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NASA Unveils Strategy for Return to the Moon
mknewman writes to tell us that NASA recently announced plans to build a permanent base on the moon by 2024. The (still tentative) plans call for building the base on one of the moon's poles, which constantly receive light from the sun and have less temperature fluctuation. This base will start small in 2020 and grow over time with the hopes of eventually supporting 180-day stays and providing a jumping-off point to Mars."
I'm excited about this announcement. However, how many other "NASA Initiatives" have been announced, and due to funding, have never materialized? How many times by how many different presidents has used space exploration purely for political gains with no intention whatsoever to follow through?
Like the OP said, I'll believe it when I start seeing it built. If they really do it, I'll still be alive and senile enough to appreciate the monumental and technical achievements not seen since (then) 55-60 years ago.
This is WAY too slow of a schedule.
I suspect that by 2015, we will be back on the moon due to Bigelow. Even now, the sundancer is a nice small module for launching as a good way to carry to the moon, as well as land on the moon for a station. Combine that with 2 launch systems, one for earth and one for the moon. By 2010, there will be at least 5 human rated systems (Russian, China, Space Shuttle (probably will not be fully canceled until we have orion going) or Orion, and the 2 cots system). By 2014, the Sundancer will have been in orbit for at least 3 years. That will make it acceptable for taking to the moon and landing on its surface. All that is needed is a landing system for it, a connection module, and a true lunar transport. Finally, the BA-330 will be available by 2015 (I would guess by 2011) and that will be used for the real transport to lunar orbit.
While I like the Ares V (love the capacity), I think that the only real chance is the direct launcher. It is the true safer, faster, cheaper approach.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!
He was the Russian space program. It all went downhill after that. The US had no way of knowing, of course, but his death signalled the end of the space race and the US had won. The fact that they got a man on the moon at all after that is a massive acheivement - a political one as well as a technical one. Even without a heavy lift vehicle, I think Korolev could have beat Von Braun to The Moon. He had the contingency all planned out. This is the plan that the Russian space agency announced last year: take a Souyez up to a space station, refuel it, do a flyby of the Moon. With another refueling in Lunar orbit, you can land and takeoff. You don't need a heavy launch vehicle to do a Moonshot.. it just makes it a lot easier.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's a rumor that NASA will announce the discovery of liquid water at or near Mars' surface.
God I hope that's true.
And I hope the aquifer is substantial.
Why not spend a decade concentrating our efforts on designing and building radically new heavy launch lift concepts? While we are far from being able to build a space elevators, we could build both launch assist catapults and orbit assist tethers.
Letter To Iran
Everybody understand? Good, now go! It's Oscar time!!!
I would guess that the lunar budget would be cut totally before it got that fine. There is plenty of time before an actual landing for Congress to cut that part of NASA's budget, saying "The money could be better spent here on Earth," leaving out the last part of the phrase. ("The money could be bettter spent here on Earth getting pork for my constituents so I get re-elected and/or my party gains more seats.")
I hope that it doesn't happen that way.
NASA is fully aware of the current work in commercial spaceflight.
Some NASA centers (*cough* Marshall *cough*) feel threatened by it. The brass, and some of the centers, love it, though. They can't say it strongly in public right now, but they would love to take advantage of it to make lunar exploration cheaper and more sustainable.
If the commercial sector --- including COTS, Bigelow, and the other players --- take root and grow, expect NASA to revise the lunar plans. The current plan is the fallback plan. Read the words they used today. They make very clear that the plan is provisional, pending future developments.
Coincidentally, a pretty good article analyzing the planned launch architecture was published yesterday. Here's the link.
Additionally, aerospace engineer Jonathan Goff over at Selenian Boondocks has a post titled Lunar Much Sooner (and Better) which discusses a number of alternatives to NASA's current plan.
Finally, Selenian Boondocks also has another post about some things revealed by one of the architects of NASA's plans, suggesting that several of the design constraints imposed on the architecture may be somewhat dubious, (arguably) making the whole project much more expensive and unsustainable.
A direct transfer orbit (which is nowhere near a straight line) to Mars is the fastest way to reach Mars, but it's also one of the least fuel efficient ways. For this reason, large payloads such as the orbiter, rover, etc. have been sent to Mars via gravity assisted transfer orbits instead. These usually involve multiple trips around the sun and a couple close passes with other planetary bodies. If the payload goes past a planet or moon at just the right angle it will sling-shot around, effectively stealing momentum from the body. (don't worry, planets have plenty to spare) Go watch Star Trek IV to get the hollywood version. Gravity assisted transfer orbits are more difficult to plot, far far slower, and overall just a PITA, but there isn't any other option at the moment. Even if we had the money to spare nobody makes rockets big enough to send large payloads to Mars "directly".
Unfortunately, sending humans to Mars via gravity assited transfer orbits is not as easy. It's a much longer trip, so unless we sort out that suspended animation gig soon they would need much more food, supplies, etc.. That means more mass and more fuel, so a direct transfer orbit starts to look more economical for human travellers. As an added bonus, they don't spend several years in deep space, probably much closer to the Sun for much of their journey facing who knows what kind of added health risks. Given that there's little chance we'll ever build a rocket big enough to blast off directly for mars,we'll have to assemble the ship that goes to mars in orbit or on the moon. The moon's low-gravity environment may well prove to be an easier and safer environment for assembling an interplanetary space vessel. The moon is only about 1.2% as massive as the Earth so it's not that much of a "detour".
As for putting a fueling station in lunar orbit, yeah, that's more difficult. The moon's gravity is low enough that 'wasting' the fuel to do direct lunar launches all the way back to Earth orbit would probably have to do until we come up with a 'cheap' way to get mass quantities of fuel to lunar orbit.
But, again, it might be cheaper to launch one big 'fuel depot' to the lunar surface and cut down on the need to carry return fuel out (from Earth) and down on the actual landing craft.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
They need to be so fast that going to and from Pluto should take no more than an hour.
186,282.397 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law!
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
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I'd say this is the exact problem with the space program. Yes, the ISS is a steaming pile of crap. Spending our the to make the planet we will all live and die on a better place is a noble goal, however, its not the only goal. I think we already have a large number of people concentrating on that. That is I know people involved in Amnesty International, developing new hybrid vehicle systems, Engineers Without Borders, and the best of organized religion (mission trips concentrated on helping people as opposed to simple evangelism). I hear of even more here on slashdot, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the One Laptop Per Child Project, and the endless watch for Big Brother-ism and the tyranny of monopoly. I personally do some work with regards to the improvement of the educational system within the US, which is one of my main personal cause du jours. However, I think with all this effort spent to improve our earthly existence, theres a little room to get us off this planet and help to provide some relief that way. Obviously it won't have immediate effect. The early colonist's to America didn't immediately stem Europe's problems even directly related to population growth, however in the end its impossible to deny its effects. And with space we dont have the genocidal side effects that are such a stain on that period in history. The future of humanity (in my own very humble opinion) depends on us establishing offworld settlements, and whether thats in the next 20 years, the next 200, or the next 2000, I plan on doing my damndest to push us forward, and supporting others who do, because some people need to do it. And there's nothing wrong with a small portion of the national budget going that way too (and it is a small portion, look it up.) Find your own way to save the world, improve it, or keep it going. All of those things are vital.
I will take the idea of spreading our risks around rather than trying to solve just one or several issues, thank you very much. NASA is acutally some of the cheapest insurance that our society has. As it is, a bunch of new jobs are about to come on line in aviation and aeronautics, due to NASA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You don't stockpile your supplies on the Moon. You stockpile them in Earth orbit. You don't build a spaceport on the moon. That would be pointless. You build an interplanetary spacecraft in orbit. The moon serves but a single purpose in a Mars mission: Technology proving ground. Can we build functional habitats? Can we stay in space for months, years at a time? What tools do we need? What issues might arise?
The only role the moon might play in the actual Mars launch would be as a gravitational slingshot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
As someone who finished watching "From the Earth to the Moon" earlier tonight, I can say that I can't wait for humans to return to the moon. We do need a permanent presence on the moon, for many reasons, such as; separation of the human species in case of global tragedy, explore moon's geology (where did that thing come from?), explore theories about colonization, biospheres, and self-sustenance, launch point for future missions to distant worlds (if we could build a manufacturing center on the moon, its 1/6th gravity would be very beneficial to launching new craft), and many, many, many more benefits both seen and unseen.
Returning to the moon is in humanity's best interest, and is clearly the path to the future. Focus on the space program will push development and inventions to help push the edge of what is capable. I see space travel as one of the grand challenges we will face in our lifetime, and it would be a shame to hesitate when we have already taken so many steps toward that goal. As someone who was born prior to the last Apollo mission, I feel it is a crime that we have abandoned the moon for the majority of my lifetime.
Unfortunately, the political winds have not been blowing favorably towards NASA, and it may take another visionary like JFK to take us back to the moon and beyond.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
All we need is another space race and it'll be done inside a decade. Let's start fabricating evidence that the terrorists are planning their own moon base.
qntm.org
Outsource the project to India and China
Rebrand it
Declare success
+5 for informative? wow... if I had mod points that would get overrated.
sorry, that was pretty polemic. Your post and the rating it got show however, a lack of understanding of both physics, and the process of scientific discovery and eventual engineering.
A quick google search reveals tha the distance of pluto (presumably average distance) is 5.4 light hours. A light hour is the distance light can travel in an hour. It's also the shortest possible time anything can get from point a to point b as dictated by the fundamental limits of the universe as best we currently understand them. So travelling at the speed of light, which we are so very very far away from being able to achieve, we could get to pluto in 5.4 hours. For frame of reference, the fastest manned spacecraft to date is appolo 10 at 11000m/s (3.7e-5 c, a pretty impressive feat actually).
What are the issues facing high speed space travel?
First off you have the limitation of the speed of light. It might be there is some fancy sci-fi solution to this limit, but we don't even have a theoretical idea of how to approach the problem, so until there's a major revolution in physics (it could happen, it does from time to time) you're stuck with it.
A second issue is the problem of the energy required to accelerate a body to sufficiently fast speeds. This is the issue your Heim reference addresses. Well, another consequence of relativity is the mass of a body increases as you accelerate it. This means that the closer we get to light speed, the more force required to accelerate a given body by the same amount (f=ma, but a=a(v)!). Practically speaking this imposes another limitation on the speed we can accelerate to. To keep it simple, lets say we it really is possible to use this Heim stuff to overcome the limits of the rocket equation (extra mass for extra acceleration, yuck!). Well great. But we still don't even understand the theory properly, let alone have a working prototopy, so that's years and years away, and because of relativity we probably can't hope for better than ~.001c as maximum speed. That means 5000 hours at max speed to pluto.
But we haven't addressed acceleration yet, which is my point 3: The human body can only withstand so many G's (1g = earth's gravity, a unit of acceleration, 9.8m/s^2). the space shuttle accelerates at 3G which uncomfortable but doable (note that special materials were developed as part of the space program to reduce the impact of acceleration, for example tempur. These materials now have civilian applicatons). The detonator at thorpe park goes to -5.5g. Wikipedia says the highest g force sustained by humans were (voluntary 46.2g astronaut john stapp, involuntary 180g F1 driver David Purley in an accident). But surviving high g's for a short time and for a long time are different things. We'll take a n aggressive estimate and say we could accelerate at 5g's sustainably. To reach .001c with 50g's would take .003e8 m/s / (5 * 9.8m/s^2) ) ~= 8 hours (neglecting relativistic effects, real time would be longer... lets say we can increase the force arbitrarily to compensate for relativity, again more new physics needed). So we need 16 hours to reach that speed, and another 16 hours to decelerate at the other side, means 16 hours accelerating and decelerating, and I'm neglecting more relativity here, but again on the aggressive side.
My next point is often neglected. What happens if you hit a little meteorite (It could be the size of a pebble, or even just a little cloud of dust). If that smacks into you at .001c relative velocity, you can bet it's going to do a lot of damage, even without considering relativistic mass. Think about how much damage small meteors do impacting earth at terminal velocity, which is probably at .00001 c or something... So we need shielding technology. Think about how much trouble the shuttle has with it's shielding tiles...
The up
That's good, because at 6 times the speed of light 'soon' would be 'recently', and your comment would be a dupe.
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