a supply, why risk so much money on adding more supply? Where is the market demand that the private market is supposed to profit from?
You have to look at this from a competitive standpoint. IF the lunar ISRU gets going, and IF there is a need for water in space, THEN any lunar supply would have to compete with supplies from Earth.
– What if the Earth contractor always beats the price of the lunar one?
– Will the U.S. Government run the operation at a loss?
– At what point will they decide to pull the plug and write off the $88B+ that the taxpayer put in?
Unless you’re saying the the lunar ISRU operation gets a monopoly on government water contracts – but that would not hold up in court, so that approach is doomed from the start.
See, none of this makes any business sense – it all depends on the desire to make water on the Moon.
“Given the moribund demand for launch, you could be just as circumspect about the prospects for commercial transport to Earth orbit.”
My assessments of the commercial crew & cargo market have always been based on known demand (ISS needs), and from that standpoint I have always said that any additional markets will be slow to develop. I think if we have 20 people living in LEO by the end of this decade we’ll be doing pretty good. And if that happens, I also think we’ll have 10X that many within the next 10 years, and expand quicker after that.
But you have start someplace, and that is what I see as the promise of the ISS commercial crew & cargo program – it offers LEO services that the private market can try out for a reasonable price. From that, companies and wealthy individuals can experiment with business models, and the natural business evolution will eventually result in stable and profitable businesses that will gradually expand our presence in space.
My $0.02
@Oler:
This is the case for any enterprise that has yet to turn to profitability; the only difference is scale. Even then, exploiting space exposes risks probably no more than one or two orders of magnitude more than say petroleum discovery (based on capital sunk before production). Your industry’s lead times are measured in decades (five decades for government space); lead costs run up into the hundreds of millions (tens of billions for NASA). Labor can fit in a handful of buildings.
And of course, an enterprise that dies in the red or offers only the certainty of future loss is a failure.
You’re focusing on cost control for an industrial input. Not a bad thing, but not a panacea to making space pay off or even standing up the infrastructure for extensive migration into space. The total cost of a trans-Atlantic trip, for example, has gone up (steerage v. Delta), but so has trans-Atlantic migration.
What matters in the long run is profitability, and for that you’re going to need more demand.
Faith is precisely what it is. Even after cutting costs we’ere still looking at capital expenditures in the realm of tens of millions of dollars per launch, and in that range you’re only expanding the margins of customers who have no need to increase their flight purchases. To expand the base of demand, space needs to give up something more than we’re currently getting out of it.
So by all means, cut costs. But do what government has done since the founding of the republic; send out folk to open up the frontier and dig up its wealth. You ain’t gonna do that playing jacks in LEO, staring at the cosmos, or chasing down an endless array of dubious “justifications” for more interagency, green economy boondoggles.
Deorbit the ISS now. And if the crew puts up a fight, I’m more than willing to let them go down with the ship.
It’s possible, but it’s *highly* unlikely. Not with 3000 Earth’s worth of mass configured in a favorably low gravity environment and the sun belching out a couple hundred yottawatts to boot. Turning it into ore, production, power, agriculture and living space is a matter of when, not a matter of if.
Let me boil that down for you. You believe that an uncertain “plan” to cut an industry’s launch costs will spontaneously increase demand in areas hitherto unknown. Let’s keep that in mind as we move on to the following…
Spudis proposes re-configuring monies we are likely to spend anyway on HSF to stand up an in-space refueling infrastructure between Earth and the Moon. Last I checked, damn near everyone was in agreement that depots were a critical component on the path to a (and I hate this word) sustainable architecture for existing sources of demand for spacelift beyond LEO. None of which depended on economic handwaving or vague fantasies about prices spiraling down to an unknown ground state.
Ultimately, the debate over the Spudis plan should be over how to arrange its particular scheduling and transportation assumptions to minimize its lead time to production, upfront costs AND the opportunity costs of Earth over lunar extraction while remaining within a budget. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen fit to have that discussion yet.
Prestly, you could shut down all of human spaceflight and NASA would still be of value. The first A in NASA is for Aeronautics. They are one of the organizations that helps fund r/d into all forms of flight not just space flight. If it is a blimp, helicopter, jet or rocket NASA it is NASA’s job to improve the state of the art and invest in things industry can not/.
I hate to break this to all the lunar fans but the cost of lunar spaceflight at the moment is not worth it and wont be worth it until prices are lower to LEO.ISRU helps but doe not close the case. What I can’t figure is why lunar first people think that things like LEO space stations are useless. I view man’s progression into space as settling more than just that dull airless hunk of rock we call the moon. I view it as being able to live and work in space and those are things better done on a space station.
IMHO it is much easier to sell a plan based on lunar propellant production when LEO propellant use is already in place and transportation to from or near the moon is in place.
It is much easier to get LEO propellant use in place without coupling it too the moon. For instance what if hydrogen is uneconomic as a LEO propellant?
The reason why space stations are much more economical at the moment is because existing rockets can send crew and cargo and can do so in less than the most expire form. For instance an Atlas that could lift the CST100 can’t even land 1MT on the moon.
What needs to happen is either bigger rockets need to get more economical and/or advanced technology like electric propulsion needs to be applied. Otherwise the 3-4 billion Human space flights gets wont amount to much in a lunar context. If Apollo is a guide 3 billion would only buy 3 days on the moon for 2 people. I am sorry but an entire National space program can’t be based on sending so few for so little time. Heck even Apollo thought that it would get a slightly bigger budget and be able to do things in LEO as well as the moon.
For instance what if instead of spending 88 billion on the moon you spend 5 billion on electric propulsion and improving in space power production? If for instance you had a VASIMR based you could send more cargo to the moon for not much more than the price of the launch. So instead of an 18MT to LEO rocket being able to only land 1-2MT you could in theory land 2-4MT on the moon. Even better this tug when not being used for the lunar program could do other things like help deorbit Statlights, reduce the cost of sending probes to the planets, supply stations in higher orbits, boost statelights ect.
This also why lunar spefic rockets and other things should generally be advoided. With only one mission their cost can not be spread upon other users.
@ common sense
Ah, I understand what you’re saying now. Yes, Ares I was a bad example for the point I was trying to make. I’m not too familiar with all the technical specifics so in my haste to find examples of rockets today that would be able to lift 100 tons with the new fuel (assuming it is as helpful as the sources I’ve read have claimed) I simply looked for the 25 ton payload crafts without considering exactly which ones were solid-fuel rockets. The Space Shuttle system would be a better, although still not perfect, example since it uses solid rocket boosters for 83% of it’s liftoff needs. But if solid rockets really get this much of a boost in payload efficiency, would we really seek to keep using hybrid systems?
The point I was trying to demonstrate was that we are already building rockets at least close to the size and complexity needed to use this potential new fuel to meet the 100 ton legislative benchmark. I wasn’t trying to suggest we could simply throw the fuel into the exact current rocket designs and make it work.
The Ares 5 rocket would’ve been a FINE heavy-lift vehicle, and would’ve been built had the damned Planetary Society types not been so dead-set opposed to renewed Lunar exploration. Mr. Louis Friedman seems to believe that small sized rockets alone could do the job: the job of reaching asteroids, with a total ignoring of the Moon. Just read his essays on the Space Review web-site. What, with VASIMR just about to be built, plus the in-orbit refueling depots at the ISS, what’s to stop us from building gigantic cities upon several NEOs, come the 2020’s, right?! Seriously folks, this is all sci-fi dreaming here! A heavy-lift launcher WILL BE NEEDED, sooner or later; and the Orion-Altair missions were the perfect opportunity to have had one built. But wait! The horrors of actually having to send men over to the Moon again! Hey, maybe the Atlas or the Delta rockets might just suffice….?
“Put another way, we don’t know enough about future demand for space transportation to say when either Earth or lunar based operations become profitable. We also don’t know whether lunar ISRU can be done at a cost that, combined with lunar’s favorable gravity, will allow an operation to compete with an Earth-based one. Spudis proposes to find out.”
If you read the Spudis plan and do some basic arithmetic, you will find that it already provides the answer. It invests $88B and 15 years to be able to generate 150 mt of water at the lunar surface – far from any source of demand – for a recurring cost of $6.5B/yr. For no investment and no wait it is possible to launch the same amount of water to LEO – where it would be more useful – for $0.9B/yr. The Spudis plan is sufficient to demonstrate that lunar ISRU will not economically justifiable with the technology they assumed for the foreseeable future – sourcing from Earth is simply much cheaper.
Major Tom wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:49 pm ….[Once you have those numbers, then you can begin to crunch the technical variations to see if there’s a solution that closes. I don’t know of any that does, and the $88 billion study, which actually leveraged a lot of existing launch infrastructure, shows that we’re probably off by an order of magnitude or so from the knowledge and technology needed. My instinct (FWIW) is that four things have to happen before such a case could be made…]
Just curious about your instincts Major Tom. What are they based on? What is your expertise? What have you flown or proposed? What do you view as success?
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 6:41 pm
“We also don’t know whether lunar ISRU can be done at a cost that, combined with lunar’s favorable gravity, will allow an operation to compete with an Earth-based one. Spudis proposes to find out.”
and you have just stated what makes Paul’s plan so goofy.
First the only market for either EArth or Lunar H or O (or H2O) is the space station. There is no other “market” for it. All satellites are launched “tail to head” meaning that the booster carries everything up for the entire mission of the vehicle.
There is a H2O market for the station (ie the crew needs it) as well as a market by the station for other consumables…but NOW that market is clearly being filled at a far cheaper price then lunar resources could be used…by Earth based resupply.
The entire notion of lunar resources has no cost to value ratio and this is where both Paul and Anne start off on the ephemerals of American exceptionalism, the Chinese taking over the Moon, and the worst one of all “we are going to spend the money anyway”.
and this is where YOU go off the track. The NASA budget is not just spent on HSF….even if one rounds to 20 billion (as you do) the money gets spent on a lot of things other then HSF…there are uncrewed efforts and of course the other A in NASA…aeronautics.
But no matter what the number the entire notion of “spend it and see what happens” is goofy
Robert G. Oler
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:54 pm […..but sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons…..]
You need to add “appear to” to you above comment and then write it on the chalkboard 500 times.
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:57 pm […..And at least the social programs keep people alive…] […In the End I will be correct…..Just like I was correct about the Iraq war…and everyone who was for it, was wrong.]
Memorable quotes.
John Malkin wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm […Augustine said that POR was doable but Congress would need to put up the money, they won’t. He also said it wasn’t in the best interest at NASA to replace it with another program unless it was significantly different and offered significant advantages. So is this wrong or what? How can the status quot get us an infrastructure? Speaking of Sci-Fi,…]
I must conclude one of two things: 1. You didn’t read the Spudis-Lavoie Architecture, or 2. You didn’t read it comprehensively. There is a #3 but I won’t go there.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 pm […. And his plan focuses on the ISRU part, not the real transportation issues, so “extensible infrastructure†is a vast over statement….I know you don’t like it when I say this]
Which is it Ron? He puts too much focus on ISRU or he includes transportation? You are all over the map on different posts on different threads. By the way, I like your posts, as they draw a clear contrast between us.
A heavy-lift launcher WILL BE NEEDED, sooner or later
That is a highly dubious assertion since you can land Constellation sized payloads on the moon with just existing EELVs and existing storable propellant transfer to a spacecraft, wihout even needing dedicated depots. The mass penalty is only on the order of 10%, so costs would clearly be lower when you don’t have to pay for a new launcher. With use of reusable spacecraft and ultimately RLVs costs would be much, much lower.
And even if an HLV were needed eventually, that’s not a good reason for building it now. And even if we did need it now EELV Phases 1 & 2 or maybe Falcon XX would be a better choice.
I think for the moment, talk of such things as lunar and Mars flights, is certainly on hold. Just getting through with building a shuttle replacement, will be an accomplishment. We do need Orion, and presently that is all that seems to be surviving this attack on NASA and its policies. I hate to see our space program in such digress and not moving forward. It is always money……… Russia recently offered to join us in studies to promote nuclear engines and deep space travel, which I believe we turned down. It is better to go with them, then not at all… Just perhaps it is time for a nuclear rocket capable of taking us through the solar system…..
@Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 8:01 pm
“Commercial companies like Space X are their own worse enemies because they are obsessed with trying to integrate themselves with government as the essential provider of services for NASA and the US military instead of focusing on the private commercial benefits of manned space travel– which should be far more lucrative in the long run!”
Problem is, there are no commercial benefits to human space travel that can demand the kind of capital investments necessary to fly in this era of human history. The technologies surrounding rocketry and human spaceflight are comparatively new and young. Gagarin’s flight was half a century ago this April and modern rocketry and missile development not much older than that. And neither were propelled forward by commercial benefits or the profit motive. It was military and political needs that fueled rocket development and human space travel, not any commercial need. For the next 150 years expect governments to lead the way in space exploration/exploitation. And before you question that time frame, bear in mind it has already been 42 years since Apollo 8’s circumlunar mission– not quite a third of the time frame cited has passed already. Indeed, it may very well be 250 years or more. Private enterprise has never led the way in this technology but always been a follow aliong, cashing in where ii could. To advocate otherwise does a disservice to the inevitable future human space exploration. Reaganomics will not be the motivation fueling the expansion of the human experience out into the cosmos.
@Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:45 am
“the ephemerals of American exceptionalism…”
There’s no such thing as ‘American exceptionalism.’
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:45 am [….The entire notion of lunar resources has no cost to value ratio and this is where both Paul and Anne start off on the ephemerals of American exceptionalism, the Chinese taking over the Moon, and the worst one of all “we are going to spend the money anyway .]
Tricky way you attribute that quote to Paul and I. Never said it.
For those who want real quotes:
The New Space Race (SpaceRef, Feb. 2010) [Excerpt] Warfare in space is not as depicted in science-fiction movies, with flying saucers blasting lasers at speeding spaceships. The real threat from active space warfare is denial of assets and access. Communications satellites are silenced, reconnaissance satellites are blinded, and GPS constellations made inoperative. This completely disrupts command and control and forces reliance on terrestrially based systems. Force projection and coordination becomes more difficult, cumbersome and slower. ……There is indeed a new space race. It is just as important and vital to our country’s future as the original one, if not as widely perceived and appreciated. It consists of a struggle with both hard and soft power. The hard power aspect is to confront the ability of other nations to deny us access to our vital satellite assets of cislunar space. The soft power aspect is a question: how shall society be organized in space? Both issues are equally important and both are addressed by lunar return. …….[End excerpt]
And for those who want more:
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/12SpudisNDU.pdf
What needs to happen is either bigger rockets need to get more economical and/or advanced technology like electric propulsion needs to be applied.
I agree with most of what you said, but not on this point. Rockets in general (or more generally launch vehicles) need to get more economical, not just bigger ones. Size is not a real constraint, we don’t need electric propulsion in order to use smaller rockets for exploration, propellant transfer (even if only for storable propellant) would also work. And that does not require advanced technology, at least not for storable propellant. HLV vs advanced technology is a false dichotomy, you need neither for exploration.
They are mutually exclusive in the short term however, since you can only spend money once. If you had to choose one, then advanced technology would be the wiser choice. But in my opinion it would be even better to spend the money on exploration instead and to depend on demand pull, not technology push to fund the right amounts of commercial R&D. That’s how it works in the ICT and automotive industries.
Dennis Berube wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 6:12 am [I think for the moment, talk of such things as lunar and Mars flights, is certainly on hold. ….]
Initial steps in the Spudis-Lavoie Architecture are designed for incremental buildup (time not money is the free variable). Robotic exploration of Mars has never lacked attention. It’s time now to focus our attention on our Moon/cislunar backyard, where both our national security interests and newly discovered space resources command our immediate attention.
pathfinder_01 wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 8:46 pm [……………..What needs to happen is either bigger rockets need to get more economical and/or advanced technology like electric propulsion needs to be applied. Otherwise the 3-4 billion Human space flights gets wont amount to much in a lunar context. If Apollo is a guide 3 billion would only buy 3 days on the moon for 2 people. I am sorry but an entire National space program can’t be based on sending so few for so little time. Heck even Apollo thought that it would get a slightly bigger budget and be able to do things in LEO as well as the moon. ….]
Perhaps what needs to happen pathfinder_01 is:
“Much of the current debate about launch vehicles stems from the mission or objective of human flights beyond LEO. We believe that the fundamental objective of such flight is to extend human reach and presence from its current limitation in LEO to all levels of space beyond. To that end, we are agnostic on the need for any specific launch vehicle solution; our goal is to make
complete dependence on such vehicles unnecessary as rapidly as possible through the use of offplanet resources. If a heavy lift vehicle is available early in the program, we will use it. If one is not, we will use other launch vehicles. Because we must scope the total effort within an assumed budget profile that would be available to NASA for any launch vehicle development as well as
all mission hardware development, we developed an architecture that accomplishes the goal while fitting under the budget. We assume that a medium heavy lift launch vehicle (~70 mT) will be available during the later phases of our program (when humans are needed on the Moon.) Our particular architecture uses such a vehicle and reflects the cost of its development and
operations, but other solutions are possible within the assumed budget wedge used by the Augustine Committee (2009).”
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
Trinitramide is not a new fuel, it is a oxidizer that is unstable. It is not going to be usable.
“Try the definition of sophistry again;”
Again? You never told me to look it up a first time. You’re confusing me with another poster.
If you can’t keep track of who you’re talking to, then don’t bother posting. You’re wasting other people’s time.
“this kind of word game is pointless.”
It’s not a word game. You have a fundamental lack of understanding about how the US government functions. You don’t know the difference or don’t bother to differentiate between an act and a bill, which is critical since the former is law and the latter is not. You don’t know or can’t keep track of which budget requests and which bills are introduced in what calendar years and cover which fiscal years (see below). And, worse of all, you (and a couple others here) don’t know or understand the bedrock concept of separation of powers — that the executive branch and the legislative branch have different and distinct responsibilities with regards to legislation.
It doesn’t matter to me what you do or don’t know, except you littered this thread with false statements based on your lack of knowledge. You blame the White House for legislation it doesn’t write. You make false claims about what is in certain pieces of legislation based on erroneous chronologies. And you apparently don’t even bother to read the legislation you’re commenting on. So instead of having an intelligent discussion about policy options based on how the federal government actually works and the policy documents as they actually exist, I and other posters have to waste our time correcting idiotic comments based on your ignorance about things you should have learned in junior high civics class or that you can Google in five seconds.
“As for as your order not to post here I did not realize (and still don’t) that this is your website.”
It’s not my website and it’s not an order. I obviously have no control over what you do or don’t do. But have some consideration for other posters. Check your facts before you post so we don’t have to waste our time correcting your false statements. It’s fine to have opinions, but don’t make stuff up.
“And that budget request was made in line with the previous plan”
No, it wasn’t. The White House’s FY 2010 budget request for NASA continued funding Constellation. The White House’s FY 2011 budget request for NASA terminated funding for Constellation. The latter was not “in line” with the prior at all.
For the umpteenth time, don’t make idiotic statements out of ignorance. Research and check your facts before you post. It’s a waste of time for others to have to correct them.
“as the Obama Administration said it was waiting to make changes for the results of the Augustine Comminsion.”
The Augustine Committee delivered its final report in October 2009. The White House’s FY 2011 budget request for NASA was released in February 2010. The Obama Administration was clearly not “waiting to make changes for the results of the Augustine Comminsion [sic]” when it developed and released NASA’s FY 2011 budget request.
And it was the Augustine “Committee”, not “Comminsion [sic]”. The Augustine Commission was a different review chaired by Norm Augustine under a different White House years ago. If you can’t get the chronology straight, at least get the titles right. Cripes…
“Don’t you waste this forum’s time with idiotic statements made out of your ignorance, which appears to know no bounds.”
Pot, kettle, black.
“Never said it was”
Yes, you did. You wrote:
“Wow, a whole $50 Million (most of which has still not been spent). You sure got me there.”
You’re arguing based on inputs and you’re arguing that this input is small and therefore bad.
Again, why are you measuring based on inputs? Programs should be judged on their outputs — how much we can get for a taxpayer dollar, not how many taxpayer dollars we can throw at a program.
“…merely noted that $50 million spread among a number of contracts is not ‘earth shattering’.”
I never wrote that it was “earth shattering”. I wrote that it was significant and substantial.
Don’t make stuff up, especially about other poster’s statements that are right in front of you. Scroll up and reread posts if you have to, but don’t put words in other posters’ mouths.
“By the way if you think the continuing string of personal insults is going “to get a rise out of me†you are wrong.”
Where did I throw a “personal insult” at you? I’ve repeatedly written that you’ve made idiotic statements out of ignorance about the facts. But I’ve never claimed that you personally are an idiot or are ignorant in general.
Don’t make stuff up. I don’t know you — I can only judge your posts here.
“And all these “non-mockups†were funded by that amont of money (right).”
Yes, they were. For the second time, read the document I provided a link to. It’s all there in black and white accompanied by multiple color photos of the actual hardware. If you’re not going to read the sources provided by other posters to back up their statements, then please don’t post here.
“including reverting to the inaccurate assumption that I am opposed to commercial space development”
I never stated that you are “opposed to commercial space development”. Again, you’re confusing me with another poster.
And again, if you can’t keep track of who you’re talking to, then don’t bother posting. You’re wasting other people’s time.
Ugh…
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 7:14 am ..
lots of laugh
really a hoot.
You are like all the people who now say “Bush never said Saddam was going to threaten the US with the WMD” or “he never said Saddam had anything to do withe 9/11″. perhaps not in those exact words but the implication was there.
Look even t”he people on this forum who support Paul’s not so very elegant in terms of space policy and politics ideas think that he is saying “we are going to spend the money anyway”.
here is an example
“Spudis proposes re-configuring monies we are likely to spend anyway on HSF” from Presley Cannady wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 8:39 pm
so dont say I am misquoting you or Paul unless you leap to correct what your supporters are saying. Thats the worst way that extreme political people try and dodge responsibility for their own statements, and I wont let you get away from it here.
as for the rest of the post you make.
Its a bunch of babble. First it tries to link a “possible” and very theoretical attack on US earth orbiting assets with some notion of “cislunar” assets as if the two were equatable in any military planners mind.
They are not.
There are a few givens about lunar resources. First there is no market for them SEcond what market is there for H and O can be filled far more cheaply from Earth…and that ends their value at least to todays and most likely the next 10-20 years world.
When it cost 88 or more billion in up front cost and then a lot of recuring cost (probably about 6-10 billion) to get what can be had today for under 1 billion….it is “lunacy” to give the effort a try.
Pauls plan comes unhinged on that one point…and nothing else you toss up as “flack” can change that.
Robert G. Oler
“Just curious about your instincts Major Tom. What are they based on? What is your expertise? What have you flown or proposed?”
I’ve worked both civilian and military space programs, both robotic and human space flight, both in an oversight role external to the implementing agencies and as a manager in the implementing agencies, for two-odd decades. I have advanced technical and policy degrees.
To be clear, those four numbered items are my best educated guesses about what will have to happen before lunar ISRU makes economic sense for either government or private investment. I’m very willing and would love to be proven wrong that the technical bar to achieving a lunar ISRU product that is competitive with the terrestrial alternative launched from Earth is much lower.
“What do you view as success?”
With regards to the ISRU topic, it has to be a product (water or LH2/LOX propellant in this case) that is delivered to a user in space at a cost that is significantly lower than the cost of delivering the terrestrial alternative to that same user from Earth. That cost advantage is the only way that the government can justify the expense of erecting the ISRU infrastructure in the first place, or that a business can make a profit to pay back the investors that paid for erecting the ISRU infrastructure in the first place.
FWIW…
I understand your (politely phrased – and thank you for that) point, but development cost are usually amortized over early operations and that would reduce their operating costs for some period of time. You allude to discounts for the government yourself.
I said that might be one way for the government to get value for its early investment, not that it was in this case. In this case, the value to the government in being the anchor user is in closing the gap, regardless of its downstream costs.
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 10:44 am [….really a hoot….]
Indeed!
When you place quotation marks around a statement and purposely incorrectly tie it to someone and when called on it, resort to muddying the waters by saying lunar return supports have said such and so I should not call you on your miss-attribution. Thank you for explaining that in your world, I’m dodging responsibility for someone else’s comment if I don’t accept your position that I said it.
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 10:35 am
“Ugh…â€
Ugh indeed.
You are correct on one point, after a long day when you jumped into another conversation I mistook you for Coastal Ron. An error for which I profusely apologize to Coastal Ron.
As for the rest of the rant, I think the only constructive response is best summed up by the immortal words of Homer Simpson (when Bart and Lisa were confronted by an over the top Adam West trying to tell them he was really Batman):
“OK kids, back up slowly, don’t make eye contactâ€
Have nice day and try not to blow a fuse.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 7:14 am
“(…)There is indeed a new space race. It is just as important and vital to our country’s future as the original one, if not as widely perceived and appreciated. It consists of a struggle with both hard and soft power. The hard power aspect is to confront the ability of other nations to deny us access to our vital satellite assets of cislunar space. The soft power aspect is a question: how shall society be organized in space? Both issues are equally important and both are addressed by lunar return.“
I have just one one question: How?
How does a lunar return address these issues? What capabilities relevant to space warfare does a lunar settlement offer that could not be met easier, faster and more cheaply met from earth orbit or from the surface?
And what of the fact that a militarized lunar outpost would in and of itself present a vulnerable target, for both direct an indirect physical attacks as well as for electronic warfare?
Note that this is purely out of interest, I don’t actually agree with your idea of a “race” or the threat scenario you’re asserting. Just thought I’d make that clear.
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 10:50 am [….With regards to the ISRU topic, it has to be a product (water or LH2/LOX propellant in this case) that is delivered to a user in space at a cost that is significantly lower than the cost of delivering the terrestrial alternative to that same user from Earth. That cost advantage is the only way that the government can justify the expense of erecting the ISRU infrastructure in the first place, or that a business can make a profit to pay back the investors that paid for erecting the ISRU infrastructure in the first place.]
That is the point. To move beyond the cost of launching from inside Earth’s gravity well. Resources of space are needed for an affordable alternative to launching from Earth and for survival in space. Learning the lessons and gaining that ability on the Moon/cislunar, while close to Earth has definite advantages. Doing one-off missions to exotic destinations will not give us lasting value like lunar resource development can with an extensible, sustainable space infrastructure.
Das Boese wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:18 am […I have just one one question: How?]
By having access and an established foothold , that’s how. If you can’t access and service space assets you’ve lost, you’ve been checkmated.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:49 am
“Which is it Ron? He puts too much focus on ISRU or he includes transportation?”
Can you point to a statement I’ve made saying that “He puts too much focus on ISRU”? No. What I said was that he was that his plan is focused on ISRU, not the real transportation issues – you even quoted me. Maybe you were in a hurry this morning pasting links to Paul’s website into every post…
“You are all over the map on different posts on different threads.”
I think that’s a comprehension issue for you, but I’m not going to go back and try and correct you.
“By the way, I like your posts, as they draw a clear contrast between us.”
They always have Anne, they always have.
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:02 am
“I said that might be one way for the government to get value for its early investment, not that it was in this case. In this case, the value to the government in being the anchor user is in closing the gap, regardless of its downstream costs.â€
And I do not disagree with you. My point (to others, not you) was that it isn’t productive to argue about whether or not the money being given to the commercial companies to allay their development costs fits a narrowly construed definition of a subsidy. Especially when the original post that used the apparently offending term was part of a compliment. I personally do not see anything intrinsically wrong with the government attempting to “subsidize†(I hope the quotation marks will allow the use of the term) the achieving of a desired result. Provided I approve of said desired result, which in this case (I seem to have keep repeating) I do.
@pathfinder:
The interagency funding nightmare behind any number of activities attracting NASA participation is another issue.
Spudis disagrees. So did Augustine, for that matter, and they weren’t even trying to do anything useful on the Moon. Hell, Spudis manages to do it and save $10 billion over the program on record.
Because they are.
Please point out where anyone said otherwise.
The Moon isn’t endgame, it’s just the nearest chunk of stuff to springboard to far more gravitationally favorable regimes for settlements–habitats carved out of the husks of asteroids. But in the more immediate future, it’s the nearest chunk of stuff to justify what would otherwise be your insanely expensive, high altitude office and the ridiculously costly commute to and from.
Nothing is stopping you from doing both. The Spudis proposal is conservative on transportation, and nothing prevents swapping out the Shuttle-derived architecture with a depot staged one that begins the pipeline Earth-to-moon and reverses later on.
By keeping it coupled to Earth? Dream on.
It’s already used as an propellant in LEO and more.
You’re using “economical” wrong. You mean cheaper, which until recently would’ve been a dubious proposition. Space stations still don’t make much economic sense–they’re presently terminal destinations at the end of a commute that even optimistically speaking will cost a hundred million a round trip to support. That will continue to be the case until space stations become way points between Earth and some place of value; the nearest of which is the Moon.
Which is sufficient for early phases of a Spudis-like operation. If you want to go heavy lift to bring the 10 ton pieces up, you can do it within the existing budget for the program of record given Shuttle sidemount. You can swap in whatever replacement architecture you like whenever and wherever appropriate.
The main point is that you can race these transportation architectures against one another within the run-outs for present HSF funding, and presumably trade money for time waiting to open the Moon.
No, it doesn’t, anymore than boil-off needs to be perfectly addressed before we start doing things. What we need to do is stop complaining about the tools and do some goddamned work.
That’s in a low ebb. Constellation saw peaks of up to $19 billion. The “less constrained” scenarios Augustine favored were still north of ten.
Engineering doesn’t work that way.
It will remain that way until we find something out there that pays out more per seat and cargo space than we dump into moving men and material.
I’m not going to compare a well researched cost against a number pulled out of one’s ass.
IMHO,
If we want government to supply the increased demand that will be needed to lower the cost of Earth-to-LEO lift, government will need to go to a destination somewhere beyond LEO. Logistical support of a lunar base would supply the demand for LEO depots.
Supporting ISS and doing occasional one-off asteroid missions will NOT generate sufficient demand to significantly lower launch costs, at least IMHO.
If the demand for Earth-to-LEO lift is to come from non-government buyers (as I would prefer) then the sooner we deploy a privately owned LEO hotel independent of ISS, the better. (Mir Corp II)
And, I have said for years that a zero-gee sports facility supported by beer commercials and ESPN contracts would generate FAR more demand for Earth-to-LEO lift (and thus RLVs) than any government program ever will, or could.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:35 am […..
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 pm […….And his plan
focuses on the ISRU part, not the real transportation issues, so
“extensible infrastructure†is a vast over statement.] Couldn’t
help but comment on that remark CR because you berated the
architecture more than once for pricing a transportation mode, when
from your viewpoint he should only stick to ISRU. I’m glad you saw
my links. I’m sure a few others did too.
@Oler:
What, taking a
calculated risk? Tell that to the CRYOTE folks.
In other
words, there is only the market that the government sees fit to
create for itself at the time being. So how about instead of
dumping money to prop up a space station that does nothing, we dump
money on projects that at least have a chance of spurring private
sector settlement?
Yes, we all accept that a market
driven entirely by a government that does nothing but dick around
in LEO is better served, at least in the short run, by
Earth-sourced resupply.
1. We are going to spend the money anyway. Americans want to be in
space even if they don’t know why. 2. Space war with China is
another topic entirely, and last I checked there’s no mention of it
whatsoever in Spudis’ proposal.
Yes, that is a problem. But not relevant
here, as Spudis’ proposal lies comfortably within the current
budget on record for HSF.
I’ve no love for endless
series of X-planes and billions spent to keep a handful of
cosmologists and climatologists happy, but this is also irrelevant.
Spudis’ proposal doesn’t even touch their money.
Great. Then you wouldn’t mind putting everything else on the
chopping block as well. After all, exactly what does NASA do that
doesn’t fall under the category of “spend it and see what
happens?”
Joe wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:17 am “I
mistook you for Coastal Ron. An error for which I profusely
apologize to Coastal Ron.” No need. But you have been
guilty of sophistry yourself in these conversations. For instance,
you said the following regarding SpaceX and OSC: “The
money being given them to aid their development projects however is
keeping their development costs (to them) lower than they otherwise
would be. You can deal in this kind of sophistry (subtly deceptive
reasoning or argumentation – I can look up dictionary definitions
of words also) if you choose, but it proves nothing.” No
money is being “given” to the COTS/CRS participants. The word
“given” implies money provided with nothing in return. The COTS
program is paying SpaceX and OSC for progress they are making in
creating systems that will service the ISS. Since making deliveries
to the ISS does not have industry standards to reference, NASA
imposes specific requirements on all service providers. For SpaceX
and OSC, if they do not meet the program milestones, they don’t get
paid. If they don’t complete the COTS program, they don’t get to
move on to the CRS program. And if they fail to make a delivery in
the CRS program, they don’t get paid for the delivery. How is that
at all confused with “given”?
@Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:03 am “Just
curious about your instincts Major Tom. What are they based on?
What is your expertise? What have you flown or proposed? What do
you view as success?” It’s interesting that some people are okay
questioning other’s professional experience and other people
cannot. It is even more interesting that those who (seem to)
actually have HSF experience are those who do not support
Constellation or any plan similar to it. Wonder why…
@Coastal Ron:
Enlighten us Ron. Tell us about all the NASA expenditures that are going to make us rich some day.
Yeah, that’s precisely what it is. Spudis would die of shock if anyone actually proposed using the propellant he cracks. Don’t be ignorant.
I assume you meant “yes” (lunar water would be more expensive than Earth water, otherwise, we wouldn’t disagree) So a fifth-grader would guess that lifting against one-sixth Earth’s gravity is more expensive than lifting against a full gee?
When you’re done playing armchair economist, tell us. Where is the market demand for Earth-sourced water? Hell, where’s the market demand for a space station, or the next X-plane, a cheaper launcher, or the VAST majority of crap that earns a NASA outlay?
Beyond the telecos, space just doesn’t pay without government propping it up. Seems to me you’d be interested in executing missions that stand a chance of turning that around, but I may be wrong.
I am. Which is why this is probably the third go around where you’ve ignored my consistent response to your hair-pulling over sunk costs.
And in the long run, the source that costs the least to lift wins. Is Spudis proposing to lift ice out of Uranus? Deal with the proposal at hand.
Then lunar ISRU is a failure.
Presumably not.
Oh what a concept! If there’s a risk of failure, don’t do it. Please, Ron, tell us why we’re even playing around in space at all?
Now we’re playing lawyer? But let’s set that aside. I’ll answer your question. If and when ISRU turns out to be a fool’s errand, I’m more than willing to burn it down to the ground. Just like the Shuttle. Just like the ISS.
Only in a world where business, let alone government, doesn’t take risks
It depends on the desire to open up the largest chunk of stuff off the Earth’s surface. It’s driven by the desire to conquer and expand into new territory, pillage it of its natural resources, get rich in the process, and to architect a truly spacefaring civilization.
So you *do* grasp the concept of sunk cost. Good for you. Now explain to us why you’re fine with a pitiful market of 6 people that cost $100 billion to erect but you’re whining about an $88 billion project that actually stands the chance of growing the population, and thereby market, in space?
So $100 billion was your limit. Fair enough. Burned once, shame on you; burned twice, shame on me, right? Well, you’re in luck. Spudis lets you take money you were already going to dump into doing a bunch of mindless firsts while letting you keep your utterly valueless “science” and “aeronautics” playpens. And he does it for $10 billion less than Constellation as scheduled in 2010 and $30 billion less than Flexible Path as proposed.
They won’t be “living” in LEO in any relevant sense. They’ll be riggers without the decency of having something to drill to justify the cost of their digs and commute.
As much as I’d like to call this whistling in the dark, it’s still immaterial. Nothing in Spudis prevents you from seeing this future of a smattering of folk playing games in orbit by the time I’m fifty and you’re dead.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:33 am
By having access and an established foothold , that’s how. If you can’t access and service space assets you’ve lost, you’ve been checkmated.
Nice platitudes, but not an answer to my question.
Let me reiterate the question with some clarification and highlighting of the important parts:
“What (specific!) capabilities relevant to space warfare (hypothetical clandestine or overt international conflict involving the use of space assets) does a lunar settlement (civilian or military?) offer that could not be easier, faster and more cheaply met from earth orbit or from the surface?
And what of the fact that a (militarized) lunar outpost would in and of itself present a vulnerable target, for both direct an indirect physical attacks as well as for electronic warfare?”
“That is the point. To move beyond the cost of launching from inside Earth’s gravity well. Resources of space are needed for an affordable alternative to launching from Earth”
But the paper doesn’t show that. It doesn’t demonstrate that producing and delivering propellant from the Moon is more affordable than just buying and launching propellant from the Earth. In fact, it shows the opposite. Again, using just existing launch vehicles over the next 16 years, we can put something on the order of 2,400mT of Earth water in GEO before the _first_ metric ton of water is delivered operationally from the lunar surface. And it would cost ~$72 billion to do so, a savings of ~$16 billion vice the $88 billion lunar approach.
“Learning the lessons and gaining that ability on the Moon/cislunar, while close to Earth has definite advantages.”
You don’t need an $88 billion lunar campaign (or a $100 billion ISS for that matter but we’ve crossed that bridge) to learn lessons and gain capabilities for human activities in deep space.
Moreover, the Moon is not necessarily a good training ground for learning these lessons and gaining these capabilities. If, for example, you compare the technical requirements driving a Mars mission versus a lunar mission, there are huge differences in communications timelag, thermal environments, atmospheres (or lack thereof), gravity, radiation exposure, resources, and even toxins. These all drive major differences in critical issues like operational autonomy from ground control, heat management, descent and landing systems, life support systems, structures, and others. Most systems designed for and tested in one of these environments simply won’t function in the other.
If you spend tens of billions of dollars developing and testing systems on the Moon, you’ll get lunar systems. You won’t get systems that are extensible to another destination such as Mars, except maybe in the most generic of ways. If you want systems for Mars or other destinations, then you have to build for Mars and test those systems in Mars-like environments, either simulated (therm/vac/vibe/rad) or best approximations on Earth (Arctic, upper atmosphere) or near-space (long-duration flight above the Van Allen Belts).
“Doing one-off missions to exotic destinations”
Where did I (or anyone else) advocate doing “one-off missions to exotic destinations”?
“will not give us lasting value like lunar resource development can with an extensible, sustainable space infrastructure.”
I’m all for an “extensible, sustainable space infrastructure” but no one has shown such an infrastructure that incorporates “lunar resource development”. All that’s been shown to date is that lunar resource development costs billions of dollars more and takes a decade and a half longer than just buying water or propellants on Earth and launching them from Earth using existing launch vehicles.
I sincerely hope that someday, sooner rather than later, that a case closes and that lunar resources are shown to provide propellants, consumables, or other products at costs that are lower than the terrestrial alternatives. But until that day comes, it’s a hammer in search of a nail.
FWIW…
@common sense
We don’t need Constellation or a Constellation-like program to develop lunar resources.
I support a DIRECT-like approach (Jupiters plus LEO & EML/LLO depots) because I believe that is needed to win votes in Congress. I also believe a robust lunar architecture done with Jupiters would be cheaper than a lunar architecture done entirely with EELVs.
However, if SpaceX can support a lunar architecture for less money than DIRECT and/or EELV and if Congress can be persuaded to fund that program, I am okay with that, also. Tossing in some Proton launches to lower costs and make it international is okay with me too.
Anyway, I deny that a LEO only program will lower launch costs unless tourism and/or zero gee sports are embraced in a significant fashion and occasional asteroid missions won’t generate sufficient demand for mass in LEO to lower launch costs, either.
IMHO, if we want low launch costs then its either build and sustain a moon-base or facilitate big-time tourism and entertainment markets in LEO (or both).
@Oler:
Paul didn’t say that, I did. And we are going to spend the money anyway. And Flexible Path is configured to spend mroe than $10 billion over the Spudis proposal ($3 billion over 2010). So don’t give me this garbage about the “not so elegant policy and politics” of a proposal that still comes under your preferred path forward.
That said, Spudis’ proposal doesn’t even assume $88 billion is the floor; the components are swappable and can be traded against time while still making progress. $88 billion is the cost to get it done with no initial depoting, no commercial lift, and a heavy launcher in 15 years.
@DCSCA
“Problem is, there are no commercial benefits to human space travel that can demand the kind of capital investments necessary to fly in this era of human history.”
I disagree. Polls have shown that 40% of Americans would love to travel into space– if they could afford to do so! But there are already at least 100,000 super wealthy people living on the planet that could afford the $20 million dollar plus ticket to fly into space if there were facilities in orbit for them to go. Even if only 10% of that group would be willing to spend the bucks and only 10% of that group got around to purchasing a ticket to a commercial space station every year, that would mean 1000 space passengers every year which would probably require at least 200 manned launches annually. That would dramatically increase the number of manned space launches per year which should correspondingly dramatically increase the demand for expendable rocket engines, resulting in huge reductions in their cost. This could finally allow our factories to begin the serial mass production of rocket engines by the hundreds or thousands every year. Rocket engines cost tens of millions of dollars each because of the low demand for such devices. High demand and serial mass production should dramatically lower their cost.
And further reductions in rocket engines and the cost of spaceflight would only increase demand for such services. Space tourism could be the catalyst that ignites a new space paradigm that could someday allow tens of thousands of people to travel into space annually by mid-century, IMO.
The concept of tourism may seem trivial, but on Earth its nearly a trillion dollar a year global industry.
FYI – line breaks don’t seem to be working consistently.
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
“So how about instead of dumping money to prop up a space station that does nothing, we dump money on projects that at least have a chance of spurring private sector settlement?”
Regardless how you feel, the ISS is the POR right now, and it has the support of Congress and the President. But the real problem seems to be that you have a completely different idea of what NASA should be doing, and until the Congressional appropriators agree with you, you’re going to have frustrated space fantasies…
@Das Boese
“How does a lunar return address these issues? What capabilities relevant to space warfare does a lunar settlement offer that could not be met easier, faster and more cheaply met from earth orbit or from the surface?
And what of the fact that a militarized lunar outpost would in and of itself present a vulnerable target, for both direct an indirect physical attacks as well as for electronic warfare?
Note that this is purely out of interest, I don’t actually agree with your idea of a “race†or the threat scenario you’re asserting. Just thought I’d make that clear.”
The EMP effects of a couple of thermonuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit could disable all of the world’s military and commercial satellites as far out as geosynchronous orbit in just a few minutes. Electromagnetic Pulse would also knock out most of the electricity, cars, and computers on the Earth’s surface making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the military to quickly launch replacement satellites.
Back-up military and even commercial satellites placed in shelters on the lunar surface, however, could be quickly deployed to GEO and LEO in just a few days using reusable lunar shuttles such as those proposed by Spudis and Lavoie.
Attacking the Moon from the Earth’s surface would be foolish since it takes several days for any device to reach the lunar surface. Plus the Moon could easily repel any such attack with military lasers already in existence and by intercepting such devices using high delta-v flights from the Moon. Even an EMP blast over a lunar base would have little effect since a lunar base would be buried beneath at least 5 meters of lunar regolith.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:10 pm
OK, let’s try this again. We seem to be getting hung up on very narrowly stated definitions of words that are in common usage.
First. You do not like (in fact seem to hate) the term subsidy, even though as previously stated I see nothing wrong with the government “subsidizing†a process in the attempt to get a desired result.
Now you appear to object to the word given as well. Never the less the commercial providers are receiving money from the government which is allowing them to pursue activities that they would have to otherwise raise money in the private market to work on (or forgo the activity). If they raised it in the private market they would have repay it. The standard way of doing this in private industry is to amortize the cost over some number of years of operations revenue. They will not have to (as I understand it) repay the government. This therefore (if they are successful at meeting their milestones) reduces their cost of development allowing lower operating costs.
I have no desire to needlessly offend anyone (people around this place seem to get into enough fights all by themselves). So, seriously, help me out; give me a set of “politically correct†phrases that I can substitute for subsidy (and even given) that will not cause offense. If this sounds like I am being sarcastic, I am not. I have (in the past) dealt with negotiations with both the Russians and the Japanese and I have never encountered anything quite as arcane as this aversion to a word as value neutral as given.
@Coastal Ron:
Would you say the same for the Shuttle infrastructure?
Irrelevant. I find the Spudis proposal intriguing precisely because it achieves the first worthwhile measure of VSE within constraints imposed by the most sacred of the Administrations’ and Congress’ cows.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
“The EMP effects of a couple of thermonuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit could disable all of the world’s military and commercial satellites as far out as geosynchronous orbit in just a few minutes.”
You do realize, of course, that what you’re describing would happen to our enemy too. And since we have more experience with EMP, and more military capabilities across the board, the advantages of this type of attack quickly fade away. Especially when you consider that the enemy will not have a civilian economy to rely upon (disabled during the attack).
“Back-up military and even commercial satellites placed in shelters on the lunar surface”
You could do the same on Earth for far less the cost, and rotate the inventory (First In First Out) so you always have current satellite units in storage. The cost for the same on the Moon would be very high, and no more secure.
“Attacking the Moon from the Earth’s surface…”
Who said that the enemy would only be located on Earth? If we’re on the Moon, so could they. Maybe you haven’t heard, but we don’t own the Moon, and every nation on Earth has the same rights to it as we do.
Please avoid military justifications for your lunar fantasies – they waste electrons…
@Bill White wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
“We don’t need Constellation or a Constellation-like program to develop lunar resources.”
I agree.
“I support a DIRECT-like approach (Jupiters plus LEO & EML/LLO depots) because I believe that is needed to win votes in Congress. I also believe a robust lunar architecture done with Jupiters would be cheaper than a lunar architecture done entirely with EELVs.”
Well see the problem is here again. Jupiter will NOT work no matter the political support. The reason is fairly simple: There is no budget to support DIRECT or any SD vehicle. You really need to read the ESAS (http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/ESAS_report.html) and I believe you will see that their intent was to use SD material as much as possible. In the end it did not work and we spent $B to the wind. Jupiter will have the exact same fate. There is NO, zero, evidence to the contrary. Forget SD vehicles! They don’t work, financially that is, even if you can overcome all, ALL, the technical difficulties. I will try and give you a simple example. It is not because you use SD boosters and tanks that the new LV will follow the same ascent trajectory. If the vehicle does not follow the same ascent, exact same, you have to make sure your design can sustain all the environments (aerodynamic and aerothermal loads). On top of that if you want any form of LAS you have to do the same for ALL possible abort scenarios. The point is that you will most likely have to RE-design your LV. See in order to have an operational design, the design MUST close. Ares I and V do not close BECAUSE the SD elements were NOT designed for such vehicles. You CANNOT design a LV with “tape” and hope it is going to work. It will NOT. Please try and educate yourself on that matter. I do realize that not even some NASA management educated themselves for Constellation and we can see the mess we are ALL in. I am not saying to learn all the detail of aerospace design but at least the basics if you are to support this or that. Let me remind you further that it was “believed” that EELVs could not do the job because of “black” zones, similar issue that I am describing above. In the end the “belief” was proven wrong. Unbelievable don’t you think that “beliefs” take the place of sound engineering?! So again, Jupiter will not close no matter the nice power points. Neither would Ares, ever. If you get to learn more about what it takes to achieve your dreams you will become that much more powerful in your advocacy.
“However, if SpaceX can support a lunar architecture for less money than DIRECT and/or EELV and if Congress can be persuaded to fund that program, I am okay with that, also. Tossing in some Proton launches to lower costs and make it international is okay with me too.”
See here let me give you a little clue about SpaceX. If they can figure a way they WILL try to go lunar with or without government support. Actually they would rather do it without government support. But don’t take my words for it, go ask them.
“Anyway, I deny that a LEO only program will lower launch costs unless tourism and/or zero gee sports are embraced in a significant fashion and occasional asteroid missions won’t generate sufficient demand for mass in LEO to lower launch costs, either.”
It is NOT a LEO only program! Come on! It is a program that starts at LEO. LEO is essential for lowering the cost. I am sure you can see this, can’t you? You, like several others, are mixing up tourism, NASA, private, government but you put firewall between each activity and player. This is NOT the plan. The plan is to allow government access to LEO/ISS for a lot cheaper than today. At the SAME time lowering the cost to LEO might help spruce up commercial activities such as tourism allowing for more people to go there.It is a synergistic approach. And so on and so forth. Also if the cost are “low” enough then more players can play: Other countries, universities, industries that are otherwise denied access. You MUST start somewhere and somewhere is LEO, not the Moon, not Mars, not the asteroids.
And, not for you here, I am not even giving a thought to a NASA militarized Moon station. This is totally IDIOTIC. NASA is NOT part of the DoD, never was, never will.
“IMHO, if we want low launch costs then its either build and sustain a moon-base or facilitate big-time tourism and entertainment markets in LEO (or both).”
Again think parallel and synergy. It is more subtle than serial and compartmentalized thinking but it has more potential. Does not mean it will work though… That much I agree.
If this sounds like I am being sarcastic, I am not. I have (in the past) dealt with negotiations with both the Russians and the Japanese and I have never encountered anything quite as arcane as this aversion to a word as value neutral as given.
It’s not value neutral. It implies that nothing is received in return for it, and has the same connotation as “hand out,” which many defenders of Constellation and cost-plus have been idiotically using to bash the new plans.
“I find the Spudis proposal intriguing precisely because it achieves the first worthwhile measure of VSE”
How is spending $88 billion and 16 years to deliver water in space from lunar surface resources (or anywhere else) “worthwhile” when it can be done today for a fraction of that cost?
It’s arguable that such a plan is better than aimless lunar missions with no clear technical goals, but how is this particular goal “worthwhile” given that the terrestrial competition would still be years faster and billions cheaper?
Moreover, who is the in-space customer for an annual 150mT of water, whether it comes from the Moon or Earth? If there’s no user, how can we assign a “worthwhile” value to the product?
“within constraints imposed by the most sacred of the Administrations’ and Congress’ cows.”
Based on the studies to date, if we want to put lots of water into space, there are cheaper ways to do it — that will even better fit the likely constraints of NASA’s human space flight budget going forward — than lunar resources.
FWIW…
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
“You do realize, of course, that what you’re describing would happen to our enemy too. And since we have more experience with EMP, and more military capabilities across the board, the advantages of this type of attack quickly fade away. Especially when you consider that the enemy will not have a civilian economy to rely upon (disabled during the attack).”
No rational country would explode an orbital nuclear device unless it were under the control of irrational people. If Pakistan ever came under the control of the Taliban then you might have such a scenario. Acts of suicide are not unknown in the Middle East!
The US did explode a small nuclear device in orbit back in the 1960s but government officials were unaware at that time that such weapons would produce EMP effects. The explosion knocked out electricity in some parts of Hawaii.
The radical leadership of a country might also explode such devices as a last desperate act if they felt that their nation was under siege by a hostile western power.
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
in response to this post and an earlier one.
I get it now, the foundation of your beliefs is that “space” is something like the American west…its not.
If the template is the American West (or any other place people have traveled to and settled on a permenant basis) the door is and has been closed on that for over a generation, and it is unlikely to reopen in our lifetime…
meaning all the land that can be settled…land that can justify the cost of settling it by providing a “living” to the people who have settled it ….has been settled. No one lives permenantly at the South Pole, few live in the Western Sahara and few live in (mostly) red states of the American west for a reason…There is no ability to “live” at the standard of today’s living doing something that can substance that living.
OH a guy and gal (or just one person) can take a few hand tools and carve together a life of the old western Mountain man…but most space junkies wouldnt live that life…and that life is 1000 times easier and less expensive then life on the Moon.
To justify Spudis plan, when water from EArth is a lot cheaper NOW requires a lot of “blue sky” justifications…and unless the federal dollars come along (and they wont…) then the notion doesnt exist.
The Republic did not “send people” out to the west…they went on their own because an individual could go with the technology that was available for a cost an individual could afford and stand an “OK” chance of survival. and there was mostly free land.
That is not accurate in space…unless the nation subsidizes the effort almost no person period, and no one who is seriously interested in the effort can afford to go to the Moon and make a go out of it.
And after that, with the fact that the product is far more expensive from the Spudis effort then could be had by simply launching the product from EArth…that is the end of the effort.
Like Iraq we will never get our monies worth back from Spudis plan. And thats why it will never be done.
It would be 1000 times easier to build a city on the bottom of the sea, where there are far more accessable resources then on the Moon. And yet no one does it, because the value is not there. The closest we have come are oil rigs (excluding nuclear subs which are an entirely different purpose) and no one lives on those permanently. No one lives at the South Pole in a permanent state.
After 50 years of NASA BS we will be lucky if in the next 30 years of human spaceflight we can find some price break/use for HSF which takes it from the government dole to a taxpaying plus.
That is the foundation that space policy should be built on.
Robert G. Oler
Joe wrote:
“Now you appear to object to the word given as well. Never the less the commercial providers are receiving money from the government which is allowing them to pursue activities that they would have to otherwise raise money in the private market to work on (or forgo the activity). “
No, the federal budget is providing funds for NASA to carry out their mandated objectives. One of NASA’s objectives is to have a commercial launch service created to provide them with cargo resupply to the ISS. NASA provided written documents to the COTS winners with what that service entails and what particular bells and whistles they want and when they reach the defined milestones they will recieve a percentage of the total COTS award amount. SpaceX has provided most of those milestones to date and have received about 250 mil of the total 278 million.
SpaceX is not receiving money to pursue activities they would have been pursuing on their own. They were not building a launch capability to the ISS, they were building a commercial satellite launch capability using all of the publically available NASA documents for human ratings with a long term goal of launching humans with the same systems. When NASA put out the COTS award SpaceX tossed their hat in the ring to win that award and adapt their system to meet NASA requirements. Falcon 9 is a dual use launch system and was specifically designed for that from the ground up.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
“The EMP effects of a couple of thermonuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit could disable all of the world’s military and commercial satellites as far out as geosynchronous orbit in just a few minutes. ”
no.
the affects of an enemy doing as you suggest would be equally painful to “them” and our satellites particularly our military ones would be far more resilent to EMP then almost any other countries.
If a triple seven (777) survived the blast of a “gadget” its electronics would survive the EMP.
And in any event a lunar “storage shelter” would be useless in terms of satellite replacement…and equally easily destroyed.
A nail looking for both a hammer and a 2X4…
Robert G. Oler
Das Boese wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:38 pm [Let me reiterate the question with some clarification and highlighting of the important parts:
“What (specific!) capabilities relevant to space warfare (hypothetical clandestine or overt international conflict involving the use of space assets) does a lunar settlement (civilian or military?) offer that could not be easier, faster and more cheaply met from earth orbit or from the surface?
And what of the fact that a (militarized) lunar outpost would in and of itself present a vulnerable target, for both direct an indirect physical attacks as well as for electronic warfare?â€]
You have a nice imagination Das Boese. Where did all that come from?
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:41 pm [………If you spend tens of billions of dollars developing and testing systems on the Moon, you’ll get lunar systems…..]
We don’t know if we can develop off-planet resources. We need to demonstrate that ability. Are you suggesting we begin that learning curve on Mars?
Joe wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Re: proper words
He won’t be happy until you agree that they deserve the money.
Regardless how you feel, the ISS is the POR right now
Only 1 year ago, the POR had ISS deorbiting in 2015. Then a capricious administration and congress made it permanent, not having a clue of what else to do. I expect the political winds to shift yet again when a more sober congress realizes that ISS distorts the budget and denies the development of a viable post shuttle launch capability..
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 2:24 pm
“It’s not value neutral. It implies that nothing is received in return for it, and has the same connotation as “hand out,†which many defenders of Constellation and cost-plus have been idiotically using to bash the new plans.â€
OK, but that statement you quoted was in conjunction with a request for a set of terms acceptable to “all of you†that would not offend your “well developed†sensitivities. Did not notice any suggestions there. Or do you just enjoy being offended?
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 2:25 pm […..Moreover, who is the in-space customer for an annual 150mT of water, whether it comes from the Moon or Earth? If there’s no user, how can we assign a “worthwhile†value to the product?….]
I seriously doubt savvy investors will be sitting on their hands, gazing at their navels for 16 years if we’re sending robots to the Moon to demonstrate ISRU.
For anyone interested, please read the architecture for yourself. Because if I only read this thread (how it has been sliced and diced) I’d have questions.
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
Or access it at Air and Space’s “Once and Future Moon” blog post.
Can we afford to return to the Moon?
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
“Joe wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Re: proper words
He won’t be happy until you agree that they deserve the money.â€
Actually to be fair to Coastal Ron he does not seem to have responded yet. Rand and Vladislaw gave the responses so far.
Never the less I take your point.
He won’t be happy until you agree that they deserve the money.
Are you saying that people who provide a desired product or service don’t deserve to get paid for it?
@ Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
“We don’t know if we can develop off-planet resources. We need to demonstrate that ability. Are you suggesting we begin that learning curve on Mars?”
I am not Major Tom but it must be frustrating at times. Where did MT say that we should learn anything on Mars? I sure hope I don’t ever have to review any one of your proposal for anything because language comprehension seem to be something hard.
Why do “we need to demonstrate that ability”? Why? To do what?
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
“I seriously doubt savvy investors will be sitting on their hands, gazing at their navels for 16 years if we’re sending robots to the Moon to demonstrate ISRU. ”
why not? They have been doing that with the space station now for about 16 years…there is no group seriously thinking of investing in that turkey…it just cost to much to operate there.
As does the program Paul has come up with.
We spend 88-XXX billion dollars with about 6-10 billion a year recurring cost for something that can be had for under 1 billion from Earth.
OK the same folks who bought that Saddam was going to kill us might think that is a good deal but no one else, no one with money will.
All this is is a scam to try and restart lunar exploration by humans.
Goofy
Robert G. Oler
“We don’t know if we can develop off-planet resources. We need to demonstrate that ability.”
Agreed.
“Are you suggesting we begin that learning curve on Mars?”
No, I’m stating that an $88 billion effort that consumes practically all of the nation’s civil human space flight funding for 16 years just to produce 150mT of in-space water per year is a non-starter, especially when we could launch that amount of water to space from Earth each year starting today and when we could provide ~2,400mT of in-space water from Earth over 16 years for billions less than the $88 billion lunar plan.
As I stated in an earlier reply to you:
“I’m all for exploring the potential of lunar and other extraterrestrial
resources. Given recent discoveries, there are robotic precursors and technology demonstrations that make a lot of sense to pursue at the ~$10-100Mx level. Things that the White House’s FY11 budget for NASA proposed to do (see the Teleoperated Lunar Lander on slide 14 of this presentation):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/457443main_EEWS_ExplorationsPrecursorRoboticMissions.pdf
Or that NASA is already doing under this White House:
http://www.xprize.org/media-center/press-release/nasa-embraces-commercial-lunar-explorers-and-becomes-customer-of-google-l
But the huge, tens of billions of dollar infrastructure costs and multi-decade time to market of existing lunar ISRU concepts are uneconomic and uncompetitive at best and unrealistic scifi at worst. A lot, lot more work needs to be done before they can become the baseline or goal for a human space effort.”
If you want to advocate for lunar ISRU, then focus, like NASA under the current White House proposes to do, on the near-term, immediate, multi-ten and -hundred million dollar robotic steps needed to identify the local sources and characterize them.
Building multi-billion dollar spreadsheets of human lunar launch, transit stage, and lander costs and writing dozens of pages about those spreadsheets in the absence of even knowing where you’re going to dig and what the ice is like at that location — nevertheless any extraction technique and transportation infrastructure that’s efficient enough to compete with the terrestrial alternative of just launching Earth water to space on existing rockets — is a huge waste of effort. All that “study” has done is show how impractical and uncompetitive lunar resource utilization remains. Instead of advancing the endeavour with some actual progress, it’s just thrown up more questions about why lunar ISRU is worth pursuing at all.
FWIW…
Anne,
Do you believe there is anything, technically, stopping the United States from developing resources on Luna?
Do you believe there is anything, technically, stopping the United States from sending those resources from the surface of Luna to any point inside the Earth Sun Lagrange points?
Do you feel the 88 billion is the best use of taxpayers funds to achieve the objective of proving that resources can be developed on Luna at a best cost?
What percentage of the 88 billion do you feel should be used to promote commercial activities as well?
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Was my sentence not clear? My grammar poor? My spelling misleading, wrong?
Or did I just happen upon a Monty Python bit?
http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/sketch.htm
“Only 1 year ago, the POR had ISS deorbiting in 2015.”
Source? Reference? Link? What policy, plan, or budget document did this milestone appear in?
“ISS distorts the budget and denies the development of a viable post shuttle launch capability.”
The ISS budget is less than half the Shuttle budget prior to the retirement rampdown. Why would anyone need more than the Shuttle budget for a “viable post shuttle launch capability”?
common sense wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:04 pm [I am not Major Tom but it must be frustrating at times. Where did MT say that we should learn anything on Mars? I sure hope I don’t ever have to review any one of your proposal for anything because language comprehension seem to be something hard.]
I’m sorry you are confused. Go to Major Tom’s post that I referenced
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
in the post you’ve weighed in on (apparently to insult me).
I’m not going to play your, “repeat it again” game.
@Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Feel free to disagree however history is on my side. Polls also show many ‘Americans’ (and HSF is not necessarily the province of Americans only BTW) believe Elvis is alive and Earth has been visited by little green men.
The largess of initial costs necessary from private capital markets and the mimimal ROI due to the limitations of the very market it tries to service, commerical HSF will never ‘lead the way’ out into the cosmos in this era. That’s why governments do it.
A quick review of history also shows that it has been facist and socialist/communist government efforts, for political gain, not financial profit, which pushed the science and technology forward, not commercial enterprise. Western efforts have always been reactive, not proactive– and in the case of the United States, government led. ‘For profit’ private enterprise follows along, cashing in where it could. And the pattern is reappearing as the PRC ramps up its space efforts in this century.
@Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
“The Republic did not “send people†out to the west…they went on their own because an individual could go with the technology that was available for a cost an individual could afford and stand an “OK†chance of survival. and there was mostly free land.”
Inaccurate. ‘The Republic’ peppered the plains with installations (aka ‘forts’) peopled with soldiers and their families sent by ‘The Republic.” Many of those ‘forts’ evolved into the cities we have today, initially seeded by government installations. =sigh=
@common sense
I would be very pleased if SpaceX (and Bigelow) undertook a lunar program without NASA involvement. And, a NewSpace effort that beat NASA back to the Moon would be good for TV ratings, IMHO.
But regardless of who does it I see the primary drivers for low cost access to LEO as being either (1) logistics for a moon-base and/or (2) LEO tourism and entertainment business models.
NASA buying a handful of flights for ISS or occasional asteroid missions will not generate sufficient demand to significantly lower costs, at least IMHO.
See people I for one don’t really need to read a paper whose conclusion includes:
“If God wanted man to become a space-faring species, He would have given man a Moon.†– Krafft Ehricke, 1985
God??? God is part of the plan now? God is why we are, or not, going to the Moon? Maybe then the whole plan ought to be funded by “the” Church?
I for one hope that the GOP deficit hawks stay true to their word and try and cut the deficit….including the cuts at NASA.
NASA needs a good house cleaning and a good chopping, while sadly taking some good wood with it, would prune most of the bad wood….Plus it would end the notion of NASA developing rockets when it really no longer has the expertise to do that.
Second it would be a sea change in how we do human spaceflight.
The notion of abandoning the “project mentality” so loved by the big government proponents of NASA is important. this alone will lower cost as we see private enterprise work its magic on the cost of human spaceflight…and it will open up the notion of innovation in both technology and use.
Third…Those of us who love political theater can also sit back and watch the “big government NASA fans” here…try and shift the blame from the GOP to someone else. I am for one enjoying the notion of whittington and others squirming.
Sadly I I doubt it will happen.
there are going to be some “goofy charges” by the House (Have you read the title of the bill that is set to repeal the health care changes? Goofy) that are doomed to failure.
and pretty soon the GOP faithful will find that the spending outside of their district is pork, but the one inside their district valued infrastructure.
But its going to be fun to watch…
missed the solar eclipse…I was to far south 6 degrees north of the equator…They had nice pictures of “me” (and a few others) on the BBC!
Robert G. Oler
Robert G. Oler
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:05 pm [All this is is a scam to try and restart lunar exploration by humans.]
Others might not have your take on an architecture designed for lunar resource development on the Moon to create a sustainable, extensible space faring infrastructure.
Anne Spudis wrote:
“We don’t know if we can develop off-planet resources. We need to demonstrate that ability. Are you suggesting we begin that learning curve on Mars?”
Anne,
What some of the more strident “commercial” space advocates don’t seem to realize is that they’ve boxed themselves into a corner of sorts. Because of their use (some might say “misuse”) of the term “commercial,” they seem to think space exploration proponents are bound by the same restrictions. That is, any space mission has to turn a profit or at least break-even. They’re thinking about short-term ROIs. But, as I’ve suggested in a previous thread, “exploration” does not equal “commercial” … and exploring space is not the same as exploiting space.
Your husband’s plan doesn’t purport to be commercial. It simply offers a means to reduce the cost of exploring space beyond Earth orbit. At the same time, he and Mr. Lavoie have put together a plan that would enable us (humankind) to learn to live “off the land” on other worlds. All of which is invaluable to the EXPLORATION of space. There are no short-term ROIs to be gained by going to the Moon. Which is why governments have to foot the bills for manned and unmanned missions to the Moon — and for unmanned missions to Mars, and to Venus and Mercury, and to asteroids and comets, and to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. Not to mention orbiting observatories. That is why we haven’t seen the private sector launch their own spacecraft beyond Earth orbit for the past 50 years. Yet, we HAVE seen the Soviet, American, Chinese, Japanese and Indian governments send missions to the Moon (and beyond).
We also see governments fund all sorts of basic scientific research here on terra firma. Think astronomical observatories, particle accelerators, etc. And we’ve seen governments fund explorers throughout history. Think Ferdinand & Isabella, Elizabeth I, Thomas Jefferson, John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, etc. The private sector simply didn’t have the means to mount those voyages of discovery themselves. But where explorers paved the way, the private sector has often followed. And THAT is what Paul Spudis and Tony Lavoie are trying to create in space.
In short, it is not so much a matter of “how much?” ($88 billion or whatever.) It’s more a matter of, “Do we, as a nation, have the will to explore? Are we willing to invest in our country’s long-term future?” In the case of space exploration, it’s also a matter of investing in humankind’s long-term future. Which is why a lunar outpost would undoubtedly be supported by partners from around the globe — just like the ISS.
One last point …
You have been repeatedly criticized for advocating a return to the Moon because “there is no commercial value in going there” (or words to that effect). But I would counter that those who talk about the future of “commercial” space are kidding themselves if they think there will be any short-term ROIs without large amounts of NASA (taxpayer) dollars funding their efforts. They echo many of the same promises that were made by Space Shuttle proponents nearly 40 years ago. And 40 years later, the “commercial” market in space is still very limited. Basically, it’s confined to commercial satellites — NOT private sector human spaceflight. If that weren’t the case, why hasn’t Arianespace developed its own manned spacecraft? Yet, Arianespace has done quite well launching commercial satellites.
I believe one long-range advantage of the Spudis-Lavoie plan is that the Moon would offer more commercial opportunities some day than low Earth orbit ever will — both in terms of lunar resources AND space tourism. It might be 100 years from now. But we have to start someplace if it’s ever going to happen.
That’s why I supported COTS (as did George W. Bush and Michael Griffin) because it represents a start toward the genuine commercial spaceflight of the more distant future — and because it has helped to generate innovative ideas for accessing space in the short-term.
What I find a little ironic is that some of the same people who praise Elon Musk to the hilt (it’s almost like a cult of personality) seem to miss his comments about the Moon and Mars. Musk doesn’t limit his thinking to Low Earth Orbit. But many of his fans do.
Curious, don’t you think?
common sense wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
“See people I for one don’t really need to read a paper whose conclusion includes:
“If God wanted man to become a space-faring species, He would have given man a Moon.†– Krafft Ehricke, 1985
God??? God is part of the plan now? God is why we are, or not, going to the Moon? Maybe then the whole plan ought to be funded by “the†Church?â€
Wow, now we are down to dissing Krafft Ehricke who is, of course conveniently dead and unable to respond.
Stay classy man.
common sense wrote:
“God??? God is part of the plan now? God is why we are, or not, going to the Moon? Maybe then the whole plan ought to be funded by ‘the’ Church?”
You’re taking Krafft Ehricke’s comment out of context, and you know it. But for the record, the world-class Vatican Observatory IS funded in large measure by the Catholic Church. Penance for the Galileo case, perhaps.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
It took me 15 minutes of trying to correct the technical misconceptions which alone doom your scenario to realize just how patently absurd it is.
So, aside from all the technical reasons…
1. Of all the nuclear powers, only Russia and the USA and possibly (but unlikely) China even have the capability for such an attack, by which I mean the ability to build EMP-enhanced nuclear weapons and launch them. None of them are insane enough to even consider it because
2. An attempt to attack with nuclear EMP devices is indistinguishable from any other nuclear first strike, thus retaliation will be immediate and total. In other words, World War 3.
Simple logic reveals that this strategy is undesirable. In the best-case scenario, the attacker will be turned into radioactive dust while the rest of the world merely experiences a temporary setback to 1940s era technology, in the worst case we’ll eradicate ourselves from the planet.
You’ll certainly agree that a lunar base is not of very much use either way, except perhaps in the second case as a kind of bizarre technological tombstone, an enduring monument for the brief existence of our species.
But the huge, tens of billions of dollar infrastructure costs and multi-decade time to market of existing lunar ISRU concepts are uneconomic and uncompetitive at best and unrealistic scifi at worst. A lot, lot more work needs to be done before they can become the baseline or goal for a human space effort.â€
If you want to advocate for lunar ISRU, then focus, like NASA under the current White House proposes to do, on the near-term, immediate, multi-ten and -hundred million dollar robotic steps needed to identify the local sources and characterize them.
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:06 pm [………..Building multi-billion dollar spreadsheets of human lunar launch, transit stage, and lander costs and writing dozens of pages about those spreadsheets in the absence of even knowing where you’re going to dig and what the ice is like at that location — nevertheless any extraction technique and transportation infrastructure that’s efficient enough to compete with the terrestrial alternative of just launching Earth water to space on existing rockets — is a huge waste of effort. All that “study†has done is show how impractical and uncompetitive lunar resource utilization remains. Instead of advancing the endeavour with some actual progress, it’s just thrown up more questions about why lunar ISRU is worth pursuing at all.]
Now you are just misleading and spinning a big fish story. Did you get the wrong link?
This is the architecture I’m discussing:
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
DCSCA wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Inaccurate. ‘The Republic’ peppered the plains with installations (aka ‘forts’) peopled with soldiers and their families sent by ‘The Republic.â€..
nope…the forts “mostly” came after the settlements and defiantly after the people…who went without a big government program.
Robert G. Oler
@Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
“I’m sorry you are confused. Go to Major Tom’s post that I referenced
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
in the post you’ve weighed in on (apparently to insult me).
I’m not going to play your, “repeat it again†game.”
No I am not “insulting” you. Where? I may be harsh but there is no “insult” in my post.
Major Tom answered now. But in the post you refer to Major Tom said
“If you spend tens of billions of dollars developing and testing systems on the Moon, you’ll get lunar systems. You won’t get systems that are extensible to another destination such as Mars, except maybe in the most generic of ways. If you want systems for Mars or other destinations, then you have to build for Mars and test those systems in Mars-like environments, either simulated (therm/vac/vibe/rad) or best approximations on Earth (Arctic, upper atmosphere) or near-space (long-duration flight above the Van Allen Belts).”
Now the key words are “If you want systems for Mars or other destinations”. All Major Tom is saying and rightfully so is that no system, or very few, actually designed for the Moon will be extensible to Mars or anywhere that does not “look” like our moon.
If you think that questioning your comprehension is insulting then you probably never published a scientific paper in your life. Is that an insult too? So in essence I am “peer-reviewing” your comments and I am telling you with all due respect that they don’t make any sense.
Here is the definition of “insult” for you and if somehow I insulted you then I do sincerely apologize. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&defl=en&q=define:insult&sa=X&ei=p5kjTfqADorCsAOetbCdAg&ved=0CBMQkAE
Ah Anne anybody with any knowledge of chemistry knows that it is indeed possible to make anything on the moon as long as the necessary elements are present. However making money is another story. Even on earth you can turn coil into gasoline but the cost of turning coil into gasoline is currently not justified because it would cost three times more to turn coal into gasoline than to turn oil into gasoline.
Investors will flock when there is an established market and when they think that exporting it from the moon could be cheaper than from earth.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
You have a nice imagination Das Boese. Where did all that come from?
The New Space Race (SpaceRef, Feb. 2010) [Excerpt] Warfare in space (…) Both issues are equally important and both are addressed by lunar return. …….[End excerpt]
@ Bill White wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
“I would be very pleased if SpaceX (and Bigelow) undertook a lunar program without NASA involvement. And, a NewSpace effort that beat NASA back to the Moon would be good for TV ratings, IMHO.”
Yes absolutely. But you must also understand that SpaceX is a commercial company. One of their major customer is NASA. NASA decided they need transport cargo, so far, to the ISS and possibly crew. SpaceX exists to develop LVs and RVs. It only is natural they try to answer a request from a major customer, NASA. Now, NASA is not and by far their only customer if not the most publicized but I encourage you to visit their website and/or call their PR department. Musk has a dream for sure but he certainly is savvy when it comes to make money. Why in heck would he go this route if there was no money to be made? Just to lose his personal fortune? Is it a very risky gamble some how? You bet it is. But as you know the riskier the higher the pay off. But here agin you make it NewSpace vs. NASA. In the NewSpace world NASA is a partner not a competitor. Now this view may not be shared by every one at NASA, especially within Constellation but believe they will be the first to go, sooner or later. NASA with the help of NewSpace will go forward, the others will watch. Note further that the commercials are not exclusively SpaceX. Please read who sent a bid to CCdev to convince you otherwise.
“But regardless of who does it I see the primary drivers for low cost access to LEO as being either (1) logistics for a moon-base and/or (2) LEO tourism and entertainment business models.”
But as you say yourself “you” see that as primary drivers. Again think synergy. However a Moon base today only is fantasy. And since we are crystal-balling here is my prediction. The commercials will have opportunity(ies) to visit the Moon. They will, or not, find if there is a market for lunar resources. This will be done with NASA if NASA, but more so Congress, wakes up and is a participant rather than going into oblivion for lack of foresight. NASA with FY11 had an opportunity to develop the required technology. Most people who want to go to the Moon with fantasy plans cannot recognize that we do not have the cash that matches the current technology, hence fantasy. If NASA develops said technology then the commercials will benefit from it and will be able to explore. In the end if there is nothing of (immediate) value on the Moon or elsewhere that will be the end of it. So?
“NASA buying a handful of flights for ISS or occasional asteroid missions will not generate sufficient demand to significantly lower costs, at least IMHO”
Again synergy. You oversimplify NASA’s plan.
God has nothing to do in a paper for Moon exploration whether you like it or not. It is not taken out of context, it substantiates the “why” of the Moon plan. It is first and foremost in the “conclusion” of the paper.
Being “classy” in my world means that you keep your religion to yourself and don’t use “God” in vain. But that’s me.
Obviously some people may refer to God as they wish even to justify whatever it is they want. But this is not classy it is sensational.
common sense wrote:
“Now the key words are ‘If you want systems for Mars or other destinations’. All Major Tom is saying and rightfully so is that no system, or very few, actually designed for the Moon will be extensible to Mars or anywhere that does not ‘look’ like our moon.”
True, every world is unique. Yet, other than the landing sequence, much of the technology used for working on the lunar surface could be applied to the martian surface — including habitat modules, spacesuits, rovers and equipment for extracting and processing water ice and other resources. The Moon would be an excellent proving ground for living and working on other worlds. And, as the Spudis-Lavoie paper points out, it doesn’t have the communication delays that Mars missions will encounter. Thus, it is better (safer) to learn about living off the land on the Moon than it would be to get that experience for the first time on Mars. And that was Anne’s point.
As for “insults” … they seem to be tossed about with great frequency in the Blogosphere. Which is sad, in my opinion. The Internet provides a forum for people to discuss all sorts of topics. But more often than not, they simply choose to toss insults. “The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” And that is NOT a religious comment … it’s just an old saying to make a point. (As Krafft Ehricke was doing in the quote Spudis and Lavoie used.)
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:47 pm
“Others might not have your take on an architecture designed for lunar resource development on the Moon to create a sustainable, extensible space faring infrastructure.”
no doubt…there are people (you, Paul, Whittington, a few others come to mind) who see the logic in spending 88-XXX billion initially and 6 or so billion or more to get a product that from the Earth launched into space cost at worst 1-2 billion dollars.
Somehow you must see that logic because you (and Paul and some others) tirelessly advocate it.
Sadly for you outside of a few space groupie folks not many do…and very quickly the American people if such a plan would be presented to them would go “are you nuts?”
Not even the goofy right wing of the GOP House will probably go along with this.
People see strange things.. Whittington use to argue that Saddam was going to attack the US and that we could take down his country with under 50,000 people and ….you know he bought all the goofy stuff Bush and the rest of the thunderheads said.
It is just a measure of how extreme you folks are
Robert G. Oler
Joe wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
“Actually to be fair to Coastal Ron he does not seem to have responded yet.”
Sorry, was busy.
There are many ways of describing it, but what NASA is doing on the COTS and CRS programs is paying SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for services performed. They don’t perform them, they don’t get paid.
For the COTS program, the deliverables range from a Project Management Plan Review ($23.1M) to demonstration flights like the Dragon flight last December ($5M). All of these tasks are designed to show NASA that they are acquiring and mastering the capabilities to deliver cargo to the ISS under the CRS program.
For the CRS program it is even more simple. SpaceX and OSC get paid for successful deliveries of supplies to the ISS. No supplies, no payment.
Hope that helps.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
“I seriously doubt savvy investors will be sitting on their hands, gazing at their navels for 16 years if we’re sending robots to the Moon to demonstrate ISRU.”
A couple of things.
Savvy investors look for defendable markets, and so far you have not outlined one. If the goal is to deliver water to LEO or lunar orbit, then “savvy investors” today would invest in a company that would supply it from the Earth – less risk, shorter risk period, etc.
Savvy investors may indeed watch robots roaming about the Moon for 16 years, still trying to figure out a potential market. How much demand, how many competitors, what are the alternatives, who are the competitors – you know, the kind of questions no one has answered yet. It’s not personal, it’s business.
You can demonstrate ISRU all you want, but what motivates savvy investors is the ability to profit from an activity. Until the challenges, market and economics of it are clear, you won’t get many investors jumping into a brand new market, especially one that is based on the creation and movement of commodities. Savvy investors hate commodities in an immature market.
@Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:01 pm
FYI, ‘big government’ brought America into the 20th Century and launched America toward the stars… (as opposed to the private sector which did not) and saved ‘The Republic’ as well from the self-destructuve nature of rampant, unchecked, free market capitalism. (See TR and chiefly FDR for details on how the antique shackles of the 19th century were shed.)
William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Yet, other than the landing sequence, much of the technology used for working on the lunar surface could be applied to the martian surface — including habitat modules, spacesuits, rovers and equipment for extracting and processing water ice and other resources.
Utter nonsense.
There would be little, if any, commonality between these systems.
common sense wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:22 pm
I never had the honor (and yes I would have considered it one – so through me out of the glee club, oh wait I think “Major Tom†already did that) of meeting Dr. Ehricke, so I have no idea if he was even a religious man or not. However, the expression that so offends you (Is everybody that is such big “New Space†supporter that easily offended?) is clearly a play on the old expression “If God had intended man to fly, He would have given him wingsâ€. It doesn’t make any appeal to a higher authority or tell you anything about Ehricke’s religion (or for that matter lack of it).
Was my sentence not clear? My grammar poor? My spelling misleading, wrong?
Clearly, your point was not clear.
@ commonsense
After reading this, I’d say you and Anne Spudis agree rather more than you realize.
My reading of the Spudis / Lavoie plan is to develop robotic technology that can be used to ascertain how to extract lunar resources. As far as money? Send robots at a pace that can be afforded. Don’t send people until the technology is mature.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
NASA’s immediate future lay with building Orion. Anything else is going to end up on the cutting room floor.
Initiating large scale American space exploration projects in the Age of Austeritry is simply a luxury a government which borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends cannot afford. Boehner has already indicated DoD will skirt initial cuts as discretionary spending is hard-targeted for the budget ax (hence the notion of ‘protecting’ NASA by absorbing it into the DoD.) Get Orion flying. That’s America’s HSF program for the next decade.
@ William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Yes without the “tone” it is any one’s guess how the other is “talking” therefore we can easily be insulted. I can be insulted for people are using the word “God” in a technical paper because it is used in vain. It is not a casual conversation between friends when you submit a paper in a technical journal, conference, etc. Why would any one hold the high ground on how to use “God”? But enough of that, I stand by my words, even if anonymously…
I do not think space suits and other equipments can easily be tested on the Moon since there is an atmosphere on Mars. Not on the Moon. There are atmospheric cycle on Mars not the Moon. Can they be an okay first order approximation? Possibly but it is not even that clear to me.
Now you cannot, CANNOT, discount the “landing sequence” as you call it. Atmosphere vs. no atmosphere. Different gravity. You will need a vehicle to launch from Mars and that vehicle will be quite different from a lunar ascent vehicle. You (seem to) focus on the logistics on Mars and you (seem to) forget how we are going to get there. I am not advocating Mars rather saying that Major Tom is absolutely right. You cannot address a Mars exploration project with a Moon exploration project, both are significantly different. You can get some knowledge how to being able to live away from Earth but you might as well with an L1 station or a LEO station.
You and others (seem to) only want to see “it” happen in “your” lifetime. The problem, again, is that there is no budget commensurate with your dreams. Others like me would like to see a robust HSF. But your dreams tend to be shattered when others tell you “nice plan but no go no cash”. Well you then take a different approach: How much do I have? And what can I do with what I have? Life becomes “simpler”. It doesn’t mean you lose sight of your goal, only that you can adapt to changing circumstances which this plan does not. $88B is a number out of a hat. If you have ever worked on aerospace project you heard of the term BOE (Basis of Estimate)? It means that you need some basis to come up with your cost. For the Moon the only ever plan you can refer to is Apollo. There is no such thing as a funding level commensurate with Apollo funding in corrected or not dollars.
So now what? You tell me. Because so far none of those plans, including Constellation, has flown us anywhere, not even LEO.
William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
“But, as I’ve suggested in a previous thread, “exploration†does not equal “commercial†… and exploring space is not the same as exploiting space.
Your husband’s plan doesn’t purport to be commercial. It simply offers a means to reduce the cost of exploring space beyond Earth orbit.”
I think sometimes you try to draw a too hard of line between certain things, when reality is more nuanced. For instance, if NASA is going to explore something, they don’t do everything themselves. Regardless of who builds the exploration hardware, they depend on commercial launchers to get the hardware into space and on it’s way.
What the commercial world is advocating for is a the chance to do more for NASA, and in the process, NASA spends less. In a perfect world, this would mean more money for NASA programs, but the politics of this muddy the waters. Nevertheless, having commercial crew capabilities would give NASA a way to get crew to LEO for far less than NASA can do on it’s own.
And really the definition of commercial crew is in some ways a misnomer, because as I have previously stated, I’m sure NASA can buy their own capsules from SpaceX, Boeing or whoever, and run things their way. This would be same model the Air Force & Navy use for aircraft and ships.
Regarding the Spudis/Lavoie plan, according to Anne there is a commercial aspect to it, because they want investors to come in (investors require revenue). Also, they are advocating that it is worth $88B to the U.S. to set up a water production facility on the Moon.
This “fueling station on the Moon” is hardly “a means to reduce the cost of exploring space beyond Earth orbit“, but just one component in the supply chain for exploration.
Man does not explore the cosmos on water alone.
“For the CRS program it is even more simple. SpaceX and OSC get paid for successful deliveries of supplies to the ISS. No supplies, no payment.”
Not quite true. They get progress payments for passing mission integration milestones. The final payment which is based on successful delivery is 25-40% of the mission fee.
@Robert G. Oler
“The EMP effects of a couple of thermonuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit could disable all of the world’s military and commercial satellites as far out as geosynchronous orbit in just a few minutes. â€
“no.
the affects of an enemy doing as you suggest would be equally painful to “them†and our satellites particularly our military ones would be far more resilent to EMP then almost any other countries.
If a triple seven (777) survived the blast of a “gadget†its electronics would survive the EMP.
And in any event a lunar “storage shelter†would be useless in terms of satellite replacement…and equally easily destroyed.
A nail looking for both a hammer and a 2X4…
Robert G. Oler”
Again, you’re assuming your enemy is rational or that they care about the fate of others in their country.
Again, a thermonuclear weapon exploded in Earth orbit would have no effect on the Moon. Its range of EMP destruction would only extends to geosynchronous orbit.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
“We don’t know if we can develop off-planet resources.”
For someone that purports to believe in American exceptionalism, this is a pretty negative comment.
The answer, of course, is that we WILL be able to develop off-planet resources. There are no barriers to us doing that, once we devote the time and money.
Ah, but the money required is quite high, even by fiscal standards of today, and because there is no great need, it will have to wait.
But Paul should keep stimulating the economy by churning out his papers, because who knows, he might actually propose a Moon plan some day that is affordable. Miracles do happen…
And I’ll restate a previous comment I have made. Paul should strip out the transportation elements of his plan, and just define what he needs delivered and where – let the market decide how best to get it there. Oh, and drop any notion that this plan “sets man free to roam the universe”, or however they term it. Focus on the robotic exploration and exploitation of the Moon – the rest will happen on it’s own.
COTS is doing something that no other NASA program has ever done by rewarding efficiency, creating diversity, invigorating innovation and utilizing scalability. There is no guarantee of success but diversity helps by not relying on one vendor for one system. We will have multiple spacecraft with different capabilities. A Virgin orbital vehicle would be great for crew large crews and passengers while Falcon and EEVL are scalable for cargo and specialized crew. The commercial path get wider as we proceed.
The X prise was another example of competition working. It helped to get new commercial its start.
@Oler:
$88 billion gets you water, depots, and a lunar settlement primed for growth, all the while leaving the rest of your quaint priorities in place. Compare this to $100+ billion which gets you cheaper access to a useless space station and a laundry list of meaningless firsts.
Yeah. $88 billion < $100 billion.
I don’t know about that. VSE passed by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate. People seem to like the idea of going back to the Moon.
As opposed to $99 billion for Constellation, or $3 billion more for Flexible Path?
You’re saying the GOP won’t go with a cheaper 10 year outlay than the program on record? Surely you jest.
@pathfinder:
That logic changes the minute natural production and transport surpasses the cost of synthetics. How much would you wager we’d press oil out of coal before we imported it from…say…space?
And so markets just spontaneously pop into existence? Whether we’re talking private or public money, there are always going to be ventures with initial investors and early adopters who take the risk of the market imploding around them. At some point the risk is so great that no private entity can afford to take it on; the point where governments must start asking whether or not the reward is worth it in the long run.
@White:
The plug in a replacement.
@Oler:
Trite. I never said space is like the American west, anymore than the American west was like the West Indies, Baluchistan, or…say…any place outside of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago.
You’ll forgive me if I largely skip over this silly tangent.
By law.
The whole of the Western Sahara is within a few hundred miles reach of any major North African city. The Moon, unfortunately, is not.
Safe to say that you’re pulling this shot at middle America out of thin air, but that’s another discussion for another day.
To justify Spudis plan, when water from EArth is a lot cheaper NOW requires a lot of “blue sky†justifications…
Earth is the only supply of water available now, so attempting to compare price is meaningless.
Why not? We’re dumping $100 billion into not doing VSE’s only task of interest. So why not spend $12 billion less and do something worthwhile?
The Republic sent explorers, geographers, cadastres, naturalists, and the goddamned military out West. And into Latin America. And across the specific. She paid for them out of the national purse and gave them one overriding mission–open up the land for exploitation and reduce barriers to trade.
If you’re going to argue a strawman about how space and the West are different, it would help if you at least got the West’s history right.
Except it’s not. An oil rig alone costs you $500 million. Congrats, your seasploitation is now in the realm of national space budgets. That said, who gives a crap? If you want to colonize the sea, go ahead. That’s not an argument against settling space.
Once again, by law.
Dude, do you even have a clue as to what the foundation–if any ever emerges–is for?
@Das Boese
It took me 15 minutes of trying to correct the technical misconceptions which alone doom your scenario to realize just how patently absurd it is.
So, aside from all the technical reasons…
1. Of all the nuclear powers, only Russia and the USA and possibly (but unlikely) China even have the capability for such an attack, by which I mean the ability to build EMP-enhanced nuclear weapons and launch them. None of them are insane enough to even consider it because
2. An attempt to attack with nuclear EMP devices is indistinguishable from any other nuclear first strike, thus retaliation will be immediate and total. In other words, World War 3.
Simple logic reveals that this strategy is undesirable. In the best-case scenario, the attacker will be turned into radioactive dust while the rest of the world merely experiences a temporary setback to 1940s era technology, in the worst case we’ll eradicate ourselves from the planet.
You’ll certainly agree that a lunar base is not of very much use either way, except perhaps in the second case as a kind of bizarre technological tombstone, an enduring monument for the brief existence of our species.”
Again, any EMP attack would either be an attack of state terrorism or of suicidal desperation by fanatical leaders who could care less about the fate of their own people. 9-11 wasn’t some attempt to conquer the United States– it was a suicidal act of terror that cost the lives of a few thousand people while costing the west trillions economically. Nuclear weapons.
But any attack that completely wipes out our military satellite systems would have to be quickly replaced. A lunar base could launch replacement satellites immediately and have them deployed at GEO and LEO in just a few days. But it might take weeks, months, or even years for terrestrial based launch systems to deploy replacement satellites for the military.
An EMP attack requires only one or two high powered thermonuclear weapons. It would however be extremely unlikely that such state sponsors of terrorism would have the capability to take out a lunar base that 4 days away.
Hi MT –
“The White House budget request for NASA released last February covered FY 2011, FY 2012, FY 2013, FY 2014, and FY 2015. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act signed into law last October authorizes funding for NASA in FY 2011, FY 2012, and FY 2013. The former preceded the latter, the latter covers three of the same fiscal years as the former, and the latter incorporates all the key elements (kills Ares I, invests in commercial crew, invests in exploration technology, accelerates an HLV) found in the former.”
MT, it seems that everyone else is mistaken then in thinking that work conintues on ATK’s 5 seg and the Ares 1 and Ares 5. Could you explain the source of this confusion for us?
This has probably been addressed before, but how is it that a “protection clause” for Constellation, in an FY10 appropriations act, can extend beyond FY10? That is, the bill language, as passed to public law, said “none of the funds provided herein and from prior years that remain available for obligation during fiscal year 2010 shall be available for the termination or elimination of any program, project or activity of the architecture for the Constellation program”. But the funds provided from the continuing resolution are not those provided “herein” in the FY10 appropriations bill. These are additional funds tacked on later.
In particular, the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which bundled Transp.-HUD, CJS, Financial Services, Labor-HHS, MilCon-VA, and State-ForOps appropriations did not call out specific expenditures for Constellation. Where it was called out was in the summary funding listed in the Conference Report which, after all, is not public law. That is, the Act itself, as passed into public law, doesn’t seem to specify expenditure on Constellation.
I guess this is an arcane legal point of continuing resolution that has already been settled by NASA LegAff and Legal, but I’ve never heard the point discussed. It’s remarkable how bill language in one year can end up hijacking policy well beyond that year. Maybe someone can elucidate.
“Yet, other than the landing sequence, much of the technology used for working on the lunar surface could be applied to the martian surface — including habitat modules, spacesuits, rovers and equipment for extracting and processing water ice and other resources.”
This is a very false statement.
The thermal management systems on a lunar habitat, rover, or EVA suit are very, very different from a martian habitat, rover, or EVA suit. Mars has an atmosphere, while the Moon does not. This means that martian systems can take advantage of convective effects to reject waste heat while lunar systems must rely entirely on radiative effects. High temperatures on Mars max out at 20C while lunar temperatures soar as high as 100C. So even if they used the same heat rejection systems, Mars and lunar systems have to deal with very different thermal environments.
The life support systems in a lunar habitat, rover, or EVA suit are very, very different from the life support systems in a martian habitat, rover, or EVA suit. In addition to the differences in atmosphere (or lack thereof) and temperature regimes, the toxic threats on the Moon (regolith dust) are very different from the toxic threats on Mars (hexavalent chromium). The systems used to reject lunar regolith dust are very different from the systems used to reject martian hexavalent chromium.
Even something as simple as the structures on a lunar habitat or rover are very, very different from the structures on a martian habitat or rover. The gravitational gradient on Mars is about twice that on the Moon. This means that Mars structures must be heavier and thicker than lunar structures, or they’ll risk warpage, bending, and collapse.
“The Moon would be an excellent proving ground for living and working on other worlds.”
No, it’s not. The Moon is a proving ground for living and work on the Moon. It’s not applicable to Mars or other destinations except in the most general, broadbrush way (e.g., they both need habitats, rovers, and EVA suits).
Naturally occuring Earth environments like the Arctic and upper atmosphere, as well as artificial environments like thermal/partial vac/radiation test chambers, have more in common with Mars than the lunar surface. If you want to go to Mars, you go there to test, not to the Moon.
“And, as the Spudis-Lavoie paper points out, it doesn’t have the communication delays that Mars missions will encounter.”
This is another major reason why you don’t practice Mars operations on the Moon. Surface operations with roundtrip communication timelags of only seconds with ground control (Moon) are very, very different from surface operations with roundtrip communication timelags of 40 minutes with ground control (Mars). Astronauts at Mars are going to need to be much more autonomous and independent than Apollo or ISS astronauts. And you can test those kinds of operations on Earth just by introducing a 40-minute time delay in your communications testbed. There’s no reason to go to the Moon.
“Thus, it is better (safer) to learn about living off the land on the Moon than it would be to get that experience for the first time on Mars.”
No, it wouldn’t. In fact, it’s not even possible. The resources you want to leverage on Mars, like atmospheric C02 for CH4 and O2, are completely different from the resources you want to leverage on the Moon, like polar H20 ice for liquid H20, H2, and O2. Even when considering just the ices, they’re very different in composition, with Mars ices incorporating large amounts of frozen CO2 while lunar ice does not. If you want to reduce the risk of martian ISRU, then you send robotic missions to Mars to test the techniques ahead of time. You don’t waste your time with lunar ISRU techniques that have no applicability to Mars.
Just to be clear, the above is not an argument for sending human missions to Mars over the Moon. I’m personablly skeptical that the biological potential of Mars will prevent human missions from visiting the martian surface for a very, very long time to come. But we shouldn’t make up false arguments about the applicability of lunar systems and operations to Mars systems and operations when the environments are so different and the resulting designs and procedures are so different. We can’t justify human lunar missions based on future human Mars missions. The rationale for a human return to the Moon has to stand on its own.
FWIW…
“Now you are just misleading and spinning a big fish story. Did you get the wrong link?
This is the architecture I’m discussing”
Yes, it’s the same study I linked to towards the beginning of this thread. Again, it makes no sense for a government or a commercial outfit to spend $88 billion over the next 16 years to get 150mT of water in space in year 17 when they can spend billions less dollars over the same amount of time and get 2,400mT of water in space by year 17 by just launching water from Earth on existing rockets.
Again, all that architecture “study†has done is show how impractical and uncompetitive lunar resource utilization remains. Instead of advancing the endeavour with some realizable near-term progress (such as the robotic missions needed to identify and characterize local polar ice sources), that study has just thrown up more questions about why lunar ISRU is worth pursuing at all.
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 7:00 pm
“We’re dumping $100 billion into not doing VSE’s only task of interest.”
Last I looked, the VSE was composed of four sections:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
It’s funny when the Moon First proponents point to the VSE as their justification for returning in force to the Moon, but they gleefully ignore the other portions of the VSE. Like the part where it says:
“Focus U.S. research and use of the International Space Station on supporting space exploration goals, with emphasis on understanding how the space environment affects astronaut health and capabilities and developing countermeasures“.
Hmm, if you want to follow the VSE, then you have to keep the ISS.
I guess my point is that if you want to use the VSE as justification for your Moon activities, then you can’t be selective about ignoring the other aspects of the VSE. You either support it, or you don’t. Otherwise you’re not supporting the VSE, and you should use some other justifications.
In any case, there are no penalties for ignoring the VSE, as the 2020 Moon date will eventually show – it’s an aspiration document, not force of law.
Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Inaccurate, as usual. Big government helped make th West a part of the Republic land and launched America toward the stars. big government is our future.
Das Boese wrote:
“Utter nonsense. There would be little, if any, commonality between these systems.”
Balderdash. First of all, basic hardware can be adapted for use in different environments — not just in space, but here on Earth, as well. Take the aircraft industry, for instance. The Antonov An-225 was derived from the An-124. They are two very different airplanes built around a common design. And the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 and MD-90 were derived from the original DC-9 Series 10 for very different markets. Perhaps a better example is the F-35. The ‘B’ version, with its V/STOL capabilities, is quite unlike the ‘A’ and ‘C’ versions. Yet, all three utilize some basic structures and components. Not exactly the same thing as the Moon and Mars, I know. But there is every reason to believe that lunar hardware could be adapted for martian use — just as aircraft are adapted for use in desert environments and arctic climes.
Just as importantly — and maybe even more so — is the operational experience that would be acquired while living and working on the Moon. There has been no experience with human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit for nearly four decades. Some of that original experience has been lost or forgotten. A new generation needs to regain that experience. Conveniently, the Moon is only three days away by spacecraft — and just a second or so away by radio. Flight controllers here on Earth can work in real-time with explorers on the Moon. Together, they can build up much useful experience working on a world just a quarter of a million miles away before going tens of millions of miles to Mars.
I sometimes wonder how much politics enters into the equation? Would we be reading the same negative comments about the Moon had President Obama called on NASA to devise a new plan to send humans back to the lunar surface (i.e., same goal, but a different architecture)? What if President Obama had called on Elon Musk to come up with a new approach to creating an outpost on the Moon? I suspect some of scorn heaped upon “Moon Firsters” would be missing from these threads if he had.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
“Again, you’re assuming your enemy is rational or that they care about the fate of others in their country. ”
lol
at the very least they would think things out better then you have.
It would take more then 1 EMP blast to get “all” or even a “chunk” of our satellites (at least the military ones.
An EMP blast would have zero affect on satellites that are on Earth in secure storage (they have thought of the EMP problem and they would be far easier to launch then on the Moon…and far cheaper then maintaining an infrastructure on the Moon to do so.
but nice try
As for “rationale” enemeis. Osama Son of Ladin was and is quite rationale. He has played the US (at least Mr. Bush) hook line and sinker..
stay out of military space matters…you know even less about that then you do civilian space.
Robert G. Oler
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 7:00 pm
“Trite. I never said space is like the American west, anymore than the American west was like the West Indies, Baluchistan, or…say…any place outside of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago”
the first sentence aside (and there is some comment there) but I want to get this off before heading out for ops this morning (I am in Africa!)…
all that paragraph shows is that you dont understand the issue the pivot point of what separates space (and the ocean) from everything else humanity has done in terms of settling areas.
Since the first moment that human kind started “moving” (and we can ignore the discussion of how people started)…the “roamings” of people have been accomplished with the technology that is needed for “every day” life by almost all cultures. Until sailing ships become “routine” technology and did so for reasons which had nothing to do with exploration there was not a lot of venturing over the oceans.
Space (and the ocean) take technology just to live…that has no other application on the Earth…and without that technology there is no life…not just any standard of living.
Until you grasp that basic fact and understand why it makes space and the oceans different then anyplace on Earth then you will always respond to the notion that the reason people do not live permanently at the South Pole is because of the law.
you could change the law, and that wouldnt change the reality.
The rest of your post falters along the same lines and later this afternnon I might continue to take it apart…but right now I am off to “fly”.
Long Live The Republic
Robert G. Oler
@ Joe wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Well you do not understand my problem, clearly, with this statement. I am going to try again. I may sound a little slow to you so maybe you can again explain it to me.
Having a reference to God in a technical paper that is a “justification” for exploring the Moon is not appropriate no matter what you think. This is not a casual conversation between friends but supposedly a proposal to go explore the Moon. Something that the community is supposed to adhere to. It is the exact purpose of such a statement to make appeal to a higher authority even if it is supposed to be taken with a grain of salt. I will say it again. It is not appropriate in a proposal on a technical paper. A reference is made to support a point of view or a technical assessment or whatever so that you do not have to redo the work of others who already have done some work and whose work has been peer reviewed.
In this particular context this statement is out of line. Period. I know it is fashionable to use God for anything these days from pipe line to wars but it does not make it right.
@Coastal Ron:
Of interest, as in:
More meaningless fluff, a project manager’s version of trite admonishments to “center oneself and make the most out of life.”
You’re conflating “support” with “following.” I’m no saint, but even if I were the VSE is no Bible.
Wait, why can’t I be selective?
I support VSE because it delivers something I want at a price I’m willing to pay. And I don’t even have to be as optimistic as those Flexible Path supporters who believe they can kill Constellation, wring commercial out of the Administration, ditch Obama in 2012, and get back to their favorite bits of VSE.
Or what? You’ll call the cops?
My point exactly.
@ Bill White wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:55 pm
“After reading this, I’d say you and Anne Spudis agree rather more than you realize.”
Nope I don’t think so. I say they put the carriage way before the horse(s). And that is a major difference. They will not be able to justify the Moon with unverifiable budget. No matter what.
“My reading of the Spudis / Lavoie plan is to develop robotic technology that can be used to ascertain how to extract lunar resources. As far as money? Send robots at a pace that can be afforded. Don’t send people until the technology is mature.”
I understand that. All I am saying is that there is no good justification for the plan as it is. Maybe they should concentrate on the (tele)robotic part and tell us why it is important to do what they want to do. Unfortunately the premises are that the goal is to have a human lunar outpost. So they try for justification with the robotic part. Others in this thread have shown how this is not economically viable to focus on ISRU on the Moon now if whatever you produce can be had a lot cheaper on Earth and sent to space. My other grief is that the number $88B cannot be supported. So again, first things first. Let’s look at lowering the cost to space. When we have a functioning infrastructure at or near LEO we can forward to other places. It does not mean we do not send scout (most likely robotic) missions but they are not upon themselves part of the architecture for HSF. The overall strategy is missing here again.
I personnally would first define what I want to do in space. Then try and determine the best possible infrastructure, possibly modular and expandable. Then I will address the first point of this plan with the most available money yet use some money to finance tiger team type missions. Say you can determine with a robot that whatever resource on the Moon cannot be used for deep space mission even though you thought so then you do not need to send humans. You do not need to have an “end” product. Basically you need to develop plan A, plan B, plan C etc until you’ve come up with a strategy. The strategy would be based on existing assets and upcoming technology. It is an iterative process. Until we do implement an iterative process HSF BEO will remain a fantasy that cannot be supported by multiple WHs and Congresses.
Personally I like this quote better than pretty much any other “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.â€
FWIW.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 3:44 pm
“I do believe in American exceptionalism.”
It’s a fallacy– and a kind of arrogance reserved for the bravado voiced by nations insecure– or in decline.
What some of the more strident “commercial†space advocates don’t seem to realize is that they’ve boxed themselves into a corner of sorts.
William, I think you may be seeing things that aren’t there, or hearing things differently from how they were intended. Which “strident” advocates are you talking about?
Because of their use (some might say “misuseâ€) of the term “commercial,†they seem to think space exploration proponents are bound by the same restrictions.
Who have you seen suggesting that? I haven’t seen anyone doing that.
@ All
Here is an interesting call to relaunch the U.S. space program by Dutch Ruppersberger (Democrat – Maryland’s 2nd District ) on the eve of the new congress.
[Excerpted]
“Relaunch the U.S. space program” — We need an ambitious, long-range plan that envisions trips to the moon, Mars and beyond
……[In conclusion)To give up our quest for the moon, Mars and beyond is not what is best for America’s space program. We need a new road map. We must commit to return to the moon through a program run by NASA in partnership with private companies that will invest in bigger, American-made engines to get us to the moon without relying on Russia. This plan must reinvigorate our space industrial base and inspire people, especially younger generations, to dream about our future in space.
As the new Congress convenes today, Republicans and Democrats can build on our progress and keep us reaching for the skies. [End]
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-space-20110104,0,5917759.story
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
I’m glad that’s cleared up.
William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 4:49 pm [……Curious, don’t you think?]
Curiouser and curiouser Bill.
Your posts are always an oasis of reason and sanity.
Das Boese wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Where did your fertile imagination come up with all those war game scenarios Das Boese?
…(……)…..
So cute.
Major Tom wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 8:00 pm [……….This is another major reason why you don’t practice Mars operations on the Moon. Surface operations with roundtrip communication timelags of only seconds with ground control (Moon) are very, very different from surface operations with roundtrip communication timelags of 40 minutes with ground control (Mars). Astronauts at Mars are going to need to be much more autonomous and independent than Apollo or ISS astronauts. And you can test those kinds of operations on Earth just by introducing a 40-minute time delay in your communications testbed. There’s no reason to go to the Moon.]
If we can’t learn how to work and live on the Moon, we won’t be going anywhere else.
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 8:24 pm [….I guess my point is that if you want to use the VSE as justification for your Moon activities, then you can’t be selective about ignoring the other aspects of the VSE. You either support it, or you don’t. Otherwise you’re not supporting the VSE, and you should use some other justifications.]
You constantly rely on a straw man argument Coastal Ron.
If one fails to repeat every aspect of everything that has been proposed or possible for someone else to add to an idea, you submit that the entire premise of their proposal (or comment) is wrong, lacking, selective, inferior, foolish, wasteful, stupid, uninformed, unworkable, fantasy, etc., etc., etc.
Again, I ask. Where is your proposal?
common sense wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 1:20 am […..Unfortunately the premises are that the goal is to have a human lunar outpost. So they try for justification with the robotic part. ….]
You’re spinning and you know it. Look again.
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
ABSTRACT
We present an architecture that establishes the infrastructure for routine space travel by taking advantage of the Moon’s resources, proximity and accessibility. We use robotic assets on the Moon that are teleoperated from Earth to prospect, test, demonstrate and produce water from lunar resources before human arrival. This plan is affordable, flexible and not tied to any specific launch vehicle solution. Individual surface pieces are small, permitting them to be deployed separately on small launchers or combined together on single large launchers. Schedule is our free variable; even under highly constrained budgets, the architecture permits this program to be continuously pursued using small, incremental, cumulative steps. The end stage is a fully functional, human-tended lunar outpost capable of producing 150 metric tonnes of water per year – enough to export water from the Moon and create a transportation system that allows routine access to all of cislunar space. This cost-effective lunar architecture advances technology and builds a sustainable transportation infrastructure. By eliminating the need to launch everything from the surface of the Earth, we fundamentally change the paradigm of spaceflight. [End excerpt]
common sense wrote @ January 3rd, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“Star Trek to me is the depiction of a yearning but also a reflection on what our societies were going through during the Cold War, as far as TV series go.”
Hmmm. Trekkies and devotees to the now-ancient series (which is beginning to look like Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serials did in the mind’s eyed rearview mirror of viewers in 1966) turned it into a ‘religion’ of sorts- pre- Star Wars era, but my best recollections of Trek from childhood, when it was originally aired, was that it used what then seemed to be wonderous props- desktop talking computers, communicators (aka cellphones) tricorders (ipads)… and a computer bank which retrived volumes of information within seconds (aka Google/internet search engines.) All of which are fairly routine realities these days and relatively inexpensive and disposable. When kids see the show, as they text away, it’s a big yawn, gadget wise. The big disappointment, of course, has been the failure of miniskirts and thigh-high boots to become standard issue in the wardrobes of women worldwide.
@Spudis:
From Ruppersberger:
This piece was written on autopilot, with tone calibrated to offer a brief nod to the fact people are knocking heads more than usual over legislation that typically passes by voice vote and unanimous consent.
Presley Cannady wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 8:29 am
He could have picked any number of topics for an “accomplishment” ad but he choose this one and it is very controversial and he is a Democrat.
@Spudis:
From Ruppersberger:
Not seeing anything in there that would qualify as controversial, or anathema to a Democrat.
I guess people will have to read it in its entirety and judge for themselves.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-space-20110104,0,5917759.story
“If we can’t learn how to work and live on the Moon, we won’t be going anywhere else.”
Says who? Based on what analysis? Reference? Link?
If you want to go other places, then don’t spend $88 billion in taxpayer money to start getting 150mT of water per year 17 years from now. Spend that money on the technologies and capabilities needed to go to those other places.
And if you think getting a large amount of water into space is a capability critical to going other places, then don’t wait 17 years and spend $88 billion to start getting it from the Moon. Just start shipping it from Earth now using existing launch vehicles for a fraction of that price.
What is your major malfunction that makes this so hard for you to understand after so many posts?
Sigh…
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
“Sorry, was busy.â€
No problem got a little busy myself.
“There are many ways of describing it, but what NASA is doing on the COTS and CRS programs is paying SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for services performed. They don’t perform them, they don’t get paid.
For the COTS program, the deliverables range from a Project Management Plan Review ($23.1M) to demonstration flights like the Dragon flight last December ($5M). All of these tasks are designed to show NASA that they are acquiring and mastering the capabilities to deliver cargo to the ISS under the CRS program.â€
Thanks for the details. The only thing that sort of surprises me is that they got more for the Project Management Plan Review than the test flight (would have thought it would be the other way around).
Milestones like this are also required for bank loans (management plans, how many foundations have you completed for houses in the housing tract by a specific date etc.) and the bank loans have to be repaid. I know we are going in circles here, but that is the point of this whole exercise. It is more advantageous for these companies to get these government interfaces than to get a loan for similar amounts of money. Again repeating myself I am NOT against this practice, just stumped as to what you (and others) find acceptable to call it. I used subsidy and that was offensive to you. In asking why I (without any intent to characterize anything) used the word given and that was also offensive.
“Hope that helps.â€
So while I appreciate the effort (seriously) I still do not have clue as to what kind of shorthand would be acceptable. I just cannot bring myself to start saying “the money that Company A has earned and has every right to expect and nobody has any right to question that†every time the subject comes up.
Seizing the rhetorical high ground is always a good idea, but that is a bit much.
Boehner has already indicated DoD will skirt initial cuts as discretionary spending is hard-targeted for the budget ax (hence the notion of ‘protecting’ NASA by absorbing it into the DoD.)
No one has such a lunatic notion except you.
Joe wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 10:11 am [……So while I appreciate the effort (seriously) I still do not have clue as to what kind of shorthand would be acceptable…..]
Would “Charge Code” work?
Joe wrote:
“It is more advantageous for these companies to get these government interfaces than to get a loan for similar amounts of money.”
The reason the business is not taking out a loan for this, is they had no plans for doing what NASA wanted. Send cargo to the ISS. NASA wanted this service. The big difference with COTS is it is not a cost plus contract. It is literally performance pay. So if you want to know how to refer to it there it is.
That is one of the major issues you see posted about here on why NASA costs so much. Constellation was never about performance and what the Nation received to date for the billions spent is nothing compared to what we received from SpaceX for 250 million.
That is what a lot of posters here want to see a lot more of, innovative funding for dual use commercial activities not another 88 billion dollar space “program” that in the end will just be more of the same. An idea chasing a justification.
Shipping propellant to LEO from the Moon is made easier (IMHO) if momentum exchange tethers are used.
“Catch” in bound propellant with LEO tethers (thereby raising the orbital energy of those tethers) and later transfer that energy to outbound cargo payloads. Is that enough to close the business case? I dunno.
But remember, form follows function. Are we going into space to make money or are we looking to make money so we can afford to go into space.
If making money is Goal#1 there are easier ways to make money staying on Earth. As Bill Gates has observed when asked to fund a moon base.
But if making money is intended to facilitate going into space (which is the intrinsic, existential goal) then the analysis changes.
As I recall, Aristotle wrote about intrinsic goods that are pursued for themselves and other goods that are pursued in order to facilitate pursuit of intrinsic goods.
There may be better and cheaper ways to deliver propellant to LEO than via lunar ISRU however cheap propellant in LEO that is NOT the intrinsic goal.
The intrinsic goal is to become spacefaring.
And the debate (IMHO) is whether “spacefaring” is advanced more by NASA buying water in LEO delivered from Earth via RLV or by NASA looking to develop lunar water. Today, the “RLV/LEO depot factions” versus “ISRU factions” argument has replaced “Moon vs Mars” as the central divide amongst space enthusiasts.
My belief is that NASA (and Congress) will NEVER buy water at a LEO depot, whether delivered by RLVs or otherwise, without a commitment to a BEO destination and occasional asteroids missions won’t require enough fuel to actually justify LEO depots.
On the other hand, building a moon base would be far cheaper if the effort were supported by LEO depots.
Joe wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 10:11 am
“Milestones like this are also required for bank loans (management plans, how many foundations have you completed for houses in the housing tract by a specific date etc.) and the bank loans have to be repaid.”
I don’t know what your background is, which would inform your frame of reference on this. I spent part of my career with defense contractors, so this type of work is very easy to understand.
SpaceX and OSC won the competition that NASA held for a contract to service the ISS. They weren’t asking NASA for a loan to finish the work on internal projects.
As part of the contract, since NASA has unique requirements, it is paying SpaceX and OSC to meet their ISS specific needs. Part of those needs are validation related, where they want to make sure the companies have the basic capabilities to carry out the service, part of it is to create ISS specific systems (like the SpaceX DragonEye proximity sensor), and part of it is to demonstrate the actual ability to do what the CRS contract needs done (the demo flights).
“I used subsidy and that was offensive to you.”
If I kept calling you a communist, but you were really a capitalist, wouldn’t you want the record set straight? In this case, the words subsidy, loan or gift do not apply to the COTS and CRS program. The contractors are being paid for work they have performed, not given money.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 10:54 am
“Would “Charge Code†work?”
Not bad. The only thing I had come up with was “Transfer Payment” and that sounded bad even to me.
We’ll see what Coastal Ron (and I am sure others) have to say.
I just cannot bring myself to start saying “the money that Company A has earned and has every right to expect and nobody has any right to question that†every time the subject comes up.
How about “fee”?
@ Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 7:07 am
“You’re spinning and you know it. Look again.”
Hey look I am spinning? We’ll see how many people you can convince to go with your plan. Do you have a time line? So that we can all follow the progress…
You do not seem to accept that your plan is flawed despite what I and others have told you. See the right approach for you would be to step back a minute, or more, and think that through. Is it possible we have a point? Is it possible that as it is your plan will go nowhere? Or do you hold the truth as to what needs to be accomplished? I tried to offer you a (skeleton of a) strategy in a post above as to what is really needed. You may or not agree with me and it’s okay. So again we shall see how many people you’ll convince at this WH/Congress or the next or the next etc. See facts matter more than words and all you are getting from your “friends” in Congress is words, a lot of nonsensical words. Nothing else but I suppose it is enough right?
Oh well…
@ William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:22 pm
“But there is every reason to believe that lunar hardware could be adapted for martian use — just as aircraft are adapted for use in desert environments and arctic climes.”
Nope there is not every reason (see my post and Major Tom’s post above, no need to repeat) and this is where I question your experience with space or HSF for that matter. Had you worked on a space program you would know that the reference to “usual” aviation program is flawed. Nothing compares to space. They require modes of transportation that go through at least one atmosphere and that is how far they compare. It’s the same thing for the wings vs. no wings debate. If there is an atmosphere then wings MUST be good. Try them wings on Mars…
“Just as importantly — and maybe even more so — is the operational experience that would be acquired while living and working on the Moon. There has been no experience with human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit for nearly four decades. Some of that original experience has been lost or forgotten. A new generation needs to regain that experience. Conveniently, the Moon is only three days away by spacecraft — and just a second or so away by radio. Flight controllers here on Earth can work in real-time with explorers on the Moon. Together, they can build up much useful experience working on a world just a quarter of a million miles away before going tens of millions of miles to Mars.”
And why experience with the ISS or another space station a lot less expensive would not be the right first step. How about we build several stations in LEO and see how people can live, develop technologies while on orbit etc. Why do we have to go to the Moon to start doing something? Why do we have to invest billions and most likely trillions to do what you are dreaming about when we could invest millions (!) to already do a lot. See again you and others who like to dream big cannot economically justify the expense. All is based on our destiny and things alike. Blahblahblah “there’d be a Moon”-thing as if it is enough to justify the expense. Water? Come on! Go sell that to the public! “People we are going to the Moon and do the other things, not because we need it but because there is water”. See how it goes.
“I sometimes wonder how much politics enters into the equation? Would we be reading the same negative comments about the Moon had President Obama called on NASA to devise a new plan to send humans back to the lunar surface (i.e., same goal, but a different architecture)? What if President Obama had called on Elon Musk to come up with a new approach to creating an outpost on the Moon? I suspect some of scorn heaped upon “Moon Firsters†would be missing from these threads if he had.”
Of course it is all about politics! Noticed the name of the website here? President Obama offered a plan to help us go explore space. Ah but hey he did not provide a timeline! What kind of a plan is that?!?! I ask you. Who told you that President Obama did not call Musk to ask this very question? Would he have to let you know? Could it be they had a conversation like “Elon, can I call you Elon? – Of course Mr. Pesident – How about you come up with an architecture for LVs/RVs that only is 10% of our current cost? Then we can look at going to the Moon and elsewhere? – Of course Mr. President, you are the President, you decide. Should I let every one knows now? – No Elon we need RESULTS FIRST – Ayeaye Sir.” How about that? How about he had the exact same conversation with Boeing, Lockheed, BO, SN, Bigelow, ULA, VG?
I’ll try again. It is not about the Moon!!! It is about making it as inexpensive as posible so that you, and I, can “go” to the Moon. Is this very difficult to understand?
Bill White wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 11:26 am
That was a very thoughtful post.
William Mellberg wrote @ January 4th, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Balderdash. First of all, basic hardware can be adapted for use in different environments — not just in space, but here on Earth, as well. Take the aircraft industry, for instance. The Antonov An-225 was derived from the An-124. They are two very different airplanes built around a common design. And the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 and MD-90 were derived from the original DC-9 Series 10 for very different markets. Perhaps a better example is the F-35. The ‘B’ version, with its V/STOL capabilities, is quite unlike the ‘A’ and ‘C’ versions. Yet, all three utilize some basic structures and components. Not exactly the same thing as the Moon and Mars, I know. But there is every reason to believe that lunar hardware could be adapted for martian use — just as aircraft are adapted for use in desert environments and arctic climes.
No, it’s not exactly the same thing, you got that right. There is a literally a world of differences between aircraft adapted to different conditions on Earth and systems operating on different planetary bodies.
Aircraft, no matter where on Earth, are subject to the same surface gravity, atmospheric composition and only minimal differences in air density, thermal environment and radiation.
The Moon and Mars do not share any of these. Major Tom already did an excellent comparison of the Moon’s and Mars’ characteristics so I’m not going to repeat that here.
The idea that Moon hardware could be easily made to work on Mars is as ridiculous as suggesting that with a few minor modifications, the aircraft you mention would be able to fly on Mars.
Just as importantly — and maybe even more so — is the operational experience that would be acquired while living and working on the Moon. There has been no experience with human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit for nearly four decades. Some of that original experience has been lost or forgotten. A new generation needs to regain that experience. Conveniently, the Moon is only three days away by spacecraft — and just a second or so away by radio. Flight controllers here on Earth can work in real-time with explorers on the Moon. Together, they can build up much useful experience working on a world just a quarter of a million miles away before going tens of millions of miles to Mars.
Working on a world “just a quarter of a million miles away”
I hate to break it to you, but the Moon is in orbit around the Earth. Unless you propose dropping people off on the dark side without any sort of communications relay, going there is not going to teach us any more about “beyond Earth orbit” operation than we can learn on a LEO space station like ISS, or even in research facilities here on earth, like the Mars500 project at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Biomedical Problems (which, despite the fact that it is probably the most important project related to human deep space exploration in the last decade, seems to have gotten little attention.)
Working on a world “only three days away by spacecraft — and just a second or so away by radio (…) just a quarter of a million miles away”
does not teach us anything about working on a completely different world millions of miles and hours by radio away or in distant space.
I sometimes wonder how much politics enters into the equation? Would we be reading the same negative comments about the Moon had President Obama called on NASA to devise a new plan to send humans back to the lunar surface (i.e., same goal, but a different architecture)?
This blog is called “Space Politics”. Duh.
I’m not American, so I don’t care about other aspects of US politics as much except for their entertainment and educational value. I do care about space because it’s something important to us as a species and I want to see it done right, plus ESA and NASA cooperate so it’s going to have an impact on my future work.
By the way, the plan of your president as I understand it doesn’t prohibit sending anyone to the moon, it just doesn’t set that as a priority.
What if President Obama had called on Elon Musk to come up with a new approach to creating an outpost on the Moon? I suspect some of scorn heaped upon “Moon Firsters†would be missing from these threads if he had.
That would indeed have been an interesting proposal, however I can’t imagine that Musk would have spent a lot (or any) money and manpower to come up with solutions unless a “commercial moon” program was already defined and most importantly, funded. SpaceX went after the COTS contract because it’s profitable. A funded program to meet a well-defined demand for cargo transfer to an existing structure, ISS.
The problem I see with the “Moon first” idea is that there is currently (and in the near future) no valid reason for humans to be there, as there is both insufficient knowledge of the lunar environment and resources as well as insufficiently advanced technology to sustain permanent human habitation.
A comprehensive robotic exploration and technology development program as needed to remedy these shortcomings is a far better investment of the limited NASA dollars, plus it’d benefit the whole of space exploration, not just that of the Moon.
The thing is Martijn if you or I are talking about COTS we both seem to be on the same page, I do not remember having to call you on one of your comments before because you did not understand it.
This disagreement was fundamentally about funding commercial and what type of funding did that represent, e.g. subsidizing, corporate welfare, pork, cost plus, give away, or performance pay.
I believe everyone is now on the same page when it comes to what the COTS awards were, performance pay for completed milestones.
That does not mean that some future funding that NASA awards does not fall under a different definition than what COTS was. For me, if the Orion capsule is awarded another cost plus contract for 3-4 billion dollars I most certainly will not agree that it was based on performance.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 5:11 am
So cute.
Flattering.
But since you’re continuing to evade the question I asked regarding the scenario laid out in the article excerpt you posted, I can’t help but assume that you’re not actually interested in discussion.
If all you want to do is pontificate, I have no problem with that, but you really should put a in disclaimer, “Posting opinion, not interested in discussion” or something.
@ Das Boese wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
“I can’t imagine that Musk would have spent a lot (or any) money and manpower to come up with solutions unless a “commercial moon†program was already defined and most importantly, funded. ”
There is a lot more to Elon Musk than that. You are right and wrong
Elon is a smart guy, very smart, who can see where there is money to make and how to make it. But he’s also a “space cadet” with money to go.
You will be suprised. Sooner… Or later.
@Das Boese:
Interesting userid, is there a story behind it?
@ Das Boese
You aren’t discussing, you’re making things from whole cloth and have already stated something about platitudes. I do not care to play those games.
common sense wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 12:16 pm [Hey look I am spinning?…..]
Yes, like a top.
common sense wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
There is a lot more to Elon Musk than that. You are right and wrong
Elon is a smart guy, very smart, who can see where there is money to make and how to make it. But he’s also a “space cadet†with money to go.
You will be suprised. Sooner… Or later.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m fairly sure that he has more than just one surprise in the drawer for us, one only needs to watch him talk about his plans with SpaceX to see that he can barely hold back.
I don’t see him as a “space cadet” as much as someone who cares about the future of humanity. Branching us out into space is only one way to ensure that we have a future, I think he said as much in a number of interviews. Remember that he’s also involved in the solar energy and electric car business, both key technologies to sustainable development.
As far as the Moon is concerned, we already know that Dragon is capable of surviving a lunar return. If they can get the “pusher-LAS/powered descent” thing to work, it might even be able to land on the moon without using a separate vehicle. But I’m fairly sure that Musk would agree that while this would be a great step toward reducing cost, there is more to do and learn yet before we’re ready to go back to the Moon.
“First of all, basic hardware can be adapted for use in different environments — not just in space, but here on Earth, as well. Take the aircraft industry, for instance. The Antonov An-225 was derived from the An-124. They are two very different airplanes built around a common design. And the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 and MD-90 were derived from the original DC-9 Series 10 for very different markets… Yet, all three utilize some basic structures and components. Not exactly the same thing as the Moon and Mars, I know.”
It’s far from the same thing. All these derivative aircraft designs fly in the same atmosphere and gravity well and are subject to the same temperatures, pressures, graviational gradient, and atmospheric constituents. They’re designed for different markets and users, not different planetary environments.
“Perhaps a better example is the F-35. The ‘B’ version, with its V/STOL capabilities, is quite unlike the ‘A’ and ‘C’ versions.”
This is a worse example. It’s just a different landing/take-off system and technique for the same environment. There are multiple different descent and landing approaches for the Moon (vertical landers, horizontal landers, crushable landers), and there are multiple different descent and landing approaches for Mars (fixed decelerators, deployable decelerators). But the latter won’t work at the former and vice versa.
“But there is every reason to believe that lunar hardware could be adapted for martian use — just as aircraft are adapted for use in desert environments and arctic climes.”
The differences between the Sahara and Greenland are trivial compared to the differences between the Moon and Mars. A change in temperature isn’t even in the same ballpark as going from a planet with an atmosphere to a planet with no atmosphere.
“There has been no experience with human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit for nearly four decades.”
There has _never_ been any experience with human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. Apollo went to the Moon, which is in Earth orbit and only seconds away via radio. Apollo didn’t go to Mars or any other deep space location with roundtrip communication timelags measured in half-hour increments.
“Conveniently, the Moon is only three days away by spacecraft — and just a second or so away by radio. Flight controllers here on Earth can work in real-time with explorers on the Moon.”
That’s all great and well for the Moon, but it’s not applicable to Mars or another deep space location. When you’re that far away, round-trip radio communications take tens of minutes, not seconds. So your planetary explorers _cannot_ work in “real-time” with their flight controllers on Earth. At those distances, they’d wind up dead if they waited on ground control like the Apollo astronauts did.
“I sometimes wonder how much politics enters into the equation?”
It has nothing to do with politics. The differences in these planetary environments are what they are, and the resulting physics drives the engineering in very different directions.
“What if President Obama had called on Elon Musk to come up with a new approach to creating an outpost on the Moon?”
Musk probably would have said “No thank you, Mr. President” since Musk’s goal is Mars and he’s never evinced any interest in the Moon as an interim step. The Moon apparently provides no value added to his Mars planning.
Again, I’m not saying whether the Moon, Mars, or something else is the right next step beyond LEO for human space exploration. I don’t think we know enough to say with any certainty. But if the guy spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get to Mars doesn’t find the Moon to be a useful stepping stone, then a government effort that wants to spend tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to get to Mars should think critically before deciding that the Moon is on that path.
And, honestly, applying a little common sense to some basic knowledge about the enormous differences in the lunar and martian environments tells us this anyway, without cribbing from Musk or anyone else.
FWIW…
@ Das Boese wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m fairly sure that he has more than just one surprise in the drawer for us, one only needs to watch him talk about his plans with SpaceX to see that he can barely hold back.”
Just look at his body language after the successful reentry of Dragon…
“I don’t see him as a “space cadet†as much as someone who cares about the future of humanity. Branching us out into space is only one way to ensure that we have a future, I think he said as much in a number of interviews. Remember that he’s also involved in the solar energy and electric car business, both key technologies to sustainable development.”
It was meant as a compliment, “space cadet”. And yes for the rest. He both cares AND wants to make money. He cares so much that he put on or about $100M of his own. I’d be curious to know how much of those who relentlessly crticize him have ever done in that respect.
“As far as the Moon is concerned, we already know that Dragon is capable of surviving a lunar return.”
No we don’t really know that. It’d be presposterous to say this. They still have some way to go. BUT they are very close. Much closer than Orion will ever be.
“If they can get the “pusher-LAS/powered descent†thing to work, it might even be able to land on the moon without using a separate vehicle.”
Think Mars here.
“But I’m fairly sure that Musk would agree that while this would be a great step toward reducing cost, there is more to do and learn yet before we’re ready to go back to the Moon.”
Here is what is going to happen. Take it for it is. They’ll get a few (2?) more flights under their belt. Maybe a crewed flight as well. But soon there’ll be a Dragon on its way to the Moon and back. If they can figure a way they’ll do it really soon. But as they build credibility with investors they will get more and more cash flowing their way. Unlike what some have you believe around here, even the OldSpace is interested in SpaceX. But that is a different story. Only future will tell. Future and my crystal ball of course.
Spinning even faster eh Anne? You’ll always have nice plans to read when they have a crew on the Moon. Maybe you’ll ask them for help? Who knows…
Martijn Meijering wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 11:57 am
“How about “feeâ€?”
Interesting. Fee? Award Fee? Now we are least directly addressing the issue. Any other contestants?
Martijn Meijering wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
@Das Boese:
Interesting userid, is there a story behind it?
I’m big, I’m bad, and I’m German
Nah, not really, at least not the “big” and “bad” parts. It originated to poke fun at the hilarious “evil” pseudonyms of metal band members, but really it’s just a silly nickname that stuck. I’m keeping it for lack of a better one, as well as a humorous hint about my nationality.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
You aren’t discussing, you’re making things from whole cloth and have already stated something about platitudes. I do not care to play those games.
Perhaps you are confusing me with Marcel F. Williams and his hilarious nuclear EMP doomsday weapons straight out of a Hollywood movie script?
I was asking a question directly related to the scenario described in an excerpt of the article The New Space Race (SpaceRef, Feb. 2010), which you posted.
If you have an issue with the relevancy or accuracy of that scenario (which I have already stated I do not agree with), I suggest that you take it up with the author of the article.
But since you posted it, in response to someone else’s post, I thought it safe to assume that the article reflects your opinion. If that was a mistake please say so.
@ Das Boese
Take a full, direct quote from the link and re-post it here in quotation marks and then ask your question about it.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1376
Rand Simberg wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 10:35 am
Inaccurate. If you’re going to pass yourself off as an ‘educator’ you best educate yourself on the orgins and histories of the space agency. The bulk of which began within the military (USN, USArmy & USAF space research activities from the period are well documented.) The military brass was less than pleased when it was culled out of the services and reconstituted under the civilian guise as NASA. Von Braun himself (then chiefly associated w/the the Army’s missile work) was initially opposed to it. Of course, if you’re a shill for current commerical space efforts at tapping government funding for survival, getting in line behind existing military contrators isn’t very appealing.
Joe wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
“Interesting. Fee? Award Fee? Now we are least directly addressing the issue. Any other contestants?”
Instead of us guessing what your frame of reference is, and then trying to provide a definition that you’re familiar with, why you don’t just tell us what field you’re in, or have the most experience in? I know you mentioned construction loans, so are you in home construction?
For instance, I’ve worked in manufacturing in both commercial and government (i.e. DoD) environments, so I’m familiar with contracts where we had to produce products or perform services in exchange for payment. In fact, I can never remember a time that a company I worked for received a gift, loan or subsidy from any of our customers, including Uncle Sam.
So, what’s your frame of reference?
“Unlike what some have you believe around here, even the OldSpace is interested in SpaceX.”
I agree, there was an interesting article at Space News relating to this:
ULA Says Workforce Reductions will Help Cut Costs
It looks like they are seeing some writing on the wall but they still do not like the idea that they might have to actually compete head to head.
“He [collins] urged the government not to force a competitive environment on an industry that may be ill suited to it. “I’m not saying no to competition, I’m just urging us to be judicious in its use,†he said. “Our success will be judged not on how widely we used the tool of competition, but … on how wisely we used the tool of competition.â€
Given the U.S. policy of barring non-U.S. rockets from launching U.S. government satellites, the most likely near-term competition for ULA will be from Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif., whose Falcon 9 rocket recently completed a demonstration mission of launching into low Earth orbit, and recovering, a cargo capsule.
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk was sitting with Collins on the panel, and he used the occasion to urge the government to scrap its cost-plus contracting scheme in favor of fixed-price contracts. The cost-plus formula, he said, makes “good people do bad things. … You’re creating an incentive to maximize costs up to the limit of the program being canceled.†“
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
“Take a full, direct quote from the link and re-post it here in quotation marks and then ask your question about it.”
Just out of curiosity, why are you trying so hard to boost the page rank of Paul’s articles? Does he get his Air & Space contract renewed if he gets enough hits? Or somehow trying to prove how popular his articles are?
I only ask because you’ve been excerpting and linking his articles a lot recently – far more than I can remember you ever doing.
It’s one thing if you want to ignore a conversation with someone, but extorting someone to visit Paul’s website before you’ll converse with them just seemed pretty blatant…
“The bulk of which began within the military”
Wrong, the bulk came from NACA. The military only provided JPL, ABMA, and NRL launch team.
@DCSCA:
Yeah. Fifty years ago. You know, long enough ago that the principals are less likely to be retired than they are to be dead.
From the SpaceRef article.
“In short, by going to the Moon, we create a new and qualitatively different capability for space access, a “transcontinental railroad” in space.”
Actually, using the transcontinental railroad as an example is the exact opposite for your concept of returning to the moon. The tracks were laid by competing commercial firms, as were the train builders and the commercial firms that ran the railroads.
Spudis does not make any of this commercially owned and operated. Everything is built for NASA and ran by the government. Once again, a federally funded NASA monopoly. I wonder how much of the 88 billion could be saved if NASA was kept out of it and only bought tickets on the “train”.
I would sure like to see a Spudis proposal where the trains are ran commercially and he just buys a ticket.
Anne Spudis wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
“Take a full, direct quote from the link and re-post it here in quotation marks and then ask your question about it.”
That is exactly what I did in my initial post.
It can easily be found with a quick search for my username. Please also read the second post where I have commented (in parentheses, like this) and highlighted in bold the important part of the question.
Also please note, if you’re going to reply with vague statements and empty rhetoric like “access and footholds”, don’t bother.
Anne,
Here is a commercial alternative for a lunar mission. 15 billion in 2003 dollars, I prefer this style over another NASA decades long attempt that in the end, doesn’t do anything to open commercial space.
The Shackleton Crater Expedition: A Lunar Commerce Mission in the Spirit of Lewis and Clark
Coastal Ron wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 5:03 pm [….It’s one thing if you want to ignore a conversation with someone, but extorting someone to visit Paul’s website before you’ll converse with them just seemed pretty blatant…]
Actually, after your post to me Coastal R. I sincerely believed you were interested in what I was pointing you to in that link.
As for my exchange with Das Boese, since it is of interest to you, check back after he clearly asks me a question from Paul’s essay (our exchange had become so disjointed I asked for a clean cut quote and question) because I will happily try to address it.
@Byeman wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Inaccurate. You best bone up on the history of the agency you work with. The missile and rocket elements, including the high altitude aircraft research, came from the military, not aeronautics.
@ Presley Cannady wrote @ January 5th, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Personnel, perhaps. Province, doubtful. The military is quite capable of operating and managing NASA activities and more likely to be able to fund space projects in this economic climate. ‘National security’ makes for a very broad ‘umbrella’.
DCSCA is wrong as usual.
“The military is quite capable of operating and managing NASA activities and more likely to be able to fund space projects in this economic climate”
Idiotic. The military has no use for most of NASA space projects. Also, the military has trouble managing its own project, see the cost over runs, schedule delays and cancellation of many space systems and the Titan failures of the 90’s.
“The missile and rocket elements, including the high altitude aircraft research, came from the military, not aeronautics. ”
Wrong, again. NACA was involve in the high altitude aircraft research and provided funding and personnel.
“Missile and rocket elements.”
Hair splitting. The military only provided the contracting. NASA still did analysis and integration; and NASA had its own vehicles, Scout, Delta, Little Joe ,Centaur, etc
Anyways, events that happened 50 years ago are no longer applicable to today.
The DOD comes to NASA for more support for spaceflight, than the other way around.
Besides, none of this provides to support your claim that NASA can be moved to the DOD.
@Vladislaw:
Shackleton is a proposal for a five-year demonstration, one that remarkably lines up well with Spudis’ prediction for the first five years of his plan (culminating in the water extraction demo). They differ in that Shackleton is returning demo products whereas I don’t see Spudis making the same effort. Shackleton also costs a quarter less on the dollar ($17 billion to $21.5 billion) than Spudis for similar effort, although this could be due to simple uncertainty given the years of separation between the two proposals and, of course, different aims. Specifically, Spudis goes beyond five-year demonstration and proposes–if we clear certain conditions–that we jump straight into the commerce stage with 10-year way stations to accept products.
@DCSCA:
Not going to pretend I know what you’re talking about here. I was addressing your point about organizational continuity with the military fifty years after the creation of a civilian space agency.
Not going to pretend I know what you’re talking about here.
Don’t worry about it — he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either.
@Presley Cannady wrote @ January 6th, 2011 at 9:15 am
Personnel in terms of retired vesus expired; Province in terms of the military managing space projects currently under the sole province of NASA. It would be an relatively easy fit under their umbrella. The critical factor is to maintain funding– the military can manage it well if not better than the current teams.
@Rand Simberg wrote @ January 6th, 2011 at 12:07 pm
How would you know- history has proven to be a weak point for you but the fear of a DoD umbrella is very real to a shill for commerical space. All those military contractors to compete with.
@byeman wrote @ January 6th, 2011 at 8:39 am
‘Use’ in strict terms, has nothing to do with it. The military will salute and do as its told. And, of course, the DoD managed the missile and space efforts at the start, and were sorely disappointed to have it taken away and established under a civilian guise. Von Braun himself was opposed to NASA at first, wanting the army to maintain missile development– funding, you know. So it will be again in the Age of Austerity. DoD is ‘off limits’ for the budget ax per Boehner as of now. NASA, as you know, is not. You really don’t know much about the agency. Life-sciences guy most likely. Have your resume ready, fella.
NASA’ HSF future is Orion. That’s their manned space program for the Age of Austerity. They gotta think Mercury/Gemini and keep their Apollo appetites in check for most of the decade.
@ DCSCA wrote @ January 6th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
“NASA’ HSF future is Orion. ”
Then it is a pretty grim future. I mean visiting the Orion’s mock up on a regular basis may get boring after a while.
Oh well.
DoD is ‘off limits’ for the budget ax per Boehner as of now.
No, it’s not:
“Republican lawmakers, who have taken control of the House of Representatives after elections in November, say defense spending will not be excluded from budget cuts though they have suggested military programs will be spared deep reductions.”
What a maroon.
@commonsense…..; It wouldn’t even be a mock-up, if it wasn’t for freaking Barack Obama cancelling the new Moon program!! Orion would’ve been America’s next major manned vehicle, plus the Ares 1 could have easily been the new Saturn 1B-type of LEO access launcher. (You recall: the rocket that was used to ferry the Skylab crews in the 1970’s.) Because of Mr. Obama, now we have the makings of rudderless chaos, with regard to what NASA will now do, to provide for a viable crew excursion vehicle. Under Obamaspace, the ISS will NEVER be allowed to end, because then, what will the commercial space firms & space hobbyists have left to do??!! Get ready for an ISS-2, come 2020!! The U.S. won’t ever leave LEO, for the next twenty years, easy!
“Ares 1 could have easily been the new Saturn 1B-type of LEO access launcher”
Wake up and see the reality.
No, Ares 1 couldn’t be it, it was too expensive and redundant.
“The U.S. won’t ever leave LEO, for the next twenty years, easy”
Now you nailed it! You described Constellation.
“missile development– funding, you know. So it will be again in the Age of Austerity. DoD is ‘off limits’ for the budget ax per Boehner as of now. NASA, as you know, is not. You really don’t know much about the agency. Life-sciences guy most likely.”
Huh?
Look in the mirror. You really don’t know much, period.
Spaceflight is not just launch vehicles. The military does not care about space science.
“The military will salute and do as its told’
No it won’t because it will not be given NASA’s tasks. It is an idiotic idea. a. It won’t never be proposed by a sane person
b. congress will not pass any legislation to do such thing.
Me? I am former military space and knows what goes on in DOD space. Now, I do launch vehicle integration.
“
@ Chris Castro wrote @ January 7th, 2011 at 2:10 am
“It wouldn’t even be a mock-up, if it wasn’t for freaking Barack Obama cancelling the new Moon program!!”
You’re right it would not even be a mock up! Do you understand what you actually write?
“Orion would’ve been America’s next major manned vehicle, plus the Ares 1 could have easily been the new Saturn 1B-type of LEO access launcher. (You recall: the rocket that was used to ferry the Skylab crews in the 1970′s.) ”
Not a chance.
“Because of Mr. Obama, now we have the makings of rudderless chaos, with regard to what NASA will now do, to provide for a viable crew excursion vehicle.”
It’s not “excursion” it is “exploration”. NASA once tried “excursion” with the Lunar Module and they backed off real quickly. Any idea why?
“Under Obamaspace, the ISS will NEVER be allowed to end, because then, what will the commercial space firms & space hobbyists have left to do??!! Get ready for an ISS-2, come 2020!!”
That would be pretty fantastic I think! ISS-2 and 3 and 4…
“The U.S. won’t ever leave LEO, for the next twenty years, easy!”
Says the expert. Oh well…
The space science that the military needs doesn’t that currently get done for them by NASA at no cost? Material studies is done on the ISS and space weather as it relates to military sats?