In her speech at the AIAA Space 2012 conference Tuesday, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver mentioned that NASA had just delivered to Congress a “comprehensive report outlining our destinations” for human exploration of the solar system. That report, formally titled “NASA Exploration Destinations, Goals, and International Collaboration”, is now available on NASA’s web site. However, for those who have been following NASA’s exploration plans, there’s not much, if anything, new in this ten-page document, as it reiterates plans for continued utilization of the ISS, a human mission to a near Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s and to the “Mars system” in the mid-2030s.
Curiously, a Wall Street Journal article played up a perceived interest in human lunar exploration. The report delivered to Congress, the Journal reported, “includes a section focusing on the scientific benefits of establishing a long-term human presence on the lunar surface.” Yet there is hardly any mention of the Moon in the 180-day report, including nothing on a lunar base. (The reporter may have been confusing the 180-day report with the earlier “Voyages” report, which does discuss the benefits of and requirements for human lunar exploration.)
The Journal article also claims that Garver said that “an unspecified mission to the moon is tentatively scheduled as early as 2017.” That is simply the first Orion/SLS mission, designated EM-1, which would send an uncrewed Orion around the Moon in 2017. EM-2, the first crewed Orion mission, would follow in 2021, also on a circumlunar trajectory. However, in a panel session Tuesday afternoon at the Space 2012 conference, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said that NASA was looking at what other things could be done on those missions, such as visiting a Lagrange point. “We’re in the process of doing those trades to see what makes sense,” he said.
“The Journal article also claims that Garver said that “an unspecified mission to the moon is tentatively scheduled as early as 2017.†That is simply the first Orion/SLS mission, designated EM-1, which would send an uncrewed Orion around the Moon in 2017. EM-2, the first crewed Orion mission, would follow in 2021, also on a circumlunar trajectory.”
That time frame is totally unrealistic as long as SLS is involved. The Booz-Allen-Hamilton report says that development of SLS can only stay within budget for the first 4 to 5 years maximum.
The hearing “The Path from LEO to Mars” yesterday produced a rather succinct statement of what I think many see as the elephants in the room:
A visit to a Lagrangian point is a waste of time. We already know they work. Focus on an asteroid mission if you want to do something on the cheap, but focus! NASA has been so hopelessly tainted by politics that only a change in administrations can kick start reforms. SLS is essential to this nation’s future in space.
Steven W. Squyres has it right – Lori is claiming a “lunar mission” when it is just a test flight with little capability. And when would we get money to add some sort of autonomous sensors for instance?? The hardware that we would need to actually land on the Moon is hardly as far as the sketch on a napkin stage.
And a visit to a Lagrange point sounds neat – but explain that to the taxpayer. We are going to visit a point in space where there is not anything to see, anything to interact with??
Regarding Egad’s reference to Dr. Squires testimony.
He points to the ‘unsustainable path’ we are presently on wrt achieving even the simplest of ‘first missions’ with crew. So, when Lori Garver say’s were “better off now than 4 years ago”, ,,,,well, not sure that makes any sense.
@Egad
Thanks for supplying that reference to Dr. Squires’ testimony. He did a very succinct job of covering SLS’s drawbacks.
amightywind wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 8:59 am
“Focus on an asteroid mission if you want to do something on the cheap, but focus!”
So I imagine you’ll be contacting your local Republican member of Congress and telling them that you stand with President Obama on his goal for reaching an asteroid by 2025?
Don’t forget to tell them that the only way that goal will happen is if Congress actually funds it, since THAT is the holdup (i.e. no funding from Congress), not the lack of a goal.
“SLS is essential to this nation’s future in space.”
If so, then “this nation’s future in space”, as pointed out by Steve Squyres in his testimony, is unaffordable.
a visit to a Lagrange point sounds neat – but explain that to the taxpayer. We are going to visit a point in space where there is not anything to see, anything to interact with??
Worked for ISS in LEO. Except for debris, it’s pretty empty up there. Not much to interact with.
For cis-lunar space, an Earth-Moon Lagrange point really marks a high-ground location. For depoting lunar surface hardware and products, for controlling lunar surface telerobots, for constructing large ships in space. No, there’s no regolith to mine there, but there are opportunities to mine. But yes, it’s sad that the taxpayer often simplistically equates rock and gravity with value.
CharlesHouston wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 10:17 am
“And a visit to a Lagrange point sounds neat – but explain that to the taxpayer.”
The lunar flyby as part of the SLS & MPCV test program is really just putting lipstick on a pig – a really obese pig.
But it does do something that, if we’re going to really make the SLS & MPCV operational, needs to be tested out. It also doesn’t need anything additional developed beyond the current capabilities of the SLS & MPCV, so it fits within current Congressional spending desires.
But it’s still just putting lipstick on a really obese pig…
Squyres is pointing to an inconvenient truth about this administration’s space exploration plans. That is the fact that it has no space exploration plans.
James wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 10:18 am
“So, when Lori Garver say’s were “better off now than 4 years agoâ€, ,,,,well, not sure that makes any sense.”
I’m not sure you understand what the situation was 4 years ago.
A. Four years ago the plan was to cancel the only American crew access to space (i.e. the Shuttle) until the Constellation program was able to field the Ares I/Orion combo. The Ares I/Orion effort was going way over budget & schedule, and it would not have been ready in time to visit the ISS before it was dumped in the ocean. Even after it became operational, there was no place to go with the Ares I/Orion combo until the Ares V became operational more than a decade later. So the future four years ago for American human spaceflight was occasional trips to LEO for a couple of weeks until the mid-2030’s. Pretty bleak.
Now the ISS is funded through at least 2020, is ramping up it’s science output, and we have two crew transportation systems being worked on with a third as a back up. That provides low-cost, redundant American access to space without the need to beg money from Congress. Oh, and it also allows American companies to test out their business ideas in LEO, which further strengthens America’s dominance of space.
B. Four years ago the choice was to end America’s presence in space by 2015, and wait 20 years until the Constellation program was ready for a few short trips to the surface of the Moon.
Do you understand that? The U.S. would have been abandoning our permanent presence in space? That we would be going back to the disposable mission methodology of “leave footprints, but no reusable hardware”?
C. Four years ago America had no way to compete with Russia’s Soyuz for transporting people to space, which meant Russia had a monopoly on commercial crew access to space. You may think that’s a good idea, but lot’s of people in America didn’t (including me).
Now America is just a couple of years away from having a redundant and low-cost crew transportation system that will allow the U.S. to be the leader in opening up space to the private sector.
So really it’s not a hard comparison to make at all. Without doubt, we are better off today in space and for our future in space than we were four years ago. Are there still inefficiencies like the Congressionally-mandated SLS that need to be addressed? Sure. And likely that will fail sooner or later for the same reason the Constellation program did – because it was economically unsustainable.
Subsequent missions would occur on a pay-as-you-go basis, with a launch roughly every two years.
With regard to that, I notice that Our Gracious Host has tweeted from the AIAA Space 2012 bash the following:
Hopefully details will be forthcoming. Perhaps Gerst meant a surge rate, not a sustained one.
@Mark Whittington
“Squyres is pointing to an inconvenient truth about this administration’s space exploration plans. That is the fact that it has no space exploration plans.”
That’s it Mark. Ignore the true points of Squyres’ comment which consisted of criticisms of the SLS that you adore. But that’s the typical blind-eyed Whittington fashion that we have become so used to.
Thanks for supplying that reference to Dr. Squires’ testimony. He did a very succinct job of covering SLS’s drawbacks.
Do not lie about Dr. Squyre’s testimony. He did not discuss any drawbacks to SLS but actually explained the benefits of SLS and deep space exploration in opposition to robotic missions.
If so, then “this nation’s future in spaceâ€, as pointed out by Steve Squyres in his testimony, is unaffordable.
Can’t fault the man for trying to protect his budget. The Mars program isn’t the enemy of HSF. It is ISS funding which is the honey pot.
President Obama on his goal for reaching an asteroid by 2025?
Words not backed up by a program. Where are the spacecraft designs? Where are the large rockets? Constellation had us back on the moon in 2018.
Now America is just a couple of years away…
Just like cold fusion and electric cars.
McGriddle wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 12:52 pm
“Do not lie about Dr. Squyre’s testimony. He did not discuss any drawbacks to SLS…”
Hmmm, really? Then why did he say this:
“Subsequent missions would occur on a pay-as-you-go basis, with a launch roughly every two years.
I believe that the low flight rate currently projected for SLS and Orion is a cause for concern. No human-rated launch system in NASA’s history has flown so infrequently. With such a low launch rate it would not just be difficult to maintain program momentum; it would be difficult to keep flight teams sharp and mission-ready.”
Then he goes on to say:
“A more serious concern is that the SLS/Orion combination alone is insufficient to carry out missions to any important destinations beyond low Earth orbit.”
He stated that because there are no funded payloads, and no room in the current budget profile for any SLS-sized mission payloads.
So yes, he did discuss drawbacks to the SLS. Serious ones from a safety and affordability standpoint.
egad –
2-3 is about right for NASA’s estimated annual SLS flight rate. The same as the Shuttle in terms of ATK boosters.
Aside from that, I’d just like to point out to everyone once again that we could have had DIRECT and two manned launch systems for the money wasted on ATK’s Ares 1, all with no disruption to our industiral base.
And we still don’t know what total architecture Mike Griffin had in mind, nor his engineering juitifications, nor anything about defense justifications.
Given the combustion oscillations in large solid grain motors, one wonders.
Going farther into space is and has to be a learning process. One of the first things we have learn is to recycle are environment this what is we are learning on the space station. Without learning how to do this properly it would be foolish to venture farther. Another thing we have to learn is to protect ourselves from solar radiation on long trips outside our magnetic field. Also we have to learn is to be able to grow our food out there and everything about that. This is what the space station is all about. There are many other things we have to learn that the space station
will help us uncover while we are close to mother earth. So you see in spite of what AMW and Mark have been telling you the space station is a very important part of what we have to learn before we venture on the long trip to Mars.
@Coastal Ron
Thanks for straightening McGriddle out. You saved me some time.
Steve Squyres is right about those two problems with SLS, but he didn’t talk about two other problems that are politically incorrect to mention in Washington DC:
3) Is SLS the most efficient use of the money? Even launching 3 times per year is a pretty lousy capital utilization rate. We could have had the “direct” plan, or medium lift plus orbital assembly, or propellant depots, or other possibilities that would have done more with the same amount of money.
4) Why are people repeating NASA’s budget and schedule estimates as if they are likely to occur? Based on historical data we should inflate them by 100% or more if we really want to know what it will take for NASA to do the job.
amightywind wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
“Words not backed up by a program. Where are the spacecraft designs? Where are the large rockets?”
Where is the money from Congress for all those things? Even the “large rockets” (the SLS) are underfunded.
“Constellation had us back on the moon in 2018.”
What was that comment supposed to be, some sort of sick joke? You don’t seriously believe that, do you?
Ares I wasn’t even supposed to have it’s first flight with Orion until 2017, and the Constellation budget profile didn’t allow for funding of the EDS and lunar lander until the Ares I and Orion had become operational.
You are living in Cloud cuckoo land if you really believe that…
For cis-lunar space, an Earth-Moon Lagrange point really marks a high-ground location. For depoting lunar surface hardware and products, for controlling lunar surface telerobots, for constructing large ships in space.
Hilariously, these were all touted as functions of a space station in LEO when Freedom/ISS was originally sold. A waystation (thus “station”) for parking and assembling stuff headed for higher orbits. It turns out a space station in a particular orbit is largely useless as a waystation.
What we have in fact done to get spacecraft beyond LEO is take more direct routes that don’t go out of their way to ISS, just as we did with Skylab, Salyut, and Mir. That similar considerations apply to these LaGrange points — the extra time and energy versus more direct routes to particular destinations beyond — and that an even worse one applies — the destruction from radiation that comes from storing things long-term above the earth’s magnetic belts — are as usual lost on our doll-house “capabilities” prophets and their obsessions with centrally planned infrastructure-of-the-future.
Bizarrely, the same people who criticize SLS for not having funded payloads conveniently forget that this argument applies far more strongly still to these waystations to unfunded future fantasies.
The previous dogmatic infrastructure having failed to produce what was promised — having not learned from hundreds of billions of dollars sunk down the rat holes of the many space stations and Shuttle — these porksters have simply shifted the locale of their useful-sounding heavenly shrines. Our intrepid astronauts having failed to find any of the economically magic cosmic dust in LEO, taxpayers are now supposed to cough up vast new sums to find it at the earth-moon LaGrange points.
One of the first things we have learn is to recycle are environment this what is we are learning on the space station.
Oiy. What are we learning? We know zero G and radiation are hazards. We know how to recycle water. The exorbitant cost of ISS prevents us from experimenting with spinning sections and advanced radiation shielding.
how about this.
Asteroid mission(SLS) resupplied by private contracters. space x , orbital, or boeing
Why are people repeating NASA’s budget and schedule estimates as if they are likely to occur? Based on historical data we should inflate them by 100% or more if we really want to know what it will take for NASA to do the job.
How dare you introduce history into the discussion. Space is different, space is cosmic, and history doesn’t matter there. Only our fantasies of the future matter. Get with the program!
Thanks to Egad for quoting Dr. Squyres. I noted that when watching it live.
His statement exposes what SLS is really all about … It’s a jobs program, protecting jobs in the districts of those on the space and appropriations committee in the House and Senate. It was never intended to ever really fly, but those of us paying close attention the last two years knew that.
I suppose the diplomatic way of putting it is that SLS will give the United States the “capability” to fly deep-space missions should Congress choose to do so.
That was pretty much how I explained it to a tour group today. I held up the 180-Day Report and told them it had just been released. The Report *does* have a schedule, on Page 8, because it was required by Congress as quoted on Page 1:
Consequently, the conferees direct NASA to develop and report to the Committees on Appropriations … a schedule for the proposed attainment of these goals …
Notice the words, “proposed attainment.” NASA was required to propose them. NASA has.
Now we sit back and wait for the Appropriations Committees to do their part.
Don’t hold your breath.
amightywind wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 4:57 pm
“The exorbitant cost of ISS prevents us from experimenting with spinning sections and advanced radiation shielding.”
Neither “spinning sections” nor radiation shielding need the SLS in order to be tested.
Kill the SLS and we’ll have $30B to spend on rotational gravity systems and radiation shielding, AND we’ll have an existing platform (the ISS) and logistics system (Commercial Cargo & Crew) to test them with.
Since you are an SLS supporter, please point to the studies that show our current rocket capabilities are too small.
For instance, in typical transportation markets it’s easy to project future demand enough to predict when higher capacity transportation systems are needed. For a space-specific example, the commercial satellite market has not needed larger rockets, even though the average mass of satellites has trended larger. If anything, that market would respond more to less expensive transportation than larger capacity systems.
Even NASA science payloads have not grown large enough to require anything larger than single-core rockets like Atlas V. Delta IV Heavy has been available for a decade, but only DoD/NRO needs it (but not anything bigger).
Where is the demand for SLS-sized transport?
It turns out a space station in a particular orbit is largely useless as a waystation.
The NASA Decadal Planning Team, which spent several years under Dan Goldin looking for a way out from ISS, concluded very differently about Earth-Moon Lagrange points. The reason ISS is largely useless as a waystation is that it is still significantly in the gravity well of the Earth. It takes a lot of propulsion to go anywhere from there. Earth-Moon L1 and L2 are orbits around potential saddles, not primarily around the Earth. Going anywhere from there is easy. That well-vetted DPT work, done by leading aerospace engineers, which was summarily buried when Constellation appeared, largely contradicts what you’re saying.
What we have in fact done to get spacecraft beyond LEO is, for human spaceflight, exactly zilch since ISS was available. So your Skylab, Salyut and Mir references are baloney. For science spacecraft. SMD sees no reason to make it’s planetary missions human-rated, in order to dock, service, and maintain at ISS. That would add significant expense. Also, the orbital inclination of ISS is not well suited to a mission that it headed out into the ecliptic. But that’s not a fault of orbital waystations. Just a fault of ISS planners.
While the radiation burden outside of LEO is significant, that for Lagrange points is not much different than for lunar orbit or even the lunar surface. Unless you’re hiding in caves down there. That is, the radiation problem you refer to, which is quite serious, isn’t just one for free space. “The destruction from radiation that comes from storing things long-term above the earth’s magnetic belts” is gonna happen on the lunar surface as well.
So let’s see, because we didn’t find any economically magic dust in LEO, we’re going to find it on the Moon? Hah. Show me a credible business plan. Lot of dust, but economically magic?
Oh, it’s Lagrange (as in Joseph Louis), not LaGrange. La Grange Texas is the proud city that once hosted the Chicken Range whorehouse. Get your terminology straight, please, and keep your pants zipped.
Yep, you should learn something about these locations. You evidently don’t know very much.
Interesting perspective by Squyres. Of course, he circumvents any commentary regarding the massively wastreful JWST or of the bloated, massively over budget expense of the gold=plated turtle, Curiosity, which essentially is ‘dupicating’ the roving of Spirit and Opportunity with a few more expensive bells and whistles and a far greater cost than the much cheaper rovers of a decade ago. Before chiding NASA for attempting an another ‘Apollo 8′ w/Orion, he best reviw the over-hyped press releases of Space X which has Dragons orbiting crews, delivering cargo, the mail and press on to Mars ae Warp speed to settle the Red Planet with millions of people, per Master Musk– all aboard a capsule w/t volume of a walk-in closet– which has flown nobody to date. =eyeroll= Of course, the absence of a long stay habitutaion module development project and a lunar lander, etc., is precisely alnog the same lines of though Kraft has been advocated. The way to Mars is via space ops to the Moon. Just as Gemini ops led into Apollo. Accordingly, for near term planning, financing a lander nd habitation module could be sourced y terminating all government subsaisides for the commercial HSF LEO ops, then crater Mars mission planning to one a decade, let the ISS splash and press on to Luna.
DCSCA wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 7:51 pm “Interesting perspective by Squyres. Of course, he circumvents any commentary regarding the massively wastreful JWST or of the bloated, massively over budget expense of the gold=plated turtle, Curiosity, which essentially is ‘dupicating’… blah, blah … and press on to Luna.” Ah, the last part identifies you as a Lunartic, which is funny because going back to the Moon exactly duplicates what Apollo did – yet another duplication that should have made your list. As usual, to put it your words, you are just crankin to crank. And of course money is no object for you, despite the U.S. Government having to borrow 43 cents on every dollar to finance your lunar dreams. Oh, but I forgot that going to the Moon somehow makes borrowing all that money from China OK, right? You need better jokes…
The report, like so many before, speaks in hopeful and ambitious generalities (sans commercial encouragements) and appears to spring from a traditional NASA framework that speaks to Congress’ budget priorities. All pork wars aside, we seem to have a philosophical divide between the well worn mammoth, command economy, one-off space cathedrals approach and the emerging lower cost, more frequent flights, incremental public/private partnerships concept. The former depends on essentially doubling the SF portion of NASA’s budget (eventually tripling or quadrupling, if we’re planning to set up housekeeping and do useful work at the destinations). The latter requires a very different mindset and could take some getting used to, as it relies on building one accomplishment upon another, and paying for each step partly with public money, and the rest with profits from business contracts. This tugging between the status quo and what is just taking shape happens with the backdrop of economic dislocation and structural change we have not seen since the Great Depression, WWII and the middle class surge of the 50s and 60s.
“Constellation had us back on the moon in 2018.”
why do you resort to flat out lying so often windy? i’m sure you know perfectly well that constellation, even with a large increase in funding would have enabled lunar landings no earlier than 2025, probably not until some time in the 2030s. again, stop lying.
@Coastal Ron wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 8:33 pm
LOL Crankin’ to crank, as usual. And of course, space projects of scale require government financing, as the private sectore repaeately fails to do it on its own, as history repeatedly demostrates. And, as you repeatedly need to be told, space exploitation is not space exploration.
I would rather trade SLS for a modernized Saturn C3 (2×2+) instead. At least we would have launch capability with options.
Stephen C. Smith wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
” It’s a jobs program”
In fact, Smitty, subsidizing LEO commercial HSF ops is the primo, going in circles, no place fast, jobs program. Because w/o the subsidies and accompanying contracts, and the government subsidized ISS as the servicing point, w/its international partners in tow, the subsidied commemrcial ops anf LEO toys for servicing the $100-plus billion, Cold War dinosaur that’s doomed to a Pacific grave– the joy of those who ascribe to the Magnified Importance of Diminished Vision, would be dead. And when it splashes, you’ll be riht where you are tofay– only older and deeper in debt. LEO is a ticket to no where.
NASA Decadal Planning Team [plan that is more than a decade old]
NASA’s answer to Gosplan: if 5-year plans don’t work very well, let’s make 10-year plans. If top-down central planning the near future of already existing industries doesn’t work very well, let’s try designing novel infrastructure for grandiose missions-of-the-future for which where is scant prospect of even taxpayer funding much less revenue from useful industry.
the radiation problem you refer to, which is quite serious, isn’t just one for free space
And this rebuts my argument how?
well-vetted…. done by leading aerospace engineers
So were the plans and economic justifications for Skylab, Salyut, Shuttle, Mir, the National Aerospace Plane, and ISS. Hundreds of billions of dollars down such retro-futuristic black holes, and here you are lobbying for more.
So let’s see, because we didn’t find any economically magic dust in LEO, we’re going to find it on the Moon? Hah.
You’re confusing me with somebody else. Indeed logically you are confusing me with yourself, since it’s grand lunar bases that are the main justification for these Lagrangian grandiosities, and these fantasy lunar dust markets that are the main justification for the bases. For normal planetary science, or even an improbably somewhat expanded planetary science budget, much less the reality of a shrinking planetary mission budget, these Lagrangian depots are orders of magnitude away from making economic sense. It’s just a new dogma for selling the same old centrally planned pork, a translation to a new orbit of the same old cosmic bridges to nowhere, in the tradition of Shuttle, ISS, and SLS.
SMD sees no reason to make it’s planetary missions human-rated, in order to dock, service, and maintain at ISS.
It would be similarly ludicrous to astronomically increase the costs of planetary missions in order to do these things in a Lagrange halo.
I’m highly surprised to see you being snookered by this nonsense. You should step back and actually run the economic numbers, based on realistic cost and planetary mission budget estimates.
paying for each step partly with public money, and the rest with profits from business contracts.
It’s entertaining to see how highly detached from reality these economic fantasies can get. There seems to be no known astronomical limit. In the actual reality of “commercial” HSF, the profits come from the public funding — which accounts for over 99.5% of the revenues for Dragon and other NewSpace orbital HSF fantasies, at least for those that have any revenues at all.
Of course, I am failing to account for that spectacular NewSpace discovery, that space in the future will be made out of cosmic pixie dust. The more Crony Capitalism & Corruption is taxpayer funded, the more holy regolith will be breathed in. Upon the future inhalation of these astral substances private customers will flock to put down their hard-earn money to buy (something or other — Lagrangian halos to put over orbital tourists’ heads?) from these politically planned and funded (“commercial”) bridges to nowhere. Another kind of heavenly powder will render government fixed-price contracts orders of magnitude cheaper than traditional government contracts. The astronomical lowball.
Of course for this magic to work you must drone-chant “commercial”, “private”, “commercial”, “private”, “commercial”, “private”, …, …, ad nauseum in the comments after every blog post about NASA on the web. Invoking the great prophets Bigelow and Musk at all opportunities is also crucial.
This hot air does keep the bubble expanding. Get on board while the NewSpace rocket is still going up!
So were the plans and economic justifications for Skylab, Salyut, Shuttle, Mir, the National Aerospace Plane, and ISS. Hundreds of billions of dollars down such retro-futuristic black holes, and here you are lobbying for more.
You claim about waystations in a single orbit being useless is still false, even if you limit it to LEO waystations.
Where is the demand for SLS-sized transport?
There isn’t, there never was and there won’t be, and anyone here and at NASA knows it. It’s about NASA hero worship, a political preference for command and control government programs instead of private meritocracies, and above all, pork.
Martijn Meijering wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 4:28 am
“Where is the demand for SLS-sized transport?”
=yawn= “Demand” is a facet of market-driven economics. Space Space exploitation is not space exploration.
@ Googaw wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 11:32 pm
Watched the hearing, gavel to gavel. Correct on the if not 5, make it 10 pitch and the peculiar avoidance of budget numbers by those giving testimony. If you began layign any numbers to their proposals- it rockets up budgets to $500 billion easy. give us a lander. Give us a sample return. JWST must not be touched, restore cancelled Mars probes. Just ivory tower prattle. The Curiosity team flew 3,000 miles to give a presentation- that is, a ‘report’ on what they’ve learned so far, crowed over the engineering landing success again, not any science, showed that goofy EDL film for the umpteenth time then said little more on any thing new returned. And even more ironic, the $2.5 billion turtle was proudly shown to have actual money, albeit a penny- afixed to it. Now NASA is gluing real money to its throw away probes. . It was embarrassingly high-schoolish with vaguries– but no science. But they’ll be driving for six months andf want more missions. But as Nelso quipped, Curiosity will be ther to greet the human crew when they arrive. Somebody outta sober him up. =eyeroll=
@Phillip
“how about this.
Asteroid mission(SLS) resupplied by private contracters. space x , orbital, or boeing”
No, because 1) SLS cannot stay within budget and is not likely to be finished because of that one factor alone and 2) even if it actually flew, for the $1.5 billion per flight for SLS you could do a lot more with commercial vehicles. I know that at one of the recent Congressional hearings some NASA officials were saying $500 million per launch, but NASA inhouse estimates are notorious for low balling by a factor of several times. Remember NASA’s estimate for Constellation versus OMB’s and GAO’s more accurate estimates? Remember the Air Force/NASA study that showed that using NASA’s normal procedures Falcon 9 would have cost at least several times what SpaceX spent to build it?
Even if you were to accept the unreasonably favorable estimate of $500 million per launch, you could still loft a hell of a lot more payload with several Falcon Heavies. Falcon Heavy on SpaceX website is priced at most $128 million per launch, but they offer discounts for multiple launches. So you’re talking about 4 FH’s for 212 metric tons to LEO versus maximum of 70 mtons for Block 1 SLS or 130 mtons for Block 2 SLS at around $500 million. But, as I have already mentioned, even that estimate is being overly optimistic about SLS’s cost. At the more likely cost of $1.5 billion, it is even more ludicrous.
The involvement of SLS in any project (even mixed with other vehicles) would effectively economically cripple the project.
And this rebuts my argument how?
About the importance of radiation mitigation for any work outside LEO, there was no intention to rebut your argument. Rather to offer clarification on it. To the extent your argument is why Earth-Moon Lagrange points are inferior to other destinations, that’s not really justified from a radiation perspective. To the extent it’s hard to do (as are other destinations) you’re correct, but in some sense it’s an argument not to go anywhere. I think you knew this, but didn’t make it very clear.
It would be similarly ludicrous to astronomically increase the costs of planetary missions in order to do these things in a Lagrange halo.
Not necessarily so, if you broaden what we mean by “planetary missions”. If you dug back into the DPT literature, you’d understand why. Certainly the way we build planetary missions now, in 10mT pieces that fit in 5m shrouds, that’s true. But if we wanted to build something bigger (a really dumb idea in the increasingly debris-polluted LEO) that didn’t need to endure Earth-escape propulsion stresses for prompt delivery, EM L1 or L2 would be a great place to do it. I think we’re mainly talking about the scale of human missions though. But the idea of developing Mars ships at EM L1 or L2 is vastly, I mean VASTLY more sensible than developing those ships for launch off of the lunar surface or in LEO. EM L1 and L2 are, in fact, the sensible place to make full use of lunar resources for space transportation. You put your filing stations there, rather than down in the dust.
Now this doesn’t happen for quite a while, but if the Lagrange points uniquely offer this potential, we have to start gaining experience with them.
if 5-year plans don’t work very well, let’s make 10-year plans.
If the Apollo program offered us a prime lesson, it was that ten year plans can work pretty well! You’re criticizing the *name* of the DPT?? Geez. That’s thin.
The bottom line is that, for reaching further out into space, the Lagrange points offer a lot more than LEO for a space waystation. LEO taught us about microgravity, life support, and perhaps about R&D, but that’s about it. ISS was simply not designed as a waystation.
DCSCA wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 7:37 am
““Demand†is a facet of market-driven economics. Space Space exploitation is not space exploration.”
Ya dip, you thought Martijn talked about demand, but he was quoting me. I guess it’s pretty clear you weren’t in the print trade…
As to identifying government demand, the military is able to articulate their land vehicle, ship and aircraft fleet needs based on the missions they are tasked with. More specifically, the Air Force has a forecasted demand for what they need from United Launch Alliance (ULA), and if ULA wasn’t so opaque about their pricing, they would have locked up an order for 40 rocket cores this year.
Even within NASA they did a survey of their Science Directorate about the need for the SLS and received zero interest. Nada. No doubt because no program would ever get enough budget to build something SLS-sized.
So no, demand is not just “market-driven economics”, it is how everything works, including the government:
“In economics, demand is an economic principle that describes a consumer’s desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service. Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by buyers.”
And in this case, the definition of “consumer” means the one creating the demand, not mom & pop consumer.
So it is very disturbing that other than unfunded dreams, no one can point to any real, identified need for the SLS. Even you can’t point out any need, other than your generic “programs of scale” dribble.
The Apollo program was able to identify how many rockets they thought they needed to accomplish Kennedy’s goal, then like good planners they probably doubled the number to be on the safe side. For the SLS, even if you double the number of known demand for the SLS you still end up with zero…
You claim about waystations in a single orbit being useless is still false, even if you limit it to LEO waystations.
Thus all the productive use of Skylab, Salyut, Mir, and ISS as waystations, for the many hundreds of spacecraft that were launched to beyond LEO destinations when those space stations were inhabited, that must just be slipping our minds right now.
Oh, not the many hundreds? Ten maybe? No?
Oh that’s right, we don’t do history here, we recycle bizarre fantasies about the future, the more detached from reality and attached to 20th century sci-fi the better.
You got me there. You have the better L. Ron Hubbard story.
Non sequitur. Once we have commercial manned spaceflight (even if it is a hundred years from now), gateway stations in LEO and at L1/L2 will be an excellent way to go beyond LEO, thus disproving your silly assertion. You would have a lot more credibility with the people here if you actually engaged in real discussion instead of spouting silly rhetoric and attacking strawmen.
I think we’re mainly talking about the scale of human missions though…Now this doesn’t happen for quite a while…
This seems to be as far as you’ve gotten with your cost and budget analysis. Even this far though, to anybody with good knowledge of NASA cost histories and budget trajectories, it screams “pipe dream to gull the masses and win fat government contracts.” When you get to concrete numbers, far moreso still.
The trouble with gulling the masses, though, is that this infrastructure stuff just makes the masses yawn. Regardless of how entertained all of us who comment on this blog might have been when we learned about it in the pages of 20th century pulp fiction. You’ve invented a great government program for producing a collective oral gape. Until you express a realistic cost number, at which time it will make the masses wince and make the Romneys of the world want to fire you.
If the Apollo program offered us a prime lesson, it was that ten year plans can work pretty well!
It worked well solving a very clearly and simply defined goal with close to two hundred billion dollars. Send a man to the moon and back, then quit. Such plans are terrible at creating useful infrastructure for hypothetical industries of the future, since the goals such projects should pursue, being matters of the economics of unobserved industries, or the politics of future NASA budgets, and of the technological as well as economic resources available to engineers in that future, are highly speculative. Regardless of how certain you may be of them in your own mind.
Thus the contrast between the success of Apollo at the former and the failure of all the many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of government HSF funding despite repeated tries (Salyut, Shuttle, Mir, National Aerospace Plane, Freedom/ISS, etc.) at the latter. The failure of the Soviet Union and its long-range central plans to innovate and grow important new industries such as semiconductors, computers, software, digital electronics, etc. is also a glaring historical example. Technological progress, much less future economic and political conditions, are extremely unpredicatable. But again I forgot that history and economics are irrelevant and we are supposed to base our space policy on what Werner von Braun and L. Ron Hubbard were telling us we should do 60 years ago.
If the Apollo program offered us a prime lesson, it was that ten year plans can work pretty well!
Only under unique and almost certainly unduplicatable circumstances.
[I’ve spun a sci-fi story in my head] thus disproving your silly assertion.
Ah, the argument ad Hubbard. It makes mere logic based on mundane facts look so quaint and old-fashioned by comparison. You win again.
Related to the subject of my last comment, I noticed Clark Lindsey had an interesting comment about NASA’s claimed $500 billion per launch for SLS.
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/at-the-aiaa-meeting-this-week-in-pasadena-nasa-officials-admitted-that-the-space-launch-system-sls-will-likely-cost-half-a-billion-dollars-per-launch#comment-61332
I also notice that Joe is busy putting his special spin on the situation on that same blog.
Such plans are terrible at creating useful infrastructure for hypothetical industries of the future, since the goals such projects should pursue, being matters of the economics of unobserved industries, or the politics of future NASA budgets, and of the technological as well as economic resources available to engineers in that future, are highly speculative.
Yes and no. We do know that high launch prices are the #1 obstacle. Apollo-style missions, only with competitively procured launch services and competitive on-orbit procurement of propellant and shying away from direct government involvement with infrastructure, would be an excellent way to generate the required infrastructure. And the most important item of infrastructure would be a $1000/kg space launch system.
Note that I only said this would be an excellent way to generate the infrastructure, not that it would be an excellent way to make money or even that we should do it.
Thus all the productive use of Skylab, Salyut, Mir, and ISS as waystations, for the many hundreds of spacecraft that were launched to beyond LEO destinations when those space stations were inhabited, that must just be slipping our minds right now.
Skylab, Salyut, and Mir were never ever designed to be waystations. Never any plans whatsoever to use them as stopovers in sending missions somewhere else. That’s just setting up a straw man. You can do better that that …
ISS was once promoted (“spun”) as a potential bus stop/parking garage waystation. But, as I said, once it was decided to put it in a 51 degree orbit, it wasn’t a good waystation to anywhere we really wanted to go. In fact, what it taught us about human factors made it very much an engineering and technology research waystation rather than a bus stop/parking garage waystation.
ISS was once promoted (“spunâ€) as a potential bus stop/parking garage waystation.
Actually, that was Freedom. Once it became ISS that completely went by the wayside.
Actually, that was Freedom. Once it became ISS that completely went by the wayside.
That’s an important point. Because once the space station concept name accreted the “I” its purpose was no longer as a waystation. It’s purpose became a tool for international relations. The orbit it was put in served precisely that purpose and was precisely wrong for a waystation to anywhere we wanted to go.
“In her speech at the AIAA Space 2012 conference Tuesday, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver mentioned that NASA had just delivered to Congress a “comprehensive report outlining our destinations†for human exploration of the solar system. ”
I have the highest respect for General Bolden and Lori Garver’s service to The Republic and Administration is admirable. It takes a lot these days to go into public service at any level AND while it might seem lucrative (and might turn out that way for Garver after she leaves) its not while you are there.
Having said this…Garver’s speech is along with several polls taken recently is an amazing testament to how weak Willard Mitt Romney’s candidacy is and (in this case) his space policy “notions” are…that Obama is now almost cruising to a second term.
I dont know what notions Garver goes on with in private but her and NASA’s corporate public sense of vision is barely past the corporate nose. There is nothing in this report or her speech that is more then intellectual exhaustion; sort of a rehash of old ideas updated with new viewgraphs to illustrate the current level of “spare parts”.
As much as I opposed Bush43 and in particular Griffin’s notions of a vision…at least he had one; ok it was simply a rehash of Apollo much as Bush’s entire administration was “the cold war on steroids”…
Bolden’s job with Garver running the political shop is to work on a vision that is advanced in their department their purview and to try and sell that to the administration who then should sell it in some fashion to the people.
A problem here is that I dont think that the Obama administration has much of a vision for almost anything or at least they do not do a good job of explaining that vision. Contrast what Garver said for instance with the sell job that was going on when Reagan was in the mood to build a space station. OK most of that perished from bad execution; but that is a different issue.
So for instance ” NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said that NASA was looking at what other things could be done on those missions, such as visiting a Lagrange point. “We’re in the process of doing those trades to see what makes sense,†he said.”
what Bill should have added was “what makes sense, but in this economic environment with cost of SLS still difficult to ascertain it is challenging to make that fit”.
But its not in the nature of this space agency leadership or this administration to have the balls to advance an agenda.
Hence it is all the more impressive that Willard is losing (and yes he is losing). And it is a tribute to the reality that he is even more (and yes it is possible) unable to define what his administration would be like. His campaign is kind of like some homebuilt airplanes…a bunch of policies flying formation with no real coherent thought on design.
And it is to bad. If Romney had a (space in this case) agenda that was more then “policies” then Obama would be forced to either have one of his own; or actually defend whatever his agenda is.
we are strangely enough replaying Dewey/Truman. RGO
If SLS’s total cost for launching whenever it was to start launching end up at 1/2 billion a launch I will in the words of Ed Bowland…eat my hat or the soup of crow that Rand S advises I keep hot…(which I do there buddy I dont mind saying when I turn out to be not right) RGO
Ah, the argument ad Hubbard. It makes mere logic based on mundane facts look so quaint and old-fashioned by comparison. You win again.
More empty rhetoric. You made a technical point about waystations in individual orbits not being useful and now you can’t back it up. Don’t change the subject, don’t distract attention away from your original incorrect assertion. Don’t pretend you’re an orbital mechanics expert and can just handwave it. Tell us why waystations in fixed orbits aren’t useful. You can’t, because they are. The fixed orbits are not an obstacle and you know it.
I like how the SLS, in the 70 ton version, can move exactly 70 tons of cargo to the ISS. Where are they going to store 70 tons of cargo?
What is the development cost for this imaginary 70 ton cargo carrier? The Falcon 9 can lift 10 tons but the dragon only 6. The dragon capsule adds how many millions to each flight because NASA wanted a new capsule for each flight.
A SLS cargo carrier would also add costs to the per pound cargo costs.. but when you look at calculations .. you NEVER see them list how much this imaginary cargo carrier for the SLS/ISS is going to cost per flight.
Why isn’t the SLS under the same constraints.. how does the SLS manage to lift all it’s potential lift capability and not need a cargo carrier? Or show the development costs for the carrier, or the per unit costs of each carrier and which cost plus contractor is going to build them?
The orbit it was put in served precisely that purpose and was precisely wrong for a waystation to anywhere we wanted to go.
Actually, that’s a myth. The ISS would be just fine as a waystation, the penalty because of the higher inclination is not a problem for most launchers. The reason it was for the Shuttle was because the Orbiter was so heavy compared to its payload. ISS merely isn’t very suitable as a waystation for an SLS-based exploration program. And even a station at 28.8 degrees wouldn’t be since it further reduces the case for SLS.
“Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by buyers”….. ONLY at every given price point. prices rise demand falls, prices fall, demand increases. Demand is not a fixed point. It is refered to as a demand curve and it slides relative to supply. They are interlocked to illustrate how equalibrium between supply and demand meet, not mutually exclusive.
“That is simply the first Orion/SLS mission, designated EM-1, which would send an uncrewed Orion around the Moon in 2017. EM-2, the first crewed Orion mission, would follow in 2021, also on a circumlunar trajectory.”
Four years to go from an unmanned test to a manned test? Really? How many billions will the standing army burn during those four years?
Actually, that’s a myth. The ISS would be just fine as a waystation, the penalty because of the higher inclination is not a problem for most launchers.
I’m not talking about getting stuff from the ground to ISS (though the high inclination is certainly inconvenient for that) I’m talking about getting stuff from ISS out into the ecliptic. The orbital velocity vector isn’t even close to what you’d need to do that optimally. The difference in delta V between going to Mars directly, and going via ISS is pretty substantial.
http://history.nasa.gov/DPT/Architectures/Libration%20Points%20&%20In-Space%20Ops%20Libration%20Point%20Gateway%20Final%20Report%20DPT%20Oct_01.pdf
Heinrich, I wish I had a better link(Can’t remember it). The idea was to go from ISS to L1/L2 via a CTV carried by the shuttle to the ISS(with crew) and a Delta IV heavy launch of a DCSS which pushed the CTV to l1/l2. The CTV would mass about 20tons(about the same as Orion). A lunar lander was sent ahead via SEP. In this case the CTV would aerocapture back to the ISS’s orbit after the mission to be picked up by the shuttle(if that failed it would support a crew for a month to allow the shuttle rescue it)).
These plans were political non-starters in the Bush adminstration. However yes you can stage missions out of the ISS’s orbit and Delta V isn’t everything(for instance you could use SEP to move a chemically propelled mars craft from LEO to L1/L2). It could take months but doing so would drop the amount of chemical propellant needed drastically and the ISS’s orbit is rather nice in terms of solar power.
The issuse is that on orbit assemble and propellant depots do not favor large rockets and if you don’t have a large rocket to build you have nothing for a shuttle based nasa to do.
@Rick Boozer wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 10:45 am
“Thanks for supplying that reference to Dr. Squires’ testimony. He did a very succinct job of covering SLS’s drawbacks.”
Squyres supports SLS and stated so in the Q&A period..
For those who missed it, you can watch today’s House hearing on commercial crew at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc2MM_Ahsd4
Coastal Ron wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 10:02 am
Indeed and the reference goes to both of you. Try and keep up. Or at least watch the hearing.
Heinrich Monroe wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 4:18 pm
The difference in delta V between going to Mars directly, and going via ISS is pretty substantial.”
Yes, but that is never going to happen…really it is not. this is Lori Garver kind of thinking RGO
Heinrich, I wish I had a better link(Can’t remember it).
All good points. Now, the fact that ISS and Shuttle were part of the DPT plans was, well, because the strategy would have been totally rejected if it didn’t build on those existing elements that represented huge national investment. That idea was more politically correct than engineering correct. I can forgive that.
Of course you can in principle get out of LEO gradually and at low propellant cost with SEP. That’s how the Boeing ISS-EP would get to L1 or L2. But the issue was about sending science missions to distant planets. You’d use chemical propulsion to do that if you wanted to do it in any one lifetime. Actually, ISS orbit is pretty crappy for solar power, because the Sun is up only half the time. So you’d really like to start the trip higher up. Also, very large structures like SEP power panels are sitting ducks for orbital debris damage. You don’t want to spend much time between LEO and GEO (above ISS) with something big and precious.
Earth-Moon Lagrange points are SLS friendly, however, if just that you can use it to get your Orion there. You don’t need SLS, but you can use it.
You made a technical point about waystations in individual orbits not being useful
No. I made an economic point, and backed it up by history and NASA’s budget, to wit:
The NASA planetary exploration and science budget is very small and is likely to remain so or, as it has recently, shrink even further. SLS opponents admit the lack of large beyond-LEO missions in NASA’s foreseeable future when they correctly observe how bereft of cargoes SLS is.
Furthermore, the economic value of assembly and similar operations for beyond-LEO spacecraft is very far from being demonsrated. The only big example, ISS, isn’t a spacecraft that has to be boosted to any greater degree then tiny bursts for stationkeeping. It has demonsrated what huge amounts of money can be wasted on gratuitous assembly. Real space commerce never uses even docking much less assembly, beyond-LEO exploration and science have never used them since the never-to-be-repeated extravaganza called Apollo, and if any military uses it it’s a deep top secret.
Much less is the value of going to a particular orbit where nobody has ever gone to dock or assemble before, not even Apollo, been demonstrated. You’d think after the hundreds of billions of dollars spent going to the moon and beyond over the last 50 years, somebody would have used Lagrangian halos for docking or refueling if it was such a valuable thing to do. But they never have. Real payloads are destined to a wide variety of locations: a wide variety of earth orbits and an extreme variety of BEO desinations. Diverting a substantial fraction of these BEO payloads to L-points, burdening them like ISS with gratuitous assembly operations, is orders of magnitude away from making economic sense given realistic projections of NASA planetary science budgets.
What would happen to planetary science if this dogma gained control? Planetary spacecraft would be gratuitously redesigned to fit the new dogma, in order to try to justify the utility of the L-points. Just as U.S. spacecraft were forced to fly on the Shuttle in the 1980s. Small simple projects would turn into large complex projects in order to seemingly justify the use of the L-points and thus avoid being defunded — radically increasing the cost of exploration and scientific return. That’s how the politics of infrastructure dogma work.
At least with SLS, while its large cargoes are imaginary we know that they could actually be launched. Infrastructure dogma from SLS would cause missions to be oversized, but it wouldn’t on top of this distortion add complex and gratuitous assembly and refueling operations. Furthermore, we’ve transported payloads to BEO with rockets hundreds of times before. (Never, BTW, stopping to park at an Earth-Moon L-point on the way up).
In any probable extrapolation of NASA budgets, there’s nowhere close to being enough money to support the large number of large missions that would be needed to amortize the cost of even a fancy robotic depot at an L-point, much less a manned one.
Actual history confirms these arguments. I cite the hundreds of billions of dollars that has been spent on both space stations and beyond-LEO enterprises, without the one ever having been significantly used as a waystation for the other. If these had been judged so economically important, they would have been launched into orbits that made them appropriate waystations from Russia or the U.S respectively, and then they would have been heavily used for same. That is how the long-range planners who invented the idea of a space station in the first place intended that they be used. The real history is as usual very different from the planners’ dogma. The people who actually had to build and use the things realized that the ccosts of turning them into waystations to BEO or even just higher earth orbits was far outweighed by the extra costs. The economic losses of a waystation were so large that they had to account for them despite the hundreds of billions of dollars they collectively had available as budgets for both the LEO and BEO efforts.
You come back by mindlessly repeating a sci-fi story you heard, and saying that your dream that this story will come true proves me wrong. Here is exactly what you said:
Once we have commercial manned spaceflight (even if it is a hundred years from now), gateway stations in LEO and at L1/L2 will be an excellent way to go beyond LEO, thus disproving your silly assertion.
I just had to concede the entire argument after this gem.
And then as the cherry on the milkshake you demonstrate your intimate familiarity with the delta-v costs of inclination change.
the strategy would have been totally rejected if it didn’t build on those existing elements that represented huge national investment. That idea was more politically correct than engineering correct.
This is a pretty good account of how infrastructure dogma works. And why such political infrastructure drives up costs.
The difference in delta V between going to Mars directly, and going via ISS is pretty substantial.
Not with a stop at a Lagrange point, which you should probably want anyway.
@ Robert G. Oler wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 1:33 pm
“A problem here is that I dont think that the Obama administration has much of a vision for almost anything or at least they do not do a good job of explaining that vision.”
He certainly doesnt have much of one with respect to space. We’ve already witnessed his reversal and in-the-out-box attitiude on same with his speech at KSC some years ago. As far as Mr. Obama is concerned, space is off the desk and he has pressed on to much higher agenda items in his view. But witness this- it’s a small but telling reveal on Mr. Obama’s attitudes:
As President of the united States, Mr. Obama found time three Septembers ago to climb aboard AF1 and jet to Manhattan, motorcade to Lincoln Center and deliver remarks at a public memorial held by a private firm for a long retired and then recently deceased TV news journalist- an anchorman, Walter Cronkite. One of many with similar and distinguished legacies in that trade. Yet Mr. Obama could not muster similar respect yesterday and motorcade across Washngton to the National Cathedral to deliver remarks at the public memorial for the first human being in the history of everything, an American no less, to set foot on another celestial body. And make no mistake. As President of the United States, Mr. Obama clearly should have done so. Particularly as Mr. Armstrong’s place in history was secured through a government finanaced project anmd not, as Mr. Cronkite’s was, through private sector initiatives.
In point of fact, at the time of the Neil Armstrong memorial, Mr. Obama was busy campaigning in Golden, Colorado. Which speaks volumes about his priorities and his calculus on the political use of his time rather than that as CIC. Yet today, Mr. Obama made a point of appearing at a very public, televised- and clearly politicized- solemn event to greet the returning remains of a slain diplomat and staffers. Yet no time for Neil Armstrong. Never mind the remainns of KIA service personnel from Afghanistan and other locales return to Dover all too often and without the honor of Mr. Obama’s presence.
So it comes down to this: Anchorman, yes. Spaceman, no.
If your barn is blown down in Ohio by a twister near a TV camera, Mr Obama will show up. If you’re a Florida pizza peddler who is a campaign activist, Mr. Obama will show up. It will make news. But if you’re publicly honoring the memory of the first man on the moon across town- who by doing so in passing outshines you– forgettaboudit. Because it’s about Neil. Not Barry. And that’s Mr. Obama’s attitude about space, its place in our society and its low-to-no status on his agenda– forgetable.
@DSCA
“Squyres supports SLS and stated so in the Q&A period..”
Yes, but I don’t think he understands the full implications of his critique of its shortcomings.
No. I made an economic point
Then what the heck was the remark about individual orbits about? Note that I didn’t advocate waystations, I happen to believe there are much more important / useful things to spend money on first.
The economic losses of a waystation were so large that they had to account for them despite the hundreds of billions of dollars they collectively had available as budgets for both the LEO and BEO efforts.
I’m not saying we should invest in waystations first. In fact, I’ve argued quit strongly against premature infrastructure investment, and more generally against government involvement in infrastructure projects.
You’d think after the hundreds of billions of dollars spent going to the moon and beyond over the last 50 years, somebody would have used Lagrangian halos for docking or refueling if it was such a valuable thing to do.
There’s no reason at all to think that. The Shuttle political industrial complex was only interested in pork, not in achieving anything in space.
Real space commerce never uses even docking much less assembly,
They might in the not too distant future, I’m sure you are aware of MDA’s on again off again servicing plans. Do you doubt it will happen sometime in the next ten to twenty years? Do you think Orbital Express was a waste of money?
What would happen to planetary science if this dogma gained control? Planetary spacecraft would be gratuitously redesigned to fit the new dogma, in order to try to justify the utility of the L-points. Just as U.S. spacecraft were forced to fly on the Shuttle in the 1980s.
That would not be a problem if NASA’s HEOMD paid for the transfer stage, docking system and the propellant. The former two would be needed by HEOMD anyway. It would be a net win for SMD.
You come back by mindlessly repeating a sci-fi story you heard, and saying that your dream that this story will come true proves me wrong.
There was nothing mindless about it and as for it being a sci-fi story, you’ve long agreed that commercial manned spaceflight will happen sometime in the next one hundred years, possibly closer to a hundred years than to fifty years. The utility of waystations beyond LEO for exploration beyond LEO is a function of the level of traffic. And regardless of the level of traffic an L1/L2 waystation would be a less ambitious, incremental step towards a moon base.
And then as the cherry on the milkshake you demonstrate your intimate familiarity with the delta-v costs of inclination change.
Don’t patronise me. And yes, I’m well aware of it and no, it isn’t a problem. A plane change at roughly lunar distance is much cheaper than one in LEO. And I didn’t say you had to do the plane change in LEO.
The NASA planetary exploration and science budget is very small and is likely to remain so or, as it has recently, shrink even further.
Very true. Which is why Matt Mountain brought up the idea that science funds might not have to buy the SLS launcher, much as science funds didn’t buy the shuttle trips for HST servicing.
Furthermore, the economic value of assembly and similar operations for beyond-LEO spacecraft is very far from being demonsrated.
is that a joke? The economic value for doing ANYTHING beyond LEO hasn’t been demonstrated.
You’d think after the hundreds of billions of dollars spent going to the moon and beyond over the last 50 years, somebody would have used Lagrangian halos for docking or refueling if it was such a valuable thing to do.
Huh? And who was going to go dock there to dock and or refuel? I don’t need any refuelling for LRO, thank you, nor did I need it for Clementine, or Lunar Prospector. You like strawmen, don’t you …
I cite the hundreds of billions of dollars that has been spent on both space stations and beyond-LEO enterprises, without the one ever having been significantly used as a waystation for the other.
Well, for space stations in LEO, why would you need a waystation to get there? And for beyond-LEO enterprises (all robotic science, in recent history) the spacecraft were never big enough to need a waystation to help send it on its way. Why was that? Gosh, maybe because there way no waystation to use!
You don’t built a 100mT ship for Mars and say, “Oops, we need a waystation. Get that in the budget!”
And then as the cherry on the milkshake you demonstrate your intimate familiarity with the delta-v costs of inclination change.
Inclination change has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with this. The velocity in a Lagrange point orbit is very small — a hundred or so meters per second, relative to the Moon. You’re worried about changing the direction of THAT velocity vector??
Your astrodynamical understanding is as faulty as your policy understanding.
Not with a stop at a Lagrange point, which you should probably want anyway.
It wouldn’t be if you had a low inclination orbit for a LEO station. Getting out of a high inclination orbit and going either to a Lagrange point or Mars is hard. Yes, stopping at a Lagrange point on your way to Mars makes some sense, for checkout and perhaps fueling, but not if you’re coming from ISS.
DCSCA wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 8:43 pm
I dont share your fixation on the Cronkite/Armstrong funeral matchup. I dont think that there is really any relevance there.
Armstrong’s future as a historical figure will depend on the march of history from this time on. Nothing done in a ceremonial stand will change that.
RGO
If SLS’s total cost for launching whenever it was to start launching end up at 1/2 billion a launch I will in the words of Ed Bowland…eat my hat or the soup of crow that Rand S advises I keep hot…(which I do there buddy I dont mind saying when I turn out to be not right) RGO
You wouldn’t have to keep that crow stew on the pot if you wouldn’t make such premature, idiotic, off-topic prognostications. As for example, you did with Rubio.
DCSCA wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 6:23 pm
“Squyres supports SLS and stated so in the Q&A period..”
He might also support a new car in every driveway and a turkey in every oven. He doesn’t have to worry about the money aspects of government.
However he did say this:
“A more serious concern is that the SLS/Orion combination alone is insufficient to carry out missions to any important destinations beyond low Earth orbit… There is no funding in NASA’s budget to develop this [SLS destination-specific] hardware.”
So while he may WISH that the SLS could be developed and made operational, even he agrees there is no money to use it. Pretty damning statement.
Then what the heck was the remark about individual orbits about?
It’s about real commerce, real security, and real science — they use a very wide variety of orbits. Each application has its own best transfer and operation orbits, and their functionality is often extremely degraded or destroyed by forcing them to use different orbits. Ignorant central planner wannabes and astronaut cultists perpetually overlook this crucial variety.
Low, intermediate high inclination (GPS), polar, geosynchronous, Molniya, and many others just in earth orbit alone are used by real commerce, security, and science. (Earth-Moon Lagrange points being among the least common). The variety of destinations BEO is even more extreme — 8 planets, an increasing number of dwarf planets, thousands of asteroids and comets. Many of the dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids are at substantial inclinations increasing the delta-v penalty for diverting to a Lagrange point to satisfy infrastructural dogma. And there are missions far out of the ecliptic e.g. to study the sun. What’s more, the beyond-LEO missions have not used docking, much less sophisticated assembly, since the once-in-a-millenium extravagance of Apollo. So the idea that we should force a high fraction of NASA missions to go through a single orbit, and force them to dock or assemble there, is economic insanity.
These sci-fi waystations-to-nowhere can only justify themselves politically by enforcing a bizarre and extremely damaging dogma that forces planetary science missions to go way out of their way both orbitally and in terms of design, adding bells and whistles for gratuitous docking and assembly steps, and cancels those projects that don’t comply. This will lead, even more than it did with the Shuttle, to extreme cost increases and destruction of opportunities to do science and explorationn that don’t satisfy the infrastructural dogma.
It wouldn’t be if you had a low inclination orbit for a LEO station.
Agreed, and I’m not saying Lagrange point staging is absolutely necessary, just that there are no good reasons not to do it.
Getting out of a high inclination orbit and going either to a Lagrange point or Mars is hard.
Not really, and you indicated the reason in your previous post. If you make the plane change far away from Earth (lunar distance), then it’s not all that expensive. This affects timing, but not cost.
Each application has its own best transfer and operation orbits, and their functionality is often extremely degraded or destroyed by forcing them to use different orbits.
So, it was a technical point after all. And you are mistaken about it. Transfer from the ISS to a Lagrange point orbit is perfectly feasible, with ordinary chemical propulsion and without an enormous performance penalty. Similarly, transfer from a Lagrange point to beyond is not only practical, it is much more practical than the alternatives which do suffer from plane change issues, unless they use the near equivalent of a Lagrange point stop. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term apo-twist.
[…]
So the idea that we should force a high fraction of NASA missions to go through a single orbit, and force them to dock or assemble there, is economic insanity.
Not if HEOMD paid for the transfer stage, docking mechanism and propellant. And guess what, they are already working on the transfer stage (Orion SM + avionics) and the docking system for their own purposes. All you would have to do is to offer them a fully fueled transfer stage and a docking system. Do you seriously believe SMD would turn down such a generous offer? It would give them the near term capability to land large payloads on Olympus Mons, to do sample return as well as very quick missions. They’d be insane not to jump at the opportunity.
These sci-fi waystations-to-nowhere can only justify themselves politically …
That’s a function of the lack of sufficient traffic, which merely means that waystations aren’t a good idea just yet, not because the idea of waystations in fixed orbits is wrong. And I wasn’t pleading the case for waystations, I was merely pointing out that your technical assertion, which you have now finally owned up to, was factually wrong.
“No. I made an economic point, and backed it up by history and NASA’s budget, to wit:”
You did not make any economic points. Like your “natural markets” non existant economic term you use, you are not talking about economics other than pointing out, what many point out here ad nausum, the government programs and spending for manned flight and a lot of science projects are so grossly over spent it is almost criminal.
Wow stop the presses, government programs cost more.
Show me examples of SEVERAL commerical space stations and their costs? Show me examples of several commercial space access companies and their costs?
You keep trying to lump the government costs together and extrapolate that into that somehow that is what space costs.
The govenment has maintained a monopoly and elements in government and business who have wanted this 50 year pork train extravaganza to never end, have worked to systematically set up road blocks to discourage, increase cost of entry and other means to insure that manned flight continues to stay in NASA’s exclusive wheelhouse.
NASA has never did anything …. ever .. to bring down the costs of space. Point to a commercialized transportation system that only saw huge price increases to the point only a handful of people utilize it.
Your points … are silly…. until the government monopoly is finally and forever DEAD do not even begin to try and say we “know” the economics .. we don’t .. we only have government pork laden numbers to base anything on.
DCSCA wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 8:43 pm
“In point of fact, at the time of the Neil Armstrong memorial, Mr. Obama was busy campaigning in Golden, Colorado. Which speaks volumes about his priorities and his calculus on the political use of his time rather than that as CIC.”
I’m sure Armstrong had no intentions to die when he did, but it IS a Presidential election season, and Obama is in a very tight race. Romney didn’t show up either, which should say something about how “national” he thought the memorial was (i.e. anything to show Obama in a bad light).
No doubt if Armstrong had a say, he would want his favorite Presidential candidate (likely Romney) to skip his public memorial in the same conditions, because after all – HE IS ALREADY DEAD AND HIS PLACE IN THE HISTORY BOOKS SECURED.
It’s time for you to move on.
Low, intermediate high inclination (GPS), polar, geosynchronous, Molniya, and many others just in earth orbit alone are used by real commerce, security, and science. (Earth-Moon Lagrange points being among the least common).
That’s kind of nuts as an argument. Earth-Moon Lagrange points offer potential for lunar access and development, and for access (via maintenance and supply) to places beyond cis-lunar space. Putting a habitat at one of those Lagrange points would be an investment in doing these things in the future. Commerce and security have nothing to do with the Moon (well, we’ll see how 3He does on the market, or what missles aimed at us the Chinese install there), and for science, no one has designed planetary spacecraft that could take advantage of maintenance and supply.
In fact, if you wanted to set up a real supply chain to Mars or beyond (as per Buzz Aldrin’s cycler trajectory), these Lagrange points are key locations.
In fact, for cargo shipments back and forth into the solar system,. Earth-Moon Lagrange points offer huge advantages, The delta-V to get from there to anywhere in the solar system (given enough time) is tiny. Very much “high ground”. You keep talking about the disadvantage of “forcing” one to use a particular orbit. These Lagrange point orbits are actually enormously flexible, astrodynamically, at small delta-V cost. Very unlike Earth orbits. It is a serious mistake to lump Lagrange points orbits into the bag of Earth orbits. Dynamically very different things.
Let’s not ignore the potential for lunar surface telerobotics from Earth-Moon Lagrange points, which would offer continuous real-time links to anywhere on a lunar hemisphere. Can’t do that from LLO. The agency is thinking hard about those near-term opportunities. That has nothing to do with maintenance, supply, staging, or high volume need. It’s about controlling stuff in real time on the lunar surface without putting humans in that gravity well.
If you make the plane change far away from Earth (lunar distance), then it’s not all that expensive. This affects timing, but not cost.
That’s right about timing. If you have load of time, you can do a whole lot with minor propellant use (e.g. SEP.) For human spaceflight, you don’t have that time. If you’ve got humans on board, just sending them to the Moon in a month or more doing a leisurely plane change at large distance is going to cost you big time. At best, you’ve got some very bored astronauts.
Rand Simberg wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 12:07 am
I always keep it on the boil so I can serve it to people like you and Whittington that get everything wrong. Its a courtesy that we do here in Santa Fe.
Willard absent a game changer is going to lose and lose badly. He might be the catalyst for the implosion of the GOP (and start a rebuild)…
At the bear or bare minimum what his bad campaign is doing is allowing Obama to skate on almost all his policy trends good or bad. For instance the Fed just started spending a ton of money to keep the economy proped up. RGO
@ Robert G. Oler wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 1:01 pm
“Willard absent a game changer is going to lose and lose badly.”
It’ll have to be something major I think/hope. If we elect Romney it’ll mean that the country hasn’t learned anything and space will be the least of our worries!
“He might be the catalyst for the implosion of the GOP (and start a rebuild)…”
Not sure considering how stupid they have reacted in Congress with Obama. I don’t know they have reached bottom of stupidity just yet.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of Lagrange points here. Let’s try a little three-dimensional thinking.
Draw a line connecting the center of the Earth and Moon. The Earth-Moon L-1 (EML1) is, very roughly, about 85% of the way to the Moon.
Draw an ellipse from EML-1 down to LEO and back. This is your Hohmann transfer from LEO to EML1, or vice versa.
Now, using your calculus, rotate that ellipse around the Earth-Moon axis.
What should be obvious from the geometry is that EML1 is accessible from all LEO inclinations, and that all LEO inclinations are accessible from EML1. The difficulty arises from the pudginess of Earth around the middle, which makes dropping into polar orbits a bit more expensive.
So you can stage in LEO in an equatorial orbit served by Kourou, a Kennedy-inclination for NASA purposes, 40 degrees-ish for U.S. commercial spaceports, and even at ISS, and all these places can get to, and can be gotten to from, EML1 for about the same delta-V (<4km/s each way, per Human SMAD). Which argues for some standardization in the trans-LEO transfer vehicle design.
It can be thought of as a hub & spoke model, with EML-1 as the hub and the Hohmann transfers down to the variety of LEO inclinations as the spokes. The hub & spoke model is well developed in the transport logistics industries like passenger and package moving, as it allows for break-bulk operations at the hubs that can improve the efficiency of the overall system.
Hope that helps.
Ken Murphy wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
well done RGO
Thanks Ken!
If you have load of time, you can do a whole lot with minor propellant use (e.g. SEP.) For human spaceflight, you don’t have that time. If you’ve got humans on board, just sending them to the Moon in a month or more doing a leisurely plane change at large distance is going to cost you big time. At best, you’ve got some very bored astronauts.
You can do it with chemical propulsion too, it doesn’t take longer and it doesn’t take much more delta-v. And a LEO waystation would be very convenient to take the pressure off the timing. If you have a waystation and two opportunities a month, that’s absolutely fine, both for lunar and interplanetary missions.
@Coastal Ron wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 11:10 am
There is simply no excuse. Stop conjuring them up for him.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of Lagrange points here. Let’s try a little three-dimensional thinking.
I think the point was that heading out into the ecliptic via a polar orbit was inefficient with propellant. Also, your simple model isn’t quite right because the EM Lagrange “points” are not destinations in themselves. The destination is an orbit around one of those points, in a plane (if a halo orbit) perpendicular to the EM line. Large orbits are much easier to manage in terms of station-keeping costs, and radii of 40-60,000 km are usually considered most viable. But in principle you could draw your ellipse to attach to anywhere on one of these orbits.
Also worth remembering is that some of the more creative and economical insertion trajectories into Lagrange point orbits involve close-approach lunar gravity assists. So what you’re really shooting towards is the Moon itself.
The main misunderstanding about Lagrange point orbits here is the utility of them and that, if you’re in one, you’re not dynamically locked in a way you’d be in an Earth orbit.
Heinrich,
There are many, many ways I could have complicated my explanation. However, you’d be hard pressed to find a much simpler way of explaining the gross concepts.
Were you to stop by The Moon Society’s Facebook page, you’d see that we’ve been discussing this very topic for a couple of weeks:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Moon-Society/50524175840
“That’s right about timing. If you have load of time, you can do a whole lot with minor propellant use (e.g. SEP.) For human spaceflight, you don’t have that time. If you’ve got humans on board, just sending them to the Moon in a month or more doing a leisurely plane change at large distance is going to cost you big time. At best, you’ve got some very bored astronauts.â€
The way you would handle it is you would send the humans on faster but send the eml station, lunar lander, mars craft or other cargo ahead via SEP. SEP in theory could make round trips from L1 to LEO acting as a cargo tug. The van Allen belts however pose a problem here (however that is a design issues more than anything else).
To send the humans you could use smaller rockets basically an FH or EELV phase one would be capable of sending people directly to l1/l2 depending on the mass of the spacecraft. Or break the trip at the ISS (send spacecraft to ISS) then send transfer stage to ISS. FH would also be capable of lifting both a transfer stage and spacecraft at once. For the trip to EML-1 all you need is a spacecraft capable of supporting a crew about 8-10 days (4 day to and 4 days back).
Here is a better link of the plan and the whole mission architecture:
http://history.nasa.gov/DPT/Architectures/Libration%20Points%20&%20In-Space%20Ops%20L1-Moon%20Exploration%20Architecture%20DPT%20Jun_00.pdf
http://history.nasa.gov/DPT/DPT.htm
Anyway the problem was that with this architecture is that the Bush administration, given its own inclinations was not about to increase funding for NASA and would never have proposed going to the moon had the Columbia accident not occurred. It wanted out the ISS as soon as possible because our allies basically snubbed us during Gulf War II.
In fact had Columbia not occurred the shuttle would still be flying. The big problem the Bush administration had was getting the ISS’s costs under control hence the cancelation of the CTV and the living quarters for the US crew. The Columbia happened and Bush proposed going to the moon and NASA went to hell in a basket for operational, funding, and organizational reasons.
Basically the problem was asking NASA, an organization that had not designed a rocket since the Shuttle to design a rocket (when the real recent experience for doing so is in the industry not NASA). The shuttle eating more funding than expected to get back to flight. NASA forced to use shuttle derived technology instead of the existing EELV (which posed lower costs and less technical risk).
The result was a cluster beep of the shuttle being shut down long before a replacement could be fielded and that replacement would cost more than the Shuttle just to do a crew exchange. Not to mention the craziness of having ares-1 without a HLV being ready so you would have a gap of 5-10 years where nothing but LEO missions would be possible and nowhere for the LEO stuck Orion to go as the ISS would have been deorbited Basically a space program that lost all common sense.
Obama was able to fix some of them, but a BEO program honestly needs an budget increase at NASA and such an increase is untenable. The best you can do is work on technology and support commercial (to bring the price down).
On Christmas Eve, 1968, as the bulk of the people on the planet was focused on listening to and watching the astronauts of Apollo 8 at the moon, Mitt Rokmney was running through an airport, proposing to Ann. Romney didn’t care about the space program then, in its heyday, nor now. So the choice this cycle is between slim and nonse. So space advocates will go w/Obama. And his plans stink.
On Christmas Eve, 1968, as the bulk of the people on the planet was focused on listening to and watching the astronauts of Apollo 8 at the moon, Mitt Romney was running through an airport, proposing to Ann. Romney didn’t care about the space program then, in its heyday, nor now. So the choice this cycle is between slim and none. So space advocates will go w/Obama. And his plans stink. Apologies for any typos.
Putting a habitat at one of those Lagrange points ….Commerce and security have nothing to do with the Moon…and for science, no one has designed planetary spacecraft that could take advantage of maintenance and supply.
So it’s not for commerce, it’s not for security, and it’s not for science.
What’s left? The same old solipsistic cult obsession — launching useless astronauts for the sake of launching useless astronauts.
If you make the plane change far away from Earth (lunar distance), then it’s not all that expensive. This affects timing, but not cost
“Affects the timing” == Extra years of radiation exposure, propellant ullage, interest costs, opportunity costs, obsolesence of technology, etc.
DCSCA wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
“There is simply no excuse.”
Apparently there was.
Only a very few are as obsessed with everything-Apollo like you are, hence the lack of public outcry over any perceived slights you see in our mind.
Life goes on…
merely means that waystations aren’t a good idea just yet, not because the idea of waystations in fixed orbits is wrong.
No, it means that since that since neither you nor I nor NASA contractors nor popular science writers are prophets about what space economics and technology will be like many decades from now — what launch costs will be, what the best propellants will be, how they will be stored, what the main commercial or security or scientific applications and missions will be out of the astronomical number of possibilities, or the levels of funding for same, what economic impacts ISRU may or may not have had and the technological implications of same, what the best economic tradeoffs betwen mission times and propellant use will be, etc. etc. — we do not know whether these Lagrangian halo depot ideas will be right or wrong. Nor even if correct what form they will take — the possibilities ranging from swarms of nanosatellites doling out electric, thermal, or storable chemical propellants, stored as either liquids or tanklessly as solids, to the grandiose cryogenic bipropellant depots currently envisioned in order to win fat NASA contracts.
You don’t know. I don’t know. NASA and its contractors don’t know. Heinrich Monroe doesn’t know. Rand Simberg doesn’t know. Nobody knows what the best space technologies and infrastructures will be many decades from now. There are many people who pretend they know. There are many people who sell magazines or draw attention to their advertisements or win NASA contracts by their exciting prophecies. There are many people who ignore economic and political realities in order to pretend that their far-fetched speculations will be viable in the near future. But they do not in fact know.
We can agree that we have not observed commercial, security, or science users of space demanding these depots historically, despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent sending missions to the moon and BEO. We can agree that we do not observe practical commercial, security, or science users of space demanding them today. Just NASA contractors spinning stories about how very hypothetical and very unfunded and very impractical future missions might plausibly benefit from them, but lobbying for fat NASA contracts to fund them now. Everybody cares about getting their paycheck now — I don’t see any depot designers agreeing that the taxpayer can delay their paychecks until their sci-fi stories actually fly.
So we can agree that these ideas are wrong now. And because none of us are prophets, we can agree that it’s utterly silly to plan in reliance on or lay down dogmas based on high confidence that such ideas must some day prove to be correct in the form that we now envision.
It is of course equally silly to plan in reliance on the idea that they will always be wrong in any form. The whole point being, it’s idiotic, nay insane, to make such long-range plans, lay them down as dogma, and make big awards of taxpayer money based on them.
Instead, NASA research should be solving the practical problems and needs that we can observe facing real commercial and security and science applications in space today. When the problems, needs, funding levels, or technologies change, the research should pivot, rather than sticking to dogmatic plans. Customer-driven research, based on reality rather than fiction.
“Affects the timing†== Extra years of radiation exposure, propellant ullage, interest costs, opportunity costs, obsolesence of technology, etc.
Nonsense, timing means at what time of the monthly lunar cycle you depart. Two opportunities a month is plenty if your astronauts can spend the waiting time on KP duty on the ISS.
neither you nor I nor NASA contractors […] what the best economic tradeoffs betwen mission times and propellant use will be, etc. etc.
I have never claimed otherwise, in fact I have energetically made the same arguments myself.
we do not know whether these Lagrangian halo depot ideas will be right or wrong.
I haven’t argued for investment in Lagrange point cryogenic depots or even for any kind of depot in any kind of orbit, in fact I have argued against premature investment and in favour of letting market forces make the decisions.
What we do know is that once we send humans to the moon or beyond Earth orbit, refueling at L1/L2 will be very useful, and docking in LEO will be almost indispensable.
I invite everyone to have a look at the “Inflated Delta Vs” post on
Hop David’s blog and at the Wikipedia delta-v chart to see how strategic a location Lagrange points are. Remember, the rocket equation is exponential, so cutting delta-v in half drastically reduces the required size of a transfer stage, by effectively resetting the rocket equation. From a Lagrange point you can reach Neptune orbit for less delta-v than you can reach Mars orbit from LEO! Were you aware of that?
Note that this doesn’t specifically require depots, cryogenic or otherwise, nor waystations, even though an MTV in a Lagrange parking orbit would effectively be a waystation.
So when will we need waystations? Whenever we decide to establish a permanent manned presence beyond LEO, for whatever reason we may make that decision.
And when will we need depots? Whenever market forces decide they are more economical than not having them based on the actual levels of traffic.
This is different from asking: what is the earliest time any form of propellant transfer at L1/L2 could be useful? The answer to that question is right now, or at any time in the past thirty years. The form it could take is transfer of unmanned science spacecraft from L1/L2 to their destination, enabling larger payloads and shorter transfer times than are currently possible, without needing new technology development. Note that I didn’t ask whether the direct benefits were such that they warrant investment in such a program, only if the program would have benefits once the decision were made. And the answer is yes.
And your technical objection (the only thing I was contradicting) is wrong. It does apply to most commercial satellites and military satellites, but I wasn’t talking about those. And even for GEO sats Lagrange points could become attractive in the future, as GEO is easy to reach from a Lagrange point by SEP (nearly continuous sunlight and no crossings of the van Allens) and Boeing has recently announced all electric GEO sats.
So we can agree that these ideas are wrong now. And because none of us are prophets, we can agree that it’s utterly silly to plan in reliance on or lay down dogmas based on high confidence that such ideas must some day prove to be correct in the form that we now envision.
You’re grasping for straws here. I don’t think anyone is saying any one strategy is “right”. Certainly, we don’t have any historical basis for insightfulness in this regard. Several of us were just pointing out that Earth-Moon Lagrange points appear to offer some real opportunities for human spaceflight BEO. To the extent it appears we’re currently unable to afford lunar surface development — landers, habitats, 24/7 power systems etc., an opportunistic idea of an L1 or L2 “Gateway”, based on free-space technologies that we’ve critically honed with ISS, seems like it might be a smart direction.
So it’s not for commerce, it’s not for security, and it’s not for science.
In my quote that you refer to here, you throw in an ellipsis that intentionally obscures my meaning. I certainly never said it wasn’t for science. Such stations could well be used to enable science. Let’s consider a JWST-like telescope at Earth-Sun L2, or any of the many science missions now destined for that locale. If you wanted to service such a facility, would you send people out to Earth-Sun L2 (four times the lunar distance) to do it? No, that would be crazy given that it takes a few tens of m/s of velocity and a month or two to bring that mammoth facility back to a far more convenient Earth-Moon Lagrange point where it could be maintained and serviced, ideally at some habitat, and then just as economically sent back on its way. It is wholly impractical to bring it into LEO.
As to commerce and security, I still think that it is yet to be compellingly argued that ANY work BEO can be expected to advance commerce or security. I won’t argue that there can’t be any reasons, but for commerce, no one has argued a path that doesn’t require really cheap launches. For security, no one has argued a path that makes sense beyond “soft power”.
So I’m not sure what you’re saying. You’re saying that human access to BEO is unnecessary? Might be.
Instead, NASA research should be solving the practical problems and needs that we can observe facing real commercial and security and science applications in space today. When the problems, needs, funding levels, or technologies change, the research should pivot, rather than sticking to dogmatic plans. Customer-driven research, based on reality rather than fiction.
Hard not to agree with this, except it’s a general philosophy, not an implementation plan. Given that the pubic expects NASA money to do more than general philosophizing, one would like to come up with implementable ideas that at least exercise our abilities to solve future problems in commerce, security, and science. To the extent future problems require having humans BEO, a Lagrange point “Gateway” might well be the first step in that direction.
Were you to stop by The Moon Society’s Facebook page, you’d see that we’ve been discussing this very topic for a couple of weeks:
Thank you. What I see there is a nice but very brief summary of the huge body of work that has been done on this topic. Might think of including a few references.
Although more than ten years old at this juncture, I would still point folks to the DPT archive at the NASA History site (URL given above) for some detail to chew on. People should understand that the idea of using lunar Lagrange points was heavily suppressed in the Constellation era. That idea was considered a dangerous distraction in Mike Griffin’s ultimate and overriding goal of putting footprints back on the Moon. The idea of using EM Lagrange points for cis-lunar activities is actually an old one, and even was endorsed in major NASA policy reviews a few decades ago. The old-guard Constellation folks at JSC are somewhat reluctantly revisiting that idea now.
“we do not know whether these Lagrangian halo depot ideas will be right or wrong.”
I agree to a point, we are smart little monkeys though and we can make educated assessments.
Like.. we can build a railroad that never runs on the plains but only in the mountains… OR we can take the path of LEAST RESISTANCE and do long straight shots across the plains.
THAT is what lagrange points allow. Taking a path of least resistance. Now we do not have to be prophets to make that kind of assessment because we have CENTURIES of transportation experience. That experience has taught us that basically, it is cheaper and faster to take the path of least resistance then to keep slaming your head against a wall.
As to commerce and security, I still think that it is yet to be compellingly argued that ANY work BEO can be expected to advance commerce or security. I won’t argue that there can’t be any reasons, but for commerce, no one has argued a path that doesn’t require really cheap launches.
But exploration can give us really cheap launches, since it requires launching a lot of propellant, which could establish a huge market for launch services, several times the current demand. That could finally lead to enough funding for commercial RLVs, provided the launch services are procured competitively.
@DCSCA
“There is simply no excuse. Stop conjuring them up for him.”
What I said was no “excuse” and neither was what Ron said in my defense.
First of all, you misinterpreted my saying Squyres critiquing of SLS in less than glowing terms meant that I was saying he was against it. No I was merely stating that the drawbacks he stated were valid concerns. I think he feels that SLS is the only way to do it and thus SLS should have its budget increased. Look back at what I wrote, never did I say he was against SLS.
I meant it when I said that I don’t think my fellow astrophysicist Dr. Squires understands the full implications of his critique of SLS’s shortcomings. He uses those shortcomings as an excuse to argue an increase in SLS’s budget. However, the reason why he does so is because he thinks there is no better way. This is because, like most professionals in my field (including Neil deGrass Tyson) he is unaware of the following NASA study that has been suppressed by a powerful faction in the OCT:
http://images.spaceref.com/news/2011/21.jul2011.vxs.pdf
Whenever I show this study to my colleagues who have expressed support for SLS, they have all said “I didn’t know about this!” and change their position. Hopefully at some point this information will get spread around sufficiently to where the scientists who need to know about it can make the right decisions.
So indeed, yes, Dr Squires does not understand that the real implication of the problems he states is that we need to go a more sane route than SLS, because he does not know that alternate route is possible.
DCSCA wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 8:38 pm
I doubt that there’s a significant number of single-issue voters who care about nothing but space. People dumb enough to base their vote on a single issue usually care much more about something else.
As for “his plans stink”, the prudent question is of course wether a candidate’s overall positions are beneficial or detrimental to spaceflight, which of course favors Obama over Romney/Ryan and their desire to slash everything but military spending.
Oh and regarding
The “bulk of people on the planet” were merrily going about their daily work undistracted by the luxury of radio or TV. If they were lucky, someone told them a couple hours later or the next day.
On the topic of Lagrangian point outposts, it may be worth pointing out that the idea is a fertile ground for international cooperation, seeing as the Russians have favored this approach for a while now.
Das Boese wrote @ September 16th, 2012 at 4:43 pm
“I doubt that there’s a significant number of single-issue voters who care about nothing but space.”
There certainly are along the Florida space coast- a key state in the electoral college count. It certianly won’t tip the vote count alone, but it is enough to count all the same in a critical state full of retirees. =eyeroll=
The “bulk of people on the planet†were merrily going about their daily work undistracted by the luxury of radio or TV.”
=yawn= Except they weren’t. And 1968 was hardly a merry year. But then you may not have been alive at the time. Pity. And, of course, before he left office, LBJ made sure the iconiC ‘Earthrise’ image taken by Bill Anders was sent to every head of state at the time- including Ho Chi Minh– who every sent a thank you note. 8 rivals 11.
DCSCA wrote @ September 14th, 2012 at 6:23 pm
“@Rick Boozer wrote @ September 13th, 2012 at 10:45 am
“Thanks for supplying that reference to Dr. Squires’ testimony. He did a very succinct job of covering SLS’s drawbacks.â€
Squyres supports SLS and stated so in the Q&A period..â€
I notice a number of (what else) very angry responses to this statement downstream from yours.
I also notice that none even try to question you statements accuracy, only explain away their statements variance from (lets be polite and call it) reality.
Rick Boozer wrote:
Whenever I show this study to my colleagues who have expressed support for SLS, they have all said “I didn’t know about this!†and change their position. Hopefully at some point this information will get spread around sufficiently to where the scientists who need to know about it can make the right decisions.
But the study is irrelevant, because Congress dictated to NASA to build the SLS and won’t consider any other option. SLS was never intended to do anything other than protect jobs in the states and districts of certain member of Congress, and to protect the no-bid contractors who contribute to their re-election campaigns. You could issue a report showing that we could go to Pluto in five days for $1.99 and Congress wouldn’t care unless it met the aforementioned conditions.
Hopefully the private sector one day will go the propellant depot route, because Congress will never allow NASA to do it.
Googaw wrote @ September 16th, 2012 at 1:25 am
Instead, NASA research should be solving the practical problems and needs that we can observe facing real commercial and security and science applications in space today. When the problems, needs, funding levels, or technologies change, the research should pivot, rather than sticking to dogmatic plans. Customer-driven research, based on reality rather than fiction.>>
what do you think some of those might be? RGO
Googaw wrote @ September 16th, 2012 at 12:12 am
solipsistic >> nice I have to admit you sent me pounding keys on that one…
I had flashbacks to my 7th grade class where Mrs. Dillard would have us learn a new word a day…in her short skirt and heels! RGO
@Joe
No anger involved. You on the other hand appear to be discounting the points I made in my last comment at 1:24PM by saying they were made in anger. A typical cop out from someone who has no reasonable response to a reasoned list of points. I am tired of pseudonymous trolls cowering behind nom de plums because they are scared of being shown to be wrong, when people such as myself have the guts to put our egos on the line every time we express an opinion. Indeed, I have been in error before on this very blog and admitted it. Something I have never seen you do. It is always embarrassing, but I’m not afraid of it.
But you and DCSCA can go ahead blabbering on and have the last word, since the adrenalin rush from that appears to be what your are really after, and not a logical discussion of the points brought up. Bye troll.
On the topic of Lagrangian point outposts, it may be worth pointing out that the idea is a fertile ground for international cooperation, seeing as the Russians have favored this approach for a while now.
I was unaware of Russian interest. Do you have a reference? As of a few days ago, the Deputy PM was quoted as favoring a goal of large Moon bases. Though certainly in that the idea would build strongly on ISS efforts, ISS contributing partners might be expected to be enthusiastic about it.
Robert G. Oler wrote @ September 15th, 2012 at 12:05 am
They were public memorials. And there is simply zero excuse for the Presdient of the United States failing to attened Armstrong’s. None.
joe wrote @ September 16th, 2012 at 7:15 pm
“I also notice that none even try to question you statements accuracy, only explain away their statements variance from (lets be polite and call it) reality.”
That Squyres would like the use of the SLS is no surprise. But he does recognize that there is not enough money to use the SLS, and that poses serious questions about the SLS. Specifically he said:
“I believe that the low flight rate currently projected for SLS and Orion is a cause for concern. No human-rated launch system in NASA’s history has flown so infrequently. With such a low launch rate it would not just be difficult to maintain program momentum; it would be difficult to keep flight teams sharp and mission-ready.
A more serious concern is that the SLS/Orion combination alone is insufficient to carry out missions to any important destinations beyond low Earth orbit. The Orion capsule can support a crew of four for three weeks, which is far too short a time to conduct a mission to an asteroid. An asteroid mission therefore requires development of another major piece of hardware, capable of providing crew support in deep space for many months. There is no funding in NASA’s budget to develop this hardware.”
As usual, you don’t understand what the issues really are, and with regards to the SLS the lack of money for SLS-sized missions has always been the biggest concern. We can barely afford to build it, but we’ll never have enough money within NASA’s current budget profile to make it worthwhile to use it.
one would like to come up with implementable ideas that at least exercise our abilities to solve future problems in commerce, security, and science.
Um, no. The idea of successful R&D strategies, such as the pivot philosophy used in Silicon Valley, is to solve present problems and address present needs. Problems and needs one can actually observe. Real problems and needs, as opposed to sci-fi stories concocted about an alleged future. Problems and needs that we have actually observed, as opposed to retro-futuristic dogmas about how space developments is supposedly supposed to proceed. Real problems and needs, as opposed to fantasized markets-of-the-future.
Heinrich, as long as you are confining use of the EML halos to BEO astronaut missions, you are consigning them to the realm of economic fantasy. Heck, even I think these regions may be potentially more useful than that. Far better would be to think about how to use them for small-scale unmanned missions. That way, you could demonstrate the utility of the EML halos at a tiny fraction of the cost of our extremely hypothetical and extremely unfunded grand astronaut extravaganzas. Being set within realistic projections of today’s planetary and astronomy science budgets, these would involve relatively simple operations (e.g. docking and simple automated materials transfer rather than sophisticated assembly).
If, OTOH, we can’t think of any utility of the EML halos for smaller-scale missions that could actually be done inside a probable real-world science budget, that’s a very strong argument against their importance.
Just to get the creative juices flowing, how might or might not EML halos be useful for the following:
* Mars sample return
* “Stardust” style comet and interstellar dust sample returns from a variety of solar system locations
* A fleet of telescopes strung along earth’s orbit
* Lunar nanolander network for geoscience (i.e. seismic instruments)
* Lunar polar ice sample returns
* A space-based node for the Deep Space Network
Three of the themes are are that the EML halos might be useful for transferring samples from many parts or unpredictable parts of the solar system to a single earth reentry vehicle, or topping off the cryogens or propellants of telescope networks which draw these down unpredictably, or similar. Or for acting as a deep space network relay.
Or not. The deep space relay may be better located in geosynchronous orbit or at an ESL halo. Depot(s) for topping off such telescope networks might be more advantageously placed at ESL. The benefits of providing for such variety and unpredictability in our deep space science via such logistics may be beyond plausible planetary science and astronomy budgets. I suspect most of ideas along these lines tend to be marginal given probable budget levels, but some may turn out to be useful and feasible, and it’s far more likely that these will be economical than the far more extravagant HSF scenarios. So I think if you want to demonstrate the utility of the EML halos it is these kinds of ideas, not astronaut fantasies, that you should be pursuing.
Instead, NASA research should be solving the practical problems and needs that we can observe facing real commercial and security and science applications in space today.
RGO: what do you think some of those might be?
Much more important than my long but still very incomplete list below is how to find out: ask the right people. Ask engineers who build and operate actually commercially successful communications satellites, rather than engineers or worse politically savvy lobbyists who are chasing NASA contracts to allegedly develop fantasy markets-of-the-future. Ask engineers who actually launch communications satellites rather than engineers working on gigarockets and other infrastructural fantasies for very unfunded astronaut extravaganzas. Ask engineers who work on actually useful DoD space security assets rather than sci-fi writers. Ask engineers who do actually important science (e.g. collecting earth climate data or discovering and characterizing new exoplanets) rather than engineers who propose spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on scientifically marginal extravaganzas.
In short, in order to determine the economically, defensively, and scientifically important research problems, ask the engineers working on such projects of well demonstrated utility what their problems and needs are. Observe reality instead of fantasizing about the future or dogmatically asserting the importance of the economic fantasies of others.
As for some possible entries that I suspect might appear on this list:
Real commerce:
* Needs to increase bandwidth between ground stations and communications satellites (comsats being by far the largest real commercial space industry). Relatedly, reducing problems of cross-talk and noise between spectrum users.
* Problems of increasing bandwidth between communications satellites for distributed networks of same (e.g. through better optical communications)
* The toxic nature of the most used storable propellants and the resulting costs (which might be solved by “green propellants”, by SEP, or simply by improving the handling and disposal of said toxic propellants in various ways).
Real security:
* Unpredictable draw-down of storable propellants due to unpredictable manuevers of spy and other satellites (which might be solved by robotic refueling missions or micro-depots for storable propellants in the appropriate orbits, esp. polar or near-GEO).
* Shielding from enemy kinetic and radiation weapons (I don’t know of any easy way to solve it, but it’s a big problem)
Real science:
* Advanced spectrometers for a variety of uses (ranging from planetary rovers analyzing rocks and regolith to telescopic discovery and characterization of exoplanets).
* Needs to increase bandwidth and scheduling flexibility in the Deep Space Network, in order to get more scientific data back to earth from more locations. One potential kind of solution: space-based node(s) for Deep Space Network, potentially using optical communications for the space-to-space links.
* Increasing the flexibility and range of interplanetary trajectories (e.g. through improving solar or nuclear electric propulsion, and through creative solutions such as magsails, etc. etc.)
* Need better ways to manufacture and securely store and distribute plutonium for RTGs
* Need to increase reliability and lower costs of operations needed in planetary and asteroid/comet surface sample returns.
* See also my list in previous post
Problems common to real commerce, security, and science:
* Needs to improve radiation-hardening, so that we can take advantage of electronics that aren’t so many generations behind what we use on earth, saving weight and increasing functionality.
* Needs to lower the launch costs, increase the logistical flexibility, and increase the reliability for the most common spacecraft form factors used by real commerce, security, and science. (Falcon-9 is a great example of a promising better solution to launch costs. Dragon is a great example of something that solves none of the the problems in any of these categories of real-world problems).
* Needs to improve the reliability and lifetimes of antenna and boom deployment and other mechanisms operating in vacuum and microgravity or low gravity.
* Needs and opportunities to improve on-orbit assessments of functionality, using e.g. modern sensor technologies such as micromechanical sensors and software to analyze data from same.
This stuff is just off the top of my head and the tip of the iceberg, of course. The important thing is for us and for NASA ask, not politicians, not NASA contractors, not astronauts, not itself, nor commissions composed of such people, much less sci-fi writers from the last millenium, but rather ask the right engineers, as described above.
Heinrich Monroe wrote @ September 16th, 2012 at 10:58 pm
Granted, this is supposed to be in lunar orbit, but it could just as well be positioned at L1. The technical challenge is minimal, since it uses mostly existing ISS technology, the biggest hurdle is how to deliver it without super-heavy lift. I’d even wager that orbiting ISS components could conceivably be retrofitted for that role, all you’d need is a way to get them to L1. SEP makes the most sense in that regard, but the Russians might be able to hack together a progress-based transfer stage (if that is possible, I haven’t run the numbers, maybe I’ll get back to you on that after I’m through with exams)
D’oh, forgot the link:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/los.html
Quoting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher from Friday’s commercial crew hearing, after watching an hour of the Mad Tea Party all about him:
Let me suggest that no one wants to face the fact that we can’t afford to go to Mars now. The bottom line is, in order to have steady funding, we’re going to have to defund every other space project that we have! Nobody here wants to face that! Maybe if we’re going to provide safety, maybe if we’re going to provide reliability and do this professionally, maybe we should set our goals to something we can actually accomplish within the budgets that are possible, without destroying every other aspect of the space program. I think that’s what’s happening here today. That’s what we’re really discussing.
Of course, they continued to ignore him as they continued to blather along …
@Steven C. Smith
“But the study is irrelevant, because Congress dictated to NASA to build the SLS and won’t consider any other option. SLS was never intended to do anything other than protect jobs in the states and districts of certain member of Congress, and to protect the no-bid contractors who contribute to their re-election campaigns.
I realize as much or more than anyone that SLS is a merely a jobs program and that actually doing something in space with it is not truly a consideration. But we can educate as many people as we can and thereby shrink the pool of naive witnesses that the political culprits can use to justify their pork. It may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start.
Remember there was a time when it was thought that Ares I was unstoppable. However, I think it may come down to just the private sector taking us into deep space if the political wheel spinning continues. SLS is the surest way I know for NASA to remain stuck in LEO when one looks at what the budget is now and what it will likely be in the future. It is good to remember that there are people like Musk who are determined that we do not stay stuck.
Steve Squires is nobody’s fool. Nobody dependent on federal funding would go to a Congressional hearing these days and openly criticize SLS unless they had a death wish. IMHO he is trying rationally to do some good. He is honestly saying that if Congress decided to raise taxes enough to fund more frequent launches for the SLS and 70-ton science payloads he would be happy to use it. But he knows that will not occur. He is trying to convince Congress that he understands their position, but that they should look at reality, i.e. the amount of money they themselves are making available, and realize that the handwriting is on the wall.
Falcon 9 and Dragon finally put the nails in the coffin of Ares 1. Or at least went a long way towards making it happen.
I hope the Falcon Heavy can help do the same thing with SLS.
I can’t believe NASA is sticking with the same plan and not really making any new suggestions or paths. Instead of going for some really big goals why not make baby steps? Are they not patient enough? It seems to me that they want to discover something first before anyone else and are willing to take huge risks to be the first. If you keep taking those big risks though it could backfire and that could devastate their morale.
I think the establishment of a long-term human presence on the lunar surface would be a great next goal instead of going far out into space to an astroid. People have always dreamed of living on the moon. Its close to our home planet and is visible to everyone here on Earth. So why not put that in the 180 day plan.
Why do you think they haven’t included the moon in the plan? Do you think because they already been there that it’s boring now?
Very good post, lots of questions to be asked. I’ll be sure to come back for more.
vulture4 wrote @ September 17th, 2012 at 10:33 am
“Steve Squires is nobody’s fool. Nobody dependent on federal funding would go to a Congressional hearing these days and openly criticize SLS unless they had a death wish. IMHO he is trying rationally to do some good. He is honestly saying that if Congress decided to raise taxes enough to fund more frequent launches for the SLS and 70-ton science payloads he would be happy to use it.”
That’s the way I see it too.
And what others gloss over, is that Squyres has pointed out that there currently isn’t any money to use the SLS.
Just to get the creative juices flowing, how might or might not EML halos be useful for the following
Please don’t misunderstand me. I have no biases towards putting humans at these locations. But what we were talking about was the 180-day planning (see the intro to this thread), and destinations noted therein. That study was about destinations for humans. So you’re getting a little off-topic here. Now that I understand this, your arguments make a little more sense.
I think some of your ideas for Earth-Moon Lagrange points have merit, and should be considered. In fact, DPT did consider a facility there to accept and pre-analyze Mars samples before sending them to Earth as part of a planetary (Earth) protection scenario.
As to a “fleet of telescopes”, as in an interferometer, Earth-Sun L2 is probably a lot more advantageous.
As to a space based node for a DSN, that’s nice, but closer Earth-orbit would seem vastly more useful. More enabling, perhaps, would be satellites that would constitute a cis-lunar GPS system.
My point was simply that if you’re looking for useful destinations to send humans, where humans can do work that at least builds towards future plans, destinations that are wholly achievable with near-term planned architecture, these are them. Not the lunar surface, not lunar orbit, not a NEO, and certainly not Mars. The question isn’t where NASA is going, but where HEOMD is going. On Gerst’s dartboard of destinations, these Lagrange point orbits are big targets. The others are tiny dots.
D’oh, forgot the link:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/los.html
Thank you. Nice stuff.
Actually, looking back at the dozen or so Russian contributions at GLEX2012, none of them were about surface operations, and several of them (from Korolev/Energia staff in particular) focused on free space applications, ideally with ISS heritage. I think their ultimate goal is humans on the lunar surface, but that’s not their near-term interest, it would appear.
My point was simply that if you’re looking for useful destinations to send humans, where humans can do work that at least builds towards future plans
Whatever. These fine points of cult dogma stray far beyond the realm of rational argument. Building a heavenly shrine in a Lagrangian halo doesn’t lead to progress towards further space development any more than Salyut, Mir, Shuttle, or ISS have. Where Shuttle is now an oversized museum piece, and ISS will spash into the Pacific, this Lagrangian doll house will just stay up there eroding from radiation and cosmic dust for eons, sluffing off space junk. Just another throwaway cult cathedral built at astronomical expense to the taxpayer.
Since this is space politics, I do have to point out what should be obvious, that as a matter of STEM or political inspiration the goal of sending astronauts to an EML is a complete dud. No President is going to get on national TV and try to be Kennedy by saying we’re going to an obscure region somewhere out in remote space where there’s nothing for the astronauts to see. At least with ISS they can take pictures of hurricanes and such. On ISS our great diapered heroes can at least pretend to look useful. Out in the middle of nowhere, not so much. They will spend their time doing physical checkups on each other and complaining about the radiation and other ailments, like extremely overpriced Homer Simpsons. How inspirational.
Yes, I realize many cultists find this stuff inspirational. News flash: normal people do not. This “capabilities” sect is so caught up in its own dogmatic central plans that it fails to see how simultaneously boring and nutty this stuff looks to outsiders. So goes the holy writ: first we’ll put together some tin cans and struts in LEO, then a heavily shielded tin can at EML, then bury an RV on the moon. Each step a Next Logical Doll House. Failing to realize that this stuff is as yawn inducing to almost everybody else as any Soviet central plan specifying the next five years’ production of iron, coal, potatoes, etc., on top of being far more economically insane than any red industrial prospectus ever was.
Just a general observation and a follow-up to amightywind’s optimism concerning the usefulness of SLS:
Back in the mid-1960’s when NASA signed off on NERVA and began planning the Reactor In-Flight Test in earnest, mission planners realized that they (a) finally had a rocket that could get people to Mars and back, and (b) the list of logistical requirements was so long and so beyond their capabilities that a Mars mission was still impossible. Even if RIFT was successful, a manned Mars mission was out of the question.*
We’re in a similar position now with SLS. That situation has improved a lot over the ensuing fifty years, but nitty gritty stuff not-so-flashy stuff is still not there yet. And those are the problems the 14 STRS defined in 2010 and the Space Technology Program are meant to solve: EDL systems, in-space propulsion systems, better ECLSS, a better DSN, etc. In other words, if either SLS or a fully-operational depot-based transportation system were ready today, it would still be several years before we could use either of them to go anywhere. We’ve needed to solve these problems for decades. We can argue all day long about launch systems, but we won’t go very far unless we fill the other gaps.
* That’s not to say that a lot of people wouldn’t have given a portion of their anatomy to have one or two operational nuclear tugs operating out of LEO for the past fifty years – the alternate realities are mind-boggling.
Heinrich Monroe wrote @ September 17th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
As to a space based node for a DSN, that’s nice, but closer Earth-orbit would seem vastly more useful.>>
Probably not.
One of the few things that a libration point is good for just “immediately” is a DSN antenna site. The spacecraft technology is there. The US military is with some of its “ease dropping satellites” deploying large dishes that rival the size of the largest dishes of the DSN and a Libration point would have enormous advantages over a GEO or any other earth orbit.
Low inherent doppler shift, a stable solar environment and modest station keeping requirements…the only difficulty would be matching the transmitter power of the DSN.
The good news is that with the inverse square law working for you the RX of such a spacecraft would have a far easier time then they do on Earth and transmitter power is going to be an issue wherever one goes into orbit.
If we ever detect SETI by radio…I am convinced it will come from either a signal with an unbelievable Jansky number or from deep space radio telescopes. RGO
Steve Squires is nobody’s fool. Nobody dependent on federal funding would go to a Congressional hearing these days and openly criticize SLS unless they had a death wish.
Not to join into arguments about what Squyres did or did not mean, but that’s not correct. Federal funding (grants, contracts) isn’t going to depend on criticism of congressional policy. Academics do it all the time, as well as industry (through their lobbyists, who dangle big checks). But here’s the deal. No NASA Advisory Committee Chair would go to a congressional hearing and criticize congressional direction unless he wanted to be canned by the Administrator. The purpose of the NAC is to advise the NASA Administrator about how to carry out the tasks he’s been directed to accomplish. It’s not to argue with Congress about those tasks. Now, that’s why Squyres was called to testify by the SLS-friendly majority committee members. Because they knew that he’s a strong science voice who, as the NAC Chair, wouldn’t dare embarrass them.
But what this means is that we really don’t have a clue about what Steve Squyres feels about SLS deep in his heart. The face he has to put on is that it’s a directed task, and he has to salute and help Charlie do that task in the best possible way. This help may well include explicit recognition of the hurdles that task comes with.
As a side note (please forgive off-topic), SpaceX have just secured a couple more commercial satellites from SES. Interesting to note the following courtesy of Space News:
‘Frank McKenna, president of International Launch Services (ILS) of Reston, Va. — a veteran launch service provider and a principal SpaceX competitor — said he has calculated that SpaceX is, on average, just under 50 percent less expensive than ILS, Arianespace of France and other established launch service providers.
For McKenna, the SpaceX phenomenon means that nearly $500 million has been withheld from the commercial launch industry — an industry not generally associated with thick profit margins — in the less than three years since SpaceX arrived on the scene.
For SES and others, it is $500 million in savings.’
For those who think SpaceX has put the nail in the coffin of Cx, I’d suggest they’re doing it to SLS and MPCV ultimately. Sequestration will all but guarantee it if that goes ahead. Both DOD and NASA will be looking for cheaper rides and SpaceX will be the obvious candidate. I can’t see the other providers getting anywhere near the SpaceX prices. JM2CW.
Low inherent doppler shift, a stable solar environment and modest station keeping requirements…the only difficulty would be matching the transmitter power of the DSN.
Sorry, but Doppler tracking is really no big deal for Earth-based DSN. The rotation of the Earth is actually hugely well understood. You’re still going to need to take that into account in communicating with the space-based DSN node. Actually, for frequency tracking, plasma noise is the main issue. The plasma noise from the solar wind will be endured anywhere in cis-lunar space, though it helps to get outside the ionosphere. As to a stable solar environment, well, maybe we’re talking about power systems management? But except for equinoctal eclipses, which are pretty rare, GEO would work just fine. That’s why I didn’t specify LEO.
If the idea is to use an in-space DSN node as an intermediary for distant space-to-Earth comm, obviating atmospheric effects on low signal levels, putting it close to Earth is just a more sensible thing to do. I agree that a transponder node at L1 (and especially at L2 for farside comm) would be highly enabling for lunar surface work. From the lunar surface, those nodes would move slowly in the sky and be available continuously, making directional comm vastly easier than shooting at an LLO node that is streaking across the sky.
Whatever. These fine points of cult dogma stray far beyond the realm of rational argument.
But my point was that these fine points of cult dogma were what this thread was talking about. If this whole discussion isn’t rational argument to you, then you’re welcome to seek it elsewhere. I agree with you entirely that the case for human space flight to these as well as other destinations might be arguable, at least in the near term. But there is a big budget line to do it at NASA, and the question is how to use it responsibly.
At least with ISS they can take pictures of hurricanes and such.
Oh yeah. Like that’s an important thing ISS needs to be doing. Astronauts with hand-held cameras taking tourist shots of hurricanes. The American public isn’t that dumb.
As to gazing targets for astronauts, well, you’ve got the whole Earth out one window, and the whole Moon out the other. Even on the surface of the Moon, what do residents there gaze at? Rocks, rocks, and more rocks. As DCSCA notes (when he’s not ranting about elbow padded ivory tower academics), that’s what a grad student with a $5 camera in the desert southwest could see. Except that student would gaze on cacti and lizards as well.
I can’t resist pointing out the astonishing exploration trip that James Cameron just did, down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. You know what he gazed at down there? Pretty much nothing! But those dim pictures of dirty sand at the bottom he came back with didn’t detract from the adventure and accomplishment of his effort.
The story that is used to sell such a Lagrange point mission won’t be based on window-gazing.
Deep space DSN would make more sense for laser communication, like that asteroid mining startup is taking about putting on its prospector probes.
But there is a big budget line to do [HSF] at NASA
There is this year, for ISS. But there is no law that says the cult is entitled to $X billion of taxpayer dollars per year. The Lagrangian and lunar sci-fi stories, like all the other beyond-LEO astronaut fantasies, remain unfunded. So the question of whether in future years to put taxpayer money into these fetishes, as opposed to putting those billions into rational planetary science, or cutting the deficit, or many other far more worthwhile endeavours, is certainly on the table.
Heinrich Monroe wrote @ September 18th, 2012 at 11:39 am
Sorry, but Doppler tracking is really no big deal for Earth-based DSN>>
dah.
even my little old earth station (36 foot dish) can handle doppler tracking (or at least the electronics associated with it can)…I stand by my position that the first space addition to the DSN will be at a libration point. if for no other reason then the inverse square law and earth interference…
but we can see how that works out Robert G. Oler WB5MZO
a transponder node at L1 (and especially at L2 for farside comm) would be highly enabling for lunar surface work.
Or not. The best orbit for communications relays from a lunar surface operation will depend on where that operation is being conducted. For many purposes the most attractive locations are the poles with their ice deposits. At the poles a hill or being inside a crater (where the ice is) can get between your rover and an EML relay.
Lunar Molniya orbits — highly eccentric polar orbits which spend a great majority of their time over the north or south lunar pole — will probably be much better locations for orbital relays from such lunar polar machinery. Two satellites are sufficient to ensure that a relay is always located near the zenith of a given pole, and most of the time the bandwidth of both will be available.
Molniya orbits also work well from other parts of the moon, excepting hilly areas or inside craters near the equator.
The best orbit for communications relays from a lunar surface operation will depend on where that operation is being conducted.
Agreed. The lunar poles are visible at best half the time from a single transponder in L1 or L2 orbit. But if we’re talking about constellations of satellites in Molniya orbits, we could do the same for Lagrange point orbits. Two in the same orbit, but 180 degrees out of phase. Those two satellites will give you continuous access (though not zenith access) to BOTH poles. Fair point that deposits in lunar polar craters may well be at the base of a crater rim or mountain that would shadow these orbits though. Might need an additional transponder sitting on a nearby peak.
If you’re interested in mining more than water, though, the poles may well not be where you’d really like to be. Only so much acreage on those well-illuminated hilltops.
Not that you’d need a full fledged “Gateway” habitat as a transponder, but a facility in a lunar Molniya orbit isn’t of much use for anything else.
But there is no law that says the [HSF] cult is entitled to $X billion of taxpayer dollars per year.
Well, sure. Just as there is no law that says that NASA has to launch from the space coast instead of Hilo, or that NASA can’t fund planetary science with bake sales. But there is fifty years of historical precedent and taxpayer expectation, which in many respects, works like a law. This “there is no law” statement really isn’t one of practical space policy, but more of cultural policy. The practical space policy question is that if a nation demands substantial investment in human space flight, what’s the best way to do it?
Hello Heinrich –
“If this whole discussion isn’t rational argument to you, then you’re welcome to seek it elsewhere.”
The usefulness of manned space flight is open for debate, and the political debate among the powers that be will not be limited by any restriction which you try to place on it.Googaw has Googaw’s point of view on what he calls “the astronaut cult”, and I have mine on what I call manned Mars flight and space utopianism.
What all of the discussion here on the SLS has all too conveniently ignored is the fact that the Earth will be in Comet Schwassmann Wachmann 3’s debris stream in 2022.
Hello Heinrich –
Just to make this clear, any discussion of manned space flight anywhere which does not take into account a clear and present danger to the people of this nation is foolish.
Just to make this clear, any discussion of manned space flight anywhere which does not take into account a clear and present danger to the people of this nation is foolish.
How does this comment relate to the 180-day report? Just to make it clear, that report is the topic of this thread. There is nothing in that report (at least explicitly) about security. Yes, that report might be foolish as a result, but Congress asked for a report on exploration destinations, goals, and international collaboration with respect to “exploration goals”, which commonly translates as “human space flight goals”. That’s what they got.
BTW, SLS is, in fact, is somewhat peripheral to that topic, and was hardly mentioned in the report.
there is fifty years of historical precedent …The practical space policy question is that if a nation demands substantial investment in human space flight, what’s the best way to do it?
By this argument, governments should never have stopped spending large amounts on swords, horses, knights in shining armor, sailing ships, coal-fired battleships, surveillance balloons, and trench warfare. There were many decades to many millenia of precedent for those too. In fact, even politicians have sooner or later recognized that technologies and strategies become obsolete. Precedent doesn’t create any more cult entitlement to future taxpayer funding of astronaut doll houses than it created for afficionados of the coal-powered battleship.
And the retro-futuristic pretensions of the astronaut cult have never been more vulnerable to political recognition of their obsolesence.
Space policy in the current political climate does not come anywhere close to taking for granted the “if” part of the above statement, as if politicians and voters can’t learn from the history of the massive amounts of money wasted on these dead-end astronaut projects. Do you think most voters and politicians are ignorant of the fact that the great astronaut projects of the past led to nothing lasting beyond space junk and museum pieces? There are constant reminders of this. There were news stories just today about one of the shuttles being taken to a museum.
Mitt Romney for example does not take for granted the inevitability of such demand. He tossed Gingrich out of the running for the Republican nomination by questioning it — by saying he’d fire people who were so ignorant of economics as to propose such “investments”. And he hasn’t proposed any of his own at any funding level. There is not a single current or proposed HSF program that Romney has come out in favor of. Political cost to Romney? Nil. Political benefit to Romney? He did soundly thump Gingrich in every primary election after that debate, when he’d lost the previous one to the former Speaker. Many other politicians and pundits joined Romney in his criticism of such retro-futuristic fantasies, whereas their main proponent Gingrich has faded into irrelevance. Indeed the Republican platform only speaks of HSF in the past tense, and the Democratic platform doesn’t speak of it at all.
In an era of radical reforms such as those to health care, do you think the billions of dollars spent every year on these bizarre gigashrines are going to be ignored? It’s no coincidence that the Republican platform lists NASA under the “Reform” section rather than the “National Greatness” section.
What HSF is these days is a target for highly visible budget cuts, used by politicans to argue that they’re being responsible with the taxpayer’s money. The last two major developments in HSF were cancellations — of Constellation and of the Shuttle — and it’s likely that most of the near future developments in HSF will be cancellations as well. Until finally and thankfully there is no more such crackpottery at taxpayer expense that makes such an obvious juicy target for the responsible budgeter’s axe.
Hello Heinrich –
Nice try.
By your criterion, most of the posts here on this thread would be off topic. Please excuse me for bringing a major fact to this discussion. You don’t know how sorry I am that I have upset you.
Back here in the real world, I suppose the House and Senate will re-visit the SLS in 2017. I agree with those here whose analysis have indicated Obama will not spend political capital ending it.
Googaw –
Your discussion of manned space conveniently left out the CAPS PHO detection and mitigation architecture. I believe it is best for the task, and It requires the use of detection instruments built with human assistance on the surface of the Moon..
Come up with something as reliable an effective that does not involve man, and you might have a case.
Egad wrote @ September 13th,
“So if we truly intend to have a program of human exploration to some destination beyond low Earth orbit, there is a piece of the puzzle missing.”
What we really need is the ability to learn how to survive in space for the long term, and that requires the development of an artificial (1g) gravity station before we go to Mars or to any planetary body within our solar system. It is a necessary stepping stone SLS cannot provide.
E.P. — If our planet is in danger from celestial icebergs, putting our safety in the hands of astronauts is putting ourselves on the Titanic. Commerce and security were sacrificed to the astronaut cult when those two unfortunately intersected in the form of the Shuttle, and they would do it to planetary safety as well. They will only want your ideas as another excuse to build more of their doll houses, when their current excuses of retro-futuristic “infrastructure” and “exploration” have been unmasked for the frauds they are. You will find that the budget for a manned cometary detection and mitigation scheme will be 95% doll-house and 5% planetary safety. And even that 5% will cost many times more than it should due to other safety concerns — concerns for our diapered heroes, not for the rest of humanity.
Right now for your worries we need crater studies, infrared telescopes, a network of unmanned lunar seismometers — all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hobbit holes on the moon. And, should your fears be confirmed, unmanned electric propulsion gravity tugs. No holy heavenly hobbits required.
@Mary
You are correct, though we don’t know whether a full 1g is absolutely necessary. It may be something like 1/3 or 1/2 g is the minimum we can get by with. That’s a subquestion to the main question that you pose. But as you say, SLS won’t provide an answer to this issue.
Why do people believe that because NASA does not have money NOW
for missisions to asteriods, the moon and Mars that they dont have a
justafieable path? These destinations will be visited between 10 and 20 years from now. Why should they be budegeted now? Whats done on these
missions might change then. Right now infastructure is being budgeted and built now to do thoes missions in the future. NASA has a path. Its up
to future administrations to budget the actual missions. No future President or Congress or Senate will ever cancel NASA. We passed that point when it was possible to do that 30 years ago. All branches of the
US government will never agree to cancel NASA, now and in the future.
People who say that NASA will not go to the moon, the asteriods and mars using SLS are anti-government people that want to see NASA fail and want to see the US fail.
Mary wrote,
Egad wrote @ September 13th,
“So if we truly intend to have a program of human exploration to some destination beyond low Earth orbit, there is a piece of the puzzle missing.â€
Actually, Steven Squyres, Chairman of the NASA Advisory Council wrote that; I just quoted it. I certainly agree with it, of course, since it’s manifestly true.
@r
“Why do people believe that because NASA does not have money NOW for missisions to asteriods, the moon and Mars that they dont have a justafieable path?”
Because doing so using SLS would entail operational costs so high (assuming it can even be built with the money available) that it would require a huge increase in NASA’s budget. Such a significant budget increase has not occurred for decades even during better economic times, so it is unreasonable to expect that in the future. But studies from NASA, industry, and universities do indicate that we indeed “have money NOW for missisions to asteriods, the moon and Mars” as long as we don’t do it with a shuttle-derived heavy-lifter such as SLS. SLS is a great prescription for keeping NASA in low earth orbit through economic paralysis.
“People who say that NASA will not go to the moon, the asteriods and mars using SLS are anti-government people that want to see NASA fail and want to see the US fail.”
B.S. We could be starting those missions NOW. I and others don’t want to see NASA fail. Instead of working on a dead-end vehicle like SLS, NASA could be developing and building cutting-edge tech such as: fuel depots, radiation shielding and advanced exploration vehicles like Nautilus X. Those are technologies for going beyond low earth orbit that NASA could be working on now with the money being wasted on SLS.
Want NASA to stay in low earth orbit indefinitely rather than doing ambitious deep space missions? Then keep supporting SLS.
“Why do people believe that because NASA does not have money NOW for missisions to asteriods, the moon and Mars that they dont have a
justafieable path? These destinations will be visited between 10 and 20 years from now. Why should they be budegeted now?… Its up
to future administrations to budget the actual missions.”
It’s not the missions that need to be budgeted now. Rather, the development of the pieces necessary to put those missions together needs to be budgeted now if you’re going to put those missions together in 10-20 years.
All that NASA is building now is a 70-ton launch vehicle (SLS) and a crew capsule (MPCV). Among the things that are missing:
– A service module for lunar Lagrange point and lunar flyby/orbit missions
– Long-duration propellant storage for multi-launch missions
– A lander for lunar landing missions
– An ascent vehicle for lunar landing missions
– A transfer stage for solar Lagrange point and NEO missions
– A larger habitable volume for solar Lagrange point and NEO missions
– A proximity vehicle for NEO missions
If we’re going to mount a NEO mission by 2025 (the Administration’s goal), most of these items need to have their design, development, testing, and build started now or in the next two or three years. As Apollo showed, they’re long-lead items requiring a decade to field.
But there’s no budget for any of these things. Instead, we’re putting all of NASA’s human space exploration resources through at least 2025 into SLS and MPCV. Without at least some of the items from the list above, SLS and MPCV will only be capable of Earth orbit.
We did Earth orbit for 30 years. It was called Space Shuttle.
“People who say that NASA will not go to the moon, the asteriods and mars using SLS”
The proof is in the pudding. SLS is so expensive that it’s sucking up all the budget for any actual exploration hardware (the items in the list above). And without these items, NASA will not go to the Moon, asteroids, or Mars.
This is a fact. NASA’s own planning documents state that there is no funding for any “in-space elements” through at least 2025 using SLS/MPCV, even with substantial increases over the President’s budget runout. See p. 8 in the presentation below:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=38348
This is a shame, because much less expensive heavy lift alternatives to SLS exist. ULA could built a 70-ton Phase 2 EELV for $2.3 billion at last estimate. SpaceX has offered a firm, fixed-price, 150-ton superheavy Falcon for $2.5 billion. Either of these options uses less that one-year’s worth of the SLS/MPCV budget. Even if they doubled in cost, they’d free up on the order of $20-odd billion through 2025 for actual exploration hardware development.
“are anti-government people that want to see NASA fail and want to see the US fail.”
Speaking for myself, I do want to see NASA succeed in human space exploration beyond Earth orbit. But it’s not going to do it by spending all of its human space exploration budget on the launcher and crew capsule. NASA has to partner with the private sector, which is much more efficient at launch and other routine developments and operations, so that there is budget left for NASA to build the harder, deep-space elements of these missions.
Hi Googaw –
While robots can do some things better than People,
People can still do some things that robots can not.
To start this off, a fact is that the Earth will be in Comet 73P’s debris field in 2022.
Thus the SLS most likely will have a really, really useful purpose as as an UNMANNED deep space delivery system around 2020-2021
While I myself would have preferred DIRECT to the SLS, our legislators did not. They appear to view it as necessary for manned Mars flight, and they view that goal as being in the national interest.
My assumption is that they are waiting for the economy to pick up before
funding the construction of the flight architecture.
These destinations will be visited between 10 and 20 years from now.
It is known!
H/T George R. R. Martin.
r wrote @ September 20th, 2012 at 7:08 am
“Why do people believe that because NASA does not have money NOW
for missisions to asteriods, the moon and Mars that they dont have a
justafieable path? These destinations will be visited between 10 and 20 years from now. Why should they be budegeted now?”
For two reasons:
1. Leadtime: Look at any significantly large program NASA has been doing recently, and you will see that it takes at least a decade to do the planning, building and testing of the mission hardware. That means NASA needs to start coming up with detailed hardware plans NOW if they want to be using the SLS when it becomes operational.
2. Overall Budget Needs: Using historical analogies, it could be estimated that an SLS-sized mission payload (70-130mt) would cost at least $10B, and if we assume a decade to develop, that comes out to an average of $1B/year (it’s more lumpy than that in real life). Now add in 2-3 SLS missions per year that SLS supporters say we will be doing, and quickly it becomes apparent that NASA’s budget needs to increase by $2B/year, every year, for at least 10 years. So just funding SLS mission hardware will cost $20B/year once it hits it’s full launch tempo, but that doesn’t include the operation of all that hardware (the ISS takes $3B/year to operate).
So yes, if the SLS is going to be used, then NASA needs the money now to start working on the SLS payloads, and NASA will need an ever-increasing budget in order to keep the SLS busy.
How likely do you think it is that Congress will increase NASA’s budget by 10% per year, every year, for a decade?
You also have to include .. with the billions for mission hardware, the rocket and capsule. 2-3 billion a pop? Or will it cost what NASA says, a few hundred million per launch?