Congress, NASA, Other

Griffin endorses Mars 2021 mission concept

While the concept of a human Mars flyby mission launching in 2021 got the attention of some in Congress in late February, the proposed mission, based on designs developed by Inspiration Mars, has maintained a low profile since then. The authorization bill that the House Science Committee approved last week does require NASA to perform a technical study of the concept and also assess whether the mission “is in the strategic interests of the United States in space exploration.” However, there hasn’t been a major push to advocate for the proposed mission. Even Inspiration Mars founder Dennis Tito is staying on the sidelines: a spokesperson said last month that “based on the dynamic state of play with the NASA budget right now” Tito is refraining from interviews or other public comment on the mission concept.

The same isn’t true, though, for former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who completed a two-year term as president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) last week. Griffin, in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle yesterday with new AIAA president Jim Albaugh, argued that “Mars Flyby 2021″ provides a focus to the nation’s space program that they find lacking. “A commitment to the first human mission to Mars would provide just the impetus we need as a nation to address the political and technical issues that are the present day roadblocks on our path to Mars and, later, beyond,” they write. “The goal is near enough to require action rather than talk, yet far enough to be attained without undue pressure on the budget.”

Griffin and Albaugh don’t seem to doubt the feasibility of the mission concept in general: “unlike the situation in the time of Apollo, what faces us for Flyby 2021 are not questions of fundamental feasibility but rather are matters of routine engineering development, well within our capability to pursue.”

At the February hearing, the ranking member of the full science committee, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), expressed skepticism that the 2021 flyby mission is feasible, answering the question posed by the hearing’s title—”Mars Flyby 2021: The First Deep Space Mission for the Orion and Space Launch System?”—with a simple “no.” Griffin and Albaugh acknowledge her comments, but argue that other questions she raised at the hearing about NASA’s future space exploration plans are “precisely the questions for which Mars Flyby 2021 can focus our nation and our space agency on” to help provide answers. “For these reasons and more, the congresswoman’s questions should be seen not as reasons to stay, but as reasons to go.”

59 comments to Griffin endorses Mars 2021 mission concept

  • Coastal Ron

    Nothing new here. For some people, NASA always has to be “going somewhere” – to have a goal. Which is like saying the Army always has to be invading some country around the world, because otherwise what else should they be doing?

    Basing our major exploration activities on goals that are a reach is not inherently bad, but they have to be part of a coordinated plan so that the effort required to attain such goals can be built upon and not lost. And with the current funding levels for NASA, a Mars 2021 flyby would not be followed up by anything, and would be essentially a worthless exercise beyond PR value.

    Now is the time to building up the capabilities we’ll need to eventually go to Mars, but 2021 is far too early to do it in any meaningful way.

    • E.P. Grondine

      “For some people, NASA always has to be “going somewhere” – to have a goal.”

      NASA has multiple goals. But for some people, a small but vocal part of the population, and NASA supporters, manned Mars flight should be NASA’s only goal.

      This minority of the voters runs small forums and support “magazines” where they confirm themselves in their beliefs.

      They are now split into two factions, those who think “mankind” can get to Mars with the SLS and those who think “mankind” can get to Mars with SpaceX’s Falcon launchers.

      Here is the political part: I do not think that flying a few men to Mars would be any replacement for the immediate development of the Moon. It also seems to me that immediate development of the Moon would provide all of the technologies needed for development of Mars.

      Feel free to disagree.

      • Jim Nobles

        I don’t think the problem is Mars vs. Moon so much that it’s dummies that think government is going pay for either one of them.

        That’s my opinion.

  • This is just desperation to find something for the SLS to do.

  • quest

    Their argument that the Mars mission is achievable with and Orion capsule is nonsense. Orion was not designed for Mars but rather for the Moon. Orion probably cannot even perform a Mars reentry without substantial redesign. And a capsule the size of Orion is not adequate. You have to add a lot more to the space vehicle-a habitat module, new propulsion systems, radiation protection, redundant long life systems for life support.

    If it is a flags and footprints mission to get us to Mars then that is the wrong way to go. We did the flags and footprints to the Moon in 1969 and look where that got us. We are basically dead in the water fifty years later.

    The only thing that is worthwhile is establishing the systems to get us into space at reasonable expense and for permanence; we need to be establishing an infrastructure. It needs to be supportable and maintainable and it needs to be something that industry can and will support. It could be tourism; it could be resources and mining; it could be manufacturing to produce space systems. It could be all of these. But the idea that the American taxpayer should shell out the dollars for one or two civil servants to get the glory of being first on yet another world-that gets us no where in the long term.

    • Crash Davis

      “Orion probably cannot even perform a Mars reentry without substantial redesign.”

      You do not need Mars reentry for a Mars flyby. Think please.

      • Jim Nobles

        “You do not need Mars reentry for a Mars flyby. Think please.”

        Maybe he meant earth reentry traveling at the speed an object returning from Mars orbit would be expected to experience using the more common Mars return scenarios.

      • guest

        Thanks Jim and Reality Bits. Maybe Crash David needs to use his brain once in awhile.

    • Reality Bits

      Again with apologies for Jeff for the long, but relevant quote:

      … Unfortunately, the Primary team’s evaluation of the SLS-Orion option uncovered many technical challenges. First, while the Orion spacecraft is being designed to perform a wide variety of mission scenarios, many aspects of the IM mission fall outside of that design envelope. One of these critical areas was the reentry speed. Orion’s missions only require reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds up to 11.2 km/sec, whereas the special IM trajectory would have the spacecraft reentering at speeds near 14.2 km/sec. While this is only a 27% increase in reentry speed, the physics of atmospheric heating produce heat loads that are several times greater. To survive the Orion spacecraft would need a new, thicker, heavier heat shield along with a strict mass limit that is difficult to achieve given the fixed geometry of the Orion crew module.”

      SOURCE: Paragraph 5, Page 11, Inspiration Mars: Architecture Study Report Summary

  • bright lights

    If Mike Griffin is in favor then that means the plan is a total disaster.

  • Egad

    without undue pressure on the budget.

    Aye, there’s the rub. I have no doubt that Mars Flyby 2021 using SLS/Orion could be accomplished with a reasonable chance of getting the crew back alive if the mission were assigned top national priority (BRICKBAT in the defense world) today and received essentially unlimited funding and absolute call on resources. “Essentially unlimited funding”, at a guess, might translate into a couple of tens of billions of dollars a year.

    But, without that, I’d say that the “without undue pressure on the budget” bit needs a bit of ‘splainin.

  • We don’t need any stunts like meteoroid retrievals or Mars flybys. We need a pioneering space program that will help to expand humans and our economy throughout the solar system.

    NASA’s primary focus right now should be to get access to the lunar ice reserves so that NASA and private commercial space companies can reduce the cost of cis-luna space travel while also utilizing those resources to gain easy access to the rest of the solar system.

    Marcel

    • Dick Eagleson

      We don’t need any stunts like meteoroid retrievals or Mars flybys.

      Asteroid retrieval doesn’t have to be a stunt. Left in NASA’s hands, I agree it may well become one – assuming it happens at all. Have reluctantly come to share your conclusion about Mars (or Venus) fly-bys. That goes especially for the sadly devolved Inspiration Mars mess.

      We need a pioneering space program that will help to expand humans and our economy throughout the solar system.

      Agree except for the word “program.” That implies gov’t. – i.e., NASA – direction and control. Forty-five years after Apollo 11 it should be clear to everyone that NASA isn’t ever going to do this. Post-Apollo NASA history has been a litany of failures, each more expensive, yet simultaneously less ambitious, than the last. Thirty years ago NASA was at least failing at ambitious projects like NASP and X-33. After that, they were content, for awhile, to fail at things embodying no real technical ambition, just straightforward application of extant technology, like OSP. Now NASA has sunk to failing at projects based on Apollo and Shuttle-era technology like SLS and Orion. If NASA was a person, I’d say he had Alzheimer’s; no memory of anything recent, just long-ago stuff.

      NASA’s primary focus right now should be to get access to the lunar ice reserves so that NASA and private commercial space companies can reduce the cost of cis-luna space travel while also utilizing those resources to gain easy access to the rest of the solar system.

      Poor, senile old NASA, subject to rampant elder abuse by greedy Congressional fossils like Shelby and Mikulski, isn’t going to do anything but sit slumped in its wheelchair and piss in its Depends.

      Ice-mining the Moon? One of many possibly worthwhile projects for our spacefaaring future. NASA? Not going to be a factor. We’ll get to Mars because Elon Musk wants to go there and for no other reason. He’s building a business capable of developing the wherewithal required. His plan extends beyond the bi-annual Congressional election cycle and isn’t crucially dependent on appropriations and budgets.

      If you want to see the Moon mined for ice, find yourself another billionaire and try to sell him on your vision. Bob Bigelow would be my personal pick. He at least wants to go there and is putting some non-trivial money behind his intentions. I don’t get the impression Mr. Bigelow is going to be dissuaded by anything short of death.

      The future of spacefaring humanity will be authored by driven and successful individuals, not by senescent bureaucracies.

    • @Marcel F. Williams,…..Agreed. A new round of Moon expeditions is what’s called for. Project Constellation very much should’ve been allowed to succeed! Even if it would have taken a half-a-decade longer, to be put into effect. Even if a replacement launcher for sending up the Orion capsule, other than the Ares 1, would’ve needed to be found. (A comparably small-sized rocket, among those used for launching unmanned probes, could have been man-rated, and used for this specialized purpose, if the Ares 1 problems couldn’t be overcome, in the end.) Even if the L-SAM lunar lander, the Altair, would’ve needed another tetrad of years to go into production. Even if it would have taken till 2025 or 2028 to have finally succeeded, in reaching Low Lunar Orbit,——Constellation was the right thing to do!

  • josh

    Griffin was given the chance to go to the moon and Mars. Instead he came up with constellation. Hasn’t he done enough already?

  • Marek

    Griffin …. Hasn’t he done enough already?

    He has done enough damage.

    We have an Orion that is about half designed and that we do not know what to do with it. NASA seems to be so proud of it and yet it meets none of its original goals or requirements; its too big, too heavy. And they have spent so much money on it and yet it is no where as far along as Dragon for which about 1/10 the money has been spent and which has flown unmanned three times.

    And yet, the poorly conceived, partially developed, exorbitantly priced Orion is all we have. We have no Shuttle. We have no prospects for Moon or Mars missions.

    Yes, Mr. Griffin has has done enough damage.

    • @Josh & Marek,……Griffin has NOT done anything bad or wrong! Only from an anti-Moon point of view, can any of you see his contributions as a failure. Sure, if what you all want is any destination but the Moon, then you’d likely be denigrating & berating Constellation & former administrator Griffin. But the anti-Moon camp in these what-next-to-do debates is extremely error-filled in their thinking!

      You all gripe about how “over-loaded, too big & heavy” the Orion craft is——as presently conceived. But the Orion’s original purpose was to serve as lunar transport/lunar orbital vehicle, so of course it was supposed to be as strongly designed as the old Apollo CSM. It was freaking Obama & his minions who did the vast damage to NASA! Under the Constellation plan, we were to’ve gotten a lunar ferry & eventually a new lunar lander. A tall multi-stage, hydrogen-fueled rocket—–the Ares 5—–was to have utilized an earth-departure-stage, for the first time in 41 years!

      The only portion of the plan that could have used a bit of better luck, was the plan for the smaller rocket—–the Ares 1—-for primarily launching the manned Orion. I still think that with better patience, the difficulties with this Space Shuttle-derived rocket, could’ve been overcome. But there were always other smaller rocket options, for launching a single manned capsule, into a parking orbit; and NASA could very well have man-rated a replacement rocket, if that’d turned out to be a more viable idea.

      The Moon was the correct destination to re-send humans to, all along! Every single technological obstacle to future crewed interplanetary travel would’ve been solved there! Orion was an ideal craft for getting a second round of astronauts Moonward. It was only after the Plan got demolished by Obama, the Mars zealots, & the deluded commercial-space people that all this ludicrous talk comes up, about the Orion not being able to do this or that adequately. Guys, we were NOT going to do Mars or asteroids yet! The focus was on the Moon. Getting past those first few sorties, then moving onto the outpost missions. The only thing I could dislike about Griffin now, is that he’s putting his support behind this sure-loser & stinker of the Inspiration Mars Fly-By! He should be smart-enough of an engineer to see thru all the glittery hype in this latest scheme——and just how THIS really is a ticket to nowhere!!

  • Sean Lynch

    First of all, if you’ve been watching Adm NASA Charles Bolden’s appearances before congress, Mars IS the long term goal. NASA was NOT invited to the Republican House Science Committee meeting.
    For a reason. He’d say “Not possible.” Without an infinite budget it’s not.
    Science is not that committee’s strong point, they should stick to “Answers in Genesis” and leave space science to NASA.

  • E.P. Grondine

    As has been shown by experience, Griffin is a pretty bad space engineer.

    He designed a manned Mars flight as a response to a Chinese manned Moon program.
    Problem was, ATK’s Ares 1 did not work.

    He sized Orion for manned Mars. Some people here are ignoring the Earth re-entry part of a manned Mars mission.

    PS – What is stunning to me is to watch all the hoopla about Falcon’s powered descent, ignoring the exhausts effect on the landing gear, little less the engine compartment.

    • Jim Nobles

      ” What is stunning to me is to watch all the hoopla about Falcon’s powered descent, ignoring the exhausts effect on the landing gear…

      I’m a SpaceX fan but I have wondered about the same thing. That landing gear seems to get totally scorched and burnt every test. I am curious as to how that’s going to work during actual operations. Changing them out every flight doesn’t seem to fit in with Elon’s philosophy of airplane-like reusability. On the other hand, I don’t know how often the change out aircraft tires either.

      • Hiram

        I think it’s not the “gear” that gets singed. It’s landing legs that are easily replaceable. Aircraft tires get a workout too, on landing. But that doesn’t make them functionally useless for recovery.

      • Matt McClanahan

        Whenever there was a Grasshopper test, people raced to point out the legs getting hot, except Grasshopper just used a temporary steel rig.

        The actual F9R legs have only been flown on two tests (April 17, May 1) and they were deployed for the full duration. This means they were subjected to substantially more heat from the engines than a real F9R flight, where the legs don’t deploy until a few seconds before landing. It’s been suspected they’re doing it this way on purpose, to see what kind of tolerances the legs have. After all, if they can handle several minutes of constant heat, they’ll have little trouble being reused on real flights.

        F9R Dev-2, the one flying from Spaceport America, will do higher altitude tests with legs retracted.

        • Jim Nobles

          “This means they were subjected to substantially more heat from the engines than a real F9R flight, where the legs don’t deploy until a few seconds before landing.”

          Duh, I hadn’t thought about that. In normal operations the landing legs would only be exposed to the heat a minimal amount of time.

          As for heat damaging the engine compartment I’m sure that problem was planned for from the very beginning. I’d imagine most rocket engine compartments are somewhat heat resistant. :)

          • E.P. Grondine

            My guess is that the legs are disposable-replaceable.

            I do not know how much burning there would be in powered landings on either the Moon or Mars, but I suspect little.

            • pathfinder_01

              Perhaps, but flame does not equal so hot that the material will fail. There are materials that can take a lot of heat(like the PICA coatings or the shuttle’s title, the X-15 metal skin). The steal frame seems to have held for the grasshopper flights despite the flame.

            • Dick Eagleson

              Considering the Moon has no atmosphere and that Mars’s atmosphere is essentially all carbon dioxide, I’d have to say no burning is exactly right. Of course there’s also the little matter that a Falcon 9 first stage is never going to land on either the Moon or Mars, but, hey, details.

          • Neil

            No heat or burning damage. There’s another explanation. I’ll leave it to you rocket scientists to determine what that might be.
            Cheers.

  • A Mars flyby would be a complete waste of money. With the possible exception of life support, it does nothing to advance technology useful for the long term. It provides no on-going market for commercial space, or even government-mostly contractors like Lockheed. It does nothing to advance local use of resources. Beyond some human factors experience, it does nothing to advance science, and certainly not Mars science.

    An asteroid retrieval, on the other hand, addresses many of these issues <a href="http://www.spacenews.com/article/opinion/39078what-is-wrong-with-retrieving-an-asteroid"What is Wrong with Retrieving an Asteroid. A lunar base would be better, but an asteroid mission is cheaper and thus more likely in the near term.

    • Hiram

      • Deep-space propulsion, navigation and operations.

      You sure don’t need to send humans anywhere to do that.

      • Space walks on a rugged and unknown surface with negligible gravity.

      We do space walks with negligible gravity routinely on ISS. “A rugged and unknown surface”? Well, with almost no gravity, I think it’s unlikely that there are any risks involved. You might stub your toe, but you won’t skin your knee. I mean, really, you’re going to tell the public that this is important?

      • Practice at resource extraction and living off the land, especially if multiple asteroids are retrieved.

      Again, most the critical experiments in resource extraction don’t need human space flight, at least in the near term, and such experiments certainly aren’t advanced by some resource-anonymous rock that happened to be passing the Earth.

      • All-important radiation protection, whether through passive use of regolith or the development of new-technology active protection.

      Garbage. We can assess radiation protection much more handily in laboratories on the Earth. If you want to know how well a space rock shields radiation, just robotically affix a radiation monitor on one side of it.

      • Grappling large uncooperative objects with loose, probably friable surfaces.

      Grappling with an EVA glove is a pretty worthless thing to understand. Grappling with a dexterous manipulator, ideally telerobotically controlled, would teach us a lot more. If the surface is loose and possibly friable, there are good reasons not to send people close to it.

      • Moving very heavy cargo around the inner solar system: One identified candidate, asteroid 2009 BD, weighs approximately 325 metric tons.

      And what does that have to do with HSF?

      In all fairness, your essay was “What’s Wrong with Retrieving an Asteroid”. My answer to that is *not much*. In fact, doing active deflection of an asteroid could have important planetary protection relevance. But if you want to talk about what’s wrong with sending a human to touch an asteroid you’ve retrieved, there is a lot more to be said.

      • E.P. Grondine

        Hi Hiram –

        Perhaps NASA is simply looking for a way to ensure continued public funding of HSF by tying it into planetary defense.

        • Hiram

          “Perhaps NASA is simply looking for a way to ensure continued public funding of HSF by tying it into planetary defense.”

          Perhaps the government really is dumb enough to think that a human space flight component of ARM has ANYTHING to do with planetary defense.

          I’ll be waiting for the large asteroid to hit New York. When it does, everyone will be looking at NASA. Where were you guys? What were you doing to mitigate this impact? NASA smiles and says, oh yeah, we were arranging to have astronauts go up and pat a tiny one. Get real. The money that NASA is spending on those astronauts is money not being spent on detection or deflection strategies. Hey, that’ll ensure public finding for HSF, no?

          In fact, even the capture strategy for ARM has virtually nothing to do with planetary defense. Because the one that’s going to level New York won’t fit in the bag.

          Gerst is now saying that planetary defense is a “secondary” goal of ARM , and it really doesn’t relate at all to the HSF component of it. Really just to the SEP.

          I swear, Jimmy and Dave ought to start making jokes about this. The premise that humans fondling asteroids in any way contributes to planetary defense is a howler.

          • E.P. Grondine

            Hi Hiram –

            “I’ll be waiting for the large asteroid to hit New York. When it does, everyone will be looking at NASA. Where were you guys? What were you doing to mitigate this impact?”

            The NASA detection effort already had its pop quiz, Chelyabinsk. It failed miserably.

            “The money that NASA is spending on those astronauts is money not being spent on detection or deflection strategies.”

            Yews, but the part spent on detection and interception will be spent on detection and interception.

            Enough with the rationalizations.

            Now is it not true that the amount spent on sending a few men to Mars would pay for multiple robotic trips?

            And why haven’t we heard from you on this?

            • Hiram

              “Enough with the rationalizations.”

              Take a deep breath. It’s ALL ABOUT rationalizations, and the fact that you can’t come up with any rationalization to attach HSF to planetary protection is telling. My response? Enough with avoiding rationalizations! You’re suggesting that we be irrational, it would seem.

              If NASA had its pop quiz on Chelyabinsk, and failed miserably, then their response is to send humans out to touch a random rock? No, I don’t think NASA thinks it failed anything. With regard to really protecting our planet, I don’t think NASA has a clue, or at least they don’t think they have a mandate. There we agree.

              “the part spent on detection and interception will be spent on detection and interception”

              Um, that would be smart, wouldn’t it?

              “Now is it not true that the amount spent on sending a few men to Mars would pay for multiple robotic trips?”

              I was responding to a post arguing that a human trip to an asteroid would be better than a human trip around Mars. My point was that the latter didn’t make much more sense than the former. It is also true that sending a few (wo)men to an asteroid would pay for multiple robotic trips.

              “And why haven’t we heard from you on this?”

              Goodness. You’ve heard from me plenty about this here, unless you’ve been fast asleep. In fact, you’ve heard from me on this in response to your own posts. And why haven’t you had another cup of coffee?

              • E.P. Grondine

                Hi Hiram –

                “It’s ALL ABOUT rationalizations, and the fact that you can’t come up with any rationalization to attach HSF to planetary protection is telling.”

                What I expect is that the data recovered by ARM will lead to CAPS.

                In any case, we will be in a good position to locate and respond to any of the smaller bits of 73P in 2022.

                EP: “the part spent on detection and interception will be spent on detection and interception”

                H: Um, that would be smart, wouldn’t it?

                yes.

              • Hiram

                “What I expect is that the data recovered by ARM will lead to CAPS.”

                CAPS is a decade-plus old concept that nevertheless has some life to it. But we were talking about using ARM to ensure continued public funding of HSF by tying it into planetary defense. That’s what this discussion is about. Remember that? That’s what you speculated. Not only is CAPS independent of human spaceflight, but the “Survey of Enabling Technologies for CAPS” done up at Langley has ZERO reference to human space flight. There are lots of things that CAPS could use, but nothing in data that a human mission to an asteroid could recover.

                So, OK, let’s wave our hands and say that if we send humans to an asteroid, it’ll lead to CAPS. Why? Well, because by then, everyone will realize that the human space flight part of ARM will do NOTHING for planetary defense, and it’s time to get half-serious about doing it.

                So your expectation is noted, and is irrelevant to the question at hand. Keep dancing. If you’re on your toes, the topic of discussion need not even touch you! But yes, your deft pirouetting suggests to me that you too believe that the human spaceflight part of ARM is irrelevant to protecting the Earth. Good on ya.

                “In any case, we will be in a good position to locate and respond to any of the smaller bits of 73P in 2022.”

                No thanks to hands touching a rock. We’d be in a better position to do that if we didn’t lay out good money to touch a rock.

                I should note that CAPS doesn’t even seriously consider SEPs in it’s deflection strategy. So even the SEP that gets developed for ARM won’t lead to CAPS. CAPS is about laser ablation from a nuke. You know, for the cost of sending humans to a cis-lunar asteroid, we could develop a really nice space qualified nuke.

      • Hello, Hiram.

        Deep-space propulsion, navigation and operations.

        You sure don’t need to send humans anywhere to do that.

        No, but you would get practice at it by doing it with humans. Also, Geminii and Apollo both demonstrated that, to some degree, manual astrogation is possible. Additional practice would be good if we plan to live out in the Solar System.

        Space walks on a rugged and unknown surface with negligible gravity.

        We do space walks with negligible gravity routinely on ISS. “A rugged and unknown surface”? Well, with almost no gravity, I think it’s unlikely that there are any risks involved. You might stub your toe, but you won’t skin your knee. I mean, really, you’re going to tell the public that this is important?

        Yes. If you can say that with a straight face, you have not talked to, or read much of the writings of, the astronauts. The moon turned out to be very different than automated missions led us to expect: the same will be true of an asteroid. One lesson already clear is that different asteroids have very different surface environments. We will not know what to expect in any detail until an astronaut is actually on site. I am sure that there are many ways to kill yourself exploring the rugged and unknown surface of even a small piece of asteroid. Best learn about them in cis-lunar space, rather than on an interplanetary trajectory.

        Practice at resource extraction and living off the land, especially if multiple asteroids are retrieved.

        Again, most the critical experiments in resource extraction don’t need human space flight, at least in the near term,

        True, but you could learn it with a human mission as well. Also, a human mission will almost certainly select far better samples for experiments back home or on the ISS than an automated mission could.

        and such experiments certainly aren’t advanced by some resource-anonymous rock that happened to be passing the Earth.

        I respectfully disagree, especially if we pick a carbon-containing rock.

        All-important radiation protection, whether through passive use of regolith or the development of new-technology active protection.

        Garbage. We can assess radiation protection much more handily in laboratories on the Earth. If you want to know how well a space rock shields radiation, just robotically affix a radiation monitor on one side of it.

        On the surface this is true, but, again, you (like many advocates of automated missions) are ignoring the benefits of experience. Yes, you can develope active radiation protection on Earth, but it will need to be tested at some point with a real spacecraft with people inside. Best do that near home, on the lunar surface or in cis-lunar space. A retrieved asteroid as the destination would make a test you would have to do anyway into a scientifically useful mission. Look at all the life support improvements that have come about simply with the experience of building and operating the ISS. Without people on the ISS, the motivation to develop those improvements would not have existed. Likewise, the motivation to develop the techniques I’ve discussed will only be there if we are conducting a mission. The asteroid retrieval is the cheapest meaningful human mission yet proposed. Better that, than the alternative in today’s political environment, which is probably nothing.

        Grappling large uncooperative objects with loose, probably friable surfaces.

        Grappling with an EVA glove is a pretty worthless thing to understand. Grappling with a dexterous manipulator, ideally telerobotically controlled, would teach us a lot more. If the surface is loose and possibly friable, there are good reasons not to send people close to it.

        While I could have worded it better, I actually meant the automated retrieving spacecraft. And in any case, all asteroids probably have loose and friable surfaces. If we ever plan to go to one, we need to learn how to deal with that.

        Moving very heavy cargo around the inner solar system: One identified candidate, asteroid 2009 BD, weighs approximately 325 metric tons.

        And what does that have to do with HSF?

        Well, say you wanted to use asteroidal resources and you wanted to do your work close to Earth, rather than on an interplanetary trajectory.

        if you want to talk about what’s wrong with sending a human to touch an asteroid you’ve retrieved, there is a lot more to be said.

        Yes, and you’ve totally ignored the science arguments in the article.

        • pathfinder_01

          The manual system was an back up, not the main navigation system. It was to be relied on in an emergency and was in the case of Apollo 13 due to an breakdown. How to use an astrolabe in the era of GPS might be an lost skill but it isn’t something you need to launch people into space to do.

          In the case of the moon, the only surprise was the sharpness of the soil. That was due to the limitations of lunar probes of the era. There would be no surprise about an asteroid due to much better probes and the knowledge that it could be rough\sticky gained from Apollo.

        • Hiram

          “No, but you would get practice at it by doing it with humans.”

          I find your disagreements to be curious, because once you’ve rephrased, caveatized, and apologized for not saying it better, you pretty much agree with everything I said.

          Let me highlight one argument of yours I find particularly exasperating. You seem to have a premise that radiation protection is something that needs to be tested with people. I guess you shoot some people up, and congratulate yourself if they don’t get fried. Is that what you mean? So you want to use humans in place of the sensitive and highly reliable radiation detectors we now have to tell you if humans can survive? That’s absolutely nuts. Those detectors are tiny, inexpensive, and reliable. A suitably outfitted EM-1 will tell us all we need to know about cis-lunar radiation burdens inside an Orion spacecraft, and tell us far better than a human body could tell us. In fact, when your astronaut who happily survived the trip gets cancer five years later, what’s that going to tell you about what you thought you knew, and wished you did?

          Let me add that your distaste for “automated missions” presumes that these robotic missions are working wholly autonomously. If we brought a large rock into cis-lunar space, offering small time delays for control, we could telerobotically control surveyors and samplers on it that would do at least as well as a human could in situ. They could work for vastly longer than a human EVA, and humans are doing them.

          “Likewise, the motivation to develop the techniques I’ve discussed will only be there if we are conducting a mission.”

          That’s flipping crazy. You’re saying you need a HUMAN mission to do these things. I’m saying you don’t. There are many non-human missions we can conduct that will motivate this understanding. I think there are important things for humans in space to do, but these aren’t them.

          The big problem with your essay (and this is a problem with lots of such essays) is that it strains to argue that because one CAN do something, that’s the best way to do it. Sorry, but responsible space policy doesn’t work that way, especially when there are cheaper, better ways to do it. If you really really really want humans in space, you can make up stuff for them to do, and pretend that what they are doing couldn’t be done better and more inexpensively in other ways. But that’s sad policy, and wholly indefensible.

          “• and you’ve totally ignored the science arguments in the article”

          Ah, another bullet to shoot down. Boy, I sure did ignore them. The Small Body Assessment Group (SBAG), which is NASA’s group devoted to asteroidal and cometary science oversight, has looked pretty carefully at ARM, and they are on record as being scientifically unenthusiastic about it, especially the HSF part. These are the leaders in the small body science community. So you can make your “science arguments”, but the real scientists aren’t making those arguments, or at least they aren’t that interested in them. What exactly are your science qualifications, anyway?

          • Hiram, we’ll have to agree to disagree, I guess. Sure, much that’s been done on, say, the ISS could have been automated, and I’ll even agree it might have been cheaper. But, had we done it with automated missions, we wouldn’t have learned a fraction of what we did through experience. Experience counts. Experience provides lessons and the motivation to make things work better. If the ultimate purpose of spaceflight is to explore and colonize the Solar System, than we have to do that.

            Sticking with the radiation example, I am not suggesting that we test active radiation protection by simply exposing human beings and seeing what happens. But, if you are sending a spacecraft to an asteroid (or any other deep space destination) anyway, you can learn more about the radiation environment and protecting against it than you will by sitting at home and reading measurements or by tying to model it. You will always learn more by doing than by studying, and human spaceflight is no different than anything else in that respect.

            • Vladislaw

              The ultimate purpose of space is to have robbie the robot in space and robbie the astronaut watching from the couch. It’s cheaper therefore better. You will get no other arguement. Better to agree to disagree.

            • pathfinder_01

              Nah, what you do is send a probe. It could give you the information about the radiation environment around the asteroid as some Mars probes have about the planet Mars and the trip out to it. You can then model it on earth. There is no need to send an astronaut out to an asteroid to get that information. There are lots of reasons to send a probe, but very few to send a person.

              Sure, such a mission might be an great test of manned spaceflight technology. A way to test systems before going much further out in the solar system, but there are no compelling reasons to do so.

              “If the ultimate purpose of spaceflight is to explore and colonize the Solar System, than we have to do that.”

              The ultimate purpose of spaceflight is not to do that. Unmanned spaceflight has proven it’s worth via communications satellites, weather satellites, resource monitoring satellites , Navigational satellites, and spy satellites. Unmanned spaceflight has given us large amounts of information about the universe and how it works.

              Manned spaceflight on the other hand has been lacking. Has gotten too wound up in supporting jobs in key states and appearing to wave the flag. It has not advanced near enough perhaps because we spend so much money and get so little out of it. We don’t need manned spaceflight to explore. We have probes for that. Heck we know more about the surface of the moon than our own ocean.

              We do need it to colonize, but until the cost comes down that won’t happen. Current systems are incapable of supporting colonization. There is still a lot of work to be done in LEO and an lot of work to be done on the ground (like re-usability of rockets). Colonization won’t happen until private citizens can afford to go or there becomes some compelling reason for the Government to send people(and so far there are none).

            • Hiram

              “But, had we done it [ISS] with automated missions, we wouldn’t have learned a fraction of what we did through experience. Experience counts.”

              Nope. With regard to ISS and the understanding of human factors in space, having humans there is what counts. You can’t gain that understanding by an “automated mission”. THAT is what having humans on ISS is teaching us.

              “You will always learn more by doing than by studying, and human spaceflight is no different than anything else in that respect.”

              That statement reveals your lack of any science background or perspective, and pretty clearly answers my final question above. If we outfitted Orion with radiation sensors, and used that data to assess the radiation burden to astronauts who might be in it, that counts to you as not “doing”?? Why, we should get particle physicists into the Large Hadron Collider with catchers mitts because, well, if a human doesn’t really catch a Higgs boson in their hands, they’re just “studying” rather that “doing”! In fact, we should put humans inside rocket nozzles to explore the pressures and temperatures there. You know, you go in their with your barometer and thermometer. We wouldn’t want to just “study” that stuff, would we?

              I’m sorry, but your arguments are pretty pathetic. I can see a human ARM mission as having some value traceable to an eventual human trip to Mars (which is what Gerst would argue) though what we’d learn from that exercise sure doesn’t need a rock!

              I will agree with you that the ultimate purpose of human spaceflight is to colonize the solar system. (As noted above, “exploration” — as an activity of inquiry, rather than adventure — is better done robotically, at least compared to boots-on-the-ground exploration.) Robots won’t colonize the solar system. Of course the question then becomes whether colonizing the solar system is worth doing. Congress has never established colonization of the solar system as a national priority. Until they do, human spaceflight is frankly not conspicuously in the national interest.

    • @Donald F. Robertson,…..Indeed renewed Lunar exploration & Moon bases would be way better than this preposterous crewed Mars Fly-By!! New Lunar expeditions will yield actual solutions for dealing with all those thorny problems of later on reaching the distant planets. The occupation of lunar habitation modules, and even the mere unmanned soft-landing of them onto the Moon, will do wonders for advancing space technology & capabilities!

      Lunar surface crews will have to contend with a dusty & radiation-filled environment virtually identical to that which would be encountered during both a to-Mars transit & a Martian surface setting. New human lander-craft technology, new orbiter-craft technology, techniques for ferrying & landing base-module components, will all put space travel engineering to its greatest test. The play-book for how to eventually get humans to Mars, will be typed in using the data obtained during a Lunar interlude of daring expeditions.

  • James

    The reason why NASA does not have a ‘focus’ is very intentional.
    Obama does not want to throw gobs of money at NASA, so he chooses “Flexible Path”, and Asteroid Retrieval Mission – which he thinks is both cheap, and easily kicked down the road.
    Congress does not want to throw gobs of money at NASA, just enough to keep the pork flowing into their districts ensuring re-election – so they choose to fund SLS/Orion just enough to keep folks employed, – so they choose not to commits to ARM or any thing that would fly on SLS, or pick a mission for SLS.
    NASA itself does not want gobs of Money so it can continue to complain about not having a mission

    So, all parties are happy.

  • E.P. Grondine

    It is strange that on a board that advertises itself as being about “space politics” we have only limited discussion of politics.

    There are a number of assumptions being made as to what will happen in space, and a large number of them are political.

    • Jeff Foust

      Because, Mr. Grondine, this is a blog devoted to space policy; there are plenty of other fora devoted to more general politics discussions. You are welcome to discuss politics when it is on the topic of a particular post, but this is not an appropriate forum for general chatter on politics. Thank you.

      • E.P. Grondine

        Hi Jeff –

        In the real world, space policy is made in the more general political environment.

        Where the US economy will be, and who partners with who is decided in that larger political environment.

        For that matter, who sells to who is decided within that larger political environment as well.

        I hope you will still allow for corrections of historical facts when those facts are distorted for political purposes.

  • Robert G Oler

    I am always amazed at the incompetence of the people who chose Mike for the Administrators post…that he is a complete intellectual zero has been obvious for a long time, decades perhaps and yet he was picked.

    Intellectual coherence is a foundation for solid debate. On the one hand Mike beats up “on the risk” of commercial crew and yet here he goes proposing a mission that is at every turn of its concept; extreme risk with little or no reward.

    The best that this mission can produce would not be flags and footprints, because no human “boot” would ever touch the Martian soil…it would simply be “Miles and Smiles” (to borrow a [phrase from Turkish airlines) as we watch astronauts blast off on an essentially untested vehicle, with little or no data on their surviviability in long term zero gee and in deep space try and put a happy face on their mission, and it could easily of course turn into miles and frowns as something goes wrong and they perish and then we are left with “what idiot thought up this mission”

    This is like listening to the rest of the turds from the last administration; when in power they got everything wrong and now we are listening to them???why? RGO

    • E.P. Grondine

      Hi RGO –

      Why are we “listening to turds from the last administration”?

      First off, because Griffin is talking about manned flight to Mars, a cause which replaces religion for some people who have problems with religion.

      • Robert G. Oler

        I should tell you I dont think that its just a Mars fetish…it is a “big program big spending” fetish that the NASA corporate crowd is stuck on. they cannot conceive of a space effort that is not in some fashion a rerun of Apollo…the destination really doesnt matter. RGO

  • Griffin’s argument seems to be to goad NASA out of lethargy, like putting a carrot before a mule, even if the mission accomplishes little. I disagree. The focus of the space program should be to go back to the moon in force.

    • E.P. Grondine

      Learn to speak Chinese.

    • Vladislaw

      Space is a place not a program.

      The focus of NASA should be technology and working the TRL (technology readiness level) then shoveling it into the private sector as soon and possible and turn that tech into COTS, commercial off the shelf technology.

  • josh

    You’re stuck in the 60s windy. Nasa won’t go back to the moon in your lifetime. If I were you I’d hope that spacex sees some value in doing a quick stopover before going to Mars.

    • Jim Nobles

      I don’t think amightywind is interested in a return to the Moon. If he was he’d be cheering SpaceX and Bigelow since they’re building the equipment that’s most likely to get people back to the Moon when they do go.

      I think amightywind wants to go back to the Moon because the hated Obama said we weren’t going there. I think amightywind hates SpaceX because the hated Obama went to their launch pad in Florida and had his picture taken with Elon and Elon’s rocket.

      I think the hatred is the most powerful element at work here. That’s why the “logic” is often contradictory and nonsensical, it is tacked on later to support the emotion and may or may not make a little bit of sense.

      Normally I wouldn’t talk about something like this but I believe this particular psychological ailment has a not insignificant presence in space cadet land. I believe there are others who are suffering through the same thing and it forces them to say things and do things that harm the space effort or try and harm others associated with the space effort.

      • …Bigelow

        I like Bigelow. Their modest space station concept makes more sense than the gold platted hamster maze we have now.

        I think the hatred is the most powerful element at work here.

        You sound like Yoda. I’m proud to be a member of the Sith wing of the space community.

        • Vladislaw

          Actually yodaspeak would have been:

          hatred at work here is, the most powerful element, I think is.

          You say you like Bigelow but what you really like is a stalinist, big government, cost plus fixed fee, no bid, single source FAR extravaganza that the congressional Porkonauts would lie and commit every known fallacy of logic to get spending in their district or state regardless if in the long run it ever produced a working piece of hardware.

    • Neil

      Which Elon discussed as a possibility to test capabilities.

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