Ever? Why is it that the astronaut cult swings between preposterous mania and dire depression? Our children and their children and so on many generations down will be around to go to it. Meanwhile, hundreds (thousands? millions?) of robots will go to the moon and many other places in space doing a far better job than an astronaut could do at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The astronaut cult will get its useless heavenly pilgrims back to the moon. Just, quite likely, not in our lifetimes. Get over it.

How about if instead of crying we all just insist NASA hire some better engineers in the Science division?

“Remember, the Skycrane is named after its Sikorsky helicopter namesake — a heavy lift aircraft that was designed to lift & carry over/odd sized cargo (like large empty tanks, or logs, or tanks even), but didn’t need to be bodily scaled up to physically carry them in the “conventional” manner – from a structuraly reenforced internal cargo deck.”

BUt I dont think Skycranes let their loads “deploy” downward. the Skycrane helicopter was/is adept at doing two things. It could carry a prepackaged “bus” that could be set down and detached (with the helicopter off) or attached. And it was good at carrying sling loads. To the best of my knowledge it never had a “bus” attached that it then dropped from its carry position and then “winched” down.

I share DSN and “winds” concerns here (but wish everyone luck)…and have a few of my own…

but I will say this…a lot is rolled up in this lander. We could have had 6 MER for the price of this thing…or four MER’s and 2-3 satellites in mars orbit that acted like GPS/Relay satellites.

If it goes splat…wow there are going to be some crying times. RGO

(The Skycrane, OTOH would have fine tuned its delivery point first,>>

thank you for the informative note…I am trying to “fine tune” my knowledge base here before forming an opinion, not that it matters.

SO the hovering skycrane as its getting ready to deploy the rover can figure out by some method (Radar, FLIR what?) that it is getting ready to set the rover down on say a boulder? RGO

“And pray that there’s intelligent life
somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”

I read ATK is at work on the composite truss structure for the NGST. Oh boy.

“It was extraordinarily, and foolishly risky for the program to so radically break technological continuity with the Mars Exploration Rovers.”

Um, what!? It closely *follows* the EDL developed with the Viking. It is larger, so the same profile shield, supersonic chute and rockets is scaled up. They use the same mass drop technique for GC control. They use the same type of skycrane on top with cable beneath that landed the MERs. They use the same radar distance sensor.

The incremental change is that they steer more for a smaller landing ellipse, they use that for a more horizontal ballistic descent with S-curves for braking. They also do away with the balloons and steer the skycrane away to accommodate the larger mass. Small, but vital, changes allowing for a much smaller landing ellipse and much larger payload mass.

@ Robert G. Oler:

“OK I really dont understand this one. its a rover…it moves to sample different things. I bet the thing gets covered with rocket exhaust”.

I dunno about ground effects, but the line drop and skycrane evac maneuver is performed to avoid having to cover up the rover from dust blow-back. It saves mass, especially since you can use the rover legs as landing legs.

Wonder what he thinks about rechartering it to include asteroids and Mars?

Even though, as pointed out, Spudis doesn’t work at the Lunar Science Institute, but rather at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, I’ll tell you precisely what the lunar science community feels about the rechartering of the LSI (which will also result in renaming it). The HATE it!

The LEAG (Lunar Exploration and Analysis Group) that does lunar strategy analysis for NASA has submitted a letter to Gerst and Grunsfeld expressing extreme displeasure with the rechartering.

In their view, such an action dilutes the focus of this group and, from their admittedly not-independent perspective, unproductively pulls funding away from lunar science.

Not clear why they waited so long to send this letter, as the rechartering intent has been on the street for months.

It is a fact that the rechartering would more heavily involve HEOMD in the institute funding, and also a fact that from the perspective of the 9th floor, the formal policy is that the next destination for humans beyond LEO is an asteroid, not the Moon.

Those are good points. But even before the cable system deploys, I have serious doubts that the EDL system will be able to know its position precisely enough relative to the ground to start the exquisitely timed hover sequence without going splat from too high or too low an ignition. And then I have questions about whether the system will be able to maintain a steady enough hover to safely deploy the rover (basically your #2). This is something we’ve only just learned/relearned thanks to the efforts of Armadillo/Masten, and I’m not sure they could routinely deploy a cabled payload from one of their vehicles from a half-klick away. And JPL is trying to do it 150 million klicks away on another planet. And without the practice that Armadillo/Masten have put into their vehicles. The deck seems stacked against MSL’s EDL working.

I’ve got my fingers crossed, too. But to be brutally honest, the system smacks of the same kind of unflown, Rube Goldberg contraption seen in the thrust oscillation mitigation systems on Ares I that doomed that effort. I hope I’m wrong, but I would never bet any actual money on the MSL EDL.

My 2 cents. Again, I really hope that I’m wrong.