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NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars
mattg writes, "Auntie is covering NASA's timetable for recent explorations of Mars has been called "wildly optimistic". Dr. Carl Pilcher, leader of NASA's planetary exploration program (whose sweater at the time said "Obey gravity: it's the law") has admitted that they do not know if they have the technology to bring rocks back yet.
The report into the loss of the Polar Lander is due out at the end of the month.
"
I'm still waiting on the so-called "energy of Capitalism" to push into space. Hasn't happened yet and it won't because private industry needs the government and public funds to set things up for them. Private industry couldn't fund the rail system in the 19th century, it took tax dollars to do that in the form of land grabbing from farmers and massive infusion of money into the rail monopolies. Private industry couldn't build the Hoover Dam or the highway system, again it had to come from Uncle Sam and your tax money. And don't think your going to get any return on these investments. Oh no, that's Communism! Remember, it's public expense to support private profits that defines Capitalism!
The Soviets also put the 1st man into Earth orbit. This was also a major bummer as far as the US was concerned. How do you top this? Kennedy promised a man on the moon, and NASA was more than willing to comply. Take that back, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about was more than willing to comply. Flashforward to today. International Space Station? Money to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and their subcontractors. Money for science? Here's a dime kid, go buy a candybar.
The amount of money that was spent to win the Cold War is difficult to comprehend. As Sagan used to say, billions and billions. But to me at least, the Cold War came to an end as the US bankrupted the Soviet Union. I have no idea how historians will view this, but to me the Cold War probably was unique in it being more of an economic war instead of a major blood thirsting conflict. Note: I'm not saying that economic sanctions will win a battle. No, I'm talking about no holds barred, spend, spend, spend.
Some ppl have said that the proposed SDI (Star Wars missile defense) was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't necessarily agree with this, but I can't disprove it.
Back on topic. When space exploration returned to the realm of science, the funding level dropped to a level commensurate closer to other scientific projects. If funding for space exploration increases, then you have to suspect lobbying efforts by the prime contractors will be of some significance.
Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?)
Easily solved, don't do the trip in zero G. Get the upper stage of your booster, tether it to the habitation with a piece of cord, and set it spinning. Artificial gravity.
and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.
It's just not that bad - the maximum probable dose is about 50 rem over a two year period. This is not lethal over the short term, and poses only a slight additional cancer risk in the long term. Robert Zubrin, a vociferous and convincing advocate of Mars exploration, suggests using smokers for the crew, but keep tobacco out of their cargo. Quitting smoking would reduce their cancer risk far more than the radiation dose!
Check out The Mars Society or read Dr. Zubrin's book The Case For Mars for more information.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You know, film an entirely bogus Mars Mission in some warehouse in the desert SW and show it on the nightly news and news specials as 'real'. A lot of folks would probably fall for it and be a real ratings boost too - heck, even some controversy over whether it was real or not would just attract more attention.
I'm wondering if even the recent March MM (that's 2000 in arabic) issue of Scientific American's article on MM (that's Mission to Mars) was also tied into the M&M movie (sponsored by the 'Mars' candy company) in an attempt to drum up taypayer interest, ala Sputnik in '57 CE. Even the first photo says, "FIRST WALK on Mars would be even more dramatic if dust storms were swirling nearby", which to me sounds dangerous, like saying, "FIRST WALK on the moon would be even more dramatic if Neil Armstrong stepped out and got pelted to death in a meteor shower".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Now translations, of course, are a different story...
I can see the fnords!
When I talked to some of the old timers who worked on Apollo, they always mentioned that the budget was much higher in those days. There was enough money to design and build high-quality equipment, and to document and test it thoroughly. There were also many more people. More than enough people to get the job done in a complete and professional manner. It also allowed for specialization. You could be the expert on left-handed widgets, after having worked with them for years. There were many more permanently funded positions that didn't disappear as soon as a task was completed. In later years this would be called "fat" and "overhead", which was true to a certain extent, but cutting the fat also cut quality and reliability. Later budget cuts put most of the people out on the street and slashed the wages of those who remained. Television news stories on aerospace engineers driving cabs served to scare away many bright students. Today's NASA is just a thin shell of civil service contract monitors overseeing an unstable, shrinking and underfunded collection of contractors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I read in the New Yorker, in an article on long-term space travel, that one of the big problems that NASA has with human travel to destinations like Mars is that they don't have any idea how to deal with human physiology and space travel. Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?), and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.
The people this article interviewed, including a NASA human physiology expert, said that they were actually less put off by the 'hard' technology obstacles of a mission to Mars (not that they're trivial) than they were the human physiology obstacles.
If the current snail's pace is considered reasonable, then I want to see us get "wildly optimistic". Maybe we'll see put a woman on Mars before my grandchildren are dead of old age. I'm 27.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
How much (in todays terms) did it cost to get to the Moon? How about an estimate of the cost to reach Mars now? Surely with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the costs must be at least equal?
Ah, yes, good, old-fashioned Capitalism.
Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.
I'm only half kidding, by the way.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
I can't think it is my party, the Libertarians, because NASA is part of the government. (Incidentally, NASA is one of the few things I like about our government, but I expect other Libertarians to say "privatize it!")
Republicans won't want it because they never want to increase the budget for government programs. (Unless it was turned into part of the military or law enforcement.)
Democrats probably want to take the money out of NASA and put it into social programs.
Greens would probably be afraid that rocket exhaust was damaging the atmosphere, and environmentalists would certainly object if a nuclear reactor was used to power the craft.
Socialists would probably be similar to Democrats in their thinking.
So, I was wondering if anyone, in any party has said, "Mars before 2035!" or something similar.
We need a pro-tech lobby in Washington.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Actually, it was the commies who started the space race with Sputnik. (In Danse Macabre Stephen King pointed out that that was a pretty scary that the Russians had gotten to space first when he was a kid.) So maybe we don't need a war or a cold war, just someone to show NASA up and really rub our faces in it.
Of course, I'd rather it didn't take national humiliation to get us to Mars...
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
According to one of my professors, when we landed on the moon, we actually had the capability to land on mars. he was part of a project that built and tested nuclear powered rockets that were capable of sending humans to mars. of course this was all stopped because the government thought that the moon was good enough.
I didn't say it made sense.
For crying out loud, there are people that admit to using their Palm pilot while they're on the toilet.
And as an aside - if we did send people to Mars, it could get pretty boring on the trip - better get a couple of those IBM drives stacked up with MP3s
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider
You might expect that Gore might say some pro-Mars stuff, given the VP's involvement for the space program (or has that changed now?) as well as his supposedly tech-friendly record. I guess Bush Sr. did this after becoming President, trying to drum up enthusiasm for a manned Mars mission in 1989, but nobody much cared ...
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
If a clear winner of all the different single-stage-to-orbit designs is ever made, it would really help the space program by making it efficient to haul lots of materials to build future in-space launch facilities. This would make the actual long-distance space veichles much more efficient (not having to deal with great stresses taking off from earth). What we need is an efficient, large-capacity workhorse of a SSTO craft.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I just saw Dr Robert Zubrin give a talk last night (he's in Australia at the moment) about his Mars Direct proposal. With regards the recent loss of two Mars probes, he mentioned that previously, duplicate probes were always sent, acknowledging the fact that accidents happen and things can often go wrong. Redundancy was previously built into the mission design. Expecting near perfection, every single time, from mechanical devices operating at relatively great distances from earth in harsh environments is ridiculous. The same people who believe that probably never back up their hard drives. On a side note, I recently saw a documentary on the International Space Station (Real cost: ~$100 billion and rising). For the cost of the station, we could have literally flooded the solar system with thousands of redundant probes. But I'd hate to see the world (or at least the US) give up its manned space program.
I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.
If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"
It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.
It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.
On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.
On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.
And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.
I say GPL NASA. Can't hurt.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Of course, this is the exact opposite of a desire to economize, people will try to come up with anything they can think of to use up their budget to use it up. I won't say they waste money, exactly, but let's just say they always have enough office supplies.
I think, therefore, that the reason why NASA has been economizing is the fact that the axe had already fallen on the budget, the people at NASA knew it, and they wanted to put the best face on it. So, my question is, do you think the desire to do thing on the cheap is coming from within NASA or primarily from forces outside NASA who are putting the screws on it?
I figure its the latter, because i can't imagine anyone in any government department wanting to have budgets which shrink every year.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Consider:
Day after tomorrow, the 20th of March, every nation on earth receives the following message, clearly origonating from the moon: Now, let's suppose that the message is confirmed absolutely genuine. No doubt about it. My point is, that even under these circumstances, with the entire world pulling behind the mission, we couldn't get a man to the moon in one year. We just don't have the infrastructure to build a launch vehicle and landing craft that could get to the moon. I assert that even if we were willing to sacrifice the man we sent - give him a one-way ticket and a pat on the back - we couldn't get him to the lunar surface in one piece and keep him alive long enough to do anything of value. Let alone Mars.Now, I know I am preaching to the choir here, but most sheeple think that the Space Program is a huge waste of money, even while they are talking on their cell phone in their car with radial tires and checking their stress level with their pulse-detecting watch. What we in the pro-space community must do is tirelessly try to educate these downers (read Larry Niven's Sprials for the reference) about why spending money on the Space Program is A Good Thing.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... had the same drive that got us to the moon. We would already hava landed on mars and had a research station on the moon. Sending robots to mars is a great way to learn about the planet, but the only way people are going to get excited about mars missions is when a person is on his/her way to Mars.
The way our country and society is heading I would volonteer to be the first to go. Let the MPAA try to serve me with a warrent on the moon.
The interplanatery lag would suck but I wouldn't have much competition for bandwidth.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler, and Kelly) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.
Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow, but there are others.
Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent, The Mars Society, and Artemis is strong evidence of this.
NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.
Gonzo
is voting for the most "pro mars"
candidate, I think it is important
to note that Mars is a very big
issue in the geek community. I would say
it's probably number two right now,
with crypto legislation being number
one.
This is an election year, folks. Who is
the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture
the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore
of inventing the Iridium system.
Three cheers for earth!
Amazing magic tricks
most people give them credit for - IMNSHO - these guys have, arguably, one of the toughest jobs on the planet - and while they certainly aren't the epitome of efficiency, they pull off some impressive stuff. Think about all the stumbling blocks in their way - CONSTANT media scrutiny, government beurocracy (ok, i totally spelled that wrong), budget constantly getting jacked around by congress. I'm certainly not implying that there's not considerable room for improvement, but given the fact that the deck is TOTALLY stacked against them, I think they do a better job than most people give them credit....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
It was great. The first mission had some problems. They lost contact for a while. But finally the decision was made to go on a second mission in the back-up Mars Transport Vehicle©(tm). And thank God they did. Not only did we make contact with an alien race (who had mastered holographic recording techniques), but we rescued the poor chap WHO HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE SURFACE FOR A YEAR IN A CANVAS TENT!!!!!!!
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ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
+&x
But the U.S.A. isn't the whole world. Even if we over here remain too fat and lazy to get out there and conquer the stars, other nations may not. China and India are just getting their space programs off the ground, for example, and later they may decide that mining Luna and the asteroids for their minerals or building a solar power satellite to beam solar energy to earth would not be a waste of money at all. Also the Russians could always put themselves back together down the road--never count Ivan out for long! And of course there's Japan, the European Space Agency with their Ariane (sp?) booster, and last but certainly not least, all of the privately run space organizations that an above poster mentioned (Rotary Rocket, XCOR, etc). So I'm not giving up hope just yet--you'd be surprised how fast things can change.
There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.
The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.
It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.
In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.
So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.
It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.
The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.
Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")
Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.
But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.
I can see the fnords!
At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.
At least we would have landed humans on Mars.
no sig.
The Climate Orbiter was lost because two people (one NASA, one from the contractor) were handling the entire trajectory; they were completely overworked (to the point failing to implement the backup planning which was already on the timeline, and which by itself might have saved the mission), with no one to even do basic sanity checks on their work -- and they missed not only the critical units conversion, but also the fact that their trajectory corrections weren't having the desired results. A college kid on a work-study internship, working ten hours a week, could have saved the mission. But it was faster-better- cheaper , so they didn't hire the kid...
The Polar Lander appears to have been lost over communications failure between two test groups: when the lander legs were dropped, they apparently rebounded and triggered a ground-contact sensor in each leg; this set a bit in the computer, so that it "thought" the vehicle had already touched the ground, and it killed the engine as soon as it took control. The rebound happened regularly during testing, but the group testing the leg deployment didn't look at the bit's value at the end of the test (after all, it wasn't on the ground yet, so it wasn't their job...); and the group testing the final powered descent didn't bother to look at the contents of the register before they started the test -- they just reset the bit, so they'd have a clean test. All it required was some warm body to look at the test sequence as a whole, but no one had the time. Again, that single college kid might have saved the mission... but NASA was too cheap.
What concerns me is this: they're going to spend their time and money worrying over the hardware issues:
rather than pay attention to managing what they've already developed. It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.
It just really pisses me off! Pathfinder worked beautifully (despite a scary airbag system, which was what I figured would fail), and probably did so because of the long hours and very hard work everyone did; I know I did my share of 14-18 hour days on the little piece of it I had. It was so successful that NASA said, "Wow! That was really cheap! Let's see how much more we can cut out of the budget..."
So here we are: decent, low-cost hardware, and crappy, low-budget management. But guess which one is going to get the tarbrush?
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
I think we should first mine Eros (that's a near earth asteroid.) Estimates indicate that it has 20 TRILLION dollars of ore on it- its 3% metal! It has everything, gold, plutonium, platinum...
There's nothing wrong with money. Money makes the satellites go around, and the sort of capabilities that you need to mine Eros will help get to mars- and probably pay for it.
And besides we need need to be able to stop the next dinosaur killer asteroid... living on Mars won't help much with that. Chucking around lumps of asteroid will.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"