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NASA Wants Fast Moonbuggies and Solid Lunar Lander
coondoggie writes "NASA may have its eyes on the Sun and Mercury this week but it is clearly focusing on the moon for the future. NASA is soliciting proposals from the scientific and aerospace communities for design ideas for its next lunar lander. NASA officials said the Altair spacecraft will deliver four astronauts to the lunar surface late during the next decade. According to NASA Altair will be capable of landing four astronauts on the moon, providing life support and a base for weeklong initial surface exploration missions, and returning the crew to the Orion spacecraft that will bring them home to Earth. And while they won't be flying to the moon but rather flying around the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., the space agency has set April 4-5 as the dates for 'The 15th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race'. The race is for high school and college teams where they build and race their lightweight, two-person lunar vehicles. More than 40 student teams from 18 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada and India have already registered." My proposal just features a domo-kun mouth and giant pink ears attached to an El Camino. Money please!
Tech in these areas is much less advanced than you assume it to be.
Do I really need to point out that lab trials are a very long way from actual equipment? And that we haven't got any equivalent machinery on earth that functions like this - despite decades of trying?
In so far as weight goes - the bare structure (which is all than can be expected to be produced, even with hurricane strength handwaving) is the lightest part of the base. The equipment you'll have to launch to produce it will weigh at least two orders of magnitude more than the material they will produce. That is, unless you want to spend a couple of decades building the base... but equipment reliable enough to do that without manned intervention isn't anywhere on the horizon. Getting the equipment reliable enough to last a month is going to take an incredible effort.
This is true. I agree with this part. However, everytime the topic of ISRU comes up, I see plenty of armchair engineers talking lightly about applying it from the get-go at very, very advanced levels, and it's clear they haven't given any real thought to what it takes to achieve the sort of results they're talking about. One of the posters above, for example, dismisses building a pressure vessel for a habitat as fairly elementary. That first of all neglects the point about structural mass actually being a minority of the payload needs for a moon base, and secondly shows an ingorance of the large and specialized tooling needed to build such components here on earth. How much can that infrastructure actually be shrunk down, made lightweight, or made multipurpose by simply sacrificing productivity?
As I said, I agree if we're going to live in space truly long term, we need to learn to use the resources out there. Once we reach the trade surplus point, we'll have reached that dream of the lunar-industrial age. But it seems like everyone is assuming with a little clever engineering we can do that right now. That's not so. It will take a herculean amount of engineering, testing, re-engineering, failing, succeeding, and taking baby steps to get there.
That's why the first resource utilization will be simple things. Once you've established a baseline competancy, it's easier to add on to it than to do the whole thing all at once. It also leaves you in a better and less expensive position to react to problems or unanticipated supply or demand changes.
On the point about sending unmanned missions first. That is actually part of the plan. NASA decided last year they should identify several targets on the moon of scientific interest and send short "sortie" mission similar to the Apollo program there. At the same time, they would also pick a site for a permanent base and land equipment there in advance of a crew. Right now it looks like two missions to send power, basic supplies, and a basic habitat. Then short manned mission to get everything set up. This would be followed by a longer missions with stuff like ISRU equipment, a pressurized rover for long exploration missions, and additional living/science facilities.
The requirements for Mars are so different it's not worthwhile to try to reconcile them into a common system. There may be some common technology, but on the whole, it will be put together much differently.
For one, Mars has an atmosphere. This is both an asset and a liability. It reduces the amount of fuel you need for entry and gives you a possible control mechanism, but it also creates heating and issues. Air buffeting over the spindly features of lunar-like lander would make it unstable and possibly break stuff, but the cowls and heat shields needed for atmospheric entry are dead weight and unnecessary complexity and geometric constraints for a moon landing.
Mars also has over twice the surface gravity of the moon. This means more energy to be dissipated for landing, and drastically more thrust and delta-V needed for the return flight. For the moon, the return vehicle can be part of the landing vehicle. It also means bigger engines for getting off the ground. For Mars, the return vehicle will be a rocket large enough to require being landed on its own.
The mass constraints on a Mars mission are even more restrictive than on a moon mission. A moon mission can be optimized around a short (1-3 week) stay. A Mars mission requires several months to a year to take advantage of launch windows and allow a worthwhile amount of surface activity to take place. That means a lot of extra supplies. The delta-V required means it costs more to send those supplies.
But the earth launch vehicles NASA is designing now are designed to be capable of use for sending stuff to Mars, especially the mammoth Ares V.
The first is that this not really just a stepping stone. W. and DOD are pushing this. The reason is that China has been building up their military at a rate not seen since WWII. In light of how China's conducted their anti-sat test, it was more a warning to us that we need to back off (there were other ways to test their "hit" without hitting a sat. Like it or not, But both China and US will be putting up military bases there. I am guessing that USA will do mostly lasers. With the solar, and recent deal with EEstor, it will give us the ability to hit sats.
Second, even though mars is not really the same as the moon, they are trying to make this hardware work for both planets. For example, the original orion's last stage and the lander's primary called for using methane/LOX engines. The idea was that on mars would be easily able to generate methane and even O2. But the current orion went to using the J2 on the upper stage of the orion. It remains to be seen what the lander will use. But parts of the habitat, any rover/shuttle, and automated manufacturing will be made to work for both.
I am guessing that by 2016, the private companies will already be on the moon, and gearing up for mars. The mars trip will probably be a 1 way mission that is funded by a couple of billionaires. They will expect the team to live their natural lives there, or return them after 5-10 years. The idea of sending a team for a couple of months or even 2 years makes NO sense what so ever.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.