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NASA Prepping Plans For Flexible Path To Mars
FleaPlus writes "A group at NASA has been formulating a 'Flexible Path' to Mars architecture, which many expect will be part of the soon-to-be-announced reboot of NASA's future plans. NASA's prior architecture spends much of its budget on creating two in-house rockets, the Ares I and V, and would yield no beyond-LEO human activity until a lunar landing sometime in the 2030s. In contrast, the Flexible Path would produce results sooner, using NASA's limited budget to develop and gain experience with the technologies (human and robotic) needed to progressively explore and establish waypoints at Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moon Phobos, Mars, and other possible locations (e.g. the Moon, Venus flyby). Suggested interim goals include constructing giant telescopes in deep space, learning how to protect Earth from asteroids, establishing in-space propellant depots, and harvesting resources/fuel from asteroids and Phobos to supply Moon/Mars-bound vehicles."
if it gets "rebooted" very 4/8 years by new president/administration
NASA is going nowhere unless the gov't stops the loss of our prosperity overseas. Yes, I mean outsourcing. Good manufacturing jobs get replaced with crap-wages retail jobs so more and more people live near the poverty line. You can't tax people like that to pay for sky adventures by NASA, and there's fewer and fewer rich people to tax, too. Eventually the Chinese are going to wise up and stop lending us money, and that'll be that for a whale of a lot of things, with things like NASA getting the axe first.
Asteroids are a good target for missions because they are easy to get to in energy terms. There were plans to do it with Apollo. Doing something is better than doing nothing, and an asteroid mission is pretty much all NASA could do now outside low earth orbit. It is actually easier than going to the moon.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They need to settle on a plan and stick to it!
'Easy' to get to and provide potential for resources.
While getting hit by an asteroid isn't that common - we've been hit in the past by big objects from space and its a world changing event. Personally, I'd like it not to change so I can stay living here.
Wouldn't the vast sum of money required be better spent preserving the rainforests here on earth?
That always bugged me too. The idea that we should be exploring other planets in case we screw this one up just doesn't work... how badly would be have to screw this one up that starting from scratch would be easier than fixing this one???
By all means go and explore Mars because it's a fantastically cool thing to do, but don't do it under the pretense that we might kill the Earth so bad one day that we need somewhere else to go.
Our hardware is too unreliable
Launching from Earth is too expensive to build something which will mass thousands of tonnes
Assembly in vacuum and microgravity by humans is too dangerous and expensive
I could go on. We are just not there yet. We won't be there in 100 years either.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Orbiting Fuel Depots, 'bout time. Use of the LaGrange points, asteroids, yes! Scifi has known this for years, 'bout time that NASA caught up and went for long term development of space instead of quick one-shot missions.
I would like to see a link to the thousands in the US that have died in the past 10 years by asteroids.
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It never ceases to amaze me how often this objection is raised. The original drive to the moon in the 1960's is one of the very few examples of a government program that WORKED, and that paid for itself many times over. This point has been raised many times over as well: a quick Google search, in fact, led to this comment from September of 2007 right here on /.:
Besides, even if it did cost, why not invest in the future in the most tangible way? Rather that sitting on this planet whining about resources running out, why not go "out there" and FIND MORE? Rather than worrying about overpopulation, why not go find some more real estate??? Man, even if we never make it to Mars, putting viable colony/way stations at the Lagrange points would be cooler than liquid helium. :)
It's time for us to stop whining and tightening our belts and worrying about the future. It's time to start MAKING IT.
As for a change of administrations killing this new initiative, it won't happen if the people get behind it. That's a simple sales job. And to quote Jerry Pournelle, one great way to start is just to ask everyone to go outside tonight and look up at the stars for a while.
Just look at them. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
If you don't mind going back to the Stone Age while we divert all the earth's engineering and energy resources for a decade or so, feel free to assemble enough like minded people to put it to an electorate that screams when oil goes to $4/US gallon.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Thousands of tonnes could (theoretically) be launched by something like Project Orion. The estimated cost of the fallout would be ~20 people getting cancer across the world. I think more than that get killed in car crashes, wars and famines and other pointless ways each weekend, . So I think this is the price humankind is able to afford to do more space exploration.
Computer hardware was even more unreliable in the 70s-80s, and people managed to get by. You can always have some redundancy and hot-swappable modules, both with computer and with other hardware.
Assembly under the sea is just as dangerous, and we still manage to do it.
For the price of Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we would probably be in Mars already. It's just a matter of priorities and long term goals. We don't have any anymore. It's all about next quarter profit, getting rich and doing 2 chicks at the same time. There aren't any big plans or visions anymore.
--Coder
Human-caused disaster is not the only scenario that would drastically reduce the Earth's carrying capacity. Calderas such as Yellowstone, ice ages* and asteroids are the first things that come to mind, and over a few thousand years the chances of one of those happening starts to be significant (given averages on these events, we're due for all three). Given progress from one man walking on Mars to thousands living there would likely take hundreds of years, we better start early.
Not that we should start spending billions of dollars on ice-age prevention or something, but it is always good to keep in mind that there's a reason the vast majority of species no longer exist, and odds are humans will join that group eventually.
*I realize an ice age would not kill off humans as long as there is still a habitable zone. The threat to humanity would come with the fight over the remaining land and food.
My webcomic
The Augustine committee assumed with the Flexible Path option, that the NASA budget would not expand significantly. As a result, this plan is designed to do useful and daring things without requiring that everything gets developed at once. Staggered development of technologies is a notable property of this option. However, it does require that NASA will get somewhere around $3 billion more per year to support manned space flight development including a Saturn V-class heavy lift launch vehicle, fly supporting unmanned space missions, and pay for the missions described in the report.
It is intended to be a stepping stone to some more advanced exploration scheme, but neither Mars nor Lunar exploration is required as part of the program.
Some proposals mentioned in the Slashdot article simply cannot be afforded on even that enlarged budget (for example, the space telescope construction mission). At this point, many of these proposals are merely a theoretical study of what sorts of missions are possible with the infrastructure and tools proposed by the option plan rather than serious plans.
Finally, it's worth noting that there's a good chance even the relatively low funding needs of the Flexible Path option will not be supplied by Congress. At that point, I don't know what will happen. As far as I know, the Augustine committee simply could not generate a useful manned space plan with the budget manned space flight currently gets. My view is that the dependence on a heavy lift vehicle is the reason why. Eschewing heavy lift should be possible, but that does generate a new set of problems and technologies which NASA has yet to explore (propellant depots and orbital assembly of spacecraft in particular).
An alternative they never consider is the creation of a 'mothership', i.e. a big enough spaceship that can act as a space station and as as a small planetoid, complete with its own gravity (out of rotation) and nuclear propulsion (project Orion). Assembled in space and never landing itself on planets, it can be a stepping stone for mankind to the solar system, and make the trip Mars-Earth a commodity.
The reason they never consider it is because it is a terrible idea unless you build them in quantity. Building just one that does everything, would be immensely expensive even by the current and past standards of space development and exploration. Hence, in no way would it make the Earth-Mars trip a "commodity" unless you had a large fleet of them. It also doesn't do much to address the expensive Earth to orbit trip or the other trips from significant gravity wells to space (Mars, Moon, etc).