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Why NASA's Road To Mars Plan Proves That It Should Return To the Moon First
MarkWhittington writes: NASASpaceFlight.com published the results of current NASA thinking concerning what needs to be launched and when to support a crewed mission to Phobos and two crewed missions to the Martian surface between 2033 and 2043. The result is a mind-numbingly complex operation involving dozens of launches to cis-lunar space and Mars using the heavy lift Space Launch System. The architecture includes a collection of habitation modules, Mars landers, propulsion units (both chemical rockets and solar electric propulsion) and other parts of a Mars ship.
"cis" literally means "on this side of", just as "trans" literally means "on the other side of".
cis-lunar space can be loosely defined as that part of space that is within half a million km from Earth (which includes the Moon itself, as well as all the Earth-Moon Lagrange points).
For those who have not been paying attention:
President Obama has sabotaged any plan to get to Mars in the next few decades by the following actions:
1. He initially killed the Constellation program, which was designed to go to Mars and which, while begun under Bush, was actually supported by both parties in both the House and Senate (a near political miracle). He initially tried to replace Constellation with nothing, but then supported commercial crew to/from low Earth Orbit (to service the ISS which will be splashed into the Pacific in 2024 or 2028). He has slow-walked, obstructed, and transferred funds away from the big Mars rocket congress mandated and now his administrator has indicated it will not be able to fly its first manned mission until 2024. This stalled the post-Columbia disaster bi-partisan support for a Mars push. It also did not help that Obama sent his Administrator Charlie Bolden to go on Al Jazeera TV and tell them NASA's main mission under Obama was to make Muslims feel good about their contributions to science (see it on YouTube) - this showed a complete lack of seriousness about manned spaceflight.
2. Obama claimed, as he was ordering lots of shuttle-era infrastructure destroyed and employees laid off, that he was converting Kennedy Space Center into a futuristic "multi-user" launch facility where multiple rocket types from multiple vendors would be stacked in the VAB and rolled out to the two pads (39A and 39B) which would be restored to Apollo-era-style "clean pads". The old Apollo and Shuttle support structured in the VAB were ripped-out to be replaced with structured theoretically supporting a wide variety of rockets. Each vendor would use a custom MLP adapted to his rocket, would stack in one of the 4 VAB high bays, and any would be able to launch from either pad. This was all a lie. Obama made a deal with SpaceX who have trashed the 39A pad, making it unusable by anything but a SpaceX Falcon9, and constraining SLS rockets to only 39B which will choke the maximum flight rate. Musk has built a large building, complete with huge corporate logo, right in the middle of the crawler way on OUR national historic landmark which he is mutilating.
3. Everybody knows a Mars mission will require either a handful of Large SLS-sized rockets or a LOT of smaller rocket launches. Obama has limited the manufacturing capacity of SLS to 2 per year, and the trashed 39A means all SLS launches MUST use 39B which will require refurbishing between launches as all pads do. This means there will be no way to launch enough of the large rockets rapidly enough to assemble a large Mars mission in orbit in a reasonable time. If it takes 6 SLS launches to send 3 people to Mars, just assembling that in orbit will take THREE YEARS thanks to Obama.
4. Of course, the larger problem is that Obama has DOUBLED the national debt in only 7 years. The Nation will owe $20,000,000,000,000 by the time he leaves office and will have promised to pay-out another $200,000,000,000,000 in benefits for which it has not yet found a source of funds. We now spend 70% of the national budget on welfare and other social programs, plus hundreds of billions of dollars per year just in interest on the debt. Interest rates have been held artificially-low during the Obama years but MUST eventually rise - and when they do the interest on the debt will balloon to be more than we spend on the entire military. The CBO (the non-political institutional budget analysis service of congress) says it can see no way for the government to pay all the bills beyond the year 2030. There is simply NO WAY the taxpayers will fund a space program while social security checks are bouncing in 2030. It's over. Get used to it. Obama has killed the Mars dream and don't look to Musk to keep it alive - HIS plans depend on government purchases of flights on his rockets.
How do you account for the cost of getting "tanker trucks" to the Moon? If you want to refuel rockets on the Moon you have to get the fuel there somehow, or create it on-site.
Currently the options for that are:
a) mine lunar helium-3. Cool, but let's get some rockets that can use it first.
b) spend unnecessary money to ship fuel there just so we can put that fuel into another rocket, which needs it because... it spent all the fuel going to the Moon instead of Mars.
c) ???
Anyone who hasn't actually read up on Mars Direct really just needs to stop commenting and do that first, so they can actually understand what the hell they are talking about. The Moon as a waypoint is completely and utterly unnecessary. It has no useful resources for this purpose other than helium-3, which we can't even make proper use of (because we're too scared of anything relating to nuclear energy to launch a damn RTG, let alone finish development on any actual nuclear engine). Doing anything on the Moon requires an absurd amount of machinery, life-support, and docking mechanisms, which are completely overkill for what you're trying to do (i.e, go to Mars, which is a balmy paradise compared to the environmental hell of the Moon.)
First, while Mars requires a longer journey, it actually isn't substantially harder to send a rocket to than the Moon. If you use aerobraking, it's about the same delta-v. Yes, more consumables would be needed because the flight is months instead of days, which does affect the mass of the payload, but it may also be easier to build a sustainable colony on Mars (presence of an atmosphere and maybe water, higher gravity). So I don't think Luna is even really useful as a practice run.
Second, a launch schedule like this is pretty much the only thing I've heard that could justify the development of SLS. The entire project has smelled like "big bucks on development, goes over budget or budget gets slashed so it only gets used a few times" from the beginning. If they can get Congress to give them the budget for this, yes, that would be worth making SLS for. Will Congress spring for thirty-plus Saturn V-class rockets, for only three missions? I don't think so, but I hope they will anyway.
Commercial crew funding is a political fight president Obama created and continues to wage. He knows congress wants deep space missions (that was the bi-partisan choice after the Columbia broke up on reentry) but he campaigned in 2008 on a promise to de-fund NASA and transfer the money into public education (he made the promise in the early spring of 2008 to a meeting of the national teacher's union).
When he tried to shut down manned spaceflight in 2010 it was even too much for many Democrats. He initially tried to get support by proposing the Orion capsule be completed in a crippled way ONLY for use as a "lifeboat" for the ISS (to be launched unmanned and only used to return crews to Earth in a very unlikely severe emergency). This failed to win congressional support. Then Obama hand-picked a committee (the Augustine Committee) to come up with a plan and he settled on commercial crew (which was a plan started by Mike Griffin under Bush as "commercial cargo" with an option for later crewed missions). Obama keeps trying to rob money from the deep space projects congress wants and uses "commercial crew" as the excuse. He has been offered funding for BOTH but refuses (because that would bust budget caps and he only is willing to do that if congress will let him bust the caps on ALL spending.) President Obama is, in effect, holding funding for commercial crew hostage in an attempt to massively bloat ALL government spending.
The congress won't let him gut their deep space priority, and he won't accept any more for commercial without hundreds of billions more for everything else, so commercial crew suffers and he and his advisers keep running to media outlets and trashing the Republicans. His supporters trash the congress for allowing Obama to keep buying Russian rocket rides THINK about it! - Obama keeps insisting on paying in-advance for Russian seats, when he COULD use the same dollars to purchase seats in-advance from Musk if he wanted to. He has DOUBLED the food stamps program (does he admit to doubling poverty in the country???) in addition to growing most other wealth-redistribution programs of the US govt, and it's STILL not enough. He is fixated on boosting all social welfare spending to insane levels and commercial crew is a sacrificial lamb in that fight.