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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
sounds like a marketing term for "one way"
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.
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.
Only last week hard evidence was reported that asteroids themselves collide. This implies that yet another mechanism to cause asteroids to leave their relatively stable orbits and head Sunwards exists (apart from gravitational deflection by planets.)
The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
Where they should be going. The main purpose of manned spaceflight should be to develop the technologies to form permanent self sustaining colonies off of Earth.
With the abandonment of the Centrifuge Accommodations Module (CAM) we cannot determine if Humans or even most vertebrates can reproduce in reduced gravity and how much gravity is required.
All experiments with mice in microgravity have have indicated that cell division after fertilization does not occur, and that more advanced fetus that were launched do not undergo cell migration and/or cell differentiation properly.
If it is found out that Centripetal acceleration is an adequate substitute for gravity, then the asteroids may be our best bet.
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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."
This is a bureaucratic method of killing the overall project of a Mars mission. What happens is each sub project runs into "unexpected delays and expenses" that make it impossible to complete the sub project, or delay it so that it splits up the co-ordination with the other projects for a Mars Mission. Apologists will take up the side of NASA, and they should, but in reality there are facts mitigating against NASA even existing, such as the simple fact that the USA is bankrupt and can't pay its bills, and (according to the Hirsch Report from the DoE) the USA needs to spend 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars converting itself to a non-fossil fuel culture if it hopes to maintain a technical civilisation at all.
In short: good luck with this new plan - cool if it works out - but it has "Cover My Ass" and "Plausible Deniability for Mission Failure" written all over it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
if they keep getting "rebooted" every 10 years
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
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.
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Haven't we been on the flexible path? So flexible they were able to bend it right back around upon itself making circles around the Earth...
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).
Wouldn't the vast sum of money required be better spent preserving the rainforests here on earth?
Hell no. You don't need to spend money just to leave something alone.
Another "spinoffs" myth. NASA has some effect as an early adopter of consider non-aerospace related technologies, but as I see it, it's real effect has been in the creation of the commercial satellite industry (which incidentally, it had to be pried out of after it created the market). That's something like almost $20 billion per year. NASA also is a significant developer of aeronautics technologies. Finally, it has considerable aerospace research that has reduced the cost of development for many businesses. SpaceX and Scaled Composites would be required to spend more in development costs, if it weren't for prior NASA-sponsored development. NASA also demonstrated RLV technologies and orbital assembly techniques (what I consider the meager output of hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditures).
It's done some useful stuff, but at what I consider extravagant cost. Spinoffs are one of a number of touchie feelie intangibles (inspiration to young people, national prestige, international cooperation, space science) that are used to rationalize spending money without consequence.
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???
Basically by implementing one of the concepts on this page to destroy the earth utterly.
Seriously, there's practically nothing we could do that would make earth less habitable than Mars. Global Thermonuclear War? Even if Ferris Bueller had failed to talk down that computer, the end result would be a planet far more suitable than human life. Gigantic meteor impact? They've happened before. Mass extinction followed, but the biosphere itself pressed on, as did the oxygen atmosphere it created. On post-KT-repeat earth, you could still walk around and breath the air, maybe with the help of a dust mask, and maybe find some resilient plants and animals to eat. As opposed to requiring a massive infrastructure just to keep you from dying in moments on the surface of Mars. We could poison and kill every ecosystem on earth and what remained would still be a better starting point for 'rebooting' than any other heavenly body we know of.
And you're right, we're probably much better off preventing these situations from happening in the first place than trying to move off-world in case they happen.
On the other hand, I do believe that in the very long term self-sustaining off-world colonies are both possible and desirable.
It's just the idea that we could actually pull that off, yet not be able to pull off keeping the earth habitable even in the aftermath of severe catastrophe, seems pretty silly to me.
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The Flexible Path option would be an excellent example of a pay-go approach to exploring the inner solar system. In theory, it could be able to accomodate different missions based on the value of the scientific discoveries as the program progresses, and our evolving technical abilities. However, the fact that it has no specific goal, opens the Flexible Path to political manipulation which will probably adversely affect its execution. In other words, it seems to be too flexible to ensure success in its endeavors, given the liklihood of the American political system to tinker with programs as vaguely expressed as the Flexible Path.
Although the economy is currently in a trough, an optimistic long term prediction would envision a return to healthy economic growth. In any case, the cost of a space program must be budgeted and the current costs and benefits of that program must be funded by Congress. The current situation clearly forces the prioritization of space program missions. It is crucial that the Flexible Path propose initial missions which are prioritized on cost and time to implement.
There are many possible missions which could be encompassed in the Flexible Path, including the visit to Phobos, which is discussed briefly in the linked article. A cursory examination of that portion of the article, by an interested voter, would reveal at least two fundamental, common sense flaws in the suggestion of this particular mission. These flaws are fatal in the sense that they prove that this particular mission should have a priority much later than a less ambitious Flexible Path mission of a lunar return mission, to pick but one example.
The first flaw is scientific in nature. While Phobos is a "large, dramatic world", per the article, the Moon is larger, more dramatic, and much closer. The terms "large" and "dramatic" are emotionally laden marketing terms and distinctly unscientific reasons to embark on such a mission. The term "closer" is a scientific fact, readily verified, and intrinsically linked with the cost of either mission. The second flaw is also scientific. The article suggests that the "mystery of the origin of Phobos can be resolved". If that is indeed true, then a similar lunar mission could resolve, to the same accuracy, the currently unsolved mystery of the Moon's origin.
Other flaws in that particular Phobos mission pertain to the ease of returning samples, the establishment of the initial inventory of water on either Mars or Phobos, the suggestion that material color is a sufficient criteria for collection, the implication that rover operation would be easier there than closer to Earth, and the further implication that a Phobos mission could demonstrate solutions to these problems that other missions could not.
These types of arguments will be used to prioritize other Flexible Path missions as well, but they are clearly incomplete and do not seem to pass a simple analysis for ranking on a rational basis. The major obstacles to such an ambitious mission as a Phobos visit, cost and time, are given short shrift in the article, and seem to exemplify serious problems in the early determination of the Flexible Path itself.
In contrast to the Phobos mission, for example, many people argue that any lunar mission is futile, based solely on the idea that we have been there and have done that. This particular argument can only be interpreted that human space missions are only a game to be won or lost one time, and one time only. Having won the game, one can study science at that location no longer by this immature and incomplete analysis. With respect to human spaceflight, the "been there, done that" argument is always false, and should be rejected by the voter and the scientific community every time it is brought up.
The larger issue, no matter one's preferred mission, is the question: What is the purpose of human space flight? Today, there is no shared, common sense of what this purpose should be. Part of this purpose is surely the expansion of human