Slashdot Mirror
Lockheed Martin Wins Contract to Build Mars Lander
Lord_Slepnir writes "Lockheed Martin has won a contract to build the Orion crew exploration vehicle that will eventually take humans to the moon and then on to Mars. This vehicle will hopefully also replace the aging space shuttle fleet. According to NASA the vehicle will have manned missions by 2014 and moon missions by no later by 2020."
Last I heard, there were no practical ways to deal with radiation in space.
Does this mean NASA doesn't consider radiation to be a problem, or think it has a workable solution? Is so, what is it? And isn't it irresponsible to begin contracting if they don't have a solution?
After all, we are still flying the same 747 aircraft that we had in 1970, our spacecraft shouldn't be much different either.
I'm curious as to why you think it's inferior to the shuttle:
::shrugs::
Is it because it doesn't have wings? (You don't need wings in space)
Is it because it doesn't carry cargo? (Carrying both crew and cargo on the same vehicle generally isn't a good idea)
That said, I'm rather perplexed by why it would cost $3.9 billion for NASA/Lockheed to develop a capsule when a company like SpaceX is developing their Dragon capsule for about a tenth of that cost.
That assumes mere scientific exploration of remote worlds is the entire goal. We will learn a considerable amount about living and working on those remote worlds by starting on the moon, which is relatively close by. Even the science on remote worlds will advance faster once you have an actual lab with humans on site where you can adapt to what you find on the fly. And once the technology is bootstrapped by these leaders, the rest of us will be able to follow. As with all tech toys, it will start out expensive, e.g. the $20M trips to the space station, but they're paving the way for the rest of us. I can only hope I live long enough to see it, but it would be exceedingly short sighted to believe that we shouldn't start down the path just because some of those present won't be able to enjoy the fruits...
A very good comment. Considering a manned Mars mission in light of what it took to get to the moon the first time, what it takes to get an unmanned mission one-way to Mars, and how many pounds of groceries I buy each week to feed just myself (a Mars mission would be at least 3 people for anywhere from 6 months to 2 years), I'm skeptical that even the Mars Direct is feasible, and there's quite a few engineers familiar with spacecraft design pushing the Mars Direct architecture.
In a world where you can run down to the dealer and buy a car with probably 15,000 parts for $25,000 that works and conveys a sense of being trouble-free, it's hard for a lot of people to understand why it takes 8 years to design a new spacecraft that on the outside looks just like the old one and doesn't even have a big screen TV, or why it should cost $100 billion to return to the moon.
In the 60's we spent over $100 billion (2006 eqivalent) in about 10 years to land 2 people using a bare-bones single-purpose system that flew 7 missions (6 landings). Now we're looking at spending $100 billion to double the number of feet on the lunar surface, and double or triple the mass landed, plus have a new low earth orbit crew vehicle, new heavy lift vehicle, and a sustainable infrastructure.
Of course the really big difference is that in the 1960's, Congress basically said "how much will it cost to get this done by the end of the decade?" wrote out a check, and directed most of NASA's resources to Apollo. Today, they've said, "Do this, but you have this much money per year and you can't forget to keep working on this (ISS), that (space science), and that other thing (aeronautical science), too. How long will it take?"
If we're not expecting people to go to the moon until 2020 (WTF?), we've got a helluva long time before they get to mars. Start sending useful crap up there now, and land it all in more-or-less the same place. You know, send up some nuclear batteries, tools, building material, vitamin and nutrient supplements for people and plants, seeds, maybe some water and tinned beans or something. Anything that can be sent now with today's technology, and will last 20 or 30 years before it's needed on mars. And get today's other spacefaring nations to pitch in their part, actually pull one of those "unite the planet" things without requiring a disaster.
At least then we'll know the commitment is real and not just for the TV cameras.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
1. CO2 (from atmosphere) + 4 H2 (from Earth) -> CH4 (rocket fuel) + 2 H20
2. 2 H20 (from 1) -> 2 H2 (feed back into 1) + O2 (oxygen for rocket fuel)
You fly to Mars with just enough fuel to get you there, create your own fuel from the Martian atmosphere, and fly back. To make things less risky, we send the first one unmanned, so there's a return vehicle on the surface of Mars all fueled up when humans arrive.
The 300 tons is only if you insist on bringing the fuel for your return journey along with you.
This is clearly described in The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Surprised more people haven't read that.
Want fuel? Dip-scoop the outer surface of Jupiter for enough "fossil fuel" to last us forever. Send one per year; might take 10 years to get the first balloon full back, but after then you'd have one per year -- a tank of arbitrary size, full of burnable, polymer-able methane.
Unless you really believe in voluntary population control, sustainable ecosystems and the Tooth Fairy to keep us alive as a planetary population, in which case I can't help you.
Their descendents became you. I wonder what went wrong.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
You are articulating many of the misconceptions about COTS that have been brought up recently in the space news. First off, it is completely unfair to compare COTS with CEV. CEV is being designed to support lunar and Mars missions. The delta-V, life support, habitable volume and TPS requirements are not even comparable to those for the COTS missions. Also, the $500M is only for a demonstration of cargo transportation capability - the crew transportation demonstration will not commence until one of the particpants has demonstrated pressurized cargo deliver and return and will be funded seperately
Second, COTS was underfunded on purpose. NASA wants out of the space transportation buisness and instead wants to be able to allocate its resources toward exploration while paying commercial providers for cheap, safe, reliable access to LEO. The problem is that there is no provider for such services. The goals of COTS is to facilitate the creation of a market for commercial space transportation and to then call upon these services to meet our ISS crew and cargo requirements. Completely funding one of these ventures would be "buisness as usual" - just with a different upstart partner. By only partially funding them, NASA is effectively forcing them to have a strong financing plan. Investors and venture capitalists will only put their dollars into companies with strong buisness plans - presumably ones that:
- have potential for growth (read: aren't reliant on NASA)
- turn a profit
If NASA can jump-start such a space transporation market with this COTS seed money, then they will be but one of many customers in a growing market (of both customers and providers). Bigger market - more missions - more payloads and research on orbit - cheaper cost/kg. Science wins, industry wins, NASA wins, the taxpayers win.In the early part of the last century, the postal service played a similiar role in creating the aviation infrastructure necessary to eventually support a commercial air transportation service market.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It's a theory of mine that the lack of interest in space exploration is at least partially due to light pollution obscuring our view of the night sky. Whenever I find myself in a really dark place (and living in the northeast US, such places are hard to come by) I always look up in wonder. I can just lie down and stare up at the stars for hours. Looking at the hazy glow of the Milky Way, watching satellites go by and shooting stars streaking across the sky... it's hard to not be interested in finding out more about what's up there. But in many cities it's hard to even see the Big Dipper. It's not surprising people have no interest in space when many of them don't have a connection to it anymore.
What I don't understand is why they just do not build a modular 'space bus' from uploaded sections using todays heavy lift vehicle's. Then use the current Soyus/Progress system to transfer crew/fuel/supplies/equipment back and forth. With the occasional new module again using the current heavy lift stuff. That way your missions would not be constrained by how much a single heavy launch vehicle could get off the ground. Not only that but the entire program would be sped up and be international in scope with each player doing what they do best.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
We can overcome the environmental factors on Venus?
:P
Yeah - we can - maybe - sometime after 3000AD when our craft don't melt.
I don't believe that demineralisation of bones is a straight line graph with 1G at one end and Zero G at the other. The rate at which bones lose strength must be proportional to the forces exerted upon them. In a space station, those forces remain essentially zero - except for the limited times when you are on the exercycle.
On a planetary surface (Mars), you'll be affected by gravity 100% of the time, and even if it's only slightly more than 1/3rd of a G, you still have to work against it. Suits will NOT be light - and there will be lots of manual work to be done too. So I would think that Martians won't lose all their bone mass in a year - nor will they be extra susceptible to broken bones in a short period. However, we simply do not know - and we need to find out - and the best way to find out is to send people there!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Well, carbon fiber is a mixed bag. It's not leaps and bounds better than lithium aluminum, but it is a better material in most respects. On the other hand, it's more expensive to fabricate structures, especially large structures, out of carbon fibre. Thus, you're losing out on the price advantage in exchange for getting slightly better performance.
We already had some impressive carbon materials in the 60s, like carbon-carbon. They're cheaper now, but not that much cheaper. The problem is fabrication: you have to make a mold, you have to get your polyacrylate cloth into the mold, and you either have to bake it with epoxy or continually provide pressurized, high temperature gas over a period of days to weeks (depending on whether you're making carbon fibre or RCC). It's an expensive, failure-prone process. Heck, we're just now starting to see carbon fibre airlines (the Dreamliner).
In short, yes, some rockets have flown with carbon fibre tanks (not even counting posers like SpaceShipOne), and it's a great material, but it's not a be-all, end-all. It overall works out to one of those incremental improvements.
Now, if we could mass produce cubane, that would pretty quickly provide a "leaps and bounds" improvement. The same goes for rapid CVD of high-strength carbon compounds (diamond, nanotube composites, etc). Other things include alternative propulsion methods (say, NERVA style), if you can pull them off. But beyond this, we're kind of limited to incremental improvements. There are a *lot* of potential incremental improvements out there, but they'll take time.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Other have replied: with in-situ resource utilization, a lot can be saved on payload.
Do you mean aerobraking (which is quite possible, probes have done it) or horizontal landing (for which the atmosphere is indeed too thin, but a parachute can be used after aerobraking).
We've done it on Earth, why couldn't we on Mars? It would take more fuel than on the Moon, that's all.
The atmosphere on Mars is thin. Do you really get hurricane-strength winds? (Strength, not speed.)
Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?"
Most of the rest of the world would say this of the current United States attitude. A better attitude would be to launch a cooperative project with other space agencies, as NASA has been doing in the past.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
If NASA went totally robotic, instead of this hair-brained scheme they can't afford, they'd have more robotic probes on the way to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and out of the solar system, and they'd be investigating self-assembling factories which could use endemic materials to boot-strap unmanned science stations which eventually could be manned. That would set us up to really colonise the rest of the planets instead of going for very expensive weekend trips, which is what we're going to get if this goes ahead at the expense of all the real science missions.
You're right to say pretty pictures matter, but the missions which have caused the most stir in the last few decades have all been robotic - Cassini, Mars Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, Deep Impact, Voyager, SOHO etc etc. That's where the best return on investment currently is, no matter whether we're impatient to see humans up there too. Compare that to the ISS, which no one really cares about, and is manned.
Cassini, which brought back (and continues to) a huge amount of data, cost $3.26b total
This project is slated to cost $100b (before over-runs) - that's over 30 Cassini-type missions
If they want a sustainable human presence on the moon, they should be sending robots first. They could send a hundred lunar robot missions for the price of this manned launcher.
This is admittedly off-topic, but not intended to be wholly philosophical or controversial. I am merely curious.
In the sense of technology and forward thinking, I do not consider myself to be an 'average person', yet I have trouble understanding why to so many people, the survival of the human race is of such high importance. Naturally I agree that a single human life has intrinsic value (and therefore so also, does a group of humans or the whole human race). I have also read enough humanistic literature to know that to many people, the survival and (sort of vaguely defined) betterment of our race is the prime virtue. Yet I still don't understand why people believe this (and I hope I have judged correctly that you fit in this group).
So please forgive me if this seems like an odd or stupid question. I certainly don't mean it to be an insulting one. It's just that you asserted something quite strongly that I'm not sure I believe and so I'm curious as to why you believe it so strongly. Beyond your natural instinct to survive and reproduce, what additional reasons do you have to believe that the universe is 'better off' with the complex molecules that are our genome floating around here and there? Perhaps what I'm asking is:
* Why do you believe the survival of our species has intrinsic value?
And as a bonus:
Is there anything more important than the preservation of our species (i.e. somem particular moral)?
I'm interested in anyone's opinion. Thanks.
-Charles