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NASA Wants Spacecraft For Mars Return Trip
coondoggie writes "If we ever do get to Mars, getting home might prove to be as difficult. NASA today selected three companies — Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman — to being the task of defining the spacecraft that will leave Mars, presumably at first loaded with red planet rock samples, then later possibly humans — for a safe trip back to Earth. The engineering challenges those three companies face are immense."
We don't pay for any bids that specify the same ship design be used for the return as was used during the departure.
I'd design it so it had just enough thrust to get back in Mars Orbit. Then I'd send a 2nd craft from Earth to ferry it back. I figure there is a lot of problems that could be solved by reducing that added fuel weight from it.
God spoke to me.
planning is fine but we have no realistic way to even get there let alone getting bulk material there
this is like buying tires for a car you may not even buy sometime in the future, way to pork out some contractors licenses NASA
I thought we sent those Jersey Shore kids one-way tickets...
Who needs to come back. We should send a one way craft, there would be countless volunteers even if it was clear that they are never coming home. Once there, you could start working to establish a sustainable off planet colony... Would also make getting there a lot cheaper.
... and a pony. It's not going to happen until the economy picks up considerably or we get into a space race with China to see who can get there(and back) first.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
"There does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage" -Sagan
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Just put some rockets on the space station and fly it out there with some probes that can lift off
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
"The engineering challenges those three companies face are immense"
The bureaucratic challenges will be even more so.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
These big contractors will never come up with an efficient solution. It is against their interests. They will design some very capital intensive approach. Then they will bid on the contracts to build it.
It will take a startup company to come up with a innovative and viable approach.
To paraphrase - "I think you underestimate their chances".
From an engineering standpoint, the challenges are similar to the Apollo moon missions.
What's new is size and weight for the extra storage capacity needed for fuel, food, oxygen, etc; and space for the extra living quarters.
In fact, I'd say you could do it with 3 launches from Earth to put up a propulsion module, living quarters module (the "RV" section and the mars lander module.
Assemble them in orbit like the Apollo missions did, go to Mars, drop the lander, return to Earth, jettison the RV and the propulsion module and splash down for landing.
Granted there are other, new challenges, but we've got probably 3/4 of the challenges already solved.
Well... except for the fact that we don't HAVE the heavy lift tech anymore...
...Robert Zubrin 1996 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars for a decent affordable, credible, realistic and possible plan.
Then, if anyone reading this knows Elon Musk, please send him a copy.
we need a way to make fuel on mars better to plan for a one way or very long term trip to Mars and maybe just a shouter term cargo only return.
...all the tens of thousands of people that would be employed to make this happen... I guess none of they money spent by them would go back into the country? They would spend it all offshore right? Riiiiiight...
Send some unmanned cargo & fuel-only runs out to Mars orbit to refuel the manned mission for the return trip. The problem is not the technology, it's the political will to fund it. When politicians are in charge of your budget, you wind up with decisions made by cowards.
Why do we need a super heavy-lift vehicle to get there? Can't we put the pieces one-by-one into low earth orbit, then bolt em together and head off to Mars? And why are they thinking about landing a heavy ascent vehicle on the surface, all loaded with fuel? (80% of the ascent vehicle will need to be fuel) Why not land a few cans of gas on Mars so the astronauts can fuel up the ascent vehicle prior to liftoff? Would drastically cut the weight of the descent vehicle. And since I'm designing this Mars mission, I've got a solution to the long duration weightless problem. The transport vehicle is designed to come apart in the middle. After the main engine burn to get em on their way, they snap it apart, and tie a rope around the 2 pieces. Then start them orbiting each other. Presto, there's your gravity. Maintaining antenna alignment back to earth would be a bitch, so they have another small spacecraft with the radio dish that flies along nearby that's used as a repeater.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Before they start working on how to get OFF of Mars they need to figure out how to get ON Mars. A couple of years ago I found this article (sorry, lost the original link).
Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of Mars
by Nancy Atkinson
July 17th, 2007
Some proponents of human missions to Mars say we have the technology today to send people to the Red Planet. But do we? Rob Manning of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discusses the intricacies of entry, descent and landing and what needs to be done to make humans on Mars a reality.
There’s no comfort in the statistics for missions to Mars. To date over 60% of the missions have failed. Even among those who have devoted their careers to the task, mention sending a human mission to land on the Red Planet, with payloads several factors larger than an unmanned spacecraft, and the trepidation grows even larger.
Why? Nobody knows how to do it.
Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars. "It turns out that most people aren’t aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars," said Manning.
He believes many people immediately come to the conclusion that landing humans on Mars should be easy. After all, humans have landed successfully on the Moon and we can land our human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size and atmosphere, it should be easy. "There’s the mindset that we should just be able to connect the dots in between," said Manning.
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone", said Manning, "There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."
In 2004 NASA organized a Road Mapping session to discuss the current capabilities and future problems of landing humans on Mars. Manning co-chaired this event and the major conclusion that came from the session was that no one has yet figured out how to safely get large masses from speeds of entry and orbit down to the surface of Mars.
"We call it the Supersonic Transition Problem," said Manning. With our current capabilities, a large, heavy vehicle, streaking through Mars’ thin atmosphere only has about ninety seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and finally, gently touch down.
When this problem is first presented to people, the most offered solution, Manning says, is to use airbags, since they have been so successful for the missions that he has been involved with; the Pathfinder rover, Sojourner and the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity.
But engineers feel they have reached the capacity of airbags with MER. "It's not just the mass or the volume of the airbags, or the size of the airbags themselves, but it's the mass of the beast inside the airbags," Manning said. "This is about as big as we can take that particular design."
In addition, an airbag landing subjects the payload to forces between 10-20 G’s. While robots can withstand such force, humans can’t. This doesn’t mean airbags will never be
1. Launch craft to Mars
2. Land on Mars
3. Assemble pre-fab transfer gate
4. Activate transfer gates on Earth and Mars
5. Walk back to Earth
6. Start selling access to gateway
NASA could single handedly pay off the US debt this way
Might want to budget a bit extra for the whole "develop gateway technology" portion of the schedule prior to launch
I'm surprised that nobody has yet mentioned nuclear-powered spacecraft, which propels itself with an ion thruster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster Such a spacecraft would not have a problem carrying enough fuel to make the return trip. I do need to point out that that space vehicle would not lift off from earth using its nuclear-ion thruster, nor would it land on Mars. It would have to first be propelled into earth orbit with conventional hydrogen-oxygen rockets. The nuke engine would then "go live" propelling it to Mars, where it would stay in orbit. It would drop a module down to Mars (which uses parachutes and the "beachball" technique to land safely). After collecting samples, it would lift off Mars using a conventional rocket and rendezvous with the nuclear-powered craft in orbit, which would return to earth (but stay in orbit). Conventional rockets would be used to recover the payload and take it back to earth. Think of this nuclear-powered rocket like a kind of miniaturized Starship Enterprise, though unmanned. It doesn't land or take off from a planet, it just ferries payloads between planets, never getting any closer than an orbit.
Toss a small comet at mars to thicken atmosphere.
1) Drop a reactor on Mars
2) Drop a robot tractor on Mars
3) Drop a fuel generator on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
4) Drop a greenhouse on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
5) Drop a crew habitat on Mars, use the tractor to pull it to the reactor
6) Deliver humans to Mars once steps 1-5 have been done successfully
Hopefully, we'll have some form of nuclear propulsion by the time we're ready for step 6, which would kind of ruin the need for step 3.
For extra coin, you could get sponsors - the Duracell reactor, Apple iTractor, DuPont Fuel Generator, Monsanto Greenhouse, Hilton Habitat, and put a Nike swoosh on the crew rocket - "Just Do It".
Any more so than the Apollo CSM could be the same as the entire Saturn V configured for Apollo, or an F/A-18 could be the same as the USS Nimitz. The outbound craft is going to have to contain the inbound craft - by definition, they can't be the same thing.
The idea of a self-sustaining Martian colony is beyond retarded. It costs something like a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. To get a colony going would require millions of kilograms of stuff. Then anything you manufactured there would have to be transported back to earth to be sold - again with transport costs $1M/kg (or more, as building return rockets on Mars would no doubt be exceedingly expensive). And Mars is made of the same stuff as earth - silicates, iron, etc. What the hell could you possibly produce and sell at a profit? And without any kind of profit potential, this is a non-starter. No one is going to lay out this much money just because off-world colonies are cool.
And regarding the "countless volunteers" willing to go on a one-way trip to Mars? Sure. How many of them are qualified (physically and occupationally) to do anything useful on Mars? And of that rather small subset - how many are psychologically stable enough not to lose their shit on a permanent mission to another planet? Willing. Qualified. Mentally stable. You can pick two.
... we used to call this sort of thing a self-licking ice cream cone. Dude, I hate to break this to you (are you sitting down) - there are no people on Mars. And we could save ourselves a fuck-ton of money by not shipping them there.
It costs at least a million dollars/kg to get stuff to Mars. And the stuff they'd need would include, at a minimum, some kind of power generation system (nuclear or solar), lighting, heat, water purification equipment, tools & materials needed to do farming, seeds, startup food, air and water for themselves, clothing, tools & materials to build shelters, at least minimal furniture, minimal domestic implements (spoons, dishes, etc), comm and IT gear (presumably they'll need to phone home to earth periodically) bulk quantities of water (or equipment to mine water from Martian soils) for irrigating crops, some sort of capital equipment if they're to manufacture anything (probably heavy)... Are you putting this on your Visa card? Because I'm not keen on shelling out the bucks for it.
we can accomplish almost all the same goals via robotic exploration
And if you can't, it means you need to build better robots. You need robots for any work on Moon and Mars anyway - there are no cheap laborers there, and every minute outside (esp. on the Moon) is dangerous (radiation, micrometeorites, damage to spacesuits, etc.)
However exciting a manned trip to Mars may be, it is certainly not justified at this point in time. Humans would be needed there only if we are pretty sure that there is sentient life on Mars and we need to establish contact. But a dead planet - which Mars largely is, as it seems - doesn't warrant sending people just to put boots on the ground. If a person chips a piece of rock away he will carry it to a robot, to do further analyses. If you need a more complex analysis, bring rocks back (you have to have this technology first anyway.)
As an example, if you have some money allocated for Mars and you instead want to divert it to Earthly projects, you can start with things as simple as solar panels for everyone. They last a long time and produce a lot of power (I know because I have a PV setup; my heating is now free, with lots of kW*h to spare.) But there are many other things to do too - clean water, for one, or food, or housing, or a 1 Gbps Internet link for everyone :-)
This is in fact *more important* than a trip to Mars. The human civilization is rotting from the inside; the level of education falls, the level of "I want $foo right now, waa!" is rising. Nobody wants to work, and nobody needs to work, as it seems. Ghettos keep growing, gangs keep growing. Those problems are killing us faster than Ebola; Mars is not even in the equation. We can fly to Mars, but how much good will it do us if the spacefarers don't have a planet to return to?
Your analogy isn't really getting the job done for you. Sure, the price of air travel has gone down - but it's still not cheap. It's still much, much cheaper, for example, to get something shipped UPS ground than UPS overnight. And for bulk quantities of stuff, forget it. Air's not an option for resupplying your coal fired power plant, for example.
The situation is even worse with respect to space. Prices aren't really coming down at all, and there really aren't any technological breakthroughs on the horizon as far as anyone can tell. Economies of scale, if you can achieve them, will only get you so far. You're going to need something that makes you some money "out there", and so far, no one has any particularly plausible ideas. The terrestrial planets are all made of the same stuff earth is, and no matter how cheap you make space travel, it's never going to be so cheap that mining is more economically done in space. Asteroids are the same deal. Comets: slushballs. Gas giants: hard to even imagine what you could recover or how to do it. And if you can't figure out what can be economically recovered, you probably can't even get the economy of scale.
Ok, I'll bite. Why do we need to? We've already established that there's no money in it. Carl Sagan seems to be casting about for a reason to do it in the quote. So why? This is really the heart of the matter. You can't just wave your hands and say "we need to get into space... just because". Someone needs to identify the actual benefits - and so far, they seem pretty slim.
That it completely destroys one of the main reasons to go to Mars in the first place - for the science. Oh, you were interested in knowing whether life ever existed on Mars? Sorry, we just resurfaced the planet.
Also, there's the fact that Mars has no magnetic field, whose absence allowed the solar wind to strip the planet of most of its atmosphere in the first place. So unless you want to keep dropping comets on Mars, you'll be back where you started.
And yeah, there's also the energy thing. And the fact that we don't really know how to steer comets even if we had sufficient energy. Etc, etc. Probably safe to say we won't be terraforming first.
SpaceX has specifically said it's Dragon Spacecraft has a heat shield designed to withstand the increased speed that would exist from a return trip from Mars.
"The ablator, called PICA-X for short, was tested inside an arc jet laboratory at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.
"It's actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has," Musk said.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/002/100716firststage/
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Point was regarding the earlier comment suggesting the money just disappears. Clearly spending the same dollars on something with immediate and ongoing 'quality of life' benefits is a better short term stimulus.
On the other hand, when the big rock hits, Mars may look pretty enticing.
Perpetual Motion Rockets? Yeah, Sure.
Table-ized A.I.
should be nuclear. Seriously. We need to develop a small nuclear ferry for sending goods between earth and mars. Building a prototype for moving small samples and cargo around would be worth it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, because going to Mars will be a horrendous wast of money just like the Louisiana Purchase and "Seward's Folly" aka Alaska.
Actually, it is not the broken window fallacy. History has shown over and over that expansion into new areas returns money. BIG money. THat is how EU became large from an economic POV. We will certainly find new things on Mars that we never expected. Finally, by sending man out there, we preserve our species. The fact is, that we do not know why species has been wiped out over and over on Earth. But Mars (AND expansion into the oceans) should be seen as an attempt to preserve ourselves.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I used to be a big fan of VASIMR. That is until you start to look how to generate electricity for it. Solar will not cut it, except for a real slow cargo system. For humans, we need to move fast. It will require a nuke reactor. Assume that we do not have DIRECT generation of fusion to electrons developed in the next 10 years. That means that we are left with fission thermal system. Not a problem. Right?
WRONG. The nuke generates the heat which can create steam, and drive a turbine. BUT, you have to dump the heat to cool the steam (or what ever your working fluid is, probably ammonia). On earth, we just dump to the environment. We have matter all around us to accept that heat. BUT in space, you do not have it. Instead, you have to radiate it away. That would take loads of radiators. And that will take a structure to support it. That structure will be HEAVY. All of that means that ION will NOT WORK FOR HUMAN TRANSPORT
OTH, a simple nuke engine WILL WORK. A reactor is used to heat nothing by hydrogen. This is what nerva is about. We need to restart that up all over again. In addition, we need to restart breeder reactors in the west esp. in America. Amazingly, we have loads of 'waste', that is ideal for this. Heck, if we are so afraid of this, we could build a small breeder for use in space. Put it at L0, and then use that to re-fuel a ferry engine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Build a mothership in space, one that cannot land on Earth, equip it with nuclear reactors and a project-orion propulsion system, and then you have affordable space travel to any planet in our solar system.
Then Mars becomes simply a case of having the right vehicle on the mothership.
One way trips don't preserve anything. There is no reason to send people, there is nothing that people can do on the surface that robots can't (you can make and send a *lot* of robotic missions for the price of one human mission). The argument that we should do because all these people will get jobs is a broken window fallacy... You only have to look at the pork being held over from the shuttle program to see that a bulk of NASA "missions" is nothing but government welfare for engineers.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Is the exclusion of the existing contractor Boeing (Rockwell) indication that Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are at the core of the bureaucratic problem or at least pointing towards it?
History has shown over and over that expansion into new areas returns money. BIG money. THat is how EU became large from an economic POV.
I think you will find that the EU became large from an ecomomic POV because it amalgamated some of the world's largest individual economies, such as Germany's Italy's and France's.
There isn't a lot Mars will add to earth's GDP (although that creepy face may indicate otherwise) in the short, or even medium term, even if we colonise it.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
I think that you will find that many in the world refer to EU as being =~ to Europe. IOW, the build up of Europe from an economic pov took place because of the expansion around the world. That is most true of UK.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The innovations needed to make people be able to survive on Mars would very likely be applicable on Earth. I am talking about innovations in recycling efficiency, re-use of materials, etc.
Couldn't NASA just rent the Martian Maggot for the round trip? Does Marvin have exclusive rights to the vehicle?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/
Seriously, the choices are "Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman" ?
Is there a law which forces the government to use companies with extensive track records of lying like hell on their bids to get the contracts, then creating extensive delays and budget overruns causing later administrations to cancel the projects?
How about a crazy idea of "we'll start by providing a $1 million grant to any company that meets the minimum requirements of having actually put something in space in order to get the ball rolling and get a list of tasks laid out.
We'll pay to launch your designs into space to test them and start debugging the problems.
For each task which is clearly accomplished, we'll pay for the task achieved.
You have three chances to screw up. We'll launch your stuff, but if it doesn't work, we will lose trust in you and you're on your own. You can deliver a finished functional product on your own dime at that point, but we're not paying you to screw up over and over again.
The goal is, put something on mars, then get 10 human scale mannequins to mars and then back again with life support functioning at all times.
Additionally, the cost of the unit CAN NOT exceed X dollars. You have to get there and back again, not including the cost of the initial launch or vehicle recovery from orbit for $200 million or less. If you can't do it for that much, then you're out.
Altogether, if 3 companies manage to reach the finish line on this one, it probably will still cost the U.S. government less than $5 billion including the launches and such.
When you're using mannequins, you don't have to get it right on the first try. What is important is, when you finally do it, you do get it right. I don't think I would even consider stepping foot on a rocket made by any of the three companies contracted for this task.
...AMPHO...
Perhaps you mean ANFO - Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil.
Yet another Tiller's rule violation.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The outbound craft is going to have to contain the inbound craft - by definition, they can't be the same thing.
Unless the outbound craft relies on separate stuff it finds on Mars' surface. Like component dropped by previous trips. So this trip's inbound craft doesn't have to dedicate a so big fraction of its payload to stuff that will only be sent there to be brought back.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Do I detect an Engineer? :-)
While your plan has large issues, it is MUCH better than anything I have seen lately.
Just thinking out loud here:
We could use existing heavy lift bird to get a refueled tank to LEO, but it (the tank) would be a very different monster than the gravity fed one that exists today.
The mount points would have to change, and jigs designed that could be used in orbit to align the mount points up would be a new Engineering project.
On the upside, even though the nozzle geometry of the existing liquid rockets would not probably be optimum for operation in a vacuum, we do not need much energy to get things done as we already are in space.
Heck as the whole platform would be already in orbit, a tank with anything close to the amount of fuel as the original could be viewed as wretched excess.
All in all, I find your idea AWESOME! The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Thanks! :)
:)
I'm not a structural engineer or mechanical engineer by profession, but my father was an aeronautical engineer at North American Rockwell for about 33 years, working mostly out of the Downey facility. He was responsible for structural designs of the Orbiter crew section (flight deck / mid-deck -- structures forward of the cargo bay for those not familiar) and also the structural designs of the Apollo command / service modules going back to the 1960s. My older brother also worked at Rocketdyne for a while on the SSMEs, so I grew up with the Space Shuttle and Apollo being talked about quite often at the dinner table
I was thinking the same thing about using an existing heavy lift vehicle to get a tank to LEO. I agree a different breed of tank-design would be needed to keep the LOX and LH2 feeding properly in the microgravity. Maybe a sort of variable-volume fuel tank could be utilized.
I guess the next question is how to get these ideas in front of congress or those with some research dollars to fund a prototype before our grand vehicles are only museum pieces.