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NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its annual report on various space agency programs. The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding. It suggested that NASA's plan to launch the first crewed mission on the Orion, which would use the heavy lift Space Launch System to go around the moon, in 2021 was unrealistic given current, anticipated funding. The panel also suggested that lack of a clear plan for the Mars program is compromising its viability. It also suggested that the decision not to return to the moon should be revisited in view of the desire of international partners to do so and the need of low gravity surface experience in advance of going to Mars
He will be the first to drive a Tesla on Mars.
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
We first went to Mars in 1964, and we've never stopped. We've done all kinds of amazing science there, on an ongoing basis, and we continue to do so..
Seriously, sending humans is silly. Humans are frail, highly expensive to maintain due to all the extra mass that must be taken along to keep them going, and increase the price of missions by two orders of magnitude. Let's get the most science for the dollar, which is not done by "flags and footprints". It's done by continuing to push the envelope of robotic exploration. We're so far from a sustainable Mars-colony that we don't even have to think about that. Maybe in a thousand years we can revisit. For now, it's a waste.
"The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding."
Then the panel is considering the wrong things. The areas of concern regarding a journey to Mars are many, all much greater than any funding consideration. Basically, sending people to Mars with current technology is a stupid idea. The moon is _right next door_. Let's figure out how to live there first.
Yes, Congress funds projects, not the President.
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars. We dream to go there because our technology does not provide any other manageable travel to anything else. We go to the Moon again, or Mars.
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that?
To plant yet another flag?
That it would be a easy trip to California?
La cucaracha, la cucaracha...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding.
They needed a panel to figure this out? Shit, I have nothing at all to do with NASA and I thought that was bleeding obvious from the cheap seats where I sit. The Apollo program required funding about 4X what we see today as a percent of federal budget. I don't really see us getting back to the moon within my lifetime (much less mars) without a very substantial budget increase. It's been 40 years since we landed on the moon and we haven't been out of low orbit since. I see nothing in the current plans that will change that.
no, and sticking nano on the front of it doesn't make much difference.
You know how barometric pressure used to be given in inches of mercury? well that was the number of inches you could suck a pool of mercury up a straw (don't do that!) before you end up with a vacuum at the top of your straw and you are sucking away and nothing is rising any further because the pressure of the atmosphere won't push it up any more. Turns out you can't suck it up that far before it would rather not go any further. If you use other fluids the same kind of thing happens, but more so, because mercury is heavy. For water I think it is about 13 meters For the atmosphere itself the distance you can suck it up a straw is exactly the height of the atmosphere!
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized.
When you are spending taxpayer money it is ALWAYS political. This was true back during the Apollo era too. We just ignored it because of the Cold War.
The real problem is that to fund something like a space program you either need to be doing it for national security (see Cold War) or there needs to be economic opportunity. The economic opportunity is actually there but unfortunately the benefits are indirect and long term which makes it a hard sell to politicians who only care about the next election cycle.
Let's go back to the moon and stay in high orbit.
Let's stop pretending humans can survive in deep space or or Mars.
It doesn't take a week of reading articles @ JPL to realize we're not built for longterm weightlessness or different gravities.
Let's send remote devices that can do our bidding now.
Maybe one day when we start either manipulating our DNA or build ships with artificial gravity....but landfall is going to be unhealthy
and not in anyone's lifetime that can even see this page. It's all a con.
End of Line.
I've been saying for ages that this push to skip the Moon and go straight to Mars with manned missions was a bad idea.
Maybe you could blow the air instead? Granted, it'd have to be a pretty magic straw since the earth-moon distance changes by 26,000 miles through it's orbit. Not to mention that the pumping station would have to be mobile unless you want the straw to wrap around the Earth.
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars.
Sure they have. It's another freakin' planet. Or haven't you seen the photographs? You think another planet wouldn't be awfully interesting to explore in person?
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that? To plant yet another flag?
Because we would hugely advance human knowledge by going. On trip involving humans would require advances in medicine, life support, shielding, power, communications, propulsion, ground transport, and even possibly agriculture just to start with. More technology would have to be developed than you will see from 100 years of robotic probes. You also will get FAR more excitement about humans going. Only science geeks really give a shit about sending probes but pretty much everyone will be interested (at least for a while) in a human setting foot on Mars. Sending a person to Mars can inspire entire generations of engineers and scientists. Robots not so much.
We can make the choice to not invest in sending people outside of low earth orbit but I think that is extremely foolish and short sighted. A manned space program is among the very best investments in our future I can think of. Economically, socially and experientially.
Who needs to be on Mars when the own planet is in peril. Just a mind-distraction from currently unsolved issues.
Seems to be some firmware bug in human brains. Fixing that one, maybe a collective reboot is needed....
Good luck!
President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
If you support the President you blame congress.
If you do not like the President you blame him.
Truth is that President Obama did have the killing of the constellation program as a plank in his platform. Frankly none of the HHLV that have been proposed over the last decade or so seem like great ideas. They mostly seem like recycling old programs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
somehow, become politicized.
There has never been a time in history when it wasn't politicized. NASA was never all that popular, even in the heyday of Apollo. I think the highest it has ever been was during Apollo 11.
If you had a "nano" straw to Earth from the moon, could you sip air from it?
No, that takes MEGA MAID and the combination to Druidia's atmosphere.... Be sure to get the switch in the right position...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Showing NASA's budget as a percentage of the entire Federal budget isn't a very good comparison
There are plenty of others if you prefer. Pick any one of them. My point stands. We are spending less on the space program by whatever inflation adjusted measure you care to use. Thinking we are going to get to Mars which is MUCH harder than getting to the moon while spending less is pretty naive I think.
There's many risk during space flight. I'm impressed with our rover track record. what many people don't realize is the martian magnetosphere is very week. It's not strong enough to protect DNA from damaging radiation. The solar and cosmic radiation bombarding mars will need to be dealt with. We've learned how to build a life support system.. but even the ISS needs oxygen, nitrogen, and water and depends on supplies sent. I don't think we have the technology to support a 150 - 300 day flight to Mars (all depends on time of launch). Lets say a the mission starts when mars is closest to the earth. 150 days out. .. 10 days on mars... @ 300 days to make it home.
the mission would last at least 1 1/2 years. That's a long time to survive space. Life support systems can fail. return command module can fail.
The landing module would need to provide a shelter against the harsh martian environment. Adequate air pressure, oxygen, nitrogen, and protection against solar and cosmic radiation. The martian magnetosphere is very weak.
We need that drive we had in the 50s that lead to being the first to land on the moon. we didn't know if our astronauts would make it home then either.
We are going to need enough fuel for lift off of mars, break martian gravity and point the spacecraft to earth, and a safe reentry.
I am not sure if we have the technology yet.
So trip to Mars is dangerous? Go figure...
I nanodisagree with you.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
Any given thing should be cheaper now (in real terms) then in the 1960s. And it is...if you look at SpaceX.
SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground. They are breaking new economic ground by improving already existing technology. Don't get me wrong, that's SUPER important but SpaceX isn't going to send us to Mars. They aren't working on that problem in any meaningful way because they can't. No private company can make a credible business case for going to Mars. The economic and physical risks are large and mostly unquantified, the cost is enormous, the technology needed is substantial and well beyond any one company to develop, etc. No business could possibly hope to do it.
The ONLY institution with enough money and the ability to absorb the risk of pure exploration is a nation state. They might contract SpaceX to do something but the only realistic route to the first boots on Mars is through NASA or some other nation's equivalent agency.
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
The president's study on the future of human space flight suggested a manned mission to an asteroid as a next step because it would be a more doable milestone, we could pick the easiest asteroid to get to and back from and it would give us experience in deep space without having to also get us back off the surface of Mars which essentially doubles all the mission cost and risk.
An asteroid mission was a practical milestone (despite my own initially poor reaction) but not very sexy, so they went back to the 'Ya sure we are going to Mars' because that has captured the public imagination and Hollywood more than any other destination. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your view) it has not captured the public's wallets enough to fund it and it isn't clear that NASA actually has any intention to fund it, but it is still using Mars as a PR tool to help fund all the incremental stuff they are doing.
I think in the long term it further undermines NASA's credibility to be using Mars as PR for a bunch of other potentially worthwhile stuff they are doing. But for now, everything is about Mars, and getting there, and then... studying the shit out of a bunch of dead rocks. Except it really isn't.
President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
Yep, and this has been an issue way before Obama. I stopped listening to State of the Union addresses under Bush the Younger because while he would usually bring up going to Mars and other hopeful NASA missions, when I checked, NASAs budget would not even been keeping up with inflation. Presidents and even Congress have been talking about Mars missions for years, but they have just been talking, not actually doing anything. It's all just sound bites for the public and this safety panel is probably just NASA diplomatic way to telling everybody including the public that. Anybody that has been following the effort to get to Mars knows that there has been lots of talk and never a budget to actually do so.
Space has always been politicized. We need to find a way to make funding and planning more stable.
Perhaps the money should be committed up-front to specific plans and not subject to fiddling by the next shift in DC. I'm not sure how to legislate something with a "lock box" built into it. Space bonds?
Table-ized A.I.
We just need to wait for the Chinese to start seriously pushing for a manned Mars mission, then you'll get all those right wingers on board with their dollars. Nothing gets a conservative to spend money like the fear of non-white people doing something before they do it.
It's the exact same thing that happened with Mercury/Apollo.
NASA is actually quite popular.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Well ... the start of budget negotiations is the President's Budget Request. The surprise in the mars program being overfunded is BECAUSE it was not in PB16. Such gives rarely happen except as pork in the military budget to buy a certain already designed thing from a certain representative's district. Very rarely does it happen with RDT&E money.
President proposes a budget, Congress does whatever the fuck they want with it before passing it on to the Senate. NASA funding is heavily affected by pork considerations. And this year it seems they forgot to under-fund commercial crew.
Constellation deserved to die, its only official mission was to be an ISS ferry, and it required killing ISS to fund it. Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions. (And yes, I know they're planning to use Falcon 9 for commercial crew.)
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Mars dreams give targets, but shouldn't dictate policy or actual project goals. Sci-Fi is fiction, and there's a reason it is often paired with fantasy - super colony ship is just as much a fantasy as Puff the magic dragon. Create practical technology and an actual "in-space" industrial base by continuing efforts in LEO and work on handling the risks we face now. Those are primarily the recovery of sattelites for repair, control of waste/wreckage, and maintaining the agreements against space-based weaponry. A few attacks/collisions and then there are trillions of titanium particles whizzing around would easily make Swiss cheese out of everything else up there.
"So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature"
Well then, you are in luck!
Obama wanted to cancel manned space exploration and shift support of the existing ISS to a commercial, contracted manned taxi service. Instead a bipartisan, manned space exploration program, beginning with development of the SLS was mandated by Congress. Obama got some money for commercial manned space taxis too.
The only thing I see changing, regardless of who the next president is, might be joining the Europeans in going to the moon and putting Mars on the back burner, where IMHO, it belongs.
Except for Apple, what with their $205 billion dollars in cash on hand...
Apple has cash (not enough for a Mars mission) but if they said they were going to Mars their stock would plummet faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Companies cannot do things which have unknown ROI, distant if any payback, huge costs and unquantified risks. Doesn't matter how big the bank account is, they can't do it because they can't show how they'd make a profit doing it.
A realistic Mars mission is probably going to cost north of a trillion dollars and I'm not even counting all of the R&D costs.
"President puts forward the budget and congress approves."
The president presents a budget proposal. But the actual spending legislation is put together by the House of Representatives which can add funding for other things and is under no obligation to follow any of the president's recommendations. Indeed, before the 1920s, the president wasn't even legally required to submit a budget proposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yes. That proposed budget that the president presents and has a billion printed copies made has very little to do with what actually gets approved.
True support is where money is spent.
Then you just undercut your own argument, since more money was spent at the height of the Apollo program. But whatever, nobody every admits being wrong on the internet. I get it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions.
This is an interesting issue in regards to NASA--what should they be doing about rockets?
One the one hand, NASA does research and they should be looking at rocket technology as a benefit to the space community. Look at the Shuttle Engines: they are beasts. They burn hydrogen, not some hydrocarbon. The SLS will use 6 engines to lift a little more than the same amount of cargo as the Falcon Heavy's 18 engines. And NASA is looking at ways to improve that further. This sort of research is a good thing. And while research is a wonderful thing, shouldn't we take advantage of this research and build systems to use it?
On the other hand, does NASA really need it's own rocket to do it's missions? The rocket business, now-a-days, is such that NASA can get the same capabilities for significantly less from private industry. It's not like SLS will necessarily do something that Falcon/Falcon Heavy can't, at least in regards to lifting payloads into whatever orbit you might want. And should the government even be in the rocket business at this point? Yeah, there was a time when it was necessary, but is it still necessary today? Hell, the Space Shuttle put a serious crimp in the US rocket business when it first came out, because they could underbid everyone else. NASA was going into orbit with the Shuttle anyway, so they could give space away at a loss because it lowered the cost of flying the Shuttle.
Not really the people that lost interest, it is the elite that would be footing the bill for it and they themselves are not for anything more than the theatrics of a space program and only for entertainment value, if there were one that stayed to it's focus the elite would lose control of the people. The real problem with NASA is not within NASA, it is because the US has been run by a non domestic imperialist bus load of retards through mafia occupation for over a century now. There will be no advancement of a US space program, I see Putin standing up to this imperialist NWO bullcrap so my bet is on Russia for an actual space program that isn't just a pork barrel.
Careful, you might be committing a nanoaggression with that statement.
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The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
This is actually a problem throughout government. It's impossible to plan long-term missions well when you have to argue for funding every year, rather than being able to get a five-year spending plan approved. This bugs the hell out of the CIA, for example.
They need to establish resupply dumps all the way there and back to ensure the potato supply does not run low. In fact if they grow a sufficiently large potato in orbit that could solve all of their problems including shielding the crew from space radiation. The only risk then will be the question of if a sufficiently large potato could become sentient and decide they would make good fertiliser or somehow enslave them as a source of poo.
First you build a shipyard in orbit, then you build a long-term interplanetary research vessel, deploy, rinse and repeat. Do that and Mars will naturally follow.
The present mode of expensive one-off mission after another is horribly flawed.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I don't know - the Moon versus Mars thing is a tough call. The Moon would admittedly avoid the time and radiation danger of interplanetary travel, while laying the seeds for an eventual useful moon base (assuming we can figure out something useful to do there - asteroid mining may steal its thunder).
However, a moon base is also much more challenging than Mars in many ways. The extreme temperature fluctuations from a 709 hour day. The razor-sharp dust that is going to wreak havoc on air seals and moving parts. And the near-total lack of readily accessible local resources. It's got sand, which should be useful, but only a few spots where there are potentially limited quantities of ice (and those in perpetually-shadowed craters unlikely to be conveniently accessible from somewhere you'd want to build a base).
Meanwhile Mars seems to have at least trace amounts of water everywhere, plus giant ice caps and smaller glaciers that could be harvested at will, and all the near-pure CO2 you could want delivered continuously to your doorstep. Valuable seed-stock for food, oxygen and, biomass, the latter of which can be easily converted to high-performance construction materials like micro- and nano-cellulose.
I suppose it boils down to your goals - if you're hoping to establish a self-sufficient colony with the smallest possible up-front investment, Mars is the way to go. But those interplanetary transits means you're basically not going to have any backup if anything goes wrong, and there will probably be a lot of people who die in the early days. Not unlike the European colonization of the Americas - colonization is risky business.
On the other hand, if you just want to establish a research outpost to practice living on other worlds and see how humans respond to prolonged low gravity, then the Moon is the obvious choice. Greater challenges, but Earth is just a few days away in a crisis. It's likely to be a long time before the outpost can grow without importing substantial resources from Earth, but the things we learn will likely lower the death toll for eventual Mars colonization, and may be more applicable to orbital habitats as well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Re: the Moon as a learning/training tool to help with eventual Mars habitation: One question I would ask is to what extent using the Moon would be that much more useful than what could be learned from simulations/different environments on Earth which might also be similar to Mars, although perhaps lacking the low-G and no oxygen.
I agree and think that at some point in what will probably be the relatively close future the level of technology is going to be so high that the idea of risking any human life would just seem nonsensical in comparison. What would be the point of going through the horrendous task of putting humans in far away places when the eyes, ears, instrumentation, etc. that could be put there for a fraction of the cost and at no risk to human health would be vastly superior. True, its not as glamorous as sci-fi, and you're right in identifying sci-fi as a kind of romantic delusion that finally needs to be identified and purged.
I think that's an unfair characterisation of what SpaceX has done/is doing.
SpaceX is doing some great work in lowering cost to orbit and improving rockets in a variety of ways. The importance of that cannot be overstated. But they are most decidedly NOT at the frontier of human exploration. Rockets to orbit is a solved problem. So is landing rockets on land. We can get better at it and do it cheaper (which is what they are doing) but we've done it before. They are incrementally improving work that has already been done in other projects. They're making the technology better and cheaper and more accessible.
Landing an intact first stage after it was travelling 6,000mph the other direction is pretty groundbreaking.
We've landed rockets on the ground before. Hell we've done it on other planets before. Yes it is very impressive but it's a new wrinkle on ground that has already been covered.
Propulsive landing of a space capsule for re-use is pretty major too.
Yes it is, though they haven't done that yet.
Then there's the Raptor engine, most of the way through the development with some components already tested to a high degree. A full-flow gas-gas staged combustion engine and a large one at that. No-one's built an engine like that before.
Incremental improvements to mostly already existing technologies. They are like Apple making what was already there better and more accessible and more reliable. (and unlike Apple, cheaper) I don't mean to sound like am minimizing what they are doing. It's awesome, important and badly needed. But it isn't work on the frontier of human knowledge for the most part. What SpaceX is doing is lowering cost to orbit. That is a very important piece of the puzzle but SpaceX by itself isn't going to get us to Mars any time soon. They aren't working at all on the thousands of other problems that will have to be solved to enable a Mars mission and they can't because there is no business case for it. One day hopefully there will be and the work SpaceX is doing now is a key piece of making that possible.
These comments have gone from suck to blow!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You could indeed do a lot of practicing on Earth, the problem is we've already done much of it and are well into the realm of diminishing returns. Biosphere 2 showed that we can engineer a self-contained ecosystem, there were a couple of major unforseen problems, but they managed to adapt and future projects would compensate. Current projects tend to focus more on the low hanging fruit like meal variety and other morale issues. It's really just the low gravity, vacuum, and unknown complications that remain to be explored - many of which will be very different between the Moon and Mars, but many will be similar enough to offer useful lessons.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
NASA matters to me. When I sold, I looked into it, and made a rather large donation to NASA. I'd wanted to earmark it for Educational Programs but, it turns out, they told me that it was not allowed. I donated a lot, a 7 digit sum, as I was doing everything I could think of to lower my tax burden or at least not give it to the general fund for bombing little brown people. It was still a very, very large tax bill. But, at least I can say I donated to NASA.
I didn't realize you could but it turns out that you can. You just can't say you want it spent on anything in particular, it goes into the general budget. At least that's what the flurry of emails indicated. So, yeah... I like NASA. I like them a lot.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's not like SLS will necessarily do something that Falcon/Falcon Heavy can't, at least in regards to lifting payloads into whatever orbit you might want.
But it does do one thing that Falcon/FH can't, it's a great way to pass the pork around! The primary mission of SLS is not to launch a rocket, it is to keep Shuttle-era jobs and spending going.
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The only way that America will do lunar or martian missions is if it is a service. Basically, the GOP will continue to treat NASA as a jobs program, which is horribly wasteful. But the private space that first W, and now O, have been backing funding, will enable NASA to take missions to first the moon and then Mars. These will likely not use the wasteful SLS that Congress forced on O. But this will depend on the GOP to quit trying to kill private space, esp spacex.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Congress and president do the budget together. No doubt about it. But the president does have power on this. He can veto anything that Congress pushes. In particular, O did kill off constellation after the group said it was way underfunded and it became obvious that it would never work economically. Instead, O focused on private space to remove congress future ability to mess with things. The GOP has fought hard against private space, and instead created SLS funding. SLS was a deal in which o gets private space funding while the GOP get their jobs bill. In the end, SLS is dead, and private space will take us cheaply to the moon and Mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.