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NASA Uncertain How To Proceed In Developing Deep Space Module (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: One of the provisions of the new NASA spending bill, which provided a hefty $1.3 billion boost to the space agency's budget, is a mandate to build a prototype habitation module for deep space exploration by 2018. Space News suggested that NASA is uncertain how to proceed with this sudden largess. Quite some time has passed since the space agency has gotten more money than expected and been told to speed up the development of an item of hardware. Usually, the opposite happens, with accompanying delays and increases in overall costs.
Deep Space 9. Already done!
No? Then this is all nonsense.
Although I have not played it, everything I've seen from Kerbal Space Program suggests that there is only one possible way to proceed.
Find a small immortal green alien and strap him to roughly 1.21 gigatons of rocket fuel.
>> NASA Uncertain How To Proceed In Developing Deep Space Module
So...all NESA's noise about preparing for a manned Mars mission was just a joke then?
Put on an RFQ to some qualified bidders (like Boeing and Lockmart) and fund the darned program. Do not repeat the mistakes of Commercial Crew and both fund development of spacecraft, then buy back rides without owning the vehicle (SpaceX). That model has worked very poorly. NASA management is pathetic.
Step 1 - genetically engineer over-ambitious, amoral super humans
Step 2 - have them take over the world for a while
Step 3 - after world revolution overthrows these, freeze them and send them out to space
Step 4 - ???
Step 5 - Yell Khaaann!!
IMHO, this is why the push for NASA to develop these techs. One of the SLS 's primary missions is their Near-Earth Asteroid Scout mission; the conspiracy theorist in me says that NASA is doing risk-mitigation just in case Apophis hits the keyhole in 2029.
I've had the feeling more than once that NASA promotes a lot of ideas that they know are impractical in order to fire up their base of support, which is largely SF fans who can't or won't distinguish fantasy from reality. With an election coming up the strategy works brilliantly, and now they're handed a big pot of money to begin realizing their dreams. So they have to hire a battalion of scientists and engineers to work on growing crops on Mars, squeezing water out of rocks, mining asteroids for minerals, and all the rest. This should be interesting.
Nasa's uncertainty is probably not about what they want or need. More likely the problem is contingency planning for when Congress changes the budgets and/or goalposts again next year.
Not joking, model it after a prison. That is literally the lowest most basic needs and nothing more.
It doesn't really matter what NASA has now. Space exploration requires projects that run 20 or 50 or even 100 years. Yes we have to reach that far if we really want to hit some big goals.
But the 4-year election cycle means NASA's funding is threatened every time we elect a new round of idiots. Sometimes they are Pro-NASA but mostly they aren't, and cutting funding is what happens.
You cannot explore space with a 20-year plan supported by fickle 4-year election cycles and 2-bit politicians.
Other countries like China have no such issues. China can set a 50-year plan and proceed to start on it. NASA is stuck.
Sig for hire.
So...all NESA's noise about preparing for a manned Mars mission was just a joke then?
Probably not but I think the claims of getting there by the 2030s are absurdly unrealistic and certainly haven't been funded in a way that would make them feasible. It might be technologically possible but I don't see it being politically viable. I think NASA knows that it isn't politically viable so they aren't seriously planning for it. There certainly hasn't been serious funding on the level necessary to do a realistic manned Mars mission so why should NASA seriously plan for one? They are working on it but the Apollo program had double the funding NASA gets now (adjusted for inflation) and the Moon is a lot easier.
Skylab was built from a Saturn V upper stage. Easy to put in orbit. Designed to be hooked up to other parts of a spacecraft. Quite sizable for the planned crew. Update the design with the technology we developed over the decades since then.
Skylab was built from a Saturn V upper stage.
Which we no longer have and do not have any plans to build again. We could do something similar but first you have to answer the question of what you are trying to accomplish. We used that design because it was economical at the time. Doesn't necessarily mean it is a good idea today.
Easy to put in orbit.
Only true if you have a Saturn V rocket. We stopped making those 40 years ago. Yes we could do something similar if we build a Saturn V replacement but easy to orbit is merely one consideration.
Quite sizable for the planned crew. Update the design with the technology we developed over the decades since then.
And do what with it exactly? What does a Skylab copy get us? What problems are you solving that cannot be accomplish better in other ways? Is copying programs from the 1970s really the best way to move the space program forward?
But... but.. but... NASA already gets like 25% of the Federal budget.
And now Congress wants to give them Billions more while there are starving brown transgender children that need to be bombed?
GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, AMERICA!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just buy some hardware from Bigelow and customize it. Why start from scratch?
One can debate the utility of landing a human on Mars. Face it, the Chinese will be the first to accomplish this, because they can conduct long-term planning across successive administrations, where the US can't do this (current administrations cancel previous administrations space agendas, etc. ad. nauseum.)
The hammer and the sickle of communism will be the first human monument on Mars.
The US has had it's day.
Humans in deep space for any length of time will need serious shielding to avoid the health risks of ionizing radiation (gamma rays, etc). Traditional shielding is heavy and crowds out payload. Without a breakthrough in shielding manned space flight can't leave our planet's protection (the magnetosphere) for any length of time. No moon base - at least on the surface, no Mars missions, no Lagrange point space stations.
They could have kept all those shuttle tanks in orbit. They would make a perfect habitat.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As of 2012, NASA is undergoing research in superconducting magnetic architecture for potential active shielding applications. Active Shielding, that is, using magnets, high voltages, or artificial magnetospheres to slow down or defect radiation, has been considered to potentially combat radiation in a feasible way. So far, the cost of equipment, power and weight of active shielding equipment outweigh their benefits. For example, active radiation equipment would need a habitable volume size to house it, and magnetic and electrostatic configurations often are not homogenous in intensity, allowing high-energy particles to penetrate the magnetic and electric fields from low-intensity parts, like cusps in dipolar magnetic field of Earth.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Okay bear with me. Everyone knows habitation in deep space would be one of the most psychologically demanding things for a human crew to endure.
The solution is simple:
A ship stocked with a self-sufficient hydroponically-grown lifetime supply of weed.
Fund industry to get them there.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
We're probably in a better state to reach Mars today than to reach the Moon in the 1960's.
Technologically I would cautiously agree though there are some pretty substantial technical problems yet to be solved. Politically it's not even close. The US is realistically the only country right now that could seriously consider such a mission and those in power currently will never be willing to raise the taxes that would be necessary to fund such a mission.
The Martian will either be Elon Musk or the vanguard of the next space race.
Won't be Elon Musk I'm afraid unless he can amass a Scrooge McDuck sized fortune. Don't get me wrong, I think it's super cool that he is working hard on the problem but I don't think he'll be able to get the financing for the trip even if we can work out the technical details. There are good reasons to go to Mars but they aren't business reasons. Not yet anyway. The risk is huge, the cost is huge and the return on investment is impossible to determine.
The only way I see us getting to Mars within the next 100 years is if we have an existential crisis (war, cold war, asteroid, etc...) or some minor miracle of a technological breakthrough. The only reason we went to the Moon was because of the Cold War with Russia.
There are no technology barriers to a manned mission to Mars. All the barriers are political and financial. We can launch big stuff. We can make a life support system work for years. We can surround the crew compartment with enough water to keep radiation levels tolerable. We can make a lander, using big fuel tanks to land on rocket power instead of aerobraking. We can make a base on Mars to sustain humans for a couple of years. We can make radiation shielded EVA suits and exploration cars. We can land enough rocket parts and fuel to get back to orbit. We can return to Earth, and we can land from Earth orbit.
Bringing back some Mars rocks would be nice in my lifetime. Even in unmanned missions.
An unmanned mission to bring back Mars rocks is probably doable. I'm dubious that we will send humans there in my remaining lifespan.
Beginning of asteroid mining too.
I think asteroid mining is a ridiculous concept. To be economically viable one of two things has to happen. Either 1) you have to bring the materials back to Earth to be refined and utilized or 2) you have to develop technology to refine and utilize them in space. If you choose option 1) you have to drop VERY large rocks onto the surface of the Earth. Do I have to explain that dropping large rocks onto Earth's surface is REALLY destructive? If you choose option 2) you have to replicate entire supply chains in space and we have ZERO technology in the pipeline to do that. We have no smelting or mining equipment that works in space on anything close to an industrial scale. We don't have the robotics. We don't have the control systems. Even if we did we have no power systems adequate to drive them on an industrial scale except maybe nuclear fission and that's pretty dicey even here on Earth.
These are completely realistic goals.
Depends on your timescale.
and catches NASA unprepared. This makes it look like actual Mars mission hardware (precursor) is to be built soon, while also preparing for development of the lunar stations NASA's prime partners (ESA, JAXA, etc) view as higher priority than Mars.
Not sure of that. Even India has sent a spacecraft to Mars. The hammer and sickle are nowhere to be seen. Communism has had its day.
The first forays outside of lunar orbit will be more like 6 month polar expeditions. Simple, austere.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed/data/space/documents/orion/OrionAsteroidMissionBrief.pdf
There are no technology barriers to a manned mission to Mars.
You're kidding right? We have built barely any of the stuff you cite. We certainly don't have any of it ready to pull of the shelf and send to Mars. We don't have human rated habitats for that kind of mission or duration, we don't have life support systems, we haven't figured out the physiology problems, we haven't even tried building a spacecraft surrounded by water and certainly don't have any other type of shielding, etc. The notion that there are no technological barriers is just nonsense. We can probably figure them out with enough time and money but that isn't the same as saying we are ready to go to Mars. Absent a crash program to work on all this (which won't happen) it's going to take decades to work out the technical details. We've only been outside of low earth orbit a handful of times and nothing longer than a few days. I don't mean to be rude (seriously I don't) but if you seriously think we've figured out all the technical problems you don't adequately understand the problems.
I think you are correct that the financial and political barriers are the bigger problems but let's not understate the technical ones.
Finding a plan that involves "space" probably involves going back to the drawing board for an organization primarily mandated to reach out to Muslim nations.
Bringing back a bunch of alien rocks home to study is a bad idea... have you not watched any sci fi???
Better to study them extensively where they are before bringing anything back
What do you want with to do with a bunch of rocks anyway? What we need is trees, or something that can do what trees do but with more output per square mm.
Without the deep space module, Space Launch System (SLS) is pretty much pointless. An expansion of the mentioned NextSTEP program to be more like COTS/CCDEV/CCDEV2 should probably be utilized. Let several companies vie for it on fixed cost contracts (go over budget, company eats the overrun) on a step by step program. I certainly hope it doesn't become a debacle like SLS/Constellation.
with all that water, we can then ship up some dolphins so we can finally have dolphin sex in outer space.
Everyday radiation in space isn't nearly the hazard it has been made out to be. Radiation levels on the Martian surface have been shown with long term observations (via MSL) on the Martian surface with no shielding to be roughly equivalent to what astronauts experience inside ISS. Levels on the trip from Earth to Mars were about twice that, indicating there will have to be some mitigation there. But with even minimal protections, such as some water/food shielding in major sleeping/work areas on the spacecraft and some dirt on the surface habitat you could pretty easily get levels BELOW what ISS astronauts experience. In both cases of course though heavy radiation shelters may be necessary short term for solar storms.
Musk will be able to generate the money to fund going to Mars IF he can prevent 'modern capitalists' from sitting on the boards of and owning significant amounts of company stock.
At this point in human history all of our expenditures are based on returning an increasing amount of revenue. It will be the death of all innovation if it continues at this rate and Musk will need to figure out how to counterbalance the weight of millions of mba's following recipes for success which do not include investment into the company
NASA only do probes and PR nowadays.
PLAN A:
1) Goal: to bootstrap a private effort with the same success as the booster outsourcing did.
2) Requires: a recognizable revenue stream for industry to shoot for
3) Requires: a commercial reason for being not dependent on fickle govt funding.
4) Conclusion: dead in water, unless funded by a really impressive kickstarter
PLAN B:
1) Goal: Fund PLAN A by actually showing Congress good effort for a few dollars spent.
2) Requires: An old NASA attitude with a shorter term goal. (A modular, portable station outside Earth orbit in 5 years.)
3) Requires: A module interface definition. (ISS defn is way insufficient.)
4) Requires: 5 Commercial contracts for delivery of modules on-orbit to the station. ($100M for the module + $100M for the delivery and setup)
5) Requires: NASA to manage the whole thing for $300M.
6) Conclusion: I won't hold my breath
Module list:
1) Crew + Life support (2 copies)
2) Power + Propulsion (2 copies)
3) Experiments + storage (1 module)
I'd love to be around to see people when all of the Musk hype comes crashing down.
At this point in human history all of our expenditures are based on returning an increasing amount of revenue.
It's worth noting that all progress is a result of effort that returns more than was put in. Profit is a standard measure of that.
It will be the death of all innovation if it continues at this rate and Musk will need to figure out how to counterbalance the weight of millions of mba's following recipes for success which do not include investment into the company
It's because modern society stamps out risk wherever they find it. Why make long term decisions when the short term ones are always profitable? A similar situation goes on at the personal responsibility level. For long term planning to be relevant, there has to be good consequences to doing it well as oppose to poor consequences otherwise.
And practice with that.
Then put another into Mars orbit, make sure you can go too and fro.
That means a Mars colony/ rescue plan is get to and from Mars orbit, the rest having been tested/adequately supplied already.
If you think dropping large rocks onto Earth's surface is even remote possibility at this point, you need to take a few physics classes.
If you have the tech to mine asteroids you will have the tech to drop the asteroids onto the planet. It's like nuclear power. If you can build a power plant you can build a bomb. You don't get one without the other.
And I happen to have a college minor in physics as well as a pair of engineering degrees so I've taken "a few" physics classes.