Congress, NASA, White House

Will Curiosity help save NASA Mars funding?

There was a tremendous public reaction to Sunday night’s successful landing by NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, and the Curiosity rover is in good health as project scientists and engineers check out the rover and its scientific instruments. Some have wondered if the public’s interest in the mission will translate into additional funding for NASA and, in particular, its Mars exploration program, which suffered significant cuts in the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. For the moment, though, there’s little evidence of that.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who spoke out about the Mars program prior to the Curiosity landing, mentioned his desire to increase to restore Mars program funding in a statement after the landing. “This success must reinvigorate our efforts to restore funding for planetary science and future Mars missions,” he stated. “While we have restored some of the funding — almost $100 million so far — much work remains to return the Mars Program to health.”

While several other members also expressed congratulations for the sucessful landing, they didn’t echo his call for increased funding. “The soft landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars is a testament to NASA’s engineering superiority. More importantly, it serves as the most recent and best example of why it is so important for us to continue to invest in deep space exploration,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), in a statement that came closest to supporting Schiff’s call. Both the chairman of the House Scienc Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) and Democratic committee leaders Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) and Jerry Costello (D-IL) congratulated NASA for the landing but said little more.

The landing also prompted a statement from President Obama, who called the landing “an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future.” The statement was as much about NASA’s overall direction, though, as about the landing, also citing NASA’s commercial crew program and the importance in investing in science and technology research. In a press briefing Monday, a reported asked White House press secretary Jay Carney if the president had seen the initial images returned by the rover. “I didn’t ask him,” Carney responded, then mentioned the statement from the president. “But I haven’t talked to him about whether he’s seen these images. It really is quite remarkable.”

96 comments to Will Curiosity help save NASA Mars funding?

  • JimNobles

    Money is tight. I wouldn’t expect much chance of an increase to any program covered by NASAs budget in the near future. Not unless some sort of miracle occurs. I expect to see a lot of nasty infighting between different departments and interests in the American government space universe.

    I grew up expecting NASA would lead the world into exploring and colonizing space. Now that I’m older I have little faith that will happen. I’m more interested in the so-called commercial sectors way of doing things. I don’t know if it will work out but unfortunately I know longer really believe government space will amount to much of anything. There’s just too much politics involved. It’s really hard to get anything done.

    Many will disagree I suppose but I don’t really think government space will play much of a role in moving humans off-planet. Not beyond what it has already done which is proving that people can indeed be sent to our nearest neighbor.

    I wish it wasn’t so but I believe it is.

  • amightywind

    There is no doubt Curiosity will have a positive effect on NASA planetary funding. Competence and execution do that. The landing engineering team in particular rules! The question becomes what planetary projects of less value will try to ride herd on this. The Mars planetary community now needs to defend their turf from this position of strength. Only a few short months ago they were left hanging out to dry by the astrophysics people. Time to turn the tables.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “There is no doubt Curiosity will have a positive effect on NASA planetary funding. Competence and execution do that. The landing engineering team in particular rules!”

    Mission execution is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for major budget increases (or restorations).

    You also have to come in close on budget and schedule. MSL blew its original cost estimate by a factor of 4-5 and launched a couple years late. If your $600 million rover missions turn into $2.6 billion rover missions, no Administration is going to trust you with a sample return mission that starts at $5-10 billion in cost.

    You also have to have a coherent program with multiple missions over multiple years sharing common elements and feeding science and technology forward. NASA has no such plan, and there’s no evidence that this summer’s MPPG is going to produce one, focusing instead on the 2018 window in the absence of a bigger picture.

    Congress is obviously going to restore about $100 million to the Mars Exploration Program. That’s a fraction of what was cut from the program, and more than that will be taken from the program when sequestration or other budget rebalancing takes effect.

    It’s a good thing Curiousity’s RTG can deliver nominal power for 14 years because the way things are going, it may be the only mission on the surface of Mars for another decade or two.

    I love it that Curiousity’s landing succeeded, the pix that are coming back, and the science to come. But the program paid a very, very high price for this one mission success (so far). The program has been reduced to this one mission for years and years to come.

  • Kate Morgan

    The special interests in the science part of NASA appear equally as self-serving as those on the human spaceflight side. Mars scientists want money for Mars, astrophysicists want money for Webb, CxP contractors want money for CxP. These special interests lobby their members of Congress who only support those programs with jobs in their districts. They all try to say “this is in the best interest of the Nation/world”… but distribution of federal money reinforces this self-interested behavior. This is why it is such a positive breakthrough to have NASA incentivize non-government markets – it is the only way true space development can occur. Unless NASA has a mission more important than pork barrell politics, (which they haven’t had since Apollo) this is how the game of divvying up tax dollars will get played!

  • amightywind

    If your $600 million rover missions turn into $2.6 billion rover missions, no Administration is going to trust you with a sample return mission that starts at $5-10 billion in cost.

    I predict that some in congress are going to compare the $2.6 billion spent on MSL with the $3 billion spent annually on ISS and come to the logical conclusion. (How are those fish experiments going up there, guys?) It is difficult to hide the fact that ISS is a waste of money.

  • It is difficult to hide the fact that ISS is a waste of money.

    It’s much more difficult to hide the fact that SLS is.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    It is difficult to hide the fact that ISS is a waste of money.

    And it is increasingly difficult to argue with this assessment. To be sure, ISS has taught us a huge amount about what we need to know to send humans further out into space, from technical, programmatic, and managerial perspectives. But, echoing others in this forum, the plans for actually using that knowledge are seemingly more and more remote. Even sending humans to Earth-Moon Lagrange points, which seemed a slam-dunk technologically, is now starting to appear difficult, at least bounded by the reduced capabilities of what Orion and ICPS are turning into. The era of reduced expectations is upon us and that, I’m afraid, has nothing to do with any age of austerity.

    The spirit of exploration is based on the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of adventure is based on acceptance of risk. With regard to at least human space flight, risk is a place that NASA, with Congress fiercely and protectively standing over them, simply doesn’t go anymore. In that sense, as well as the dearth of any kind of vision in a Congressionally funded space program, aside from district jobs, I would also agree that government space isn’t going to get humans exploring. What Congress is about for space is jobs and protecting human life. They can’t figure out any other role for them that might express leadership. Having said that, I remain highly skeptical that commercial space will have any real business case for doing what we consider to be human space exploration.

    The excitement about Curiosity is an interesting lesson in the power of risk and creativity in engaging the public. Curiosity was a bold step. Not because of where exactly we went (in that we’ve sent rovers to Mars before), but how we did it. Human space flight has been reduced to the presumption of challenges being about where we go, rather than how we go there, or even what we do there. As our president has said about the Moon, we’ve been there before. He’s right. He’s just echoing a lot of the space advocacy community, which seeks “new destinations”, where a destination is defined as a rock in space. There are only so many rocks in space.

    In these respects, selling space will come down to selling narrative, and that narrative better be more sophisticated and compelling than going to a rock we’ve never gone to before. NASA isn’t very skilled at creating narrative, though “seven minutes of terror” was certainly brilliant. Isn’t it interesting that the most publicly compelling narrative for space exploration has just come out of the science directorate. Curiosity may indeed help Mars funding if NASA learns the right lessons from it.

  • Robert G. Oler

    amightywind wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 8:30 am

    There is no doubt Curiosity will have a positive effect on NASA planetary funding. Competence and execution do that.>>

    it is no more a sign of “competence and execution” to do a program “well” but do it several times over budget…In terms of programs that they “like” the nutty right is OK with over budget and long schedules…as long as something comes out at the end that seems “American exceptional”.

    in reality the space station and Curiosity share a common thread…they cost a lot more then they were forecast at, their ultimate performance is still to be determined and yet their goofy supporters hail them as “wonderful’

    People like you are easily awed by “events” and not seriously capable of sober program analysis.

    BTW are the the “wind” who runs the Planet X site of the same name?

    RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 11:22 am

    In these respects, selling space will come down to selling narrative, and that narrative better be more sophisticated and compelling than going to a rock we’ve never gone to before. NASA isn’t very skilled at creating narrative, >>

    Interesting post but I dont agree with most of it….

    Curiosity “sold” for a short time because NASA was very very skilled at creating a narrative that worked in either success or failure. IF the probe had failed then someone would have come out and said “when you do hard things sometimes you fail” (I’ve seen this episode of The West Wing)…this was the 7 minutes of terror and all the hype running up to the entry…now that is has suceeded “wow sometimes you do hard things and smart people are able to succeed wonderfully and we did here TEAM USA”…

    Truth is that other then demonstrating a dubious engineering feat and consuming A LOT of money in the process Curiosity has done little…and I will be surprised if one week from now most of the same people who were chanting “TEAM USA” can remember the entire affair much less even today can coherently tell you what the larger mission of the Rover is…

    and then make a coherent discussion of the risk/cost/rewards of that mission.

    NASA has played this game in human spaceflight so long that its just run out of gas “Commander wonderful astronaut is in the process of docking with the space station at 17,500 mph” when the relative closer rate is less then a 737 closing on 12R at KHOU…

    its not a lack of “spirit of exploration is based on the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of adventure is based on acceptance of risk”

    It is that the spirit of adventure cost a lot of money for results which never quite seem to filter down to the ordinary people who are paying that money.

    It is not risk adverse or anything else…it is that the risk is never worth whatever is done up there…and at some point when the scientist go back for more money to replace MSL with something else…they will find they have spent themselves into oblivion…just like NASA Has with its EML dreams..

    RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kate Morgan wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 9:54 am

    The special interests in the science part of NASA appear equally as self-serving as those on the human spaceflight side. Mars scientists want money for Mars, astrophysicists want money for Webb, CxP contractors want money for CxP.>>

    Both you and Deep Space Nine have said it well RGO

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “I predict that some in congress are going to compare the $2.6 billion spent on MSL with the $3 billion spent annually on ISS and come to the logical conclusion.”

    There’s not enough data on either project so there is no “logical” conclusion.

    One is spending billions of dollars to poke at sediments on Mars. Unless some of those sediments turn out to be very interesting in terms of ancient Mars life, the $2.6 billion spent on Curiousity is probably going to seem wasteful over the long-term compared to the $800 million spent on Spirit and Opportunity.

    The other is spending billions of dollars to run hundreds of microgravity experiments. Unless some of those experiments deliver cures, multi-billion dollar products, or vast savings in the design of future deep space human missions, the $100 billion spent on ISS over its life-cycle is probably going to seem wasteful compared to the low hundreds of millions spent on Bigelow station or just running experiments up and down on Dragonlab.

    Pretty pix from mastcams or stunning videos from cupola windows aren’t enough to justify multi-billion-dollar budgets. The projects have to produce. Neither has, not yet.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    MSL blew its original cost estimate by a factor of 4-5 and launched a couple years late.

    Let’s not lose sight of the fact that these two problems were connected. In particular, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the launch window for an efficient Mars mission is strongly constrained. If you miss one, it’s going to be a few years until you get to the next. That’s what happened here. That’s not really management. It’s mostly astrodynamics.

    Now that in no way forgives these overruns, but does mean that the contingency for the mission was not well laid out. JWST won’t have that excuse when the budget on it inflates further, and the launch date is pushed out further.

    The special interests in the science part of NASA appear equally as self-serving as those on the human spaceflight side. Mars scientists want money for Mars, astrophysicists want money for Webb, CxP contractors want money for CxP.

    It’s really not clear how you could expect anything any different. Why would Mars scientists want money for CxP? Why would astrophysicists want money for Mars? Can’t fault these folks for behaving that way. And guess what. Commercial space wants money for itself. How dare they do that! There is fundamentally nothing wrong with special interests, as long as you have someone in control who is smart, and looking out for the whole enterprise. That’s what NASA, as an agency, does. If you’re complaining about Congress (which is looking out for the whole enterprise, but isn’t that smart) and lobbyists, well, that’s unfortunately how the game is played for the entire federal budget. That’s not a “space” issue.

  • amightywind

    People like you are easily awed by “events” and not seriously capable of sober program analysis.

    If you cannot be impressed by the last week’s events, I feel bad for you. The landing of Curiosity is one of about a half dozen planetary missions that are doing what I call first order exploration. My previous favorites were Voyager and Huygens. Voyager can never be topped for the sheer diversity of worlds explored. That first Huygen’s descent image showing stream channels, and the surface picture of icy cobbles on a were absolutely mind blowing.

    BTW are the the “wind” who runs the Planet X site of the same name?

    Who can say? I remain a shadowy figure.

  • MrEarl

    SSDD… Same Sh!t Different Day.

    I’ll be so glad when the election is over and political retoric can be dialed down to 8 out of 10 from the present 12 out of 10.

  • Rep. Adam Schiff’s district includes JPL (Flintridge CA). I wonder how much it protects NASA’s funding that its operations are spread out across a number of different states? There’s Florida, Texas and California, of course, but NASA has facilities in Mississippi, Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland too, and then there are all the the private contractors profiting from these projects.

    I support strong funding for space exploration, so I guess I should be relieved to think that there are at least few dozen congressmen and senators with an interest in protecting NASA’s funding? Or, at least, with an interest in protecting their share of NASA’s funding…

  • Paul

    If you cannot be impressed by the last week’s events, I feel bad for you.

    It was impressive, in the sense a monster truck performance is impressive. One might even argue that giant spectacles like this are a valid function of government. I’m not sure this was the best public spectacle for the cost, though.

  • Vladislaw

    Would anyone care to speculate what a second mission to mars would cost JUST for the landing system used. We spent almost 3 billion dollars and we now have a system that can dump a ton on mars. What would the base cost be .. excluding the actual payload cost, of the launch and landing hardware? If a couple were ordered?

    600-800 million?

  • DCSCA

    “Will Curiosity help save NASA Mars funding?”

    No. Unless you can do one for $500 million.

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 12:24 pm

    “Now that in no way forgives these overruns, but does mean that the contingency for the mission was not well laid out.”

    =yawn= Except they weren’t.

    Chen said in the EDL presser at JPL today they weren’t ready in ’09. End of story.

    @Dark Blue Nine wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 9:41 am

    “MSL blew its original cost estimate by a factor of 4-5 and launched a couple years late. If your $600 million rover missions turn into $2.6 billion rover missions, no Administration is going to trust you with a sample return mission that starts at $5-10 billion in cost.”

    Yep. Not this Administration. And definitely not a Romney Administration.

    Hillary has an interest in space and when she’s CIC there may be a more sympathetic ear from the Oval Office, but a ‘factor of 4 – 5′ habit of cost overruns for throw-away space projects is simply unacceptable in this era. The old NASA adage of “if the mission is successful, nobody cares what it costs’ doesn’t fly anymore in an era of deep debt and deficits. . Curiosity most likely will be the last of its kind greenlighted for the Red Planet for at least a decade or more.

    @amightywind wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 10:06 am

    “I predict that some in congress are going to compare the $2.6 billion spent on MSL with the $3 billion spent annually on ISS and come to the logical conclusion.”

    That being they can show constituents they save $6 billion by suspending ISS ops and terminating Mars exploration expenditures. =eyeroll=

    @amightywind wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 1:10 pm

    “If you cannot be impressed by the last week’s events, I feel bad for you.”

    Euphoria is a state of mind, not a Martian landing site, Windy.

    Everybody cheered the engineering. Not the science. And Curiosity was sent to Mars to conduct and return science, not to demonstrate it could land there.

  • DCSCA

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 11:22 am

    “The excitement about Curiosity is an interesting lesson in the power of risk and creativity in engaging the public.”

    Except it’s not.

    This is the same old NASA pitch cloaked with some fresh, up-to-date-media-savvy bells-and-web-whistles, cheering the engineering success– not the science.

    Revisit the days post-Viking, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity. Similar hype, same euphoria. Cheering- for the engineering accomplishment- not the science conducted.

  • DCSCA

    Case in point- here’s how inane reportage has become already: post EDL’s presser, in which they presented nothing new, just an overview of their precision engineering- not science- accomplished five days ago, CNN reported NASA was ‘reluctant’ to have Curioisity festooned w/JPL stickers for the cameras– so they tagged the turtle with ‘JPL’ in Morse Code on the wheels. Our tax dollars at work. No new pretty red pictures today– just a revelation sure to thrill telegraphers everywhere!.

  • DCSCA

    @Vladislaw wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 2:53 pm

    “Would anyone care to speculate what a second mission to mars would cost JUST for the landing system used.”

    That question was addressed to the EDL team in the presser. Nobody took the bait.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    cheering the engineering success– not the science

    Frankly, I don’t know what this means. The American public has never “cheered” science accomplishment, though the press likes to make it seem that way. The public takes pride in the science that was done, but it isn’t out there with NASA flags, face paint, pom-poms, and vuvuzelas. It largely doesn’t understand the science, but it does know that science is, by definition, a good thing. Sort of like “exploration”. No one quite knows what that is either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing. Engineering, on the other hand, is something we cheer. Formula-1, speedboats, rocket launches of all kinds. We get in the stands, buy our popcorn and beer, and cheer.

    To the extent you’re judging the importance of science to the American people by the “cheering” it gets, you’re way off base.

    I’ll say it again. If Curiosity had no science instruments on it, the American public wouldn’t quite know what to make of it, and would be significantly less enthused by it. They don’t have to understand what those instruments do, except that that those instruments are, to them, tokens of a real purpose greater than just going there.

    Hey, if you built a couple of sports arenas instead of Curiosity, you could buy a LOT of cheering! I guess “cheering” is what makes for a high value enterprise to you, no? Rah, rah, rah! Yep, sports arenas. That’s where it’s at.

    Wow. How many of our tax dollars went into painting JPL in Morse code on the wheels of Curiosity? How many stadiums worth? That’s a cute idea. It’s cheap, and and there is narrative that goes with it.

  • amightywind

    And Curiosity was sent to Mars to conduct and return science, not to demonstrate it could land there.

    Because of the remarkable engineering we are sending the rovers to ageographically challenging and interesting site. All previous landing sites were pretty boring, the the exception of Opportunity.The science return is no more important than showing a new landscape to the American public. Curiosity is a train though the unknown and America has a seat in front of a large window.

    Revisit the days post-Viking, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity. Similar hype, same euphoria.

    It keeps gettin’ better.

    Would anyone care to speculate what a second mission to mars would cost JUST for the landing system used.

    Pretty obvious this should be the next step, whatever the launch date. NASA could find the money if it would engage in a little creative destruction.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “Would anyone care to speculate what a second mission to mars would cost JUST for the landing system used. We spent almost 3 billion dollars and we now have a system that can dump a ton on mars. What would the base cost be .. excluding the actual payload cost, of the launch and landing hardware?”

    MSL dry mass breaks down as follows:

    Cruise Stage: 539kg
    EDL System: 983kg
    Curiousity Rover: 899kg

    The first two (cruise stage and EDL system) total 1522kg or 63% of the total mission dry mass.

    If you’re just going to build a duplicate system, then you want just the estimate for the system’s Phase C/D development (as opposed to Phase A/B design and early testing). The last public estimate that I can find for Phase C/D of MSL development is $1,802M.

    63% of $1,802M is $1,133M. I’d round down to an even $1B since the EDL and cruise stage are fundamentally less complex systems than the Curiosity rover. But roughly speaking, just duplicating MSL’s EDL and cruise stage will cost a cool billion.

    You would need to add the cost of the Atlas V 541 launch to that billion to get the total cost of getting a ton on Mars. NASA’s OIG has estimated that the average cost of an intermediate-class Atlas V from 2012-2020 to be $264 million. You then need to add some low tens of millions for operations during the cruise to Mars. So, in total, you’re looking at about $1.3 billion dollars to put one ton of payload mass on the surface of Mars if you go the current JPL route.

    I think it’s interesting to compare that ~$1.3 billion figure to the Red Dragon and Ice Dragon proposals, which estimate the cost of putting a ton of payload mass on the surface of Mars, including a Falcon Heavy launch and DragonRider capsule, at $150-190 million. I’d call it $200 million to be safe and incorporate ops, or about 15% of how JPL is doing it.

    Of course, that’s an unfair comparison, because the Red/Ice Dragon concepts did not exist (at least outside SpaceX) when MSL was started and because the Red/Ice Dragon concepts rely on supersonic retropropulsion instead of parachutes, which is an unproven by highly studied landing method. But if Red/Ice Dragon works, it would dramatically drop Mars mission costs, assuming JPL’s political masters allowed NASA to take advantage of it. Theoretically, going the Red/Ice Dragon route, you could put six tons on the surface of Mars for what it cost to put one ton on the surface of Mars going the MSL/JPL route.

    It’s also worth noting that unlike the EDL systems used on Mars Pathfinder, MERS, and MSL, which top out at about 1 ton, the supersonic retropropulsion employed by Red/Ice Dragon would be scalable to much larger payloads, including landing human crews on Mars. As amazing as MSL and the rover missions that preceded it are, it represents an expensive dead end in EDL development for Mars, assuming we ever want to put larger robotic or human payloads on the surface of Mars.

    Here’s my references.

    MSL Cost Breakdown by Phase (see p. 18):
    oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY11/IG-11-019.pdf

    MSL Dry Mass Breakdown (scroll down):
    http://weebau.com/satplan/msl.htm

    Atlas V Costs (see bottom p. 8):
    http://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY11/IG-11-012.pdf

    Red Dragon Costs:

    http://digitalvideo.8m.net/SpaceX/RedDragon/karcz-red_dragon-nac-2011-10-29-1.pdf

    http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2012/01/23/NAC_Science_Meeting_ReportOctober_31-November_1_2011-finalTAGGED.pdf

  • Coastal Ron

    Short of Congress increasing NASA’s budget, I don’t see much that can dramatically increase Planetary Science programs related to Mars. At least not with the JWST and SLS sitting on so much of NASA’s overall budget.

    And for those that see the SLS as useful, keep in mind that it is big dumb rocket without a use – no payloads or programs have been identified and funded for it to launch after it becomes operational. At least the ISS has a recognized mission, and a complete ecosystem that supports it. That is something SLS supporters can only dream of, and no one can afford.

    And actually, with NASA’s budget likely to stay at the same level it is for the foreseeable future, that pretty much caps the amount of total exploration NASA will be able to support, regardless if the SLS or the ISS programs get cancelled.

    As many of us have said before, the future of human expansion out into space cannot and will not be borne by NASA – it will have to come mainly from the private sector. NASA can & should do the initial exploration and technology development, but NASA is poorly equipped to expand beyond the cutting-edge. MSL is a good example of what NASA does best, in that now they have proven multiple ways to land on Mars, and we need to keep funding programs that are useful for future human exploration while supporting current science.

  • DCSCA

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 4:04 pm

    “…cheering the engineering success– not the science ‘ “”Frankly, I don’t know what this means.”

    Except you do. And feign ignorance for obvious reasons. No surprise there.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “Pretty obvious this should be the next step, whatever the launch date. NASA could find the money if it would engage in a little creative destruction.”

    It’s not obvious. Assuming you’re just building and operating a exact duplicate, Phase C/D and Phase E costs for MSL totaled at least $1,961 million in June 2011.

    MSL Cost Breakdown by Phase (see p. 18):
    http://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY11/IG-11-019.pdf

    They probably went up some since then.

    Regardless, the Mars Program Planning Group only has $700-800 million available for the next programmable window in 2018. NASA would have to cough up another ~$1.2 billion to afford another MSL. Unless you start putting SLS and MPCV on the table, that’s not going to happen. No other existing NASA program in early development is going to generate that kind of cash from cancellation or deferment — nothing else is that big.

    Barring a radical alternative like Ames’ $400 million Red/Ice Dragon mission:

    http://digitalvideo.8m.net/SpaceX/RedDragon/karcz-red_dragon-nac-2011-10-29-1.pdf

    The best the MPPG is going to do is a retread of one MERS rover. And I’d guess that they aren’t even going to be that ambitious and stick to an orbiter instead.

    MPPG should be focusing on an integrated strategy for sample return, one that probably starts with Curiousity and its 14-year nominal RTG delivering samples to a Mars ascent vehicle (MAV). I’d bet that a modified Red Dragon could deliver a MAV to the surface of Mars for a fraction of the $700-800 million envelope that the MPPG has to work with. Mass-wise, the GLOM for even an SSTO MAV top out at just over 300kg:

    http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20110011140

    So a Red Dragon lander with 1 ton of payload could put a couple MAVs on the surface of Mars for Curiousity to deliver payloads to in 2018, with the samples back on Earth by 2020.

    But I can’t imagine a cumbersome NASA committee (especially given a couple members on the committee) being that creative and audacious in its recommendations.

  • DCSCA

    @amightywind wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 4:17 pm

    “‘Revisit… same euphoria.’ “It keeps gettin’ better.”

    Addicts talk like that until the price of a fix climbs too high, so, the euphoria ends and their universe comes crashing to earth. And it won’t be a soft-landing, Windy.

  • E.P. Grondine

    As it is very premature to announce or even to estimate the benefits of the ISS, those who do so usually do it so that imaginary dollars will be “freed-up” for some project they favor. A common one is an unbelievably low priced manned mission to Mars.

    Perhaps if Curiosity is successful it will lead to demand for more rovers.

    Personally, I rank balloon landing system rovers going up Valles Marineris pretty high as far as Mars research goes. But I would only launch 1 at a time, in order to discover any engineering bugs before committing dollars for a second copy of the rover, and its launch.

    I also want to take a minute here to remind everyone that we could have had two manned launch systems and DIRECT right now for the money that was wasted on the Ares 1, with no disruption to our technical base… and that no one in the nation has any real idea how Griffin made the Ares 1 decision, and that no one in the space news or history business has put together a really coherent account of his action yet .

  • E.P. Grondine

    PS – When Obama said that he is a space enthusiast, a member of the space generation, he meant it.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 12:24 pm

    “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that these two problems were connected. In particular, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the launch window for an efficient Mars mission is strongly constrained. If you miss one, it’s going to be a few years until you get to the next. That’s what happened here. That’s not really management. It’s mostly astrodynamics. ”

    I dont think that is correct…ie the implication from your sentence is that wow they just missed the launch window so a lot of the overrun money went to keeping the thing together until the next one. thats not correct.

    From what I have read of the entire show, they needed every month that they had. RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    Odd thing about the pictures that have come back from Curiosity…I’ve seen nothing which would have precluded an air bag landing…

    how well did they do on their cep? RGO

  • DCSCA

    @Coastal Ron wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 4:41 pm

    “As many of us have said before, the future of human expansion out into space cannot and will not be borne by NASA – it will have to come mainly from the private sector.”

    ROFLMAOPIP Nonsense. Fortunately, the ‘many’ are few. The ‘private sector’ has failed to launch, orbit and safely return nobody. Sober up.

    “MSL is a good example of what NASA does best…”

    Except it’s not.

    Unless you embrace the culture of cost overrruns of a factor of 4 to 5 as a metric of performance. Everybody always cheers the engineering; not the science, and nobody is high-fiving the out-of-control budgets.

    Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should go further into debt to do it– 43 cents of every dollar the government spends on such projects borrowed BTW– which pretty much sums up your opposition to spaceflight ops of scale by the government. You embrace the ISS not for the ‘science’ return, nor for its awesome yet expensive engineering, but as a faux destination for your government subsidized commercial LEO HSF toys– that’s all; and after it splashes into the sea in a decade you’ll be left w/a few LEO space widgets w/no destination to fly to– leaving a legacy of going in circles, no place fast, no further up, out and away. It is, in fact, a $100 billion-plus, 20th century Cold War relic, from the Reagan days that has more in common w/t Berlin Wall, Minuteman missiles and the typewriter than the geopolitical realities of the 21st century. The MSL, and its cousin in the space sciences, the JWST, are classic examples of ‘big science’ boondoggles run amuck by the elbow-patched, ivory-towered, faculty lounge set as well– residue from the old NASA adage of ‘if the mission is successful, nobody cares what it costs.’ Those days are long, long, over. Then there’s Morphius… ;-)

  • Aberwys

    Maybe in tough economic times we need to revisit our European partnerships? There are a few: JUICE, ExoMars… Europe wants to do them, they want us there…the MPPG mtg concluded they want European collab on deck in the future…so…

  • Googaw

    The narrative worked because it focused on the actual heroes — the engineers. Both the astronaut cult and the daydreaming scientists should much more often do what they did here — step aside and let the people who actually make and operate these machines of pride and wonder take the bows.

  • DCSCA

    @Robert G. Oler wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 5:41 pm

    ‘Odd thing about the pictures that have come back from Curiosity…I’ve seen nothing which would have precluded an air bag landing…’

    Similar chatter was broached in the presser and the EDL team noted the engineering for their sktycrane design was robust enough to have permitted the spacecraft to be targeted toward rougher terrain– the fact the science team selected a ‘science store’ landing site which had a nice, flat ‘parking lot’ near by was the choice of the science team..

  • Heinrich Monroe

    I dont think that is correct…ie the implication from your sentence is that wow they just missed the launch window so a lot of the overrun money went to keeping the thing together until the next one. thats not correct.

    Yes, it pretty much is. MSL was confirmed at $1.4B. By the original launch date, in 2008, it had overrun by $400M. But it was burning $340M/yr, and so the launch delay for 2.5 years gets you pretty close to the final cost of $2.5B.

    The reason they didn’t meet their original launch date was because extra testing was needed. But it wasn’t 2.5 years of testing that they needed.

    As to whether 2.5 years of extra effort was needed, think about it. Is NASA going to spend $700M to twiddle their thumbs? Nope. They simply have to come up with some compelling reasons for spending that money, aside from the fact that they’re waiting for Mars. So you can bet the NASA party line is that they needed 2.5 years of extra effort. No question that MSL was a better project because of those 2.5 years, but was it needed? Almost certainly not.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    Unless you embrace the culture of cost overrruns of a factor of 4 to 5 as a metric of performance.

    Nope. You’re wrong. That’s not what the formal overrun was for MSL. The project was confirmed at $1.4B. Confirmation is the line in the sand that overruns are measured to. Confirmation is where the agency formally commits to a price. So the actual overrun was about a factor of two. Still not pretty.

    So where do you get a factor of 4? I’ll tell you where. The 2003 Planetary Decadal Survey recommended MSL, and came up with a budget number of $600M for it. That number was essentially pulled out of a hat. Even worse, it was in large part pulled out of the hat of a potential contractor. (Note that such vapid undercosting was also a hallmark of JWST, for which astronomers at a large professional meeting were deluded into believing would cost $500M.) That’s the timehonored tradition for getting NASA projects started. You undercost them.

    Well, no, I’m not sure where you get a factor of 5. OK, you just made that up. I guess you have your own hat you can pull stuff out of.

    ‘big science’ boondoggles run amuck by the elbow-patched, ivory-towered, faculty lounge set

    MSL and JWST certainly weren’t run amok (well, maybe muck is a good way of looking at it) by academics. For one, these were directed missions. They were run out of NASA centers. At least the Casani report, which assessed the reasons for the JWST cost debacle, didn’t blame those folks. If you want to assign blame on the basis of professional culture, the fault was largely with the necktied, badge-wearing, logo embellished, Blackberry fondling, center cafeteria set.

    I don’t want to try to analyze your paranoia about and fervent hatred for academia, but you must have had a bad experience in college, no? Do seek counseling.

  • Googaw

    the plans for actually using that knowledge are seemingly more and more remote. Even sending humans to Earth-Moon Lagrange points, which seemed a slam-dunk technologically, is now starting to appear difficult…I would also agree that government space isn’t going to get humans exploring. What Congress is about for space is jobs and protecting human life. They can’t figure out any other role for them that might express leadership. Having said that, I remain highly skeptical that commercial space will have any real business case for doing what we consider to be human space exploration.

    Very well said. Although I’m afraid you could add to that the lack of business case for most of the unmanned science. The basic disconnect here is between the “gee whiz!” but astronomically expensive and largely useless things most of NASA does — both HSF and much of the science — versus the useful and affordable things real commerce does with practical unmanned satellites.

    We can’t privatize an economic fantasy. Commerce is not interested in either pure science or in heavenly pilgrimages that are not extremely (in the case of HSF, over 99.5%) subsidized by civilian space agencies. Real commerce does things that are actually useful to people such that those people are willing to shell out of their own pockets, as they do with satellite communications. I’d also throw in public utiltities like GPS that are obviously and directly used by hundreds of millions of people.

    There’s no need to create dogmatic hallucinations about fantastic markets-of-the-future. In the real world there in actual fact exists very useful and affordable real space commerce. It’s just that this real commerce is radically different from the “commerce” of the hallucinations.

    Now of course some kinds of government contracting — such as the fixed price contracts very misleadingly dubbed “commercial” — may be somewhat better than others. So far SpaceX’s budget (albeit not their schedule) is looking far better than either MSL’s or ISS’s. But no form of governrment contracting is an actual private sector commerce with a competitive market of buyers and sellers. Any form of government contracting, no matter how “commercial”, will lead to arbitrarily diseconomic fantasies if that’s the way the politicians choose to go. As they almost always have for NASA. For real business, business that pays more taxes than it consumes, you need practical things that are of great enough use to a large enough group of people that they are willing to voluntarily and indvidually cough up all the bucks needed to fund same. That is light-years away from how NASA and the political system and most posters to this blog think about space, so expecting the political visions to be “privatized” is sheer fantasy.

    In other words, Falcon 9 is for the most part real space commerce. Dragon and NASA buying most kinds of space science data from the private sector are not. The latter are hopelessly and thoroughly dependent on subsidy by government monopsony, which can be based, and for NASA have almost always been based, on political daydreams arbitrarily distant from economic reality.

    Unmanned probe funding does have a very important economic argument in its favor. It is far more econonomically and technologically compatible with what real space commerce actually does — making and launching satellites — than HSF. It would be far less damaging to the reduction of launch costs at SpaceX to give it a number of contracts to launch unmanned science probes and robots than to launch astronauts, with the paranoid bells, whistles, and safety dances that Congress and the public will demand for the latter.

    In an era where the old Cold War habits and beliefs are dying off, it is NASA that needs to take the back seat to real commerce and security, rather than pretending to lead the way with preposterously expensive and useless economic fantasies.

  • Coastal Ron

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 5:41 pm

    Odd thing about the pictures that have come back from Curiosity…I’ve seen nothing which would have precluded an air bag landing…

    It wasn’t a terrain issue per se, but a weight issue. MSL was too big for airbags.

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 5:43 pm

    43 cents of every dollar the government spends on such projects borrowed BTW– which pretty much sums up your opposition to spaceflight ops of scale by the government.

    What? You’re saying I oppose government funded space exploration because it will add more debt? But you think adding more debt – 43 cents on the dollar – for “spaceflight ops of scale by the government” is OK?

    I don’t think you know what you’re arguing for or against anymore. No clue.

    But just for the record, I advocate that NASA should transition the routine activities it does to the private sector, and transporting cargo and crew to LEO has become routine. And unless you think NASA does things the least expensive way, it will save the U.S. Taxpayer money in the long run. Your attitude on this is pretty bizarre.

    Also you have alluded that you want the government to embark on another version of Apollo – for what reason you won’t say (flags & footprints, glory, lunar water, lunar cheese, etc.). 100% funded – 43 cents of every dollar borrowed – by the U.S. Taxpayer.

    What a hypocrite.

  • DCSCA

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 7:47 pm

    “MSL and JWST certainly weren’t run amok…”

    Except they are.

    Only the ivory-towered, elbow-patched, faulty lounge set, comfortably career-dependent on spending other people’s money to the benefit of an elite few at the expense of the many, could rationalize otherwise.

  • Googaw

    One daydreamer:

    I think it’s interesting to compare that ~$1.3 billion figure to the Red Dragon and Ice Dragon proposals, which estimate the cost of putting a ton of payload mass on the surface of Mars, including a Falcon Heavy launch and DragonRider capsule, at $150-190 million. I’d call it $200 million to be safe and incorporate ops, or about 15% of how JPL is doing it.

    And another:

    we could have had two manned launch systems and DIRECT right now for the money that was wasted on the Ares 1

    It’s funny how the hallucinations always cost far less than the reality.

  • Googaw

    That’s the timehonored tradition for getting NASA projects started. You undercost them.

    Oh my, we can’t have this blatant honesty. It just won’t do.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 7:54 pm

    Although I’m afraid you could add to that the lack of business case for most of the unmanned science.

    I would say all pure science lacks a business case, yet people, companies and governments invest heavily in pure science because they know in the long run it usually pays off. Not always, but if you don’t do the research, someone else will make the discoveries.

    Commerce is not interested in either pure science…

    Another disconnect you have from reality.

    Companies do invest in pure science, although it’s not uniform across all sectors.

    And some industries rely on government research for much of their scientific data, such as with food industries. But in those cases most of the industry is made up of small players, with no dominant ones that can act as disseminators for new discoveries.

    It all depends on the market size and business models used, but commerce relies heavily on pure science.

  • pathfinder_01

    “Odd thing about the pictures that have come back from Curiosity…I’ve seen nothing which would have precluded an air bag landing…”
    Two issues mass(air bags were at their limit landing MER, you can’t land anything more massive than them). Science, Airbag landings are rather violent and some science experiments that MSL carries would be damaged by the bouncing.

    As for the cost/schedule overrun, I think MSL was probably too ambitious to try to fit in the schedule they had. They started in like December 2004 and had to be ready to launch in November 2008(i.e. on the rocket). MER had a similar timeline, but was less complicated that this thing and MER was pretty pressed for time( in fact they stated had they not had two rovers they likely would have missed its window too). I mean that thing probably needed to be complete no later than early/mid 2008. Also once they did miss the window they probably did continue testing things to retire risk further.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 8:36 pm

    It’s funny how the hallucinations always cost far less than the reality.

    You and DCSCA are pretty funny when you’re flaming hypocrites.

    You both decry the high cost of how NASA does business under the cost-plus and political largess systems, and then you decry the efforts of people trying to break the cycle of constantly rising costs.

    Stop imitating 2-year olds crying “NO” to anything that’s said to them. Offer up realistic alternatives, engage in fine art of persuasion… in short, do something constructive if you have any interest at all in humanity doing more in space.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “One daydreamer”

    If you’re going to throw around these kinds of accusations about calculations, then you need to back them up with figures. I provided mine. Where are yours?

  • Googaw

    Coastal, you are quite confused about the phrase “pure science”, as if it just means the same thing as “science”. Companies not under government contract to do so do not do pure science — science for science’s sake. They do science in pursuit of commercial objectives — to develop a new drug, to research a new service, to explore for minerals, to investigate the environment in which their product is supposed to operate, to improve the design for their product, and so on. And these kinds of science certainly do need a business case (often just an obvious relevance to the more important engineering, to be sure) to justify them.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    I’d also throw in public utiltities like GPS that are obviously and directly used by hundreds of millions of people.

    And with regard to things that are directly used by hundreds of millions of people, let me just note that GPS is critically dependent on general relativity, which was developed as pure science. The laboratory for general relativity is space, where you have really massive things. Know what? The clocks on GPS satellites tick faster than they do on Earth, because they’re farther out in the Earth’s gravitational field. They are faster by about 40 microseconds per day because of this. 40 microseconds corresponds to an error of 10 km. So if GR weren’t explicitly written into the code, GPS units would be off by an additional 10 km every day. Slip slidin’ away …

    This is just one example of how pure science (and what is largely space science here) trickles down into hugely commercializable opportunities. There are loads of examples, but since you brought up GPS as an example of real commerce that doesn’t care about pure science, it seemed a good think to consider.

    Now, I know what you mean. That GPS folks should have funded the GR work, right? Well, you know, the navigation industry (which at the time of Einstein’s discovery) was mostly about compasses and mechanical clocks. They had NO CLUE that there would be anything like GR messing up their future abilities. Had we left it to the DoD to figure this out “Damn, that building is moving 10 km every day! Let’s go hire a really really smart theoretical physicist, pronto!” I suspect we wouldn’t be where we are now. That pure science was an investment in how we would eventually exploit our world.

    What’s MSL going to find on Mars? We don’t know. What it may lead to are realizations that pertain strongly to the Earth. Those realizations may be a lot more than a rock, or a geological deposit. MSL is in many respects about curiosity-driven science (pun intended). While curiosity may strike one as a fuzzy sort of mental activity, it’s what our economy and productivity are founded on.

  • adastramike

    Older wrote:

    “Odd thing about the pictures that have come back from Curiosity…I’ve seen nothing which would have precluded an air bag landing…”

    I hate to say it, because I think RGO is older, but This statement reveals his ignorance on the matter. I not know if RGO has any space flight engineering or science training or experience, beyond an interest in visiting this site, but I doubt he’s qualified to make tht kind of engineering judgement based on looking at a picture of landing system remnants.

    For what it’s worth, an airbag system for landing the 900 kg rover would have been too massive, requiring too much propellant to send it to Mars and for trajectory maneuvers, probably an even larger parachute, requiring a more capable launch vehicle, and probably a whole slew of other things, not to mention more cost. Airbags can only get you so far, and the engineers clearly looked at whether airbags could have been used.

    Here’s a link with more (not that I expect it to cause Mr. Oler to back track his statement):

    http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/ask/issues/47/47s_sky_crane.html

  • Robert G. Oler

    Coastal Ron wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 7:58 pm

    It wasn’t a terrain issue per se, but a weight issue. MSL was too big for airbags.”

    sorry I should have acknowledged the mass issue…I did on my facebook page and a other place.

    having said that the more I look into the skycrane system the less impressed I am with it…and the more I figure out how expensive in terms of mass discarded for mass landed the system is.

    I still have no heard a real good reason for it…the “have to have high center of gravity with heavy ramp” is a bunch of nonesense…they simply didnt think it through if that is their answer. RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    It also was not a debris issue…the rover is apparently covered with dust, dirt etc. RGO

  • Curtis Quick

    Robert, it’s no sin to admit that you don’t know something. You are a voice of reason in the near fantasy word of spaceflight that I enjoy reading. Your stock rises in our estimation when you admit to not knowing something. Those who claim expertise over a wide range of topics show their ignorance in their arrogance. We know a few of those on this thread.

    It seems that without retro-rocket atmospheric entry (ala Red Dragon) there may be no way to get large payloads safely down to the Martian surface. Sky Crane was the best NASA could come up with for a craft as heavy and delicate as MSL. But any heavier and even sky crane won’t work.

    It seems that Viking and Phoenix were the upper limit for terminal retrorocket landings on Mars. Air bags worked for rugged rovers like the light Sojourner and MER, but MER was the upper limit.

    Also, sky crane had no landing gear, and I would wager that that saved a good amount of mass that MSL could well use.

    All things being equal, it was an impressive feat of engineering and was way up on the “cool” factor that was not lost on the public. Some of us are duly impressed, and so it seems were some of the public as well. It will be very good if MSL lasts out the decade and roves much farther afield than currently envisioned. It may be that long before Mars has another rover so capable.

    Of course, where NASA falters SpaceX can fill in. They may be able to make Mars exploration affordable enough for NASA to be able to purchase the launch and lander with change to spare.

  • vulture4

    I agree w/RGO. Not sure why the rover could not have been enclosed in a dust barrier and placed low, between the thrusters, where the lab payloads were located on the Viking lander. Still, nothing succeeds like success; the mission will continue at lower cost. I’m more concerned with where NASA as a whole is going. With Ryan as VP the discretionary budget is sure to be slashed.

  • Vladislaw

    Thanks Dark Blue Nine for the breakdown …. it was higher than I thought it would be for the base system.

    I knew SpaceX costs would come in lower if the Falcon Heavy / Dragon works out, didn’t expect it be that much lower. I know on the human side commercial is proving a lot less, didn’t think it would be quite as bad on the robotic side.

  • Googaw

    You both decry the high cost of how NASA does business under the cost-plus and political largess systems, and then you decry the efforts of people trying to break the cycle of constantly rising costs.

    Problem is, these “efforts” are largely busines as usual, or even doubling down on NASA’s flaws, especially on the dishonesty and self-delusion. For starters:

    * pretending that a far more expensive mode of space travel, HSF, is the best way of breaking the cycle of rising launch costs

    * calling monopsonistic government contracts “commercial” and pretending that they’ve magically solved the problems of political largess, through an addled analogy to real markets

    * preposterous, hallucinatory lowballing (far worse than what Heinrich above admitted was “traditional” to get NASA projects started)

    * delusions about imagined markets-of-the-future, radically different from actually real space commerce markets, springing up out of nowhere

    * bizarre goals of “privatizing” NASA economic fantasies, while in fact remaining on the taxpayer dole

    * dogmatic insistence that we must all agree on these hallucinations and plan NASA’s projects based on them

    Consistently loathing delusion and dishonesty is quite the opposite of hypocrisy.

  • E.P. Grondine

    We could have had two manned launch systems and DIRECT right now for the money that was wasted on the Ares 1

    Those numbers were worked many times by many people.
    That’s no daydream, and no hallucination either, Googaw.
    It’s more like the space nightmare Obama inherited.

    The bottom line is that ATK is a crummy company which could not deliver a crummy rocket anywhere near on time or on budget.

  • E.P. Grondine

    RGO –

    I go with you on your call here.

    The sky crane was/is risky, and the mass delivered to surface by the system is too low.

    It would look to me like MSL is about at the top mass of what a sky crane can deliver.

    As far as rovers go, the key to their return is how far they are able to rove.
    I won’t celebrate this one until MSL begins to move.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 11:17 am

    pretending that a far more expensive mode of space travel, HSF, is the best way of breaking the cycle of rising launch costs

    I don’t know of anyone that has stated that, and I certainly haven’t. Competition and volume have always be two of the key reasons prices fall, and travel to space (with or without humans on board) won’t be any different.

    calling monopsonistic government contracts “commercial” and pretending that they’ve magically solved the problems of political largess, through an addled analogy to real markets

    Gee, and how do you change that (i.e. one buyer faces many sellers)? Add more buyers! Duh.

    The ISS needs cargo and crew, and Congress is willing to fund the development of commercial systems that can provide that, so why not encourage non-government demand, especially if taxpayer money isn’t required to expand the market?

    preposterous, hallucinatory lowballing (far worse than what Heinrich above admitted was “traditional” to get NASA projects started)

    I’ve worked in the government contractor world, so I do know how new technology programs can start low and end high. That will continue to happen due to the nature of the challenges. For instance, who had ever built the MSL before? There was no budget comparison for so much new technology.

    There are numerous solutions, but the best one is move routine tasks from NASA and have them purchase them at set prices – force the cost containment on the service & product providers. Just like what’s happening with Commercial Cargo & Crew. See a pattern here?

    delusions about imagined markets-of-the-future, radically different from actually real space commerce markets, springing up out of nowhere

    Seven countries signing MOU’s with Bigelow for possible future space station leases is not “imagined”. That is an indication of demand, which is what all companies look for. Who knows how much actual demand there will be, but that’s no different than any other entrepreneurial company.

    bizarre goals of “privatizing” NASA economic fantasies, while in fact remaining on the taxpayer dole

    You apparently have never heard of the laws of supply and demand. That’s how things work, and if you don’t want to believe in the laws of economics, then I suggest you shouldn’t be responsible for your own money. Who knows, maybe that’s already the case… ;-)

  • Robert, it’s no sin to admit that you don’t know something. You are a voice of reason in the near fantasy word of spaceflight that I enjoy reading.

    If you think that constantly engaging in deranged raving about the “right wing” and Sarah Palin and George Bush and Fox News and the Iraq war is a “voice of reason,” then yeah, I suppose so.

  • Robert G. Oler

    adastramike wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 11:09 pm >>

    My name is Robert G. Oler…you be careful with my name and I’ll be careful with the fake one you use to hide who you are. so either you were trying a childish name thing or you are on the face of it careless.

    I’ve already noted that in my post I should have discussed the mass issue, but having said that I did it elsewhere on the forum so ….

    But lets talk mass. I have read the link you posted and its mostly NASA word salad.

    MSL is heavy but its not that heavy. the combined mass of the rover and the EDL was 3 yes 3 times the viking lander dry mass. the lander carried 85KG of fuel…the Skycrane stage finished its mission with what 150KG or something like that…

    There is no metric underwhich this system is not enormously inefficient…and we are not even counting the cruise stage. Put it another way…for about 3500KG (which is about 1100kg more then the MSL) Viking got a lander and ana orbiter…so its hard to see how this system could not have come up with a lander and a rove off.

    Cost is also not competitive.

    This is not rocket science here it is management. something you clearly dont know a lot about RGO

  • Googaw

    Well, you know, the navigation industry (which at the time of Einstein’s discovery) was mostly about compasses and mechanical clocks. They had NO CLUE that there would be anything like GR messing up their future abilities.,

    Navigation was also about celestial navigation, which motivated most of the funding of astronomy, which in turn led to discovery of the Mercury anomaly, and led to curiousity about physics problems of the kind Michaelson and Morley were exploring when they discovered the anomaly that led to SR and ultimately GR. Funding of the research that led to what we now call “pure science” was usually motivated by important economic or military problems.

    Furthermore, the first time we launched a satellite with an accurate clock, we would have discovered the GPS anomaly you mention, and soon figured out its cause, even if Lorentz, Poincare, Minkowski, Einstein, Hilbert, et. al. hadn’t already figured out SR and GR and their cousins and predecessors. The pure science in this case as in many others is not the critical path driver you seem to be pretending it is.

    Of course I’m quite happy with government funding pure physics. I’m also quite in favor of sciece we know has economically important implications, such as comparative climatology and geology and science related to important engineering projects both private and public. But astrobiology, whose subject matter is not even known to exist, but rather is based on wild speculations, is very far away from being a science like physics. It is rather the typical NASA “wonders are coming, just give us more money” tease.

  • Googaw

    why not encourage non-government demand

    You and most other New Spacers are not encouraging non-governmental demand. You are merely hallucinating that it will magically appear, and in a radically different form from the important non-governmental demand that already exists. But you ignore real commerce and in fact spend your time plumping for ever larger doses of taxpayer’s money from the same Cold War organzation that is the source of your economic fantasies in the first place, NASA.

    Seven countries signing MOU’s with Bigelow for possible future space station leases is not “imagined”.

    Science fiction stamped “MOU” is still fiction. No significant amounts of money have changed hands. Furthermore, they’re MOUs with other government agencies mimicking NASA’s economic fantasies. As usual you hopelessly confuse preposterous hype with reality.

  • Googaw

    BTW, Coastal, I have made many positive recommendations for things we can do in space and things we can do to bring futuristic space dreams closer to reality. But since they don’t fit in with your dogmatic hallucinations, you’ve forgotten them. Try paying attention next time.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 12:35 pm

    But you ignore real commerce…

    Oh yeah, I forgot that supporting companies like SpaceX was ignoring “real commerce”.

    What a maroon…

  • Heinrich Monroe

    Only the ivory-towered, elbow-patched, faulty lounge set, comfortably career-dependent on spending other people’s money to the benefit of an elite few at the expense of the many, could rationalize otherwise.

    What I said was “MSL and JWST certainly weren’t run amok (well, maybe muck is a good way of looking at it) by academics.”

    What you turned that into was “MSL and JWST certainly weren’t run amok…”, and you criticize for me saying that. C’mon. You’re probably too big to hide behind an ellipsis. As you say, those projects were run amok, but not by academia, which is who you accuse of being responsible.

    Only someone who doesn’t read words carefully, and has inexplicable paranoia about academia, could rationalize otherwise.

    If you’re going to enter into what might be considered an intellectual argument, do try to get your quotes right. Oh, but maybe getting quotes right is only for the ivory-towered, elbow-patched, faulty lounge set. Try harder. Get out of the “muck”.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 12:49 pm

    I have made many positive recommendations for things we can do in space and things we can do to bring futuristic space dreams closer to reality.

    LIke what?

    You have to remember that people gloss over what you write when you start talking about zombies and unicorns (or whatever) – essentially when you seem like you’re tripping on drugs. Maybe you need to be specific when you have a serious point you’re making…

    And just so you know I’m not asking for anything I haven’t already provided. For the past couple of years I have been stating on this forum that I support those things that lower the cost to access space. I have been very consistent on this.

    That’s why I support the efforts of SpaceX, as well as companies like Orbital Sciences, Boeing and Sierra Nevada (and others) that are risking their own money to try and lower current cost of doing business in space. Anything effort that looks like it has a good chance of lowering costs I support, which if you’ll notice, doesn’t include every announced effort (for instance, ATK’s Liberty claims strain credulity).

    We have some huge paradigm shifts that are happening too. Up until recently space has been 100% government funded and controlled, so we have to shift the cost structures over to commercial models. The COTS/CCiCap models of public/private partnerships starts that move, and at some point I would expect that NASA won’t need to provide any funding at all – just buy services.

    I also don’t expect miraculous decreases in prices. SpaceX is a disruptive force in the market, but it will take years for competitors to respond, so I don’t expect OSC and ULA to match what SpaceX is doing. In those cases I compare the current & previous pricing levels, which would be Soyuz and Shuttle.

    Though it’s not hard to be less expensive than Shuttle, it’s still not a fully developed market either. My timeframe assumptions are in big chunks of years (decades in some cases), not months. I don’t assume a fast expansion out into space at all, so I focus on trends to see how we’re doing, and the trends are very positive with cargo and crew transportation to LEO.

  • Googaw

    Up until recently space has been 100% government funded and controlled

    Wow. I know you’ve been veering ever farther from reality, but this takes the cake.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 4:04 pm
    “…cheering the engineering success– not the science ‘ “”Frankly, I don’t know what this means.”

    DCSCA wrote @ August 10th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
    … you do … for obvious reasons.

    Well, thanks for seeing it my way. Hey, those ellipses are handy! Gee, we could almost be presidential candidates, taking opponents words out of context.

    But this is an important point. The American public responds to science accomplishments differently than engineering accomplishments. For better or worse, science accomplishment is read by the public as an honor. In many cases, because the science accomplishment really doesn’t touch everyday life, but is understood to be a step toward some greater good. Engineering accomplishment is usually read by the public as a race or game that was won. Since the money could just as well have been spent on sports stadiums, where races or games are won, the public gets satisfaction out of engineering accomplishment in much the same way.

  • Coastal Ron

    Googaw wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 4:10 pm

    I know you’ve been veering ever farther from reality, but this takes the cake.

    You disagree, fine. But just saying you disagree is not very persuasive.

    Do you think the Shuttle was not 100% government funded and controlled?

    You better ‘splain yourself Lucy.

  • pathfinder_01

    “There is no metric underwhich this system is not enormously inefficient…and we are not even counting the cruise stage. Put it another way…for about 3500KG (which is about 1100kg more then the MSL) Viking got a lander and ana orbiter…so its hard to see how this system could not have come up with a lander and a rove off.”

    Landers and Orbiters don’t need enough power to move and Viking lacked MSL’s instruments, its computer systems didn’t need to process as much/quickly (MSL and MER need to be able to drive themselves…i.e. don’t run into a bolder). Mobility changes everything. In addition going with nuclear power gives more options for where the rover could work (MER had to stay near the equator) but adds mass too (radiation shielding for instruments, mass of RTG). To give you an idea of just how costly the power to mover can be Sprit and Opportunity often stay stationary in winter…esp. Sprit as it was further from the equator to survive winter it had to climb up a hill and tilt it’s array towards the sun. When it got stuck and they took too long to unstuck it, Sprit was doomed. Oppy is closer to the equator and on flat ground, but even then it occasionally has to stop in winter.

    You are almost sounding like DCSA who thinks that Voyager was a cheap program(it appears he had not hear of Pioneer 10/11..and the big changes between those two systems Voyager and Pioneer). When in fact Voyager was much more expensive than Pioneer but a lot more capable.

  • Googaw

    For anybody who is not so far gone into cult-think that they’ve forgotten how to think and speak in English, the explanation is obvious. For anybody who is even dimly aware of the history of space development, and hasn’t destroyed said knowledge completely with hallucinations, the explanation is obvious. Try figuring out the meaning of what you wrote again — the actual meaning in English, rather than the meaning in astronaut cult-speak. Your error is glaring.

  • Robert G. Oler

    pathfinder_01 wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 11:15 pm

    I am not commenting on the differences between orbiters/landers/and rovers….what I am commenting on is the landing method and the mass that was associated with it…for every 1 kg put on the surface about 1.5 kg were tossed and that is not a good ratio…in fact it is one of the worst of the Mars program.

    There is a massive difference in the step between the Pioneeer 10/11 series and Voyager and the step between MER and MSL…

    MSL/MER step is quite a bit smaller then the 10/11 to Voyager…but again this has nothing to do with the landing method. RGO

  • Coastal Ron

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ August 12th, 2012 at 3:52 pm

    what I am commenting on is the landing method and the mass that was associated with it…for every 1 kg put on the surface about 1.5 kg were tossed and that is not a good ratio.

    Just as a point of comparison, the Dragon spacecraft has a dry mass weight of 4,200 kg, and can land 3,000 kg of payload. That’s a 1.4 ratio of non-payload mass to payload mass, but that’s also only landing on water. When they upgrade to their powered landings, that ratio could get worse.

    Of course there are many factors at work here. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which means aerodynamic methods of slowing down aren’t as effective as they would be on Earth. And though Mars only has 1/3 the gravity of Earth, that’s still double the gravity of the Moon, so powered landings aren’t directly comparable.

    I don’t think there is enough comparable information to make sweeping judgements on what are the best ways to land mass on Mars, especially when the payload mass keeps getting bigger and bigger, and possibly even more delicate. Too many variables, and not enough comparables.

  • red

    Dark Blue Nine: “The other is spending billions of dollars to run hundreds of microgravity experiments. Unless some of those experiments deliver cures, multi-billion dollar products, or vast savings in the design of future deep space human missions, the $100 billion spent on ISS over its life-cycle is probably going to seem wasteful compared to the low hundreds of millions spent on Bigelow station or just running experiments up and down on Dragonlab.”

    Compared to a Bigelow station and Dragonlab, ISS is/was expensive, but would we have had either of those without ISS development? Bigelow stations, Dragonlabs, and other commercial cargo and crew services could in a sense be considered to be byproducts of the ISS.

    It’s possible that ISS will not have single blockbuster results like cures, major products, and big exploration savings, but it could still come out ahead given the accumulated weight of hundreds of smaller results. There are so many activities now there and planned there: SPHERES, Robonaut, the robotic refueling demonstration, various Earth observation instrument tests and operations like SERVIR, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, Nanoracks experiments and instruments, new Cubesat capabilities, communication technology tests like SCAN, radiation experiments, human research, etc.

    I think we have to disregard the expensive Shuttle-based ISS development as a sunk cost. Now that it’s there the question is whether or not to use it, how, and how much. I’d like to see it used more: more NASA-funded research, more ISS capabilities added, more on-ramps for ISS commercial participation, and exploration technology demonstrations using the ISS like some of those proposed with the FY11 NASA budget and some FISO presentations. At the same time, I’d also like to see a lot of non-ISS work funded, such as research on Bigelow stations, Dragonlabs, and/or the Space Studies Institute station proposal.

    Getting rid of SLS/Orion would allow all of this while at the same time freeing up plenty of funding to restore Mars surface robotic exploration and/or sample return, robotic precursor missions, technology demonstration missions to places like Mars, and other Planetary Science lines that have been removed or severely cut like Mars Scout, Lunar Quest, Discovery, and New Frontiers.

  • BeanCounterfromDownunder

    Googaw wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 11:31 pm

    Meaningless post. Just a waste of space and another reason to gloss over your comments. CR is completely correct. You, not so. Back up your statements or don’t post.

  • Coastal Ron

    red wrote @ August 12th, 2012 at 5:20 pm

    I think we have to disregard the expensive Shuttle-based ISS development as a sunk cost.

    Yep. The money to build the ISS has already been spent, so it’s more a question of whether the science being done on the ISS is worth the $3B/year (U.S. only).

    Now that it’s there the question is whether or not to use it, how, and how much.

    Two things I think will have a big factor in increasing the science payback of the ISS are:

    1. The focus CASIS provides for utilization of the ISS.

    2. Commercial Crew allowing NASA to increase the ISS crew from six to seven, which should increase hands-on science by about 50%.

    At the same time, I’d also like to see a lot of non-ISS work funded, such as research on Bigelow stations, Dragonlabs, and/or the Space Studies Institute station proposal.

    That’s the type of stuff NASA should be doing, which is what NACA was so good at – being a resource, and an industry multiplier. Which if our government will realize that our future in space has to be through non-governmental expansion, they will support that.

    However those in charge of NASA in Congress are still beholden to the Apollo model of doing things in space, which blinds them to the commerce potential. Which is pretty strange, since many of those in Congress as supposedly say they are so pro-business.

    NASA will always be a pure expense account, since it doesn’t generate any revenue. That is why if we want to increase our activities in space, we need to promote commerce in space. Even then we won’t be able to afford too much activity in space until we start exploiting space-based minerals or producing things in space that are then exported back to Earth (medicines, unique materials, etc.). That’s going to take a long time, but the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll get there.

  • 2. Commercial Crew allowing NASA to increase the ISS crew from six to seven, which should increase hands-on science by about 50%.

    Actually, it should at least double it. There is currently one crew member devoted to science. Increasing complement by just one would be huge.

    And this could happen a lot sooner (like within a year or so) than actual commercial crew transport, because Dragon doesn’t need a launch abort system to act as a lifeboat — it only needs a rudimentary life-support system. While it needs to berth to attach to the CBM, it would easily unattach from it unassisted. Or if there is need for crew on board to release latches, the ability to do so from Dragon shouldn’t be that hard to add.

  • BeanCounterfromDownunder

    red wrote @ August 12th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
    ‘Compared to a Bigelow station and Dragonlab, ISS is/was expensive, but would we have had either of those without ISS development? Bigelow stations, Dragonlabs, and other commercial cargo and crew services could in a sense be considered to be byproducts of the ISS.’

    Not the case at all. Why? Musk has a manifest that is at least 50% commercial non-NASA payloads and the original reason he started SpaceX was to help facilitate human-kind as an inter-planetary species. Didn’t need the ISS or NASA although coincidentally they have assisted. Timing, as they say, is everything’.
    And Bigelow bought the TransHab patents from NASA and has launched 2 test spacecraft without any NASA ISS or HSF assistance. It’s hard to see how much of the patent technology he actually used. My take, minimal if anything in the end. Admittedly he’s looking for crew transport but he’d have found a way even if NASA hadn’t started either COTS or CCDev. Again timing.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Coastal Ron wrote @ August 12th, 2012 at 4:53 pm

    Two points late on a Sunday or early on a Monday

    First the issues with MSL are essentially the last 50 feet (or 100 or 150 feet) and in my view the “cruise” stage…lets ignore the cruise stage…and go right to the landing.

    There is nothing unique or different between a conventional powered landing and the “skycrane” system until you get to the last o50=-150 feet the part where they have to commit to some sort of touchdown system.

    And then I put you dime to donuts the severity of the terrain also plays almost no role in the type of landing. there is no assurance that a skycrane would not put you down on a large rock or any other ground obstruction…

    So really what we are talking about here is the touchdown phase…and there is nothing there that anyone has been able to give an advantage for the skycrane system other then well debris mediation…and even that didnt seem to work all that well. I’ve seen picture of Viking when it touched down and MSL and Viking was far better off.

    As for Dragon..if you have to carry the fuel for the LAS then the landings are probably a sort of freebee…

    But my prediction is this…we are going to do as a matter of practice rocket landings on Mars…the skycrane is over. RGO

  • pathfinder_01

    “While it needs to berth to attach to the CBM, it would easily unattach from it unassisted. Or if there is need for crew on board to release latches, the ability to do so from Dragon shouldn’t be that hard to add.”

    Err the CBM isn’t good for that. It requires the robot arm to both berth and unberth something. You could jerry rig something so that it could unberth without the arm, but you would lose the ability to return(i.e. temporally evacute ISS and come back). Plus how are you going to lift the 7th crew member up? Soyuz holds 3. And CBM latches operate from the ISS side(i.e. the passive part is the part that is the one on the VV).

    Now the power of the CBM is that you can install a docking port to the giving the ISS the ability to change docking systems but that is another story. The NDS however will attach to APAS(which is where the shuttle docked and is attached to the ISS via CBM) and covert it for use for commercail crew and Orion. The plan to launch two, on Dragon in 2014.

  • You could jerry rig something so that it could unberth without the arm, but you would lose the ability to return(i.e. temporally evacute ISS and come back). Plus how are you going to lift the 7th crew member up? Soyuz holds 3. And CBM latches operate from the ISS side(i.e. the passive part is the part that is the one on the VV).

    Sorry, I dragged us a little off topic (but at least it relates to space policy).

    As I said, you could jury-rig it. The seventh crew member could be one who stayed an extra tour, at which point Soyuz could maintain the higher complement.

    Now the power of the CBM is that you can install a docking port to the giving the ISS the ability to change docking systems but that is another story. The NDS however will attach to APAS(which is where the shuttle docked and is attached to the ISS via CBM) and covert it for use for commercail crew and Orion. The plan to launch two, on Dragon in 2014.

    Why could that plan not be accelerated? That’s what I would do if I considered research on the ISS to be important.

  • Coastal Ron

    Rand Simberg wrote @ August 13th, 2012 at 12:18 am

    Actually, it should at least double it.

    Thanks for the correction.

  • DCSCA

    @pathfinder_01 wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 11:15 pm

    “You are almost sounding like DCSA who thinks that Voyager was a cheap program…”

    =yawn= Inaccurate. You best learn the difference between something that’s cost-effective and cheap. ..

    @Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 11th, 2012 at 5:11 pm

    “…cheering the engineering success– not the science ‘ “”Frankly, I don’t know what this means.”…”The American public responds to science accomplishments differently than engineering accomplishments.”

    Congratulations- you’ve finally acknowledged how the elbow-patched, ivory towered, faculty lounge set can mislead; a difference you denied earlier in the thread.

  • Vladislaw

    Gov. Romney actually mentioned space today and the Mars rover in particular. Well not by name….

    Romney Taunts Chinese Moon Landing Plans

    “You also just saw we just landed on Mars and took a good look at what’s going on there.”

    He also wished China good luck on going to the moon.

  • common sense

    Hello everyone, was away for a while. Missed me? ;)

    Dragon as a lifeboat? My suspicion is that there will be a need (requirement?) that will bring Dragon well into its development cycle by what time the LAS may already have been developed. Just a bureaucratic/design issue. A sense of “we want to make sure the darn thing is working” also. Again I would not hold my breath for Dragon to be the lifeboat until it actually becomes operational for crewed mission.

    As a footnote, I already said that Dragon might be crewed just (or almost) right now. LAS is not a real issue (see Shuttle) but it is some comfort for some. And SpaceX is not developing a LAS. They are developing a landing system that may serve as a LAS. I know but there is a difference.

    FWIW.

  • Googaw

    CR is completely correct.

    Another dogmatic cult spasm. One mindless reaction mimicking another.

    I can hardly can present evidence better than the blatantly obvious.
    If the blatantly obvious doesn’t get through to you, nothing will.

  • Googaw

    He also wished China good luck on going to the moon.

    To great cheers and applause. Even people on the Space Coast know it’s a frivolous activity.

  • Vladislaw

    Then the space coast must have also applauded President Obama’s budget request for zero funding for constellation?

  • common sense

    @ Vladislaw wrote @ August 13th, 2012 at 5:48 pm

    “Then the space coast must have also applauded President Obama’s budget request for zero funding for constellation?”

    And then they rejected the help that the WH wanted to give to FL to move on past Shuttle. Ideology trumps pragmatism.

    BTW, some in FL forget that the development for Constellation was not done in FL. So what would they have done up until the time Orion was to fly? Polish the pad? Watch re-runs of Apollo XIII? Kind of boring if it were to take 20 years to fly, no?

    Yeah. I know. Blunt.

  • Vladislaw

    Googaw wrote:

    “He also wished China good luck on going to the moon.”

    To great cheers and applause. Even people on the Space Coast know it’s a frivolous activity.”

    Actually, there was NO applause when Romney wished China good luck with a moon landing. The applause came only after Romney said he hopes they visit one of our landing sites from 43 years ago.. THAT’S when the applause started.

  • pathfinder_01

    “Why could that plan not be accelerated? That’s what I would do if I considered research on the ISS to be important.”
    Lots of factors.

    Budget and the fact that no CCDEV craft is expected to be available before 2015/2016. The NDS is new docking standard for commercial crew, Orion and all American manned spacecraft planned. It is NASA’s implementation of the International docking standard(Soyuz won’t change to it) but it is open for other nations to adopt. There also wasn’t much of anyway to send it up expect maybe HTV till recently(Dragon). Plus the temporary reduction in cargo capacity due to retiring the shuttle.

    Soyuz and Progress production is linked so that there is a limit of how many of those could be produced in a year. The contract for Soyuz service was negotiated before the ccdev program(or at a very early point in it). Basically we are booked till 2016 on Soyuz and getting more Soyuz flights just not an easy option.

    They figured it was easier to wait and have full capacity to dock and undock than do a quick rush job.

  • Budget and the fact that no CCDEV craft is expected to be available before 2015/2016.

    In other words, research on ISS is not important.

  • BeanCounterFromDownUnder

    Rand Simberg wrote @ August 13th, 2012 at 9:17 pm
    Well if you look at the performance or lack thereof of CASIS, then quite reasonable conclusion.

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