“Recent history shows that if NASA designs the asteroid mission, it will be too complex, take too long, and be extremely unaffordable…”

You did a great writeup on this, and I just wanted to say that I greatly appreciate the detail that you spent time to include.

I have been coming to Space Politics now for many years, and as I’ve stated in the past, I come here to discuss, debate and LEARN. Explaining your logic AND providing the source information is very helpful for people like me who are space enthusiasts and not involved in the science or industry side of space, but otherwise have a stake in what our nation does in space.

Thanks for the detail you take time to include in your posts.

Recent history shows that if NASA designs the asteroid mission, it will be too complex, take too long, and be extremely unaffordable. NASA’s Human Exploration Framework Team (HEFT) was charged with developing the asteroid mission back in ~2010. Although this was before SLS was fully defined, they did assume a Shuttle-derived, 100-ton Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLLV) as well as an Orion-derived Crew Transfer Vehicle (CTV). However, their architecture also required the development of an alphabet soup of other systems (CPS, MMSEV, DSH, SEP, MO, GO, etc.) as well as nine precursor missions to test all this hardware. (The nine do not include a couple other robotic precursor missions to the target asteroid.) By the time NASA finished all that development and all those test flights (gotta keep all those engineers employed until retirement!), HEFT reckoned NASA could rendezvous with a target NEO in 2031, six years after the President’s 2025 goal. Here’s their final presentation:

http://www.nasawatch.com/images/heft.presentation.pdf

Go to page 52 and you’ll see that by the time they paid for their Shuttle-derived HLLV, Orion-derived CTV, and all these other HEFT systems, the HEFT plan was billions over the budget runout at that time. (The budget runout is much lower now.) If you add up the budget figures on pages 53-55, it comes to $143 billion total. That’s $40 billion more than what ISS development cost — ultimately for one lousy mission to one lousy rock two decades in the future. Crazy expensive. Totally nuts and utterly out of touch with the budget and what the President had directed them to do.

Georgia Tech did a study that dumped the Shuttle-derived HLLV in favor of cryogenic propellant management and less expensive launch vehicles, and dumped some of the other unnecessary HEFT systems as well, but otherwise did things NASA’s way. That got the mission cost down to $86 billion, which was well within the budget runout at that time. See page 36 in their presentation here:

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2011/F9Prop.Depot.pdf

It’s a huge improvement, but $86 billion for one lousy visit to one lousy rock still 20 years into the future (still in 2031) probably remains a non-starter.

LockMart’s “Plymouth Rock” study looked at a dual-Orion mission to a NEO. The mission is very limited in terms of the NEOs it can visit, it capabilities, and its duration. It’s really running at the ragged edge of viability and safety due to the constraints imposed by the modified second Orion (vice purpose-built habitation and propulsion to supplement the first unmodified Orion). There are also no public cost figures, and it’s unclear what additional HEFT systems and testing would be applied if NASA were to adopt the Plymouth Rock mission architecture. It was baselined on Ares I/V, which would require two SLS launches today, one human-rated. With the baseline once-every-other-year launch rate on SLS, it’s unclear that SLS could pull off this minimalist mission. But assuming SLS could, at $1 billion per Orion (from the Augustine committee’s final report) and at least $2 billion per SLS launch, the Plymouth Rock mission itself would cost roughly $6 billion. This does not include the costs of human-rating SLS, modifying the second Orion, and any additional HEFT systems or testing imposed by NASA, which would probably spiral the total cost into the low tens of billions. But ignoring NASA/HEFT practices, $6 billion is at least in the realm of possibility for a human exploration mission. Here’s a Plymouth Rock presentation:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/sbag2/presentations/PlymouthRockasteroidmission.pdf

No one to my knowledge has really looked at a sane, clean-sheet, low-cost NEO mission unburdened by SLS or Orion or HEFT assumptions. The closest is the Inspiration Mars free-return trajectory circumnavigation of the planet Mars, which should have enough dV and life support to enable human missions to a number of NEOs. Their original architecture assumed a modified DragonRider and an inflatable or Cygnus-derived habitat launched on two Falcon Heavy vehicles or an Atlas V and a Delta IV Heavy, with the latter option requiring propellant transfer. The upper cost bound on this architecture was $2 billion and change, including both development and operations. Later refinements showed that they probably needed three launch vehicles, which might have rounded it up to $3 billion total. I doubt NASA would ever take the calculated risks of such a mission or that the political environment would allow NASA to cancel or divert funding from SLS/MPCV to such a mission. But something like the Inspiration Mars architecture is probably also the only realistic option for a human mission to an asteroid within NASA’s foreseeable budget horizon. Here’s an Inspiration Mars presentation:

http://www.aiaa.org/uploadedFiles/About-AIAA/Press-Room/Key_Speeches-Reports-and-Presentations/2013_Key_Speeches/Inspiration-Mars-FISO-Presentation2013-04-03.pdf

“It’s my understanding that the science community originally believed this was the intention for missions involving humans visiting an asteroid.”

The science community doesn’t want to have anything to do with a human NEO mission, whether the astronauts go to the NEO or the NEO comes to them. Neither mission addresses the planetary science community’s priorities, or even the priorities of the so-called small body (asteroids, comets, etc.) science community.

“ARM was a bit of a disappointment to say the least.”

As I wrote earlier in this thread, ARM doesn’t achieve or contribute to any of the goals it espouses. And for the $2.6B cost of the ARM robotic spacecraft, we could afford an Inspiration Mars-model human mission to an asteroid and maybe have enough change left over for an exhaustive search of hazardous and commercially interesting NEOs.

“Every poll that I’ve seen (the Wall Street Journal poll in particular) or conducted strongly favors the Moon over any other destination.”

Great. However they don’t say when, or how, or even why. And they say nothing about the U.S. paying for setting up a lunar refueling station, which is obviously something the private sector should be doing, not John Q. Public. If there is so much demand for fuel from the Moon, then why isn’t the private sector drooling at the prospects of making money there?

There may be some amount of interest, but there is no consensus, and no money behind the interest.

“Plus there was bi-partisan support in Congress for returning to the Moon.”

There was bi-partisan support for canceling the over-budget, under-whelming Constellation program. Most of the Republicans in the House that were in states that had major work on the program voted to cancel. How do you explain that?

I’ll explain it. The key takeaway is that no matter what goal NASA has, it needs to have a good plan, well executed, and consistently funded. The Constellation program did not have a good plan, and was certainly not well executed. And in case you haven’t noticed, no government program is immune to the ups and downs of the politics of the day, so any program that wants to survive has to learn to deliver value quickly and continue to deliver value over time.

Constellation wasn’t going to launch humans on meaningful mission until two decades into the program, so it was a major failure in that regard. That’s why using existing launchers can deliver results so fast, and scale so quickly. Given the same level of funding, I could get to the Moon using existing launchers years before you could using the SLS, and I would be able to devote far more resources to actual space hardware than you could. And since I would source fuel from Earth, I would have to pay less for my fuel, and be able to launch large assemblies out of LEO for a fraction of the cost of launching using fuel from the Moon.

Every poll that I’ve seen (the Wall Street Journal poll in particular) or conducted strongly favors the Moon over any other destination. The recent revelations from the US astronauts on this issue only further supports the idea that we need to focus on the Moon. Plus there was bi-partisan support in Congress for returning to the Moon.

Marcel

You (seem to?) believe they have US leadership at heart. I would point other areas such as healthcare, manufacturing, science in general, immigration (see science as well), education, etc, where they haven’t shown the slightest interest in US leadership.

Smart? Yes absolutely. Smart at keeping their jobs by dividing the electorate.

SLS/MPCV only is a tiny, minuscule, if visible, example of the shenanigans in Congress.

I believe you give those guys way too much credit.

“They seem to truly believe SLS = US leadership; not the US-in-decline that it, in fact, represents.”

Overall I agree with your whole post. This last line I would change though, since I don’t see the U.S. in decline, nor do I see our space industry in decline either. Our space industry is the envy of the world, in that we have companies that can do far more than what entire countries are capable of.

What the SLS does represent is declining interest in space by our politicians, since the few in Congress that pushed for the SLS had no interest in actually finding out whether it would do anything useful. They knew it would help the voters in their districts and states, and they knew it would help their political contributors, but they had no verifiable information about whether it would in fact help the U.S.

Now I’m not saying those politicians are not patriots, but they are not helping the U.S. to keep ahead in the frontier of space. In fact as you pointed out so well they are actually retarding the ability of NASA to get ready for the future. In that regard you are right, that with respect to NASA we are in decline.

“I keep trying to imagine ways to salvage SLS and make something useful from it.”

We don’t lack ways of using an HLV, we severely lack the money.

Unless or until NASA’s budget is more than doubled (tripled more likely), an HLV is unneeded – NASA simply cannot afford to build and operate the amount of space hardware a constant rate of HLV launches would require.

And in reality, if a mission was identified that required massive amounts of mass to be moved to space, the SLS would be one of the last vehicles to be considered, since the existing fleet of commodity launchers can lift far more mass to space, and for far less, than the SLS can with it’s current production facilities.

Again, it all boils down to money, since the SLS mandates such a massive amount of it to justify it’s existence.