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NASA Hedges Their Bets On Return To Moon
With budget cuts in the works for everyone these days, NASA has decided to float an alternate plan for returning to the moon that is just a little bit cheaper than the current proposal. Of course, the new option would be very reminiscent of the old Apollo space capsule instead of the tricked out shuttle currently planned. "Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative that costs around $6.6 billion. This cheaper option is not as powerful as NASA's current design with its fancy new rockets, the people-carrying Ares I and cargo-lifting Ares V. But the cut-rate plan would still get to the moon."
Sigh, they're not hedging their bets. Shannon thought it was interesting, so his team studied it. That's all. This is what people at NASA do. It's their job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDGBxP3rYWw
"It is a small effort, it hasn't been looked at across NASA, because we already have a plan: Constellation. I think we should fund the plan."
The point of Shannon's presentation was to say exactly what he says at the beginning of that video. NASA is *always* looking at *all* the options and the DIRECT people are just, simply, wrong; that's why no-one is interested in their shit. Not because there is some great big conspiracy to quash their option.. but because the mission requires a Saturn class or bigger vehicle. NASA has been given the mission to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon, use in-situ resources and stay there permanently.. then move on to Mars. You're not going to land an outpost on the Moon with a 70mt launcher, and you're definitely not going to go to Mars with that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
why not just outsource it to China....
You know it makes sense. India or China could do it much cheaper. I'm sure they will be more than happy to stick a Stars and Stripes flag on the moon for you. And from this distance you won't even be able to see the 'Made in China' stamp on the flag.
I love the idea that this is some how shocking.
"NASA investigates other options and doesn't look at problem in blinkered and myopic way" - News at 11.
NASA always looks at these ideas and then normally decides that either the risk profile is too high (the most impressive thing about the first moon landings were the LACK of deaths) or that it just doesn't stack up as something that will deliver the overall objectives.
Hell in theory a great big Trebuchet could get someone to the moon, pretty one way mission though. The challenge here is to get someone to the moon, return them safely to earth and to establish a base on the moon. This is a HUGE challenge and one where a government agency has to do so at levels of safety that a commercial organisation wouldn't bother to meet.
When people bitch and moan about the price then that is fair enough, but please lets be honest here. Getting to the moon remains a HARD problem, the Chinese are going to take a long bunch of years to get there, and you can't solve hard problems with CostCo models. Either the aim is to go to the moon or not. The price comes from the aim and ambition not because NASA act like congress after pork.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
James Michener, the writer, was also on the NASA advisory board, and in his fiction Space, there are a few pages on the conflict in the planning stage between the Earth orbit faction, in which the base module would orbit Earth and the lander would go to the Moon surface and back, and the Lunar orbit faction, whose design was more efficient and eventually won.
One of the characters says that by doing that the US had foregone the availability of a space station. It is interesting that the fallback plan goes in that direction, because it could be relatively easy to have the cargo craft double as a lorry to the ISS.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Why send people? (The article doesn't explain.) 6.6 G$ would indeed be less than I'd wildly guess it would cost to send humans; but it's still a lot of moolah, and presumably a lot of that would be for a human-required payload. How about devoting just one measly little gigabuck to robot design, and then sending robots instead?
We don't need another Apollo-like mission to the moon. We've already done those enough. It's just going to cost money without any substantial new information. The next mission to the moon should be bigger and a lot different from what we have done before. Either have the balls to commit yourselves and the money to something meaningful or don't do it at all. I'd also like to point out that the moon isn't going anywhere in the near future. If a meaningful mission would cost too much now, there's no shame in waiting for the technology to became more mature.
Of course the new option would be very reminiscent of the old Apollo space capsule instead of the tricked out shuttle currently planned.
Methinks that even the author didn't RTFA... The shuttle-based plan is the new contingiency plan. And both plans would involve the same "Apollo-like" Orion capsules. I guess that if no one else does, then its misguided to even expect authors to RTFA?
The worrying part of this design is that the same orion capsule would be only able to carry 2 astronauts at a time during launch, presumably due to fuel constraints. While the rest of it sounds like a pretty reasonable bet, this bit just makes me think "well what's the point?"
On software licenses... Lower their TCO and get to the Moon? We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
I understand NASA is going to buy some return tickets from RyanAir - they fly to Moon(ISS) - sure, that's a bit out of town, but there's a shuttle bus for the remainder of the journey and it makes the actual main ticket cost look quite cheap. It may be also be possible to share a ride from ISS to Moon and split the fare.
Just avoid the in-flight food as the prices are a rip-off - best take a few freeze-dried panninis and a carton of orange juice with you.
AT&ROFLMAO
tter tserter this is a test for post in
Are we there yet ?, Are we there yet ? ,Are we there yet ?
They will hich a ride with the Chineese.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
"NASA hedges their bets"? That's strange wording. Either it's just singular ("NASA hedges its bets") or it's treated as a collective ("NASA hedge their bets"). A hybrid sounds weird, as though they were hedging others' bets.
is it cheaper than just do it again in Hollywood? Probably yes.
God's gift to chicks
Seems like a perfect time to go back, at least with the data from the LRO the chance of a gas eruption blowing up the base camp are much smaller. Lots of different materials can be used from mining the rocks but I did hear that due to how dense areas of the moon are it's feasible to mine the top surface with just a powerful electromagnet. Will search again for references.
Forget the moon. Mars is where it's at.
We don't need another Apollo-like mission to the moon. We've already done those enough. It's just going to cost money without any substantial new information
I think the point is that every iteration of Apollo would get cheaper if we kept doing new revisions. I agree that NASA should have more money. I'm a Republican paleoconservative and I have no problem paying the taxes to support NASA. Building up knowledge of space requires practice. I think NASA has missions and the track record that the private sector has yet to match.
We need a 2nd generation shuttle design as well.
And we also desperately need a practical nuclear powered spacecraft.
This is my sig.
Yes, the Lunar Kung Pao Chicken is out of this world!
Yo dawg we heard you like shuttles so we put a shuttle in yo shuttle so you can fly while you fly.
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
The summary is quite incorrect. The current Ares plan has NOTHING to do with a "tricked out shuttle", but is in fact FAR MORE like the Apollo/Saturn program than the cheaper, alternate plan shown in the article. The alternate plan is to utilize a modified form of the Shuttle launch system, but without a shuttle, instead opting to put modules on top of the external tank instead of alongside it. Obviously some sort of engine mount would be needed on the bottom.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
I think Brooks of The Mythical Man-Month fame has a name for that--"The Second System Effect". Rather than paraphrase, I'll just quote the book:
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
The Mythical Man-Month
Does this parallel? Dunno. But it might.
PS: Slashdot needs to support unicode. Sheesh.
When asked by a reporter, if anything about space flight scared him, one astronaut responded... "The only thing that bothers me is I'm sitting on top of something that was built by the LOWEST bidder. When NASA cuts costs, the safety margins go down.
This was George W. Bush's idea, not Obama's. Not that I don't think it's a good idea, it is. Even a blind dog sometimes finds a rabbit. I generally thought Bush was one of our poorer presidents, but his emphasis on space exploration was fine with me. His apparent reasons (a giant international "my penis is bigger than yours" competition) and mine (a desire to see space science and the resultant technology improve) are different, but the I agree with the result.
Foisting this off as "more Democratic Pork" is completely disingenuous. In fact it looks like the Dems may be cutting NASA's budget.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative that costs around $6.6 billion.
The new system could also launch a year earlier, and fewer space workers would have to be laid off because of that, he said.
Something about those two statements doesn't make sense. Maybe it's the 30 billion dollars that I severely doubt is just material costs between the systems. It's like he's trying to sell the layoffs in one segment and disregarding fewer work done in others, hence lower costs.
This is such typical business shit that NASA should be somewhat immune to. They have a chance here to "refactor" and really make some advances that can be used down the line. Instead they're proposing the cheaper alternative which is to complete it in the short term. Short term gain at the expense of long term?
I know it's just a proposal and I know very little about the situation aside from a few hundred word article, but I hope they really look into the aspect of not giving up advances they could get from researching and using new technology rather than just recycling the older stuff.
I don't know what sort of science fiction you've been reading, Nutria, but in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, people colonized Luna by going underground. Granted, moonquakes may still be an issue, but going underground allows colonists to avoid the issues you've mentioned.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Brad C Edwards NIAC study into building a Space Elevator pointed out that the next generation launchers would have to have enough lift capacity to send the initial 20 ton capacity spool and deployer into space. I don't know how much that would weigh, but I bet if some significant breakthroughs in CNT technology are made in the lifetime of this launch system then the priorities of what NASA tasks them to do may change dramatically.
I know we haven't successfully made long strand CNT's yet but it is feasible that a breakthrough in this technology is made in our lifetimes and the way we look at getting into space changes with that. I hope so, as it will also change the way we access other planets orbiting Sol, including Mars.
A moonstalk with 2000kg capacity to lunar orbit would be an absolutely worthwhile mission to commit *any* launch platform to building and that doesn't need CNT's to build it. From there using Lunar regolith for radiation shielding for space craft and stations become a possibility because the energy cost of getting it from earth are not there. What valuable experience it would gain us have a second means to access the Moons surface, and potentially building our first space craft *in space*.
I'm not questioning the need for either of these launch systems - we need them. But what I question is how serious we are about making access to space cheap and affordable. Why, if all the industrial efforts to build spacecraft culminated in a moon landing within a decade can we not have a 'effort' of some kind to crack making long strand CNT's? It's hard to believe that it's something we *can't* do, especially if we have the existing materials technology to work out the logistical problems with a moonstalk.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think they need to
(a) send up a bunch of automated resupply ships and practice automated precision landing of supplies within 100m of each other.
(b) construct some sort of landing pad so that rocks and assorted debris does not go flying and destroy adjacent buildings.
Once they have this capability perfected, they should start thinking about manned missions.
I like the idea of orbital transfer components because each phase can be mass produced and reused for multiple projects. Transfer vehicles might also be critical (issvehicle; vehiclevehicle). Such vehicles could be positioned in space and upgraded individually as new technologies become available without require re-validation of all capabilities. Additional vehicles could also be placed on standby as emergency vehicles.
The key is to make each component as cheap as possible so that each component can become expendable but, in terms of design, each component can be used for a variety of planetary and interplanetary purposes.
-Tim
1. After reading Eugene Cernan's autobiography "Last Man On The Moon", the bottom line conclusion is that going there is fucking dangerous. Almost every flight he was on, he came close to dying. Those odds will certainly be improved with today's technology, but they are still very high.
2. During the lunar program, there were supposed to be 20 Apollos. Only 14 flew. The reason was that, once Armstrong landed, the public lost interest. When that happened, the political currency of the program evaporated.
3. Humans are huge consumers of resources. Flying those resources to the moon is very expensive.
The concept should revolve around devising robots to establish a human habitable base. This should be the way that we explore Mars. If we can do this on the moon, then we will learn something for Mars exploration. At that time, and only at that time should we consider sending astronauts to the moon (once the station is built for them).
*** Don't be dull.***
Every time the NASA topic comes up on Slashdot, there are several hundred technical comments about the nature of the rockets and environment of space. And every time the subject appears it is necessary for someone to point out the reality of the situation.
The reality is that the USA is broke. Not only broke but trillions of dollars in debt. Not just trillions in debt but facing unprecedented challenges in energy resource depletion, over-population, financial collapse of the world banking institutions, climate change, permanent governmental grid-lock, and near-universal hostility from the other countries with growing economies.
Priorities are going to be set. The things that were important in the 1960s are not important any more. What this means is that there is going to be a lot of talk about man's destiny to travel to the moon and some superficial funding. But there is going to be no real effort made to return to the moon. The programs are going to be cut year after year.
The reason is obvious. There are real problems on the earth. They can't be ignored. There are no real solutions to these problems on the moon. Actually there is nothing on the moon. Going there is essentially a symbolic gesture:it's an act of engineering masturbation. Back when the USA was rich and powerful in the 1960s, these kind of symbolic projects could be supported and funded.
Those days are gone. We live in a different era. Accept it; because it's reality. And as engineers, reality is the most important consideration.
Man will return to the moon, it's true. But it won't happen in our lifetimes. It will happen in two or three hundred years from now. Learn to think long term.
The same thing applies to Mars exploration. You've seen the photos from the robot landers. It's a desert. No plants, no water, no nothing, just rocks and dust. Given the problems of the USA and Earth at the present time, there is no moral, physical, military, or political justification for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on space projects of this magnitude.
Please understand, it is in your best interest as technocrats and engineers to not support such projects of no social import such as manned interplanetary travel. If billions are spent on projects of this nature, and the economy continues to collapse, then you will be presented to the angry public as a scapegoat by the politicians. Lost your 401K, no health care for your children, living in your car because your underwater home foreclosed? The politicians will claim that it is all the fault of the engineers who pissed away billions of dollars for Mars/Moon landings.
Believe me, you don't want to be in the position where the massive social unrest of the 2020s is going to be blamed on the projects like moon landings that you publicly supported in 2009.
Please consider the political reality of this situation. Space engineers are being set up like fools to take the blame for situations that they had nothing to with creating.
Is that once you start going down that road, it is enormously difficult, if not impossible to come back to exploration again. I give you the Ming Dynasty as an example. Prior to the first Ming Emperor, China ruled the seas with its ships the size of our WWII aircraft carriers. They explored beyond the limits of the known world and kept going (granted, they did it because it was very profitable - I will readily concede that point). It was also a point of national pride. Then the first Ming Emperor came to the throne, a xenophobic agoraphobe who turned his entire nation inward to 'solve' the problem of foreign contamination. And it took China 1500 years to recover from that. I could come up with more examples offhand but I'm going to summarize: The problems you have listed are ENDEMIC to humanity. They will NEVER be solved, not in my lifetime, not in anyone's lifetime. There is no hope of solving them because if we start down that path, all we do is end up chasing our own tail. Humanity's progress and solutions have only occured when we pushed beyond our familiar boundaries into the unknown. So to make any real and effective attempt at solving the problems you named (while embracing the paradox that we will never be able to solve them completely), we HAVE to go to the moon, and we have to go to Mars. If we give up our Explorer spirit, we give up everything else and fall into a cycle of stagnation from which there is little hope of recovery.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Thank you for your interesting response. But you are missing the entire point of my post.
The point is that the global problems are unprecedented and very real. They can only be solved and dealt with by focused application of resources directly on the problems themselves. Exploration is a general approach to problem solving. Exploration itself doesn't solve problems. These 21st century problems that we face must be solved or humanity will either die or enter another period of dark age that will last hundreds of years.
The absolute last thing that we need to do to address 21st century problems is go to the moon.
Politicians are not equiped to solve engineering problems. They are good at directing public anger away from the institutions and corporations that fund their political campaigns. If the current problems continue to grow, and there is no reason to believe that they won't get worse, then the politicians will need an easy target to redirect public anger away from institutions and corporations. The moon/Mars exploration crowd is an easy target to direct public anger towards. The space engineers have no political consciousness. They are essentially naive fools when presented with situations outside of their technical specialities.
The fact that they continue to insist that space exploration is absolutely critical to mankind's survival only confirms this. Humans have lived on earth for 50,000 years without having the means to go into space: space travel is not essential to human survival. Don't present metaphorical horseshit in public as scientific fact: it doesn't reflect kindly on your reputation or profession.
The Chinese did not have aircraft carrier sized ships 1500 years ago. They had large treasure ships that explored the east African coast and traded with India 600 years ago. There is some evidence that they reached the Americas in 1421/1423 as presented in Garvin Mendes' books on pre-Columbian explorations. These ships were nowhere as large as a modern aircraft carrier.
They explored lands that was basically the same as those that they came from. They didn't go into places that had no land, no water, no air, and no hope of finding any resources or trade that would justify the cost of their explorations. The Chinese empire was rich at that time. They were not trillions of dollars in debt and dependent upon foreign capital to support their government expenses. Their situation had nothing in common with our current situation.
I guess there's a first time for everything. *ba-dum-CRASH*
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Since the moon always faces the Earth the same way. Could we sent a rocket there with a tethered cable ? Then we can do the whole space elevator thing and ditch the expensive rockets.
Only joking.
Seems funny that we are going back to 60's technology to get us back to the moon. Kubrick and Clark would be turning in their graves.
165 posts and not one reference to "moon base alpha" or "1999".
Leave your card at the door and never come back.
I appreciate the alternate design as a neat hack. But I'm becoming frustrated with NASA's goal-only orientation. Just getting to the moon does nothing to promote or assist other programs. The stepping stone approach would make it possible achieve the same goal plus many more. It'd take longer and cost more at first, but in the end far more could be achieved with less money. Instead of getting to the moon in 5 years, spend that time and money turning ISS into a construction and fueling facility. In 10 years we could be sending as many vehicles to the moon each year as they'd plan to send on any of their presently considered designs in total. In 20 we could be sending the same amount of traffic to Mars. And in 40 years, rather than celebrating "One Small Step" with plans so have another small step and little else to follow, we could be sending mail on supply rockets to the colonies on the moon and Mars, and building Clarke's Jupiter (or Saturn in you read the book instead) mission vehicle Discovery. And during all this, building more orbital stepping stones, which would require long term or even permanent residents to carry out the work, and we'd be on track for O'Neil's vision of orbital habitats. So some are orbiting Boeing or Lockheed factories. At least they'd be there.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
WTF? There is no "tricked out shuttle" planned for the return to the moon.
At best we can call it "stupid and expensive, but slightly less expensive than the stupidity of the shuttle".
At worst we can call it "reverting to a technology which should have remained abandoned in 1972."
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Does the "cut rate option" involve scale models and CGI, perhaps?
Dear Slashdaughter,
Please avoid ad hominem attacks to comment writers in techno-political discussions. Please use documented scientific arguments for technical points and rationally argued points for political topics.
My points were not about my financial situation, nor the fate of earth, nor whether we are in a new great depression. My points were about the singular inappropriateness of a major engineering project oriented to manned space exploration at the present time.
I might point out that although the actual physical number on nuclear weapons has been decreased by the Americans and Soviet/Russians since the height of the cold war, the actual ability of the remaining nuclear bombs is enough to end human life on earth, the omnicide shoah, remains as present as hair-trigger and as likely now as it ever was then. Little real progress has been made in convincing the psychopaths who run the nuclear weapons programs to stand down for the long-term sake of human life.
Thank you,
The main reason why NASA is so eager to use the Sold Rocket Boosters (SRB) of the shuttle is that the military uses a lot of solid rocket engines in their missiles. The manufacturers of the solid rocket engines would lose a lot of business when the shuttles are retired, reducing their economies of scale for the rest of their products. The SRBs cause a lot of stress on the shuttle because they accelerate at full power, vibrate a lot, and cause heavy air resistance at low altitudes. On the first flight of the shuttle, the SRBs thrust over-stressed the shuttle's tail and the hydraulic system of some control surfaces. The pilots have said that had they known what had happened they would not have had confidence in the shuttle to safely return and would have ejected at low level. Columbia could easily have been destroyed on the first flight!
$6.6 billion is not a little bit cheaper than $35 billion. They reduced the cost by $28.4 billion. That's a huge reduction in cost.
The "new" moon effort is a joke. Using the "advanced design" of the Apollo capsule (same shape as a missile warhead) is very important for space travel. Thing is, we don't have to impress the russians anymore and show how big anICBM launcher we can build, so the missile paradigm is really not necessary. Besides, it cuts down on the sound generated as the craft goes through space, and doesn't annoy the aliens. Shuttle has exceeded its original operational lifetime by 17 years. It was supposed to be retired in 1990 after flying through the 1980's to the "Skylab" based Space Station. Trouble is congress, even with money grabbing power like Ted "Keg" Kennedy, can't reach into space and embezzle, so the money stays on earth. It is easier to promote graft and corruption when you can keep your grubby hands on it instead of watching it fly out of reach. We should have had a moon colony 20 years ago. a space station years earlier. We can't even put up a two bit space station ourselves. We have to rely on the French, russians, and the EU. Let alone the type envisioned by people like Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The key to space exploration is establishment of an orbital platform at one of the La Grange Points between Earth and Moon, and launching from there with much less fuel requirements. Also provides a very stable and long life orbit with very little chance of decay. Good jump off point for Mars as well as you are not fighting Earth's gravity as much. Use the remaining shuttle launch vehicles (tanks and boosters) to heavy lift materials into orbit, and then assemble in orbit and ferry to the LaGrange point of choice. Problem is that a gov Agency is running the space program. They want to run GM too, can you imagine the new "Curved Dash Olds electric Car???? Hey it was a good idea in 1901, basically a golf Cart sized car. Just up the governments alley. The space program such as it is is such a disappointment in general. As one of the children of the 60's and 70's, the bright dream of a future of space travel has turned into a very dim nightmare of R/C cars on Mars, and the inability to even return to the Moon. Ideas are abundant in Science Fiction (often written by scientists) of how to construct logical space vehicles. Space : 1999 for example, or the Old "U.F.O." TV series, or any numnber of other examples. that technology is well within reach, and fro some reason, we resort to Cement Mixers again. Burt Rutan built a reusable launch vehicle and turned it around in two weeks for a repeat trip. (Spaceship 1) Where are the engineers like that at NASA?? It frightens one to consider how GM and Chrysler will emerge with Genius like this as a precedent. Jim
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Sending a Shuttle crew up to ISS to construct a Lunar Excursion Module from parts flown up to ISS by generic robotic rockets is a solved problem. Landing safely on the Moon is a solved problem. OK, I'm now on the Moon. How can I make a Buck? What can I "harvest" so that someone will trade resources with me so that I can keep looking at the surface of the Moon up close and personal? And lets project this commerce over the next 10 years? Tugs can come and get my harvest and fly it to the ISS, then down to earth. But man, I got to eat something other toothpaste flavored steak. Anyone can sit on their bun and say no, how about a working solution that gets my outsourced rear to work?
NASA is inherently conservative. It thinks itself politically neutral which it most definitely is not. As a result, the transition to the new progressive Administration has been a roller coaster ride starting with a low (Dr. Griffin talking himself out of his job), and rising to a high (billions in stimulus money promised), and back to a low (the Augustine Committee putting everything manned on the block). Surprisingly a science-based technical analysis (Frames) is available that could smooth these waters. Not surprisingly, my efforts to discuss this with my management at a NASA center have been stonewalled. This mess was avoidable. Now we must contain the damage before is spills over into the sciences where it could delay our getting the space data we need to address problems like global warming.
Tom Riley TomRiley@woodwaredesigns.com http://woodwaredesigns.com/woodware.html