NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on NASA's ongoing work on a manned trip to the moon. From the report: Without a new administrator even nominated yet, NASA's acting head Robert Lightfoot on Wednesday requested a study of whether next year's first flight of the Space Launch System rocket, billed as the most powerful NASA has built, could have a crew of astronauts. "I know the challenges associated with such a proposition," Lightfoot said in a letter to his agency, citing costs, extra work, and "a different launch date" for the planned 2018 Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). The mission would be launched by the massive SLS, which is still in development, then boosted by a European service module to put three astronauts inside the new Orion space capsule on a three-week trip around the moon. NASA first sent three astronauts around the moon in 1968 in the Apollo 8 mission. The last astronaut to stand on the moon, the late Gene Cernan returned to Earth in 1972. The new talk of a repeat moon-circling mission, aboard an untested spacecraft, has space policy experts variously thrilled, dismissive, and puzzled. "I frankly don't quite know what to say about it," space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University said. Writing on NASAWatch, Keith Cowing called the study request a "Hail Mary" pass to save the life of the SLS ahead of Trump installing a budget cutter to head the space agency. The Government Accountability Office estimates the costs of SLS and its two planned launches (a second, crewed mission is planned for 2023) at $23 billion.

Comments

Human Rated

[Anonymous Coward]

SLS is going to be tested human rated sooner or later. Why not start when the money is on the table?

Why not land on the moon?

[Joe_Dragon]

Why not land on the moon?

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

Because you have to walk before you run. Before landing on the moon don't you think NASA should get to the moon first. Apollo 11 was not the first Apollo mission to reach the moon if you remember history.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[bobbied]

Been there... Done that.... Plus, it's a whole new kettle of fish when you start trying to land on return and surviving the trip.

Maybe if we billed it as a "dress rehearsal" for a Mars mission.... Go out and orbit the moon for the duration of a Mars trip, go to the surface, return and orbit the moon some more to simulate the trip home.... All within a quick (a couple of days) return distance of home... Maybe that would sell the PR better?

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[Rei]

With what descent stage? (and preferably ascent stage too ;) )

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[LifesABeach]

Money problems? Consider; Trump Tower, The Moon.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Landing on the moon is much, much harder than just flying around it.

If you're just flying past the moon, you need a capsule of, say, 2 tonnes to carry a couple of astronauts. But if you want to slow down into a low lunar orbit, you need about 25% of your mass in fuel on the way out (an extra 0.5 tonnes) and another 25% of your mass in fuel to slow down into lunar orbit in the first place (an extra 0.625 tonnes, since you have to slow down the fuel you'll use on the way out).

To actually land, you need about 25% of your mass in fuel again to slow down into lunar orbit, another 100% to land, another 100% to take off again, and 25% again to escape lunar orbit. So, working backwards: your 2-tonne capsule needs 0.5 tonnes of fuel to escape lunar orbit. Those 2.5 tonnes need another 2.5 tonnes to get you off the lunar surface. Those 5 tonnes require another 5 tonnes to help land them. And those 10 tonnes need another 2.5 tonnes to put them in lunar orbit in the first place.

Add engines, and tanks to actually hold the fuel, and you get up to the 15-tonne mass of the Apollo lunar landers ... compared to the dry mass of their ascent stage, which was only about 2 tonnes. That's the extra it takes to actually land on the moon.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've done it (sent a manned ship to at least loop around the Moon) nine times already, almost 50 years ago.

At this point, it's not impressive or useful to replicate Apollo VIII.

It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware. The only time they did that before was for the STS, and that was only because the STS was unable to fly or land without pilots. That was a serious design flaw. This is just a stunt, forced upon NASA due to the obscene cost of the new launch system.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

We've done it (sent a manned ship to at least loop around the Moon) nine times already, almost 50 years ago.

And none of that equipment really exists anymore.

At this point, it's not impressive or useful to replicate Apollo VIII.

Who said anything that the goal was to "impress" you or the American people? If the goal is to use the moon as a base, NASA has to re-develop the technology to get back there. Remember the goal often is a mandate by the government.

It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware. The only time they did that before was for the STS, and that was only because the STS was unable to fly or land without pilots. That was a serious design flaw. This is just a stunt, forced upon NASA due to the obscene cost of the new launch system.

That's a pretty illogical position. Show me the "tested" hardware that will get NASA back to the moon. Most of the tested hardware only exists in museums and are not functional even if NASA wanted to use it. NASA has to build new hardware. They have to test it somehow.

Also when NASA sent men to the moon, all the hardware was "untested" at the time.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[XxtraLarGe]

Money problems? Consider; Trump Tower, The Moon.

Appeal to his ego, tell him space tourism is going to be YUUUGE!

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wasn't. They tested it unmanned. Then they tested it in LEO multiple times. Only then did they send it around the moon. Apollo 8 most likely would have been a failure if not for the earlier testing.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also when NASA sent men to the moon, all the hardware was "untested" at the time.

Nonsense. As I stated, the only time NASA launched people on the first flight of a launch system was the Shuttle, and that was only because the Shuttle couldn't be flown and landed remotely.

The Saturn V, for example, was flown unmanned twice before it was deemed safe enough to put people on it.

The rest of your response is just fanboy nonsense. NASA has, once again, produced a launch that is too expensive to use. Its safety is unknown and it is foolish to put people on the first flight as a stunt. But, of course, NASA doesn't have the budget to actually test it properly, let alone use it.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

No it wasn't. They tested it unmanned. Then they tested it in LEO multiple times. Only then did they send it around the moon. Apollo 8 most likely would have been a failure if not for the earlier testing.

Your logic baffles me: You are saying sending a mission to moon requires "untested" hardware but when NASA did the exact same thing the last time with Apollo 8 and Apollo 10, they were magically tested without having done it before.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that we haven't done it in nearly 50 years, then yeah, at this point it actually is useful to replicate Apollo VIII, to prove that we actually still can.

Although SLS wouldn't be my first choice.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

Nonsense. As I stated, the only time NASA launched people on the first flight of a launch system was the Shuttle, and that was only because the Shuttle couldn't be flown and landed remotely.

By the OP's logic, all of NASA's new proposed flights to the moon will be "untested" yet all of Apollo's flight were tested. No, NASA, in each Apollo mission before 11, tested different aspects of the mission. Yet the OP thinks NASA will just strap some astronauts to a moon vehicle this time and hit the launch button. That in landing on the moon with new hardware, NASA won't first test the hardware by launching it at the moon first.

The rest of your response is just fanboy nonsense. NASA has, once again, produced a launch that is too expensive to use. Its safety is unknown and it is foolish to put people on the first flight as a stunt. But, of course, NASA doesn't have the budget to actually test it properly, let alone use it.

Perhaps you would like to read carefully before you levy insults .

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Immerman]

Hardly an illogical position, unless you ignore the existence of unmanned spacecraft.

Just send the new vehicle to the moon and back unmanned, and once it's sufficiently tested, *then* you include crew. Of course that assumes the vehicle can operate unmanned, which might be presumptuous, but isn't completely unreasonable. Even the Apollo missions spent 7 years on unmanned test flights before the first manned capsule (Apollo 1) was launched, and it wasn't until Apollo 11 that they actually landed on the moon.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[Immerman]

Good luck getting anyone to sign up for that kind of radiation exposure for a "dress rehearsal"...

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

Hardly an illogical position, unless you ignore the existence of unmanned spacecraft.

The logic of the OP: NASA shouldn't use new, "untested" hardware. In other words, NASA should use tech from 50 years. My point: The Apollo tech was also new and untested when NASA first used it. NASA always has to test tech before they use it.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[religionofpeas]

Who said anything that the goal was to "impress" you or the American people? If the goal is to use the moon as a base, NASA has to re-develop the technology to get back there.

There's no economic benefit to a moon base, so it's all for show anyway.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[CrimsonAvenger]

ho said anything that the goal was to "impress" you or the American people? If the goal is to use the moon as a base, NASA has to re-develop the technology to get back there.

There's no economic benefit to a moon base, so it's all for show anyway.

Think back to, oh, 1600. Imagine the conversations in taprooms in England- "there's no economic benefit to a colony in North America, so it's really just for show anyway"....

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly an illogical position, unless you ignore the existence of unmanned spacecraft.

The logic of the OP: NASA shouldn't use new, "untested" hardware. In other words, NASA should use tech from 50 years. My point: The Apollo tech was also new and untested when NASA first used it. NASA always has to test tech before they use it.

OP here. You seem to have a real problem with reading comprehension.

Your "logic" seems to be that it is impossible to test the new rocket without strapping people on top. This is, of course, nonsense.

As I stated above, the ONLY manned rocket that was ever flown without full-up unmanned testing first was the Shuttle, and that was only because it was impossible to land the Shuttle on "autopilot". EVERY other manned rocket was first flown unmanned, to prove out each component, and the interactions between components, BEFORE they risked putting people on them.

Putting a crew on the first attempt to fly a new rocket is foolhardy. To do so on a stack that can fly just fine without a crew is a reckless stunt.

But, NASA doesn't have the budget to "waste" a vehicle or two on test flights. So they will turn the first unmanned test flight into a manned stunt, and hope they don't kill the crew in the process.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Tim the Gecko]

The Saturn V was tested without humans in the Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 flights. The second of these discovered "pogoing" behavior, which had to be fixed before Apollo 8. The astronauts were brave guys - "Final testing of modifications to address the problems of pogo oscillation, ruptured fuel lines, and bad igniter lines took place on December 18, a mere three days before the scheduled launch".

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[religionofpeas]

there's no economic benefit to a colony in North America

The analogy makes no sense. You could have dropped a naked man there without any tools, and he'd be able to survive. Try that on the Moon.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[thinkwaitfast]

This exact argument was made to justify the ISS.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[R3d M3rcury]

Apollo 7 was the first manned test of the Apollo capsule. It was launched on a Saturn 1B, not a Saturn V. So the CSM had been tested in Earth orbit.. Furthermore, Apollo 8 was originally supposed to be a test of the LM in Earth orbit. However, because the LM was not ready, Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 missions were essentially "swapped."

Apollo 8 was the first manned test of the Saturn V. There had been several tests of the Saturn V before Apollo 8, however there were plenty of issues. NASA tested some of their fixes before the flight of Apollo 8, but never on actual Saturn V. So, in many ways, Apollo 8 was riding on an "untested" Saturn V.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Gavagai80]

Think back to, oh, 1600. Imagine the conversations in taprooms in England- "there's no economic benefit to a colony in North America, so it's really just for show anyway"....

But nobody actually thought that. Columbus came to America searching for a lucrative trade route to the riches of India. Those who followed him came to loot the gold of the american people and enslave them, with a clear quick profit in mind.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[currently_awake]

The fur trade paid for the pilgrims to invade the countries of North America, it wasn't done for "Noble" reasons.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[mrsquid0]

But there was clear economic benefit in setting up colonies in North America. The fishing ground off Newfoundland were making some people in Western Europe very rich. The gold and silver being looted from Central and South America created and maintained the Spanish Empire for over a century, and there was a wide-spread belief that there were similar "cities of gold" in North America. Many a man in Britain and France became wealthy from the North American fur trade. The economic benefits of the New World were very real and very clear to both the chattering classes and to the newly emerging capitalist class.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[MachineShedFred]

Apollo 8 and 10 were just Apollo 7 and 9 in lunar orbit. 7 tested the command module, not even on a full-blown Saturn V. Apollo 8 then took it to the moon, testing the service module and SBS rocket engine. 9 tested the LM in earth orbit. 10 took it into suborbital lunar flight, doing basically the whole Apollo 11 mission except the landing, flag planting, etc.

They were all test flights, and all of these guys were test pilots.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apollo 1 didn't fly - it burned up on the pad during a test.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much was learned on each I've that waa critical to the next? Has there even been any consensus on if any could have been skipped? Very interesting.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS space travels does not come with guarantees not back then not now.
If they survive great we have a party if not we don't.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Joe_Dragon]

on GOP moon people punch cops in the face to go jail vs being shoot out a air lock when they can't pay there life support fees. And like health care the courts have ruled that the jail / prisons must provide it.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[confused one]

Because the lunar descent and landing hardware was cancelled with Constellation. In other words, there is no lunar landing module that fits on SLS -- they'd have to design and build it. Oh, but there's no money for that. So, we do a dog and pony show by flying around the moon.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

not true.
they "dropped" entire colonies off only to have most of them die.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[k6mfw]

Because if you want to land on the moon then somebody (and it's always somebody else) has to come with real money now for a lander. Oh, also need a transfer stage to get out of earth orbit to the Moon (more money). Also a service module (even more money) good enough for a earth return from lunar orbit, or TEI trans-earth-injection burn or as Michael Collins wrote, "the save-our-ass burn."

This is why everybody (except Paul Spudis and Dennis Wingo) talk about Mars because you can defer costs for transfer stage and lander to some other smucks 20 years into future.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[k6mfw]

The Saturn V, for example, was flown unmanned twice before it was deemed safe enough to put people on it.

in some ways the third flight was a "Hail Mary" pass, that second SaturnV flight was pretty hairy, but then there was a huge infrastructure of people and materials that pulled a lot of all-nighters to fix problems. Impetus was spy sat photos showing a really huge rocket at Baikonur, shortly after it was no longer there. Higher ups were thinking Soviets just test launched a Saturn V class rocket (they didn't know that at the time it blew up). So gotta beat the Reds to the Moon, and lunar module was not ready for a flight, and Apollo 8 was scheduled. I clearly remember on TV, "and that was the TLI burn that will send them to the Moon." In an instant the world was completely different. Especially after a terrible year, some good news particularly the famous earthrise photo.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Ol Olsoc]

We've done it (sent a manned ship to at least loop around the Moon) nine times already, almost 50 years ago.

At this point, it's not impressive or useful to replicate Apollo VIII.

I suspect a shakedown of sending people to Mars will indeed be a trip around the moon. If not, it's a good idea to have a shakedown.

p>It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware. The only time they did that before was for the STS, and that was only because the STS was unable to fly or land without pilots. That was a serious design flaw. This is just a stunt, forced upon NASA due to the obscene cost of the new launch system.

You kind sir, need to go back and read about Apollo 8. It fits your definition of insanity quite well. The Saturn V had 2 problem filled missions and was questionably ready - very questionably - to launch humans. The earlier Apollo flights were not capable of sending humans to the moon, so they took a gamble.

We were not all weak willed pussies once upon a time.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Ol Olsoc]

No it wasn't. They tested it unmanned. Then they tested it in LEO multiple times. Only then did they send it around the moon. Apollo 8 most likely would have been a failure if not for the earlier testing.

It wasn't a Saturn V they tested it on. Apollo 8 was the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket. https://www.theguardian.com/sc... Here's a nice story on the matter. They were taking a pretty big gamble.

Regardless it was a time when we didn't cower in our closets and saferooms because a UPS man was at the door. We did stuff.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Ol Olsoc]

Nonsense. As I stated, the only time NASA launched people on the first flight of a launch system was the Shuttle, and that was only because the Shuttle couldn't be flown and landed remotely.

The Saturn V, for example, was flown unmanned twice before it was deemed safe enough to put people on it.

When was the first successful unmanned launch of a Saturn V rocket? Those first two had some likely mission ending problems.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that North America in 1600 was already inhabited, and had Earth-normal climate... FOR FREE.

Besides that, brilliant analogy. I'm amazed you Space Nutters manage to use a computer without hurting yourselves, you're walking mentally wounded.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Given that we haven't done it in nearly 50 years, then yeah, at this point it actually is useful to replicate Apollo VIII, to prove that we actually still can"

Should we also replicate the Titanic, or a 19th century steam locomotive, just to see if we still can? Apollo belongs in the past. Space is a dead end. Look forward, not back.

Re:Why not land on the moon?

[dbIII]

We choose to do the other thing.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[dbIII]

There was no economic benefit to the first colonies in America.
Some time later they found a turkey and that all changed. It's appears we've found another one.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but there is no reason to re-invent the wheel. Apollo did land on the moon, so we have learned from that, so $23 Billion dollars just to fly around it is stupid.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that would be a giant step.... and.... "Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the Moon.... I hope my legs don't break, Walking On The Moon.........."

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

No, but there is no reason to re-invent the wheel. Apollo did land on the moon, so we have learned from that, so $23 Billion dollars just to fly around it is stupid.

NASA will be not be starting from scratch when it comes to technology learned from Apollo. However the actual equipment itself from Apollo cannot be used. There are no usable Apollo equipment that NASA can use for any moon missions. All the pieces from that era are museum pieces that do not function. NASA will have to re-develop and build everything.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

Your "logic" seems to be that it is impossible to test the new rocket without strapping people on top. This is, of course, nonsense.

Please read above: This was my first post in this thread: "Because you have to walk before you run. Before landing on the moon don't you think NASA should get to the moon first. Apollo 11 was not the first Apollo mission to reach the moon if you remember history."

Two I never said it. My point: Anything new from NASA has to be tested. Even the Apollo era technology was tested. Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 went to the moon to test various aspects of the mission including orbit and module docking.

Putting a crew on the first attempt to fly a new rocket is foolhardy. To do so on a stack that can fly just fine without a crew is a reckless stunt.

If you read my words, I never advocated for that. But it appears you didn't do so.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to read this comprehensively, please.

This is what the OP said: "It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware."

This is what you made of it: "The logic of the OP: NASA shouldn't use new, "untested" hardware."

Do you note any difference, here? Do you note the part where he says 'manned crew', for instance? That was a hint, that the other poster responding to you also alluded at.

Even after it being pointed out, you somehow were selectively blind, or willfully obtuse, or both, and refuses to acknowledge that the issue raised was sending *people* on untested hardware, not testing new hardware on itself. You then went on to make a rebuttal on something that wasn't claimed nor said in the first place. Which is a straw-man fallacy, thus.

Re: Why not land on the moon?

[UnknowingFool]

This is what the OP said: "It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware."

And your assertion is that NASA will launch astronauts on untested hardware. That NASA won't test the hardware either by unit testing or full module testing. At all. That's idiocy and you know it. Of course NASA will test the hardware. It won't be the level the OP wants, but it will be tested.

Do you note any difference, here? Do you note the part where he says 'manned crew', for instance? That was a hint, that the other poster responding to you also alluded at.

The OP said all this was one to "impress" people. Not that a mandate by the government has anything to do with NASA missions. The OP also said that NASA is replicating Apollo VII. The OP said a lot which you conveniently ignore.

Even after it being pointed out, you somehow were selectively blind, or willfully obtuse, or both, and refuses to acknowledge that the issue raised was sending *people* on untested hardware, not testing new hardware on itself. You then went on to make a rebuttal on something that wasn't claimed nor said in the first place. Which is a straw-man fallacy, thus

Again you seem to think NASA will made equipment and then send people in space without any sort of testing. That is both historically and factually false. What it is is you would like NASA to do a full scale step by step testing of every single component. All you have to do to get NASA to do that is convince Congress to give NASA more time and money to do everything carefully.

Great idea... But there is a problem...

[bobbied]

We've already done this a couple of times... The public will just throw up their hands and say "Nothing new to see here! Move along!" Even landing on the moon wouldn't be enough here.

Where I applaud the effort here and believe the money would be well spent doing this, In order to get this kind of thing funded at NASA, we are going to need a better narrative for the press to run with. Something that seems new and exciting. Sadly, because we have been running NASA on less than a shoestring budget for over a decade now, this is about as new and exciting as we can get. Look at our new space craft! It can circle the moon like we did 50 years ago, only with modern technology...

I can see it now... (slow hand clap)...

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

NASA has been handed many conflicting missions and objectives over the years. One objective is to colonize reach Mars and colonize it. While they are different ways to get there, one path is to first establish a moon base and launch from there instead of Earth orbit. That requires returning to the Moon.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[bluefoxlucid]

How would the money be well spent?

If the money is spent paying Google, Netflix, Verizon, or other engineers, we end up with newer infrastructure, better services, and the like. If it's spent building rockets to circle the moon, then we still pay this (not just "we pay it in taxes", but the labor is spent and the labor is compensated--we work and we exchange our time for this), and what do we receive?

Wasteful spending reduces the amount of stuff you receive for the work you do. That's true across an entire economy for obvious reasons (if half the farmers instead make war machines, half the food doesn't get made, and you pay for war machines that only go out to get blown up). What are we gaining by spending $23 billion here?

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

While they are different ways to get there, one path is to first establish a moon base and launch from there instead of Earth orbit.

Launch what, exactly, from the Moon?

I think you're confusing "a moon base" with "a full industrial infrastructure capable of producing complex objects". Even the concept that it would be cheaper to launch unrefined raw regolith from the moon cheaper than we can launch equivalent mass payloads from Earth anytime even remotely soon is absurd.

Earth is where industry is. The fact that we're a deep gravity well increases costs, but that difference is nothing compared to the difference in industrial capacities on and off Earth. Every production process has feedstock and consumables dependency chains. Those have dependency chains, and those have further chains, to a massive network of ever-increasing complexity. One of the worst dependencies is humans, which in turn spawn massive dependency chains.

Now, ultimately you can meet these things to the degree that the few things you have to import to sustain local industrial activity (at incredible cost) do not price the cost of local rocket launches out of the market., but if you think that's going to happen any time in the next few decades, you're deluding yourself. The serious proposals for going to the moon before Mars are for the moon to function as a testbed for habitats and systems designed for Mars.

Anyway, I'm personally much more for the habitation of Venus than Mars, but that is neither here nor there :)

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Total waste of money that could be better spent on unmanned missions such as Europa or Mars Sample Return

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

I think you're confusing "a moon base" with "a full industrial infrastructure capable of producing complex objects". Even the concept that it would be cheaper to launch unrefined raw regolith from the moon cheaper than we can launch equivalent mass payloads from Earth anytime even remotely soon is absurd.

Nowhere did I say that NASA needs to rebuild and entire installation; however, in terms of fuel cost it is much easier to launch from the Earth to the moon then refuel at the moon to launch at Mars than to launch from Earth directly to Mars. Do the math.

Earth is where industry is. The fact that we're a deep gravity well increases costs, but that difference is nothing compared to the difference in industrial capacities on and off Earth. Every production process has feedstock and consumables dependency chains. Those have dependency chains, and those have further chains, to a massive network of ever-increasing complexity. One of the worst dependencies is humans, which in turn spawn massive dependency chains.

Current NASA plans have the moon as a refueling point. That requires a moon base.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Raenex]

I'd rather they spend the money on real science than dog and pony shows. Manned missions are expensive. They could launch dozens of satellites that actually do science for the cost of this one mission.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

Nowhere did I say that NASA needs to rebuild and entire installation; however, in terms of fuel cost it is much easier to launch from the Earth to the moon then refuel at the moon

Implicit in saying that is the premise that the moon has an industrial base, because you don't make fuel and launch rockets without an industrial base. And an industrial base means dependency chains. And even importing a very small fraction of the amount from Earth to fill gaps in their dependency chains that they launch from the surface would easily price them out of the market. Never mind the absurd capital costs you have to amortize.

Current NASA plans have the moon as a refueling point

NASA has no plans for a lunar refueling point. It is not part of any actively-being-worked-towards timeline. They've posited the concept before, but they've posited a million fanciful things.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[phayes]

I think you're confusing "a moon base" with "a full industrial infrastructure capable of producing complex objects". Even the concept that it would be cheaper to launch unrefined raw regolith from the moon cheaper than we can launch equivalent mass payloads from Earth anytime even remotely soon is absurd.

Nowhere did I say that NASA needs to rebuild and entire installation; however, in terms of fuel cost it is much easier to launch from the Earth to the moon then refuel at the moon to launch at Mars than to launch from Earth directly to Mars. Do the math.

Delta-V costs are not the only criteria. You're the one proposing that it is "easier [to] refuel at the moon" [sic] so the onus is on you to detail how much developing a moon base sufficient to perform extraction of fuel/oxidizer and the means to transfer them to earth launched vehicles are versus doing so from earth. Don't forget that spending billions to develop a rarely used infrastructure is precisely the point that most critics of NASA have at present...

Earth is where industry is. The fact that we're a deep gravity well increases costs, but that difference is nothing compared to the difference in industrial capacities on and off Earth. Every production process has feedstock and consumables dependency chains. Those have dependency chains, and those have further chains, to a massive network of ever-increasing complexity. One of the worst dependencies is humans, which in turn spawn massive dependency chains.

Current NASA plans have the moon as a refueling point. That requires a moon base.

"Current" NASA plans have a tendency to change with administrations.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

They could launch a half-dozen flagship missions to other planets for this ridiculous, make-work moon mission.

Mars sample return is really, really overdue as is Europa. Enceladas also.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[MightyMartian]

"We're doing it so the Chinese don't claim the Moon..."

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

Delta-V costs are not the only criteria.

The number one limiting factor of any space vehicle is cost per kg at launch. NASA could build a Mars vehicle any size they wanted except they have to figure a way to get it in orbit without spending the entire budget to launch it.

You're the one proposing that it is "easier [to] refuel at the moon" [sic] so the onus is on you to detail how much developing a moon base

I am not proposing. I am relaying what has been proposed.

sufficient to perform extraction of fuel/oxidizer and the means to transfer them to earth launched vehicles are versus doing so from earth.

No oxidizer is required for electrolysis.

Don't forget that spending billions to develop a rarely used infrastructure is precisely the point that most critics of NASA have at present...

1) I didn't say it would be easy. I said it would be "easier".

2) How much fuel is left in a space vehicle after Earth orbit is reached? Very little. There's a reason most space probes use gravity assists to speed them towards their destination. And being unmanned they don't have constraints on time and resources that manned missions will have.

3) NASA has been directed to do something; you may not like what they propose but that doesn't mean they can refuse to do it. Get to Mars is directive. For NASA that means getting to the Moon again.

"Current" NASA plans have a tendency to change with administrations.

Engineering and numbers don't change with administrators. Math is math. What is the cost of launching directly from Earth vs launching from the moon.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

Implicit in saying that is the premise that the moon has an industrial base, because you don't make fuel and launch rockets without an industrial base. And an industrial base means dependency chains. And even importing a very small fraction of the amount from Earth to fill gaps in their dependency chains that they launch from the surface would easily price them out of the market. Never mind the absurd capital costs you have to amortize.

What is the cost of launching a Mars vehicle directly from Earth? Insanely high. And it has diminishing returns. There is no practical way to launch a large enough manned vehicle for Mars and have enough fuel to make the trip in a reasonable amount of time (even if it is a one-way trip.). The vast amount of fuel is spent to launch something into orbit; there's little left for the journey. Let's take a look at the Falcon Heavy heavy lift vehicle which is one of the heaviest available right now. The payload to Mars is about 13,000 kg. That is about the weight of 1 ISS module. That module does not include food or supplies; that's just the module weight.

If we go with your plan, NASA will have to launch multiple rockets to build the Mars vehicle and many more rockets to fuel the vehicle. Have you ever thought why no NASA missions to outer space has been refueld? The ISS station gets refueled all the time but not probes. Why is that?

NASA has no plans for a lunar refueling point. It is not part of any actively-being-worked-towards timeline. They've posited the concept before, but they've posited a million fanciful things.

By your logic, NASA has no plans for Mars either.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

What is the cost of launching a Mars vehicle directly from Earth?

$7k/kg by Falcon Heavy pricing. Would you rather a different launch system?

Insanely high

Not really. But the problem is your "lowering prices" standards involves having to send things into to an entirely different gravity well (consumables), and landed propulsively, so that other different things can then be launched from said gravity well.

And it has diminishing returns

Your proposal, absolutely.

From Earth, there are no diminishing returns whatsoever. Just the opposite - the more you launch, the cheaper it gets per kg.

There is no practical way to launch a large enough manned vehicle for Mars

One: completely and utterly false. There are a huge number of different proposals for this, all of them technologically feasible.

Two: your counterproposal involves doing the same for the moon, and then doing constant resupply so that they can build things that require an entire industrial base there. It's an absurdity.

Let's take a look at the Falcon Heavy heavy lift vehicle [wikipedia.org] which is one of the heaviest available right now. The payload to Mars is about 13,000 kg. That is about the weight of 1 ISS module.

And?

No, seriously, and? Just ignoring that you can launch to LEO, including transfer stages, and this you actually can launch over 50 tonne segments, is your notion that humans can't build things in space? If not, walk outside tonight when the ISS is due to pass overhead, and look up.

The cost per launch is $90m. Want five launches to build it? Ten? Fifty? You're still a fraction of the cost of establishing the sort of industrial infrastructure needed on the moon to support rocket launches, which in turn is still going to cost more than from the Earth due to the cost of said infrastructure's imports.

Have you ever thought why no NASA missions to outer space has been refueld?

You mean like the ISS?

The ISS station gets refueled all the time but not probes. Why is that?

Because it's cheaper to just build things on Earth and launch them, exactly the point I've been trying to get you to understand this whole time. Doing things in space increases the cost, and the further you are from Earth, the greater that cost is. Work in LEO is expensive because everything requires consumables that must be launched (humans in particular). Work on the moon is vastly moreso because it requires vastly more delta-V to get there. You're wanting to do the vast majority of the work at a place where costs make LEO look like a bargain. Work that can't even be done without developing a whole industrial base to begin with.

By your logic, NASA has no plans for Mars either.

Incorrect, and an absurd statement to make. The "Journey To Mars" program is the core of NASA's focus. (If it wasn't, nobody would ever put MOXIE on Mars 2020. ;) )

This is getting absurd. If anyone else wants to talk to this person (who actually goes by the name "UnknowingFool" - almost starting to wonder if this is trolling), go ahead - I'm out.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

$7k/kg by Falcon Heavy pricing. Would you rather a different launch system?

Have you been paying attention? The proposal is not to launch DIRECTLY from Earth. The word you don't seem to understand is DIRECTLY.

Not really. But the problem is your "lowering prices" standards involves having to send things into to an entirely different gravity well (consumables), and landed propulsively, so that other different things can then be launched from said gravity well.

What? The problem is no one has made a vehicle large enough to launch a manned Mars vehicle. No one. It's not about "lowering" standards. It's about practical limits.

Your proposal, absolutely.

False: It's not my proposal. Experts like at MIT say it's the est option.

From Earth, there are no diminishing returns whatsoever. Just the opposite - the more you launch, the cheaper it gets per kg.

Er? Are you insane? There are always diminishing returns. So the ISS was launched at once will all modules intact or was it built over decades? Why was that? Because no one can build a rocket large enough.

One: completely and utterly false. There are a huge number of different proposals for this, all of them technologically feasible.

List one.

Two: your counterproposal involves doing the same for the moon, and then doing constant resupply so that they can build things that require an entire industrial base there. It's an absurdity.

Again, not my proposal

It does not require a huge infrastructure but it does require infrastructure. The alternative is using Earth to refuel at the high cost of LEO orbit costs.

Incorrect, and an absurd statement to make. The "Journey To Mars" program is the core of NASA's focus. (If it wasn't, nobody would ever put MOXIE on Mars 2020. ;) )

Do we have a manned space vehicle ready for Mars? It is in the planning stages? By YOUR LOGIC, the mission to Mars doesn't exist either.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[RandyHill]

A far better place for a base launching deep space missions would be the lagrange points on earth orbits. There are near earth asteroids that can be hollowed out, and mined for fuel without the immense costs of DeltaV to land massive amounts of mining/production/power plant equipment on the moon, and launch ships from it. An extra 2.5 Km/sec gets you lots of places in the solar system quite a bit faster.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[JoeMerchant]

Habitation of Venus would be "cloud cities" for the next several centuries, unless you've got a better Terraforming plan than any I've read.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[thinkwaitfast]

Going to the moon is not like going to Disneyland. There's zero reason to "refuel". And getting fuel from the moon is orders of magnitude more expensive than getting it from Earth.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[currently_awake]

1-The outer space treaty prohibits doing that, and they don't have the military to enforce such a claim. 2-If China goes broke trying to colonize the moon it means they don't go broke starting WW3, not a bad outcome.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[bobbied]

How would the money be well spent?

If the money is spent paying Google, Netflix, Verizon, or other engineers, we end up with newer infrastructure, better services, and the like. If it's spent building rockets to circle the moon, then we still pay this (not just "we pay it in taxes", but the labor is spent and the labor is compensated--we work and we exchange our time for this), and what do we receive?

Wasteful spending reduces the amount of stuff you receive for the work you do. That's true across an entire economy for obvious reasons (if half the farmers instead make war machines, half the food doesn't get made, and you pay for war machines that only go out to get blown up). What are we gaining by spending $23 billion here?

You cannot be serious... Do you have any idea what kinds of technology advancement NASA has been a primary driver of? The list is long, varied and many things invented for our space programs of the 1960-70's are ubiquitous now. Ever used Velcro? Ceramics? Digital cameras? Miniaturized solid state RF communications devices? Anything that depends on something in orbit (GPS, Most Syndicated Radio programs, most remote Sports TV coverage...). Need I go on?

One would expect a new space program would have similar benefits to humanity, consider it an infrastructure project. So YES, money well spent.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[phayes]

Delta-V costs are not the only criteria.

The number one limiting factor of any space vehicle is cost per kg at launch. NASA could build a Mars vehicle any size they wanted except they have to figure a way to get it in orbit without spending the entire budget to launch it.

Irrelevant when the number one defining factor of STS is how much pork can be siphoned off to spend into each supporting senator's district and not whether or not it helps the an extremely improbable Mars mission or even just the improbable "planned" moon flyby.

You're the one proposing that it is "easier [to] refuel at the moon" [sic] so the onus is on you to detail how much developing a moon base

I am not proposing. I am relaying what has been proposed.

We're not in junior high here, you can stop trying to play semantic games. You bring the subject to the conversation, you defend it. Knowing that there is hydrogen on the Moon does not mean that it is under the form of water ices nor how accessible it is nor how difficult and expensive harvesting it may be.

sufficient to perform extraction of fuel/oxidizer and the means to transfer them to earth launched vehicles are versus doing so from earth.

No oxidizer is required for electrolysis.

You cannot know that lunar hydrogen is in the form of water ice, have not proven it's accessibility, have not proven that you have worked out the process to develop it as a usable ressource nor proven that you can do so for less than it will cost at that point in time to deliver from earth. Pray do so now.

Don't forget that spending billions to develop a rarely used infrastructure is precisely the point that most critics of NASA have at present...

1) I didn't say it would be easy. I said it would be "easier".

Proof? Nah you don't have proof (indeed you _cannot_ at present) and if this post is any indication you'll try playing semantic games again to attempt to avoid answering.

2) How much fuel is left in a space vehicle after Earth orbit is reached? Very little. There's a reason most space probes use gravity assists to speed them towards their destination. And being unmanned they don't have constraints on time and resources that manned missions will have.

Oooh, ooh I know this one! it's because Nasa, being hobbled by the U.S legislature never invested significantly in lowering the cost of launching mass to orbit, preferring to spend the money on futile studies as the only meaningful yardstick became $$$/district.

3) NASA has been directed to do something; you may not like what they propose but that doesn't mean they can refuse to do it. Get to Mars is directive. For NASA that means getting to the Moon again.

You seem to have been living in a cave with no contact with the exterior for the last few months. Allow me to enlighten you: Nasa's congressional masters and the president have changed. No-one knows exactly what the implications are yet but Trump's declarations that cost cutting is more important than rockets to nowhere means that the directives are to change soon and Mars is not likely to be a directive for much longer.

"Current" NASA plans have a tendency to change with administrations.

Engineering and numbers don't change with administrators. Math is math. What is the cost of launching directly from Earth vs launching from the moon.

Spoken like someone who lives off of studies that will never come to fruition.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[bluefoxlucid]

You cannot be serious... Do you have any idea what kinds of technology advancement NASA has been a primary driver of?

Memory foam, maybe. The general list is things that would have been invented anyway--although some of those things would have instead been DOD projects (satellite communication) more than likely. Velcro was invented by a guy who observed stupid shit like the Greater Burdock sticking itself to dogs and pants.

We've managed to invent things like transparent aluminum without NASA or the DOD; the DOD has been running with it, finding new ways to make it, polish it, and otherwise improve the stuff. In most cases, this is stuff someone already invented but that isn't viable for the consumer market yet, and so is mainly a profit source from government money; in many cases, it's stuff that's too expensive to research at a given level of technology, and becomes viable to invent a decade later; in very rare case it is only uncertain if DOD and NASA interest was the cause of an actual invention or only the cause of it being profitable or invented earlier than it would have been.

People have a hard-on for space travel and war, and they believe all kinds of delusional shit about how things just won't ever happen without a good war to make us invent new tech. No matter how technology marches on in peace time and without public-funded science experiments to fund it, people assert that certain technology must be special and would never happen from just commercial interests. They ignore the real world.

So in short: Grow up and stop believing in Santa Clause.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Enigma2175]

Work in LEO is expensive because everything requires consumables that must be launched (humans in particular). Work on the moon is vastly moreso because it requires vastly more delta-V to get there.

This is incorrect, going to the moon does not require vastly more delta-V than getting to LEO. Once you are in earth orbit it's not that much more delta-V to get to the moon. Here is a chart with the Apollo fuel budget, it looks like trans-lunar injection is about 3000 m/s. Getting to LEO is generally 9000-10000 m/s. Even with injection, lunar orbit insertion, and landing you still are only looking at about 6000 m/s. Your point is still totally valid, it's a lot cheaper to launch an interplanetary ship from the ground and assemble it in LEO than it would be to try to make the moon capable of supplying fuel or parts, I just wanted to pick a nit at that statement.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, I'm personally much more for the habitation of Venus than Mars, but that is neither here nor there :)

Seriously? Or is that just a joke related to that book :P

The "selfish" side of me that desires to see an amazing mission accomplished in my own lifetime is all that sets my hopes on Mars, since the moon has been done and not too much else is realistic to expect.
(Arguably Mars isn't all that realistic to expect for some of our lifetimes, but it's still the most likely)

Looking past the desire of being alive to see it however, I'm still curious: why Venus?

The romantic in me wants to see humanity eventually spread through the entire solar system and eventually beyond. The types of challenges we would need to overcome for a Mars colony are of the same type as posed by most of the outer planets further from our Sun.

Venus of course poses plenty of challenges of its own, and would of course be useful to know how to handle moving outward (for example any mission to Jupiter closer than one of its moons) but still seem a bit too specialized and potentially less commonly needed.

I'm not saying Venus or Mercury are uninteresting or anything, but generally there is much more for us to learn about and go see that is further from the Sun than Earth compared to closer to the Sun...
It just seems wiser to deal with the bulk of our own solar system first which lies further away, before tackling the higher temperatures and pressures from those two bodies.
The only other high temperature and pressure bodies (Jupiter excluded) we'll find will be in other solar systems, which isn't even a dream for a very very long time from now.

Probes, sure. Habitation? That's a pretty tall order!

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of having a better public message, why don't they get a better reason to exist in the first place? A commercial reason or something with an actual return on investment that will be useful to the people of earth.

GPS seems about the only good useful thing any government has yet done in space.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

Habitation of Venus would be "cloud cities"

Precisely.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

"That book"?

Why Venus? Venus has the most Earthlike environment in the solar system outside Earth. High latitudes in the middle cloud layer have Earthlike temperatures, pressures, gravity, sufficient radiation shielding, ample light, and diverse resources already gas phase and only needing to be run through a scrubber to give you feedstocks (even iron, in the form of iron chlorides - estimated at about 1% of the mass of the sulfuric acid - which, by the way, thermally decomposes in the presence of a catalyst to release water and oxygen). Concerning orbital mechanics, Venus ascent stages are of course harder than Mars, but apart from that, it's in a much more favorable spot concerning orbital mechanics, with a much greater Oberth effect and much more frequent launch windows; it can be easier to get payloads to Mars from Venus than from Earth (and can even get gravity assists from Earth). Beyond the abundant solar power, there's also abundant wind power. Normal Earth air is a lifting gas. Unlike a Mars habitat which is a cramped pressure vessel, a Venus habitat is an expansive, open, bright area, full of plants and life. If you don't like someone, go hang your room elsewhere in the envelope, potentially even hundreds of meters away. Bored? Jump into the safety netting; the scale indoors is so big you can basically do indoor skydiving.

As for learning, Venus has vastly more unknown than Mars. Venus is our twin, and the question as to why it ended up the way it did and Earth didn't is one of the great questions in planetary geology. Venus used to have oceans like Earth. Yet today its surface has become this alien place, a veritable natural refinery that bakes and erodes minerals out of the surface and precipitates them out in the clouds. The whole planetary surface, or nearly so, resurfaced itself about 500 million years ago. We have no idea why. Can Earthlike planets just up and do this? If so that's a very disturbing concept. it has the longest river in the solar system - we have no clue what carved it. The best theories are really weird, like natrocarbonatites - super-rare low-temperature lavas that look like oil, flow like water, and glow crimson at night. It has lightning, but we can't seem to find it. It seems to be the second most volcanically active place in the solar system (after Io) but we've never positively confirmed an eruption. There's a huge amount that our planetary models just can't explain. Why doesn't it have an intrinsic magnetic field? Even with its slow rotation speed, dynamo theory says it should; it doesn't. Where's its mercury? Chemical models say that there should be 3 1/2 orders of more in the clouds than the upper detection limits of the probes thusfar constrained it to. What are the strange radar reflective frosts / snows in the highlands? Pyrite? Galena? Tellurium? There seems to be more than one type, too. I could go on for pages and pages here. And there's vastly more reason to have humans present for exploration on Venus, because given the surface conditions, latency for controlling robotic probes is very important - unlike Mars, where communications "downtime" for rovers just gives them more time to charge in the weak sun. And you don't have to worry about degeneration due to low gravity like you do on Mars.

The surface, while hostile, is absolutely accessible. The Soviets had a lot better success probing the surface of Venus than they had Mars. The basic design is very simple: metal shell. insulation, and a material that absorbs heat through a phase change; it can easily buy you a couple hours. Tech developed by the Soviets in the 1960s. It's been determined that you could actually shoot a hollow titanium sphere at Venus, without any kind of heat shield or parachute, and it'd reach the surface intact; that nice "fluffy" atmosphere goes a long way. On Mars you have to have controlled propulsive landings onto rough terrain with little to slow you down - something that continues to randomly kill landers. The surface air o

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Kjella]

If we go with your plan, NASA will have to launch multiple rockets to build the Mars vehicle and many more rockets to fuel the vehicle. Have you ever thought why no NASA missions to outer space has been refueld? The ISS station gets refueled all the time but not probes. Why is that?

Because they're... probes? Most of them weigh so little and go by so energy efficient orbits that there's no point. Your typical probe is maybe a ton, the Curiosity mission was a real heavyweight at almost four tons total - of which the rover itself was around one, but still something a regular Falcon 9, Atlas V or Delta IV could deliver to Mars. There's still room for bigger missions on a Delta IV Heavy, even before the Falcon Heavy flies. We don't do it because there's no point in adding that complexity and the extra expense doesn't give any payback in science. It's better science to send two small probes than one big one.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Strider-]

And now you're learning what these kinds of things are really about. Project Apollo was not about the science, it was about beating the Russians and demonstrating the superiority of the American political and economic system. Of course, the only thing you can really do when you get there is good science, but that was a secondary objective.

Anyhow, the science isn't the primary point. It never has been, and it never will be.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the detailed reply!

Although we know so very little on Venus, relatively speaking you certainly know a lot more about it than I did. You've given me a lot to think about and read up on.
(Heck now I wish you had a website or blog or something!)

I always thought most of the atmosphere as well as the surface was far too harsh for our machinery let alone machinery to support us living in.
But given the details you've brought up I guess most of what I thought I knew is woefully out of date.

Oh, and I feel a bit embarrassed to even admit to it now, but "That book" was referencing "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars", which jumped to mind once my brain interpreted "habitation of Venus" as an innuendo.
Yes I'm ashamed in advance :P

Anyway, I mainly wanted to say thanks and let you know your reply wasn't in vein or wasted on an AC.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[JoeMerchant]

Habitation of Venus would be "cloud cities"

Precisely.

Probably better to get some kind of cloud city working on Earth before attempting to go trans-solar-system with the concept. By the altitude Venus' atmosphere is more dense than Earth's, it's also highly corrosive.

Jupiter is a little too active for my taste, but perhaps Neptune or Uranus might have some attractive latitudes at which to float a city, assuming you bring your own power sources and don't rely on the sun.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Raenex]

Arguably there was some tangible benefit for boosting science, the spirit of the country, and the United States' standing in the world, but repeating what we did 50 years ago fails at even this level.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Dread_ed]

Populate the moon. Seriously. It is the closest body on which we can install a backup culture of human DNA. Extinction events happen with certainty and regularity on this big blue orb. Going into the future without a "Plan B" is just incredibly fucking stupid.

That being said, nothing you humans do can be considered particularly intelligent. You poison your sources of sustenance. You kill each other for unknowable reasons you are completely certain about. You put yourselves through hell every day of your life to make sure a very select few of you get everything they could ever want and more than they could ever use. When confronted with the possibility of the Earth doing what it always has done your best retort is to steal money from everyone. It seems logical that you would completely ignore your own species survival, even when you have discovered the undeniable truth of the future from legacy of the rocks under your feet.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

I'm with a group called Venus Labs; we'll have our first book out later this year. :) Materials compatibility is a big topic therein. Thankfully, there are a lot of polymers that have good resistance to Venus's environmental conditions (particularly fluoropolymers, although minimizing coating fluorine content is important for ISRU because hydrogen fluoride is a lot less common than hydrogen chloride and sulfuric acid - so for example PCTFE or PVF would be preferable to, for an example, FEP). The sulfuric acid mist isn't actually very concentrated from a particle density perspective - visibility is a couple kilometers. The mist is a couple to several dozen grams per cubic meter, depending on the altitude, latitude, time, etc (by comparison, OSHA allows people to breathe up to 1 mg/m for an 8-hour work shift). But it is concentrated from a molar perspective - on Earth, H2SO4 mists self-dilute with atmospheric water vapour.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[dbIII]

Implicit in saying that is the premise that the moon has an industrial base

I think that's the long term dream (not plan yet) of the people who are seriously making these suggestions after a bit of thought. Others mistake it for something that can be done in the short term of a few years.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[dbIII]

The general list is things that would have been invented anyway

Good point. The Russians also have a space program and could have invented all those things and sold them too you instead.

We've managed to invent things like transparent aluminum

WTF? Aluminium oxide is in nature as a gemstone you tool. Why are you going all Star Trek on us?

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[religionofpeas]

Extinction events happen with certainty and regularity on this big blue orb.

Our early ancestors survived every single one of them. We'll have better chances here than on the Moon.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[religionofpeas]

..nothing you humans do can be considered particularly intelligent. You poison your sources of sustenance. You kill each other for unknowable reasons you are completely certain about. You put yourselves through hell every day of your life to make sure a very select few of you get everything they could ever want and more than they could ever use.

Doesn't sound like it's worth saving, eh ?

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

Probably better to get some kind of cloud city working on Earth before attempting to go trans-solar-system with the concept.

That would indeed be part of the development process. It's harder on Earth, mind you - a Landis habitat has to be inflated with heliox on Earth, which is much more expensive and permeation-prone. But such a habitat absolutely can be tested on Earth.

By the altitude Venus' atmosphere is more dense than Earth's, it's also highly corrosive.

The sulfuric acid is quite overstated in the popular imagination. It's more like a bad smog (or more accurately, vog) - several to several dozen milligrams per cubic meter, as noted below (also as noted below, OSHA allows people to breathe up to 1mg/m^3 for an entire 8-hour shift). It's much more of a resource than a problem; design work would be simpler if it were denser, not sparser. Material compatibility is easier to ensure (via fluoropolymers) than the scrubber design aspects are; you have to have high mass flow rates because the sulfuric acid is so sparse.

(That said, there was some - disputed - evidence from Vega that there may sometimes be "rain" on Venus. If that's correct, that'd be quite the blessing for resource collection. It's sad how we don't even know such basics as "does it rain on Venus?" at present)

Jupiter is a little too active for my taste, but perhaps Neptune or Uranus might have some attractive latitudes at which to float a city, assuming you bring your own power sources and don't rely on the sun.

The gas and ice giants are tough. They're very, very far, exceedingly hard to get out of, and because they're predominantly hydrogen (80-96%), the Landis design is right out (you can't live in a spacious envelope, you're stuck in a gondola); the envelope has to be hot hydrogen (heated with a lot of energy, because you lose it quickly on those scales). The gas and ice giants also have the wrong ratios of temperature to pressure - too much pressure relative to temperature. Plus, much less diverse gaseous mineral resources, and (effectively) no surface mineral resources at all. And of course as you note, little light. Venus is far better in virtually every respect. Its right next door, the easiest planet to get to, a great location from an orbital dynamics perspective, and it has everything.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

Anyone who can say "only 6000 m/s" with a straight face when talking about post-launch maneuvers has never worked with rocket mass budgets. ;) For a single stage, 6000 m/s with a 340s isp and 0.08 inert mass ratio is an over 10:1 scaling factor (aka, for every 10 kg you launch to LEO you get 1kg payload to your destination). Just 3000 m/s is a nearly 3:1 ratio.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[cjameshuff]

You do the math. Due to the availability of an atmosphere for performing around 6 km/s of the braking on arrival, it takes considerably less propulsive delta-v to go straight to Mars than it does to land on the moon, and that doesn't even include the subsequent launch from the moon. Red Dragon is a Dragon 2 capsule with minor modifications, and it can carry about 1-2 metric tons to the surface of Mars. The surface of the moon is well beyond its reach without an additional stage.

Every launch to the moon could instead be a Mars launch carrying more payload. Every propellant launch from the moon requires a tanker vehicle to spend enough propellant to land that it could have gone to Mars. And that's ignoring all the landings required to set up large scale ice mining and refining...you're talking about a sizable colony on a body that's more expensive to land payload on than the moon. The moon is not a stepping stone to Mars.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[JoeMerchant]

Those landers that went to Venus and died after minutes on the ground are a big part of Venus' PR problem - who wants to fund a(nother) flame-out probe that costs a billion dollars and sends back 90 seconds of video before dying. Even if we "beat the Russians" and make a lander that lasts 10x as long, that's not even two news cycles.

The gas giants feel more predictable, especially further out, mostly due to the lack of solar energy input. The resources are quite bland, and the gravity wells are deep - perhaps better to try their moons. One assumption is that if we're doing anything like this, we've cracked the next generation of energy sources (fusion?) beyond fission, so lack of solar power shouldn't be an issue.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

They didn't die after a few minutes - they lasted for 1-2 hours. And they didn't cost a billion dollars, they were built on the cheap. The Soviets launched almost all of their Venus missions in pairs because they considered it likely that something would blow up or fail at some point along the way - not a rare situation, a number of their Venus missions never even left Earth orbit, and some didn't even get that far ;). But of missions that actually got to Venus, they had great success, and even had one mission "rescued" by Venus (they designed it to parachute down, but the parachute broke - but the atmosphere slowed the fall so much that it survived the impact anyway).

For exploring Venus, if you're wanting PR, the Vega approach is the right one - aerobots, optionally paired with sondes. Aerial vehicles can fly for long periods of time studying the planet, and there's a number of exciting missions related to this being worked on (just waiting for funding). As for surface lifespans, they don't have to be limited. There's work on probes designed to "run hot" so that they don't need any (or only minimal) cooling, and there's also work on probes designed to lift off (bellows balloon) to a cooler layer of the atmosphere (to have any length of time to examine / process samples, cool down, etc) before re-descending any number of times. If you're only talking something with a ~2 hour lifespan on the surface and nothing else, you're talking something cheap, Discovery or at most New Frontiers class - not Flagship.

The main thing that's held everything back is that NASA almost never funds anything related to Venus. The last dedicated NASA mission to Venus (not counting flybies to other destinations that used Venus as a gravitational assist) was the Magellan probe, nearly three decades ago. And that came a decade after the previous NASA mission to Venus. Easiest planet to get to, and they almost never fund missions to study it. It's embarrassing.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one found the joke amusing, as well as the discussion in this thread. :p

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[bluefoxlucid]

Is a man-made production process for solid sheets of aluminum oxide and for tiled sheets of zero-distortion interfaced aluminum oxide in nature? Does nature give us a way to perfectly-control the physical and optical properties of aluminum oxide using caveman-level tools?

Gasoline is in nature. We separate it out from a pile of muck pumped out of the ground. The same with iron ore and the steel made from it. There's an argument for communism and socialism which explains that all property is theft because the natural state is that we can go anywhere and take anything, and then suddenly things which we were allowed to take are claimed to belong to someone else and thus have been stolen from us; this argument ignores that human labor is required to acquire, shape, and distribute objects as made from natural things. Giant sheets of alox to precisely-engineered specifications aren't natural, you toolshed.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[dargaud]

visibility is a couple kilometers

First, thanks for your very interesting posts. Do you mean visibility at ground level or at the altitude where the pressure is 1atm ? If the former, then why did the Russian probes only show pictures with about one meter of visibility ?
Personally I really liked the idea put forward at the end of K.S.R.'s Blue Mars: put a gigantic thin (monomolecular) film at L1 between Venus and the sun to lower the solar input and let Venus atmosphere condense to the ground.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

Because they're... probes? Most of them weigh so little and go by so energy efficient orbits that there's no point.

If their orbits are so efficient why do many of them have flybys so they get a gravity assist? These are also unmanned probes for which time is not as important a factor as a manned mission.

Your typical probe is maybe a ton, the Curiosity mission was a real heavyweight at almost four tons total - of which the rover itself was around one, but still something a regular Falcon 9, Atlas V or Delta IV could deliver to Mars. There's still room for bigger missions on a Delta IV Heavy, even before the Falcon Heavy flies. We don't do it because there's no point in adding that complexity and the extra expense doesn't give any payback in science. It's better science to send two small probes than one big one.

Falcon Heavy's max payload to Mars is 13,000 kg which is about the size of 1 ISS module. Orion spacecraft is estimated to be 25,000kg with 9,000kg of fuel. Bigger rockets will be necessary, or refueling in space has to be an option.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[UnknowingFool]

aka, for every 10 kg you launch to LEO you get 1kg payload to your destination

That's factually not true. Falcon Heavy Weight (1,420,788 kg), LEO payload (54,400 kg ): 3.83%
Ariane 5 Weight: 777,000kg, LEO payload: 16,000 kg. 2.05%
Atlas V Weight 345,000, LEO payload: 18,810 kg: 5.45%

At best it is 5%. At best. Many orbital launch systems deliver less than 5%.

Just 3000 m/s is a nearly 3:1 ratio.

Someone is forgetting basic physics. F=(1/2)m(v^2). The ratio is not 3:1. The ratio is (10^2)/(3^2) or 11:1.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Rei]

No, in the middle cloud layer. But I think you should recheck the Venera photos, visibility is a lot more than one meter ;)

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[JoeMerchant]

Strong "manned" culture at NASA, Venus is not a near-term target for manned missions.

Agreed, JPL should be doing more science missions there, and I agree with Stephen Hawking's assessment of how much of GDP we should be spending on space exploration - but Congress doesn't.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[dbIII]

Giant sheets of alox to precisely-engineered specifications aren't natural, you toolshed.

So how about a link to your giant sheet of sapphire then? Not only not natural but I'm getting an idea that your specific example only exists in your own head.

For an extra laugh a lot of what we've been doing with Alumiunium Oxide (where the fuck did you get alox from?) has been due to the space program.

As for your sliding into the mix "all property is theft", maybe change that handle, lucid just does not fit.

I suppose as soon as I saw the "transparent aluminium" I should have know that things were going from post-literate to post-fact and reality was not on the menu.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

I think you're basically right in this.

However you turn it, it needs a huge sunken cost before you'd ever be able to get any advantages out of it. So it's only good for long term planning, where you have a concerted effort to get humans to other planets for hundreds of years. Building the infrastructure on the moon big enough to be worthwhile to be cheaper to go to Mars thereafter, would take at least 150 years. Quite incompatible with the current plans to send people to Mas between 2030-2050.

There can be NO doubt that in the short term, creating a moonbase to then go to Mars is nonsensical. First of, it would cost even *more* fuel to get to the moon then it would cost to go to LEO. Secondly, you'd need far more hardware (and thus weight) to actually build the infrastructure on the moon. And then you'd have to create the fuel (and rockets?) and transport them to a lunar orbit.

The only part that is cheaper is the last part: getting your fuel out of the gravity well of the moon. but by that time, you've poured 1000 times as much money (and time) in it then it would have cost you if you had launched directly from Earth. For a launch of about 5-10 rockets to get the Mars-vehicle ready in orbit, it really isn't worth it. So for a short term (aka, a couple of decades at most) and for few launches to Mars, it makes little sense.

Only in a long-term future, where dozens upon dozens of rockets need to go to Mars, would it make sense to invest so heavily in a moon-infrastructure.

So the other poster was wrong. That said, creating a moonbase (not a huge infrastructure to launch rockets) could still be worthwhile as a testbed for a Martian colony. Not really necessary, but... at least it would make some more sense, then.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

I think you're basically wrong in this.

However you turn it, it needs a huge sunken cost before you'd ever be able to get any advantages out of it. So it's only good for long term planning, where you have a concerted effort to get humans to other planets for hundreds of years. Building the infrastructure on the moon big enough to be worthwhile to be cheaper to go to Mars thereafter, would take at least 150 years. Quite incompatible with the current plans to send people to Mas between 2030-2050.

There can be NO doubt that in the short term, creating a moonbase to then go to Mars is nonsensical. First of, it would cost even *more* fuel to get to the moon then it would cost to go to LEO. Secondly, you'd need far more hardware (and thus weight) to actually build the infrastructure on the moon. And then you'd have to create the fuel (and rockets?) and transport them to a lunar orbit.

The only part that is cheaper is the last part: getting your fuel out of the gravity well of the moon, compared to the same from Earth. But by that time, you've poured 1000 times as much money (and time) in it then it would have cost you if you had launched directly from Earth. For a launch of about 5-10 rockets to get the Mars-vehicle ready in orbit, it really isn't worth it. So for a short term (aka, a couple of decades at most) and for few launches to Mars, it makes little sense.

Only in a long-term future, where dozens upon dozens of rockets need to go to Mars for centuries to come, would it make sense to invest so heavily in a moon-infrastructure.

So the other poster was right in this respect. That said, creating a moonbase (not a huge infrastructure to launch rockets) could still be worthwhile as a testbed for a Martian colony. Not really necessary, but... at least it would make some more sense, then.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

I don't see the advantages for colonizing another planet to go for Venus instead of Mars. It IS pretty corrosive, even without the hype, you'd need to build frickle 'cloudcities' - and hope you never fall off, and there is an almost total lack of any water.

Compared to that, Mars is a relatively benign planet to colonize. Pragmatically speaking, it would be foolish to go for Venus. I mean, yes, I get it: I saw the nasa retro-art too: a cloudcity on Venus looks cool. But with that, all is said. I'm for more exploration of the inner planets (Mercury hasn't gotten much love neither), and our scientific knowledge would gain greatly by it, but if you're talking in the context of colonizing and making humans multi-planetary, it's *definitely* a better idea to go for Mars. Idem with a context of finding life in the solarsystem (though some moons like Europa are also good candidates in that case). Point is, whether we like it or not, there is a reason why there is more attention for Mars than for Venus.

Though I would agree with you it's a bit disappointing they send so little probes to the inner most planets. Then again, budgets are - certainly of NASA these days - limited, so if the money for one is to the expense of the other - in that case, I do think they should focus on Mars and/or Europa, as far as planetary exploration goes. If NASA was guaranteed 1% of GNP, much more leeway would be possible, but it is what it is.

Re: Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

" it can be easier to get payloads to Mars from Venus than from Earth "

Let's not go there. You just made an excellent rebuttal to UnknowingFool why it doesn't make sense to make a base on the moon to then send rockets to Mars, and now you're arguing the same...

By the time Venus would (if, ever) be 'colonized' by myriads of cloudcities large and complex enough to make a floating infrastructure possible to send rockets cheaper to Mars, it would take less long and would be far cheaper by that time to have colonized Mars directly.

Unless you're talking about a really, really far away future, where there is trade between planets... but by that time, Earth may have a space-elevator anyhow.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

Let's take this one step further. I'd rather they spend all that money on me, so I could have a luxurious life without any financial worries.

There.

It all depends on ones' priorities. NASA's priorities is not ONLY scientific return. NASA conducts its work in four principal organizations, called mission directorates:

Aeronautics: manages research focused on meeting global demand for air mobility in ways that are more environmentally friendly and sustainable, while also embracing revolutionary technology from outside aviation.
Human Exploration and Operations: focuses on International Space Station operations, development of commercial spaceflight capabilities and human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.
Science: explores the Earth, solar system and universe beyond; charts the best route of discovery; and reaps the benefits of Earth and space exploration for society.
Space Technology: rapidly develops, innovates, demonstrates, and infuses revolutionary, high-payoff technologies that enable NASA's future missions while providing economic benefit to the nation.

Note that scientific return is not the only goal for NASA, nor was it ever meant to be. You're starting from a wrong premise, thus. It's the fault of those scientists that they think NASA only exists to serve their purposes. It doesn't.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

True. However, as said, NASA *never* had as sole and ultimate goal only science and scientific return. So it really is strange to take the premise as if it was and is. I understand that (most) scientists would *want* that, because that's their bred and butter, and what they like most, but that doesn't make it correct. The public support - and thus political support - is far easier and better gained by manned spaceflight, than robotic flight, for instance. Colonization is, ultimately, a manned endeavor - colonizing with robotic landings doesn't make the human race multi-planetary.

That's not to say the science isn't interesting: it certainly is. But it was never NASA's sole purpose to begin with. It would be like scientists saying: if they would put all the money they waste on wars and the military, into science, we could achieve far more!

Certainly. No doubt. But that's not the point nor the goal of the military.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Raenex]

But we already have the International Space Station. Going for a joy ride around the Moon 50 years after we landed there is just stupid.

Even if we want to continue manned missions, the most effective use of money is to continue the International Space Station and use robots to start building infrastructure for eventual human colonies. But big budget expenditures that accomplish nothing are stupid no matter how you slice it.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

I'm not a real proponent to waste much time and money on a moonbase, certainly not if it's to be intended as complete moon-infrastructure to make and refuel rockets for Mars. I could mayhaps see some use if it's a kept as a testbed for a colony to Mars. But I don't think it's really necessary.

However, I was making a general point. NASA, and it's goals, have never been, and will never be, solely and purely about science and scientific return. It could be as simple as PR; making the public at large interested in spacetravel again, for instance (public = politics). That succeeds better with manned flights than unmanned, and rather with moonlandings then with a station in LEO.

Of course, Mars would achive that too, but not in the same timeframe and with the same cost. It's still more cheaper and less far off to have a moonbase, then a Mars-base.

And, let's face it, it's been such a huge-ass time... if they were going to land on the moon again, I would take leave from my work and watch it live if I had too. ;-) 'Done before' (40 years ago) or not.

Though, personally, if it's that or a Mars-landing during my life-time, I'd rather have the latter.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Raenex]

I think as a PR move it's a dud. Trying to relive glory days of something we did 50 years ago is a big fat meh. Even when we first went to the Moon, whatever excitement people had quickly faded, even as the Moon landings were still happening.

I remember the first rover missions to Mars. That generated excitement without the enormous expense of a boots and flag mission. We need to spend our money wisely, and not just throw it away on PR stunts.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[N3wsByt3]

I'm more inclined to agree with Tyson: while the rover(s) were great news and certainly generated exitment, if a manned landing had been done at the same time, *no-one* of the large public would have even noticed. That is to say: manned missions will *always* generate more excitement than robotic missions.

But, don't get me wrong, I'm all for going to Mars too, and I think purely as a PR stunt (though gathering enthusiasm of/from the public is worthwhile) it's not worth its money, unless you open it up to the private sector and get the economical factor playing. But I just wanted to say that the public, politics, economics, etc. and, indeed, science, all play a part in any decision NASA takes.

It's never going to be one sole thing. Some people - scientists included - will think one thing is a pity, while others think another things is wasted money. For instance, as one can see, some scientists are against manned spacetravel, because it cuts in the available budget and thus it means less science for them. Purely from the premise and viewpoint that NASA is there for them to get scientific data, I can understand their complaints. But I think they're mistaken, when taking a more global approach. I think taking steps to actually colonize other planets and become a multi-planetary species is important too. But everyone has his opinion on it, I guess. Politicians see NASA as a means to have and keep jobs and employment in their region, for instance. That's not a worthwhile or useful goal in my book, but I guess politicians see it differently. Etc.

Anyway, I wish they wrote into the constitution that NASA gets a minimum of 1% of the GNP. :-) That way, things would become less cut-throat, and NASA would be assured of stable finances, allowing to plan long-term.

Re:Great idea... But there is a problem...

[Raenex]

I think taking steps to actually colonize other planets and become a multi-planetary species is important too.

I do too, and that's why I like the International Space Station and think we should be taking baby steps to colonize Mars. Like right now we should already have machines on the planet generating fuel from the atmosphere.

The problem with the original moonshot was that it took up a huge part of the budget, and once the public lost interest and the funding got pulled, it left a big, gaping hole at NASA.

Three weeks? No thanks!

[fustakrakich]

Anyone check out the room you have in that space capsule? I wouldn't want to be the poor guy that has to open the hatch when they return. They can do the trip in eight days, just like before.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Moon is a dead, deadly, emtpy rock. We have lots of rocks already here. We can send much cheaper cameras in a box, no people required.

Vannevar Bush knew this in the 1940s, why can't we?

http://www.azquotes.com/quote/962225

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

So all the water on the moon that could be used as fuel for Mars missions has no value?

Re: Who cares?

[fustakrakich]

I forget, what are we going to Mars for?

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I left my wallet last time I was there.

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

"all the water"? "used as fuel"? Um, I think I woke up in a parallel dimension were the insane are running things?

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

Because politicians like to say they've done something, mostly. Scientifically, There's a lot of science to be done in person. Also if the Earth wishes to colonize Mars someday, some one has to start sending manned missions to Mars.

Re: Who cares?

[Rei]

So all the water on the moon that could be used as fuel for Mars missions has no value?

I'd love to see your proposal for launching water from the moon to Mars for less than $7k per kilogram. Include all allocation of labour, all feedstocks production, and all consumables, including system maintenance.

The reason we launch from the Earth is Earth is where our industrial production infrastructure is. And even if you have to import just a couple percent to the Moon of the mass that you could launch from the Moon in payload (aka a highly evolved industrial base), you've blown your budget. Just ignoring that the needs of Mars most definitely aren't water. It's habitats, vehicles, and industrial / manufacturing hardware. Have fun trying to produce that sort of stuff on the moon.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

I'd love to see your proposal for launching water from the moon to Mars for less than $7k per kilogram. Include all allocation of labour, all feedstocks production, and all consumables, including system maintenance.

What is the cost of launching from Earth? Depending on the rocket it could be $20K per kg for Atlas V to LEO to Falcon Heavy for a mere $1700 per kg. However that is the mere cost of getting to orbit. Most of the fuel is spent just to achieve orbit. Only a fraction of the fuel is left for the journey to Mars.

Also the proposal is not to launch water: it is to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen on the moon base, both of which could be used for fuel. By now means is the proposal an easy one. However it is cheaper than launching directly from Earth.

The reason we launch from the Earth is Earth is where our industrial production infrastructure is. And even if you have to import just a couple percent to the Moon of the mass that you could launch from the Moon in payload (aka a highly evolved industrial base), you've blown your budget. Just ignoring that the needs of Mars most definitely aren't water. It's habitats, vehicles, and industrial / manufacturing hardware. Have fun trying to produce that sort of stuff on the moon.

How much fuel is left in a space vehicle after it reaches Earth orbit. Very little. So you have to build a bigger rocket or refuel. Building a bigger rocket has quickly diminishing returns. There are no refueling points in orbit. Launching a refueling vessel is counter productive as most of the fuel will be spent to get to orbit in the first place.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

"all the water"? "used as fuel"? Um, I think I woke up in a parallel dimension were the insane are running things?

Some of us read up on current space technology.

You do understand that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms which are currently being used a rocket fuel right?

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars is a pretty terrible candidate for colonization. Both Titan and Venus have better prospects as do asteroid bases.

And while a geologist with a lab can do a lot more research than a rover with onboard instruments can, there isn't really all that much of cosequense to learn from Mars. We can learn more about how Mars formed, but that's not really all that useful as there aren't any otehr objects like mars we could apply the knowdge to and Mars itself is a low value rock. It's the kind of thing that's interesting and worth doing if it's cheap, but really it's time we moved past this fixation with Mars and focused on the myriad of other objects that haven't yet proven to be boring rocks with juts enough gravity, atmosphear, and sunlight to get all the down sides without any of the benefits.

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So all the water on Mars can be used as fuel for Jupiter missions.

(Haldol takes hours to take effect, so for now, just agree and smile benignly at the parent)

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

Mars is a pretty terrible candidate for colonization. Both Titan and Venus have better prospects as do asteroid bases.

While I don't think Mars is the best candidate, I would have to disagree that Venus is better. The mean surface temp on Venus is 462C. Also the mandate NASA receives is not to colonize asteroid bases. It is to colonize Mars.

Re: Who cares?

[religionofpeas]

However it is cheaper than launching directly from Earth.

You conveniently leave out the mass of the fuel station on the Moon that has to be launched from Earth, and gently landed on the Moon. Why don't you add that back in, and redo your calculations...

Re: Who cares?

[Immerman]

Doesn't matter. If fuel is your payload, then you're paying ~$2k/kg for fuel in orbit. You don't burn payload after all. You then use that payload to refuel a second vehicle already it orbit. Doesn't matter if it takes 100 flights to bring up enough fuel, the cost/kg doesn't change.

Re: Who cares?

[religionofpeas]

Sending people to Mars is not a very cost effective way to do science. For the same money you'd be able to send dozens of unmanned probes. Granted, they work slowly, but they don't get tired, and can spend years on the Martian surface without food, oxygen and water. They also don't have to come back.

Re: Who cares?

[MMC Monster]

I forget, what are we going to Mars for?

For science.

There is no loftier goal in all the heavens.

Re: Who cares?

[thinkwaitfast]

Second rule in government spending, why send water from earth at $22k/kg when you generate water on the moon for $220k/kg?

Re: Who cares?

[thinkwaitfast]

There's orders of magnitude more science to be done for the same price by remote sensing. All the scientists and even NASA admits this.

Re: Who cares?

[thinkwaitfast]

Maybe for one rover vs one base, but not if you consider that for the price of one base you could have 320 rovers.

Re: Who cares?

[thinkwaitfast]

Lots of things are possible, but why do that if it's 80 times more expensive than sending it from Earth?

Re: Who cares?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's a fixed cost, though. The whole point of sending the infrastructure is that in can work in situ. I used to be skeptical about the achievable mass flows in the cislunar space when supplied from lunar surface but with the right design, it turns out to be a pretty damn intriguing option.

Re: Who cares?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you're generating water on the Moon ten times more expensively than what it costs to send it from Earth, you're probably doing something wrong.

Re: Who cares?

[Strider-]

For science

If you believe that, I have a nice antique bridge that's for sale. Humans will set foot on Mars because of politics. That said, the only thing you can really do once you get there is science, but that's not why they will be going there.

Re: Who cares?

[RubberDogBone]

There is no way Mars is going to support a self-sustaining colony. It will be at best an underground habitat but there are a lot of unknowns even in that, such as whether the Martian dust will prove to be dangerous to inhale or touch, or whether it can grow food. There is no way we can keep our people dust-free. They will be exposed. And if it turns out to foam in the lungs and kill them, that's a problem. We don't know.

Assuming the dust doesn't kill us, living in tunnels underground will be all there is going to be on Mars for a very long time. We have no known way of terraforming the planet, and even if we did, we'd have to fix the magnetic field problem or any air we managed to make would just escape into the solar wind. We have no known way to fix the magnetic field.

Making a colony on Mars is a whole lot of things we don't know how to do, and a lot of technology that's at least a few thousand years away.

Re: Who cares?

[dbIII]

So all the water on the moon that could be used as fuel for Mars missions has no value?

None at all until you build an industrial city to make use of it.
Despite the cheesiness the initial premise of Space 1999 got that right. A huge base several years old with hundreds of people preparing to launch a manned ship to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Re: Who cares?

[religionofpeas]

It's not a fixed cost, because it will need constant resupply of consumables and spare parts.

Re: Who cares?

[religionofpeas]

And even discounting those, the fixed costs will be huge. If you really want to send people to Mars, then let's do it directly for a couple of times, save a bunch of money, and then quietly abandon the program after people get bored with it.

Re: Who cares?

[religionofpeas]

If you're generating water on the Moon ten times more expensively than what it costs to send it from Earth, you're probably doing something wrong.

That calculation depends on the total amount of water, but for the fixed costs of building a water plant on the moon, you can launch a whole lot of water from the Earth.

How much water do you think we need ?

Re: Who cares?

[cjameshuff]

And that "gently landed on the Moon" bit is expensive...more expensive than landing something on Mars. Each tanker landed on the moon will consume more propellant in doing so than an equivalent-mass Mars vehicle would in going to Mars...and we haven't even filled and launched the tanker yet. And then each tanker will have to reserve enough of its cargo to take it to Mars and then some in order to return to the moon for its next load. Propellant is going to be a limited resource, expensive to extract on the moon, and you are proposing to burn huge quantities of it to refuel a Mars craft.

Someday, when we have cities on the moon and lunar mass drivers hundreds of kilometers long that can hurl propellant payloads that can reach LEO with a small burn as they pass Earth, lunar propellant might become an economical way to slightly reduce operating costs for a steady stream of Earth-Mars traffic, but it's not something that's going to help us get there in the first place.

Re: Who cares?

[Renaissance Slacker]

Wasn't Alpha a giant nuclear waste dump? Was the spacecraft mission something that came up later in the series?

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

None at all until you build an industrial city to make use of it. Despite the cheesiness the initial premise of Space 1999 got that right. A huge base several years old with hundreds of people preparing to launch a manned ship to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Here's the problem: At best 95% of every launch's mass goes to escaping gravity. Only 5% is payload. That's for LEO. That's not accounting for travel propulsion beyond Earth. So either building insanely huge rockets with diminishing returns on payload vs mass. Or refuel in orbit. Refueling from Earth means 95% of each launch is to launch 5% fuel. How many launches would it take to fuel a manned Mars mission? The alternative is refueling from the Moon where the escape velocity is 1/5 that of Earth.

It's not going to be an easy plan. But for long term travel within the solar system given the current technology having refueling points beyond Earth make sense.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

It's going to be a long time if ever Mars gets a colony. At this point it is all science fiction and wishful thinking on how and when it will happen.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

True but politicians don't get press for sending more rovers to Mars. They get them by promising things like sending people to Mars.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

Oh I agree that's it is vastly more cost effective to send probes. But if the ultimate goal is Mars colonization (which is a very long time away), some one has to be the first to send people.

Re: Who cares?

[UnknowingFool]

You're assuming that it is a one time operation. here's the long term problem: At best 5% of a launch mass goes to the payload to reach LEO. At best. If launching a manned mission to Mars, the vast majority of the launch fuel will be to get the vehicle to reach LEO. So the vehicle most likely will have to be re-fueled in orbit. Again 5% of a launch just to refuel a craft.

Certainly it can be done short term for a few flights. However a long term mission to Mars might be better off with moon refueling where gravity is 1/6 that of Earth. Will it be easy to set up a Moon base to serve as a refueling point? No. But in the long run it will be better.

Re: Who cares?

[dbIII]

In the first episode there were some preparations for the launch of long range mission the "meta probe" to the edge of the solar system - some background to justify an active base on the moon I think since it didn't actually have anything to do with the plot.
The massive waste dump appeared to only have a few people who went to work there and did not appear to be the main role for the moonbase.

I'll leave it at that since there's not a lot of point attempting to find continuity in that series no matter how good various bits of it were.

Re: Who cares?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Approximately 1.15 tonnes of water per one tonne of hydrolox fuel.

Re: Who cares?

[cjameshuff]

Considerably more than that. You need enough propellant to fuel the tanker for a trip from the lunar surface to LEO with a load of propellant, and then back to the lunar surface empty. For the tanker itself, that's roughly as much total delta-v as launching to LEO from Earth. In the hypothetical "Mars as stepping stone" scenario, you'd burn most of the propellant you produced delivering propellant to the Mars vehicle. And that's only after burning more than enough propellant to establish a Mars colony to deliver all the needed mining and refining equipment and propellant tankers to the moon.

Refueling on the moon isn't a way around this: you need to get the spacecraft, supplies, and personnel there first, which takes more delta-v than sending them to Mars and would require first refueling them in LEO or launching them from Earth with enough propellant to go straight to Mars.

Re: Who cares?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why a trip from the lunar surface to LEO? I was referring purely to fuel production on the Moon. Obviously for usage scenarios, you have to do extra calculations, but since no particular one was mentioned, I didn't take that into consideration. In the specific usage scenario for fueling a trip to Mars - assuming you actually meant "Moon as a stepping stone" (otherwise the rest of your text doesn't seem to make sense) -, the logistics for that was studied recently at MIT, with promising results.

Re: Who cares?

[N3wsByt3]

But then again, NASA's stated missions is NOT solely to do about science in the first place.

How much to re-create Apollo?

[davidwr]

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

Would it be cheaper to do an "Apollo plus" with SOME modern technology where modern tech happens to be cheaper or the same price, but leaving out modern tech where it's more expensive?

In other words, would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?

Before anyone points it out, I am aware that significant amounts of the original Apollo program's designs have been lost, either literally though lost blueprints/design-documents or in practice because the "institutional knowledge" is long-gone. I also know that the original manufacturing facilities are long gone and they would have to be rebuilt. However, significant parts of the design work is either available or easily reverse-engineered, so we wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Anonymous Coward]

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

"This graph shows the amount spent by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the importance of the Apollo program ($100 billion spent over ten years) and of the Space Shuttle ($200 billion over 40 years)". A quick search suggests that NASA's total annual budget for this year is something around $19 billion for context, so Apollo would consume a little over half NASA's total budget per year over the same ten-year period. (That $100 Bn figure is inflation adjusted as far as I can see, and yes, that's assuming that it hasn't become more expensive in real terms to do the same thing.)

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[queazocotal]

"would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?".

In short - often no.
Nobody sane thinks that you can launch SLS for under 2 billion dollars per launch.
This is a launch cost of $30000 per kg of payload.

Falcon 9 can launch the same payload (admittedly split into several) for $5000/kg.
Falcon heavy (debut flight expected within several months) launches can currently be bought for around $1500/kg.

SLS 'benefited' from congress - who at best have a passing knowledge of rocketry, but a very good knowledge of who makes existing hardware in their constituencies mandating that it use shuttle components.

If you can get - for the same launch cost - not 70 tons, but 1400 tons to orbit, even if they are in 54 ton, not 70 ton lumps - it starts being really questionable what the benefit of the 'shuttle derived' heritage is buying you.

I note also that SpaceX has an at least credible plan to get launch costs down from the above $1500/kg to $30/kg or so, in a totally reusable vehicle.
At this sort of cost, it becomes insane not to entirely reevaluate your lunar strategy.

For example, it may become entirely reasonable not to use a lightweight aluminium-lithium stir-welded composite structure which is indeed very light, but requires months of engineering to design and costs millions, but instead a half inch thick decent aluminium structure that costs tens of thousands.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[UnknowingFool]

Would it be cheaper to do an "Apollo plus" with SOME modern technology where modern tech happens to be cheaper or the same price, but leaving out modern tech where it's more expensive?

What technology could be saved from Apollo? The idea of the technology could be re-used but in terms of actual physical objects none of the items from Apollo can be used. For example some of the technology of space suits pioneered by Apollo can be used in making new space suits but it will still cost money to make the suits. It will cost money to design the suit from scratch in the first place.

In other words, would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?

What money do you have in mind that could be saved? Because the vast majority of the engineering has to be re-done.

Before anyone points it out, I am aware that significant amounts of the original Apollo program's designs have been lost, either literally though lost blueprints/design-documents or in practice because the "institutional knowledge" is long-gone. I also know that the original manufacturing facilities are long gone and they would have to be rebuilt. However, significant parts of the design work is either available or easily reverse-engineered, so we wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Your assumption is flawed from the premise. Your assumption is that the 1) none of the technology has been advanced since Apollo so that era technology is the best fit. In many cases it is not. The "computers" used in the Apollo era are laughable by today's standards. It serves no purpose in re-building them.

2) reverse-engineering Apollo era technology would be cheaper than designing from scratch. Trying to retrofit technology from 50 years ago is sometimes not worth it. For example Apollo used Saturn V rockets. Besides using slightly different fuels and rocket technology, the cost of using really old rocket motors will be higher than adapting current rocket technology. This is a comparison between Saturn V vs Falcon. While the Falcon cannot lift as much as Saturn V could, the cost is significantly cheaper by almost a factor of 7 per launch. It would be cheaper to re-design and build a Falcon than to produce a single Saturn V rocket. That is barring any unforeseen problems with retrofitting the rocket technology.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Rei]

As you note, the tooling for Apollo doesn't exist. The suppliers don't exist. Some parts of the design don't exist any more, and that which does is just on paper. Everything would have to be started over in terms of modern CAD diagrams, full testing, etc. It would be more expensive to recreate Apollo than to make a new system with better performance. Today we have better alloys, better performance designs, more knowledge. And we do have infrastructure and suppliers that exist today, so it makes much more sense to make use of their capabilities than to recreate that which existed in the 1960s.

Your post seems premised on the notion that finding a way to make a big rocket is hard. It's not. There is no shortage of ways to come up with arrangements to reach the moon. The hard part is the low level engineering and testing, both at the component level and integration level. And we don't get that by going with Apollo. We actually lose in that regard, versus going with more modern systems.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[religionofpeas]

The hard part is the low level engineering and testing,

And the *really* hard part is finding a good reason to do it.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[MightyMartian]

The Saturn program should have never been abandoned that's for certain, but other aspects of Apollo technology are literally a few technical generations old now. This is like arguing "rather than building a new CPU, we should reverse engineer a 4004."

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[JoeMerchant]

How expensive would the PR fiasco of a crew death on return to the moon 50 years later be?

Apollo had its problems, but all in all, it was a very lucky program with far fewer deaths than it should have had, considering the risks that were being taken.

Sure, we can do it safer today - safer takes more time and money. Apollo was consuming money quickly, but it ran such a short span of years that it really didn't have a chance to match the budget of a modern "safer" program.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[JoeMerchant]

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

"This graph shows the amount spent by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the importance of the Apollo program ($100 billion spent over ten years) and of the Space Shuttle ($200 billion over 40 years)". A quick search suggests that NASA's total annual budget for this year is something around $19 billion for context, so Apollo would consume a little over half NASA's total budget per year over the same ten-year period. (That $100 Bn figure is inflation adjusted as far as I can see, and yes, that's assuming that it hasn't become more expensive in real terms to do the same thing.)

Awesome article - please upvote!

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[thinkwaitfast]

And the *really* hard part is finding a good reason to do it.

+5 Insightful

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[DerekLyons]

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

Outrageously expensive - because pretty much every piece would have to be re- or reverse- engineered, production facilities established and qualified, all of the production and part QA processes and procedures re-established and re-validated, etc... etc...
 

In other words, would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?

The problem is... there's nothing to build on. Apollo is over forty years in the past, and there's nothing left of it. Zip, zilch, NADA. Pretty much very manufacturing process has changed (they welded together parts we'd machine in one piece out of a single block nowadays for example). A good chunk of it's electronics were analog - and used very low part count IC's (for both digital and analog) that were manufactured using processes that haven't been used in decades. Etc... etc...

Beside which - what makes you think an Apollo-Saturn launch was cheap? In current year dollars, they cost over a billion a pop out of pocket. (I.E. not considering sunk costs or amortization.)

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[frank249]

I agree. The money would be better spent in SpaceX's ITS interplanetary Booster/spaceship program which would only cost $10 Billion to develop and $62m per launch. The ITS Spaceship could land 100 tons on the moon and return. ITS could also land 100 tons on Mars and return if refueled in situ.. SpaceX does not want to be seen as a competitor to SLS but ITS economics make it hard to ignore.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[DerekLyons]

If you can get - for the same launch cost - not 70 tons, but 1400 tons to orbit, even if they are in 54 ton, not 70 ton lumps - it starts being really questionable what the benefit of the 'shuttle derived' heritage is buying you.

It stops being questionable when you stop comparing prices - and start comparing what you get for those prices. Splitting the payload increases the amount of parasitic mass, I.E. non payload mass such as the support systems the payload requires until joined up in the final assembly. Splitting the payload also considerably increases the total risk of the mission - both by increasing the number of launches required and by adding rendezvous, docking, and assembly steps not required by a unitary payload.
 
Seriously, while I can't and won't argue the SLS is a good idea - there's a lot more to the equation than simply price. My minivan is much cheaper than a full sized pickup truck, but nobody sober and in full possession of his senses would ever confuse one for the other. No sane person would ever send one to do the other's job.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[queazocotal]

Yes, it is more than price, and yes, there is a cost.
However, assembly in orbit is also a valuable skill to learn that is a great positive going forward, and developing that robustly will mean you save nearly two billion dollars per launch.
With SLS, you get a way to use a rocket that is too expensive to use.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Anonymous Coward]

/me checks price of land in Harlem...

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Strider-]

What technology could be saved from Apollo? The idea of the technology could be re-used but in terms of actual physical objects none of the items from Apollo can be used. For example some of the technology of space suits pioneered by Apollo can be used in making new space suits but it will still cost money to make the suits. It will cost money to design the suit from scratch in the first place.

A number of years ago a group of Engineers tore down a Rocketdyne F-1 and built a set of CAD drawings/solidworks models from it. It was a useful exercise to do, as there are few people with the experience of building large RP1/LOX engines. They of course have all the drawings for the engines, but the drawings only show part of the story. They were all hand-built machines and very much works of art, but each one was unique and had its own quirks. Also, because it was a crash program, not everything was documented. The design is there, but not how to put it together, what little tuning tweaks were done on the production line, etc...

Anyhow, at the end of the process, they actually wound up firing the gas generator for the turbopump on the test stand. This small part, on its own, produces more thrust than an F16 in full afterburner, and when coupled with its turbine, 55,000 shaft horsepower. Ars Technica put together a nice write up on the process.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an example. My company made the LEM Flight Control. The processor was two shift registers into a single bit comparitor. A one bit computer.
The foundry that made the follow on processors decades later told us the underlying technology was being abandoned, make your final buy now. And that was maybe 30 years ago. The computer was literally programmed in a custom assembly language. I doubt the last one is still in the display case in the lobby.
So you can't make and you would not want to. You could replace it with an Audurino and be faster.

Oh and yeah, it had core memory, actual little metal donuts. Maybe 40 bits of non-vol. Yeah 40 bits, not bytes.

Respect your elders, we blazed such trails for you.

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you getting the Falcon heavy launch prices from? I keep seeing people claim Falcon Heavy will be substantially cheaper, SpaceX's quoted pricing indicates otherwise, and the launch vehicle itself is basically multiple Falcon 9 boosters strapped together, so I don't see why it would be cheaper.

Falcon 9 is $11272/kg to GTO (they don't quote prices to launch to LEO on their website, but multiplying by max GTO capacity and dividing by max LEO capacity I get ~$4100/kg). Falcon Heavy in contrast is $11250/kg to GTO (and doing the same calculation as before results in an approximate launch price to LEO of ~4500/kg).

Essentially, the Falcon Heavy is no cheaper than the Falcon 9. It exists to allow greater payloads to orbit, not cheaper launch prices.

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

They put humans on the moon in the 60's. Why are they fucking around with this 50 years later?

Re:What's the problem?

[omnichad]

The Cold War is back. The space program was in large part a showoff of our ability to build rockets and send them to a precise location (a.k.a. ICBMs). It was the same in Russia.

Spend the money

[tomhath]

FUD about Trump budget cutting aside, it's a common practice to spend as much on a program as possible in order to make Congress or the Executive Branch less willing to admit that it's a failure and kill it. NASA needs to find a reason for going forward with SLS versus using smaller unmanned vehicles.

Re:Spend the money

[queazocotal]

NASA never really wanted SLS.
NASA got SLS mandated on it.
They were compelled by congress to build a 'shuttle derived' vehicle.
There is no real mission for SLS, and it eats up huge amounts of the limited budget on things that could be done much cheaper in other ways.

No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[RobotRunAmok]

This is a quick, showy, last gasp "Hurrah!" for Government Space before all the heavy lifting, innovation and big expense are turned over to Commercial Space.

Re: No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I guess you're right - governments throughout history and around the world have done a far better job at burning people alive than any private industry ever could, among other awesome achievements. In the 20th century alone, democide accounted for what, at least 200 million deaths, of which the US is proudly responsible for a few million.

Re: No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the liberal arts major.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Apollo 1 was a fire that killed three astronauts, I'm not sure that's the best example of government doing things right, or better than the private sector.

You want to go back and think about that again? No need to talk about your childhood.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[RandyHill]

Are we talking about the $200B Space Shuttle that killed two crews? The one that had the same payload capacity as a $60M Falcon 9?

Can't wait for the Senate Launch System to start putting crews in space for more than 10x the cost of a Falcon Heavy.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[TWX]

I don't think that you're going to find a lot of argument about the cost problems associated with the Space Shuttle program, at least among those that actually think critically about the cost per pound, but bear in mind that if NASA had continued to pursue other launch platforms for the non-man-rated launch of materiel, and used the Shuttle more sparingly for when long-term crew accommodation was actually necessary we'd probably be having a different discussion.

If NASA had such an alternate heavy-launch method, they probably could have designed larger space station modules, could've launched more of them in groups, and sent up crews of astronauts, using the orbiter as crew quarters, to build the station in much shorter order. Instead of using the Shuttle to ferry parts smaller than the shuttle, they could have used it for what its name actually implied. They possibly could've even designed passenger accommodations for the cargo bay, if the space station itself had gotten large enough to be crewed by so many at a time, assuming that permanent emergency escape re-entry vehicles were left attached.

If the Shuttle hadn't been a bus misused as a tractor trailer needing all the weight-savings that could be achieved then they could've kept that latex coating over the main fuel tank and its insulation, such that the insulation wouldn't have been directly subjected to the forces that break it apart and that ultimately led to the destruction of Columbia.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Ol Olsoc]

IIf the Shuttle hadn't been a bus misused as a tractor trailer needing all the weight-savings that could be achieved then they could've kept that latex coating over the main fuel tank and its insulation, such that the insulation wouldn't have been directly subjected to the forces that break it apart and that ultimately led to the destruction of Columbia.

I skwacked about that one for a long time. The actual solution to a problem that was caused by the solution's removal. I fear that painting the tank again would have opened a political can of worms.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[LostMyBeaver]

To be honest, NASA is bloody brilliant and should never be denounced for their awesomeness, I agree wholeheartedly that Apollo would have never happened without NASA. That said, there are endless projects that could never have happened without them. The amount of science and tech they feedback is incredible.

Now... SLS is a project which has dumped billions into the American economy and has been a major component of helping the US recover from the DotCom Boom and later financial distastes of this century. Companies like Lockheed, Boeing and others provide a great service as money launderers for congress trying to stimulate the economy in different regions. They however are bureaucratic cesspools of filth and decay that fail at 9 out of every 10 projects announced since many of those projects really were intended to do nothing more than just feed money into the economy.

SLS would have never happened if it weren't for private space.

How many failed space projects have there been since the original Space Shuttle?

How many years did we fly the Space Shuttle and perpetuate the life of the Space Shuttle before we finally decided we had to move on and finally make something more?

This is because the ULA guys and Boeing never actually needed to complete a project in order to get more money for not completing it. It is too much work to bid on and negotiate for a new space launch vehicle. So, it's better to drag each one out as long as possible milking the government for more funding. NASA has been crippled by the government contractors. What's more is that Boeing and ULA are just so damn big, there was no other companies that could meet the minimum requirements to bid on these contracts, so NASA couldn't even pack up and go somewhere else.

Enter SpaceX and others.

SpaceX has now consistently delivered on inexpensive flights, advancing technology, even making space interesting again. They are a company that survives on launch contracts and while they take funding and government money, as far as I can tell, in the entire lifetime of the company, they haven't taken even as much as just this one SLS contract.

Does this mean that SpaceX is better than government? Nope... but here's the thing, if ULA or Boeing doesn't deliver on space projects now, the government can ask SpaceX or BlueOrigin (who seems to be working with ULA surprisingly enough). This has changed the entire dynamic of the space program. It meant that the NASA, after over 40 years of what generally has always felt like corruption can actually expect their contractors to deliver.

It is also very likely that Boeing and ULA companies may actually save their reputations and do better in business because private space is forcing them to actually be better than they were. Just imagine what would happen if Musk or Bezos got into commercial passenger aircraft and decided to compete with the 787 for example. Planes would cost a tenth as much and be designed to have lower cost of ownership.

These companies have been cornerstones of American accomplishment but when the politicians found out that they could use these companies to stimulate the economy, they started looking for projects to dump money into no matter what the outcome. It was altruistic, but it established a precedent that said "You don't actually have to build anything, just make jobs". And for nearly 30 years, that's what they did.

The design of the SLS, while FRIGGING AWESOME!!!! is just too expensive and placed absolutely no focus on practicality. My guess is a room of NASA scientists and engineers looking at the design and shaking there heads and thinking "This is what we get for that much money?". The entire rocket is probably heavily based on the idea of "If you want something good, we can go back to the drawing board for 10 years, this one we can deliver now".

I loved and adored the Space Shuttle. As a small child when it was being built, I slept snuggling on a stuffed space shuttle doll. There are so many things that made the S

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[dbIII]

The entire shuttle program since day one was a political can of worms. The original premise was to have a cheaper option than the Saturn V, for purely political reasons. Then the vultures came in to divide the project up for political pork. In desperation NASA reached out for defence money and found the price for that (due to needing to get into polar orbits) was to change to an insane design where the launcher was strapped on the side of an enormous rocket instead of on top. It's a wonder it launched at all without flipping sideways and piling into the ground at Orlando.
The infamous o-rings were so that bits could be trucked in from different states to share out the pork instead of large parts and shipping then in by barge like NASA wanted to do (and did with the Saturn V).
I think the above poster is correct and that politics would have prevented repainting the tank.

In a lot of cases I'm probably telling people what they already know, but it's bound to be new to some people.

Re: No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Renaissance Slacker]

I remember a prominent mathematician saying that the thousands of uniquely shaped tiles could be replaced by a set of only 3 (maybe 5?) different tiles. I want to say Penrose. Too lazy to look up.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[tim620]

While I like the idea of commercial space. The reality is, government funded space programs are necessary (at least initially). Despite what Musk and others say, there is no financial/commercial gain in sending people (or rovers) to the moon or Mars. Selling the idea to investors is difficult. There is a good chance people will die. There is a chance the spacecraft won't make it back. There is almost no return on investment. No investor is going to buy into that. Government space programs will need to lead the way and prove the technology and capability, well before commercial programs. SpaceX wouldn't be as big as it is today, without government contracts from NASA. Even their planned Mars "red dragon" capsule will be assisted by NASA. You can call the SpaceX flights to the space station "commercial", but it is really not much different than NASA hiring various contractors to build a rocket (like the Saturn V or space shuttle).

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[TWX]

In particular the issue with the o-rings stemmed from manufacturing the SRBs at Thiokol in Utah. The only practical means to ship said boosters was by rail. To ship them by rail ultimately meant designing components that could fit into the form-factor necessary to transport by rail.

The Saturn V rockets were manufactured in Louisiana, in New Orleans, so the large pieces could be barge-shipped to Florida in much larger segments than anything that had to be moved by rail. It was also the site where the Shuttle's external fuel tank was manufactured, for exactly the same reason.

If you look at a topographical map of the United States, you can see that Utah is about the least-suitable place, geographically, to try to manufacture and then transport something as large as the SRB. The entire state is within the Rocky Mountains and there are no navigable waterways out to an ocean or to flat lowland or plains. By contrast just about any state in the Great Plains, Coastal Plains, and the Central Lowlands possibly could've allowed for ground transport of the rockets even if it required new road or rail infrastructure simply because there are no mountains to contend with, and in the case of the Central Lowlands there's already a history of canal and lake barge shipping through the Great Lakes and out through the St. Lawrence River, in addition to alternative routes via the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers.

I they hadn't chosen Thiokol, and if they hadn't opted to remove the latex to save all of six hundred pounds, it's possible that the Shuttle would still be flying with a perfect record.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[TWX]

What may really bake your noodle is that they might not have had to latex the entire tank in order to protect it. They well might have been able to calculate the combination of ablative characteristics of the tank along with the speed of impact based on distance from the break-off point to the orbiter itself, such that they might have been able to get away with painting the nosecone and perhaps a parabolic-slice of the side of the tank facing the orbiter, such that pieces most likely to have a chance of damaging the orbiter were held down, while the side away from the orbiter wouldn't have had such protections.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[Ol Olsoc]

In a lot of cases I'm probably telling people what they already know, but it's bound to be new to some people.

You have the situation correct. And yes, I suspect the engine gimbals got a workout to keep that thing flying straight up on launch.

Re:No, SLS Is Going to Be Moth-Balled

[dbIII]

The Saturn V rockets were manufactured in Louisiana, in New Orleans [wikipedia.org], so the large pieces could be barge-shipped to Florida

Yes that's what I'm referring to. Practicality ruled over pork. "Where can we get these parts from" ruled over the later "we need to build something in Utah so how do we compromise the design so we can do that".

hadn't chosen Thiokol, and if they hadn't opted to remove the latex to save all of six hundred pounds, it's possible that the Shuttle would still be flying with a perfect record

Good point and a good lesson for the future.

Atpund the moon

[rossdee]

Didn't they already do that like 50 years ago?

and one of the astronauts read from the first verses of Genesis
Mike Oldfield used an excerpt from that on 'Somgs of Distant Earth

Yes I am old enough to remember the Apollo missions
Nice to see Eoin using the old launchpad

Re:Atpund the moon

[Rei]

And doing something impressive with it. Those realtime touchdown videos are amazing.

Re:Atpund the moon

[frovingslosh]

Didn't they already do that like 50 years ago?

No, that was all fake news. Do some research on the Internet, you'll see. Clearly if it had actually been done already it would not cost that much to do it again, and we wouldn't be talking about silly missions like going around the moon rather than landing on it.

Forget humans - send Trump instead

[BarbaraHudson]

He'll love the attention of being the first president around the moon (and he's well suited shince he's already a lunatic/space cadet. No way he'd cancel the budget for that!

Re:Forget humans - send Trump instead

[Raenex]

That's more up Putin's alley, but maybe he could convince Trump to go with him.

Re:Forget humans - send Trump instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, then NASA can get back to Muslim outreach and fudging global warming numbers.

Re:We are finally getting over

[Rei]

Could you describe to me what is the "Obama space malaise"?

Obama didn't want SLS. It was congress that mandated it. And I'm in agreement: SLS is a giant unfunded mandate. "Let's build a rocket that will be way too expensive to make significant use out of, and which we won't have the budget to use often enough to make reliable or at all cheaper".

You don't make mandates that you're not going to fund. So much of congressional NASA mandates have been make-work programs, trying to justify keeping Apollo and Shuttle-era facilities open - the cost of keeping those facilities open inherently making anything that they do very expensive. It's no mystery that they need to cut back and streamline their operations to be competitive. But they're not allowed to.

Honestly, I'd like to see NASA become in many ways NACA again. An science agency with a focus on advanced research projects that help improve aerospace technology and understanding in ways that others can make use of. Now, exploration is in many ways part of that. But "NASA as a rocket manufacturer" strikes me as akin to the government running a passenger jet manufacturer or the like. I see the current situation as totally backwards - why should NASA be redoing the tech of the 1960s, while private companies are the ones doing innovations like first stages that return to pad for reuse? It should be NASA developing new technology and the private sector exploiting it.

And this was the approach that the Obama administration was pushing for, with the very successful COTS program. There are many things I have to fault it for, but this is not one. I mean, seriously, how weird is it that Republicans are pushing for things to be run by a big government agency that does everything internal, and Democrats pushing for greater privatization and outsourcing? ;)

Manned space flight is a complete and total waste!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how much real science that could be accomplished with all the money that is wasted on manned spaceflight. I hate to break it to you space nerds, but biological entities are never going to travel to Mars nor any other planet. Think about how much we would have already discovered had we simply spent this money on robotic missions. Real science, real data, real accomplishments. How much money was spent on a micro gravity toilet?

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood has become expensive.

Instead why not offer SpaceX The Money...

[Glasswire]

For 23 Billion, Musk could probably build a Transit module for Crew Dragon and a Lander, put both up on a pair of Falcon Heavies - AND DO A REAL LUNAR MISSION. And by then the FH will already be crew rated, eliminating that first flight danger on SLS. Let's face it SLS is Sen Shelby's pure pork program to keep a bunch of shuttle worksrs employed building a dysfunctional system that's far too expensive to be useful

Re:Instead why not offer SpaceX The Money...

[JaredOfEuropa]

I think you just answered your own question...

Re:Instead why not offer SpaceX The Money...

[thinkwaitfast]

Apollo was never crew rated. Neither was the shuttle until after Challenger.

Why so expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole Apollo program with all mission cost that much.

The issue isn't if,

[Anonymous Coward]

but why. Sure you can strap a few people to a rocket for a trip around the moon, but what do you gain from doing that. The Apollo missions were stopped because after the big historical moment and a limited number of experiments, we ran out of things to do to justify the expense. Even if there was something we wanted to do on the moon, it's almost always simpler and more cost effective to just send a robot.

Re:The issue isn't if,

[thinkwaitfast]

but what do you gain from doing that.

You can't turn on a gopro remotely.

Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[hey!]

Good thing that's not what they're actually doing.

If you read the actual GAO report, it doesn't say the rocket costs twenty-three billion. That's the cost of "the first planned SLS flight, the ground systems for that effort, and the first two Orion flights." In other words the costs to meet certain early program milestones, including costs which should properly be amortized across the lifetime of the rocket and crew vehicle.

The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.

That's still a lot of money. Even if you go with expendable costs of half a billion, and billions for the whole mission for sure, well, it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls. Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.

Re:Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is enough irony here to mine. Billions of tax dollars, and all those brilliant scientists and engineers, will soon be focused on a scheme best carried out by underwear-gnomes. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Re:Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.

US would probably like to have the capability of sending people into space if necessary, without always having to rent Sojuz-time. I think the space shuttle was the last remaining human rated space vehicle in the US arsenal.

Re:Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

The end goal when it comes to space is for people to be living on other planets. It is cheaper to send machines but it's further from the end goal.

Re:Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[bluegutang]

it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls.

What is the Trump presidency about after all, except trying to show that one has big balls (even if they don't)?

Re:Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[werepants]

The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.

That $500 million per-launch cost is based on the assumption of frequent launches, but the thing is, when you are looking at the cost of a system, you need to amortize the development costs over the number of launches to get the true per-launch cost.. If we only get one productive flight out of it, it's appropriate to call it a $23B launch. If we get two, we could call it an $11.5B launch. Right now, there are one or two notional NASA missions that are designed to use the capability of SLS, a bunch of random stuff they've cobbled together that could keep it busy, and no other commercial or government customers who have interest.

The problem is at the end of the day, that even at $500M a launch it is still way, way too expensive. The only advantage of SLS is that it can put up a huge payload in a single shot, but the thing is, payloads are generally getting smaller just as computers have gotten smaller. Why spend $500M for 70 tons on SLS when you could spend $150M for 53 tons on Falcon Heavy? Or hell, do 3 launches of Falcon at $60M a pop (for 25 tons) and you still come out ahead.

What's worse, since the development and operation of SLS is so pricey, the only customer who could conceivably afford to use it (NASA themselves) is strapped for cash because SLS is consuming most of their budget.

Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.

SLS has always been intended for manned missions - what's different about this is that NASA is looking at making the first test flight of SLS (originally slated to be autonomously controlled) into a manned mission. The motivation for this is potentially to save some cost and schedule, skipping that first test flight and going straight for the headline-making positive press of sending astronauts into a lunar orbit for the first time since Apollo. However, what has everybody up in arms is that this is incredibly risky - would you want to gamble your life on a rocket that has never successfully flown? There's speculation that this might be a study carried out at the behest of the Trump administration... currently there's a test mission scheduled for 2018 and the first manned mission is planned for 2021, if instead the first manned mission could happen in 2019 it would be a nice feather in the cap for a president's first term, heading into election season.

Missed opportunity....

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We could have had a permanent moon base by the end of the second Gingrich administration ...

what about the dark side of the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Has Trump decided to go visit our dark side neighbors? /me grabs popcorn

Re:We are finally getting over

[wbr1]

And this was the approach that the Obama administration was pushing for, with the very successful COTS program. There are many things I have to fault it for, but this is not one. I mean, seriously, how weird is it that Republicans are pushing for things to be run by a big government agency that does everything internal, and Democrats pushing for greater privatization and outsourcing? ;)

For those that do not know the answer to Rei's question, the answer is: Pork Barrel
You know, they thing the politicians of both sides have you bent over as they whisper sweet lies in your ear.

Re:Make America Sane Again ( Score: +5, True)

[Anonymous Coward]

on that score, how would hillary be any better?

Already scheduled

[XXongo]

The rocket is being built already, you know. The question here is whether the first launch, which is already scheduled, should carry humans around the moon, or carry an empty capsule around the moon.

Re:Already scheduled

[Anonymous Coward]

The rocket is being built already, you know. The question here is whether the first launch, which is already scheduled, should carry humans around the moon, or carry an empty capsule around the moon.

It would be nice if NASA could prove that the entire stack worked before they stuck people in it, but they can't really afford that, can they? Imagine what NASA's future will be if they manage to kill the crew on an untested rocket.

But, even if they manage to avoid killing the crew on this untested stack, they still won't have the budget to actually use this rocket in any reasonable way. At this point, they can only afford a stunt or two, and then they're out of funds. They are hoping that, somehow, this stunt will bring back the glory days of Kennedy's moon program. It won't.

Re:Already scheduled

[RandyHill]

Isn't it a bit strange that they won't approve a Dragon capsule for human use without a full unmanned test, yet now they are going to risk lives without a test on the SLS? At least the Dragon has a reasonable escape system.

Re:Already scheduled

[bluefoxlucid]

That's only temporal: was it a bad idea, and should we hang someone for not stopping it?

Bad ideas don't become good ideas just because they've already done their damage.

Re:Already scheduled

[XXongo]

That's only temporal: was it a bad idea, and should we hang someone for not stopping it? Bad ideas don't become good ideas just because they've already done their damage.

No. But spent money doesn't become unspent money because you've changed your mind.

The new part here isn't the circum lunar test flight of the SLS rocket in itself. It's adding crew to the circum-lunar launch.

Re:Already scheduled

[XXongo]

Isn't it a bit strange that they won't approve a Dragon capsule for human use without a full unmanned test, yet now they are going to risk lives without a test on the SLS? At least the Dragon has a reasonable escape system.

You apparently have not have noticed it, but there is a new presidential administration out there. This was a request from the new administration's transition team for NASA to look into the possibility of putting crew on the flight.

Re:Already scheduled

[bluefoxlucid]

Bad ideas not recognized as bad ideas--daresay, not even considered as to whether they were productive efforts at all--lead to repetition of wasteful behaviors. For the longest time, doctors recommended strychnine as a prophylactic against disease and fatigue.

Re:Already scheduled

[RandyHill]

I'm fine with NASA's manned flights taking more risk to accomplish more and sooner, but it seems like the Dragon capsule is the "safer risk" given it's inherent safety mechanisms.

Re:Space malaise

[XXongo]

The Obama space malaise was Obama killing the Shuttle

Obama did not kill the shuttle. Bush killed the shuttle.

and Project Constellation and not providing an adequate replacement.

Bush designated Constellation to replace the shuttle, but did not appropriate funds to build it. Bush also started the Commercial Access to Space Station program, which funded the development of the SpaceX Falcon-9 and the Orbital Cygnus.

Obama commissioned a study of the Constellation program, the Augustine Commission, which concluded that Constellation should either be fully funded or else cancelled (and pointed out that there was no little of Congress fully funding it.) Obama then killed Constellation, in favor of the commercial programs which were looking very successful so far (and which, to be fair, had been started by Bush.)

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and the Earth is flat and if you sail too far you'll fall off the edge.

Get a grip, you ignorant twit.

Wouldn't it be better ...

[Tjp($)pjT]

Use the heavy lift ability of commercial concerns to get equipment to space on non-human rated vehicles and use LEO human rated space vehicles to get the humans to the equipment. No real reason to add the expense to engineer human level safety to a heavy lift vehicle at this point in time. We need to advance the assembly technology in space as well. A good direction for for Mars would be an unmanned mission where the components were assembled in orbit, creating a permanent habitat that can be pushed to a Mars orbit unoccupied but stocked for a long duration stay. Along with that should be an array of MPS (mars positioning satellite) micro-sats that can maintain an earth radio link through relays around Mars. Redundancy and positions in orbit mean earth to mars communications would be more reliable, and mars surface to earth becomes easier because the radios on the surface become commodity designs that are less dependent on critical antenna aiming in a hostile environment. We should also create a constellation of LPS (lunar positioning satellites) for further exploration there. The advances in technology will warrant the expense many times over. Space exploration generates new wealth injected into many levels of the economy, new technology and perhaps more important it is an agent of peace amongst nations, either through cooperation in missions, or through competition for prestige.

Re:Space malaise

[RandyHill]

The Senate Launch System is an adequate replacement for the Shuttle, it will waste almost as much taxpayer money, but at least be able to lift crews out of LEO.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you must have copy-pasted into the wrong browser tab, your text is a non-sequitur.

Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

23 billion is exactly what that damned wall will cost, which is all what Joe Coalminer wants.

wee-eeeeee-eeee-eeee-eeeeee-e

[Anonymous Coward]

look at meee..eee.eee.ee.eee im using taxpayers money for fun

Hijacked!

[sycodon]

Since that was a pretty lame and useless comment, I'm high jacking it to harp on my favorite space exploration related issue.

The future is not in chemical rockets. Period.

The future is in a space SHIP. Not a throw away tin can, or a floating log cabin like ISS.

An actual ship consists of...

1. A very powerful and long lasting power source. Think naval reactors or other self contained, compact reactors. We are talking 80 megawatts of power or more. The more the better.

2. Indefinitely sustainable environmental system. So recycling everything from your breath to last night's dinner you just finished processing.

3. Magnetic Shielding. People poo poo that, but it has been modeled

4. "Artificial" gravity. Actually, a huge centrifuge for the living/working quarters.

5. Lastly...engines. Banks of ion engines, the infamous and yet to be proven EM drive, or who knows what else.

All of these things are within our reach and $23 billion would go a long way towards bringing some to reality.

Once this is achieved, exploration is a matter of packing up the food and drinks and heading out. But we need to think long term (i know, I know) instead of to the latest publicity stunt.

Re: Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do you intend to lift your nuclear reactor to orbit? Nuclear reactors are pretty heavy. I've read somewhere that a 1mW reactor will weigh 11000kg. That's far from your 80mW reactor and we are not even talking about the rest of your spaceship. Chemical rockets are the only known technology that can do that, science fiction aside. To get your 80mW reactor into orbit you need a rocket capable of to lifting 880 000kg, that's about 6 of those SLS rockets.

Re: Hijacked!

[sycodon]

Then break the reactor up into six segments.

The ISS wasn't lifted all at once.

Re: Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't implying it's not feasible, but that you'd still need a chemical rocket to lift the stuff into orbit. Many rockets of the size of the 20 billion SLS rocket (although presumably producing more of these will lower their cost)

Re:Hijacked!

[currently_awake]

Or you could do the entire mission using robots, for less than $23 Billion. And without risking human life. Assuming all you wanted was the science. They didn't have that choice in 1969, now we do.

Re: Hijacked!

[sycodon]

Understood.

Chem Rockets will still have their place until other as yet un-imagined left methods are in place.

Re:Hijacked!

[amiga3D]

Robots should be part of it for the dangerous work but we need to send people too. What's life without risk? There's no shortage of volunteers willing to risk all for the opportunity. I'd like to see a serious effort to build a serious ship designed for system exploration that would hold at least a dozen people and sustain them for 10 years. To go to Mars and other places and orbit there and conduct experiments and explore. It's crazy that we put people on the moon over 4 decades ago and haven't done shit since. It's like we got there, looked around and said okay, that's it! Then went back home to stay.

Re:Hijacked!

[dryeo]

1. A very powerful and long lasting power source. Think naval reactors or other self contained, compact reactors. We are talking 80 megawatts of power or more. The more the better.

Besides what the AC said about mass, you're talking about a 80 MW steam engine in space, you need water and you need a huge heat sink for a nuclear reactor, which is actually just a steam engine.

4. "Artificial" gravity. Actually, a huge centrifuge for the living/working quarters.

You might be unpleasantly surprised at how big a centrifuge has to be to generate a decent amount of centripetal force close to equally over the average persons 6 feet as well as to keep the sideways forces to a minimum.

5. Lastly...engines. Banks of ion engines, the infamous and yet to be proven EM drive, or who knows what else.

See number 1, how the hell are you going to power it as steam engines don't work that well in space.

Re:Hijacked!

[SpaceDave]

You won't find many people in the space community who disagree with you - these are all desirable goals. Sadly I think they're pipedreams for the foreseeable future.

1. Think naval reactors or other self contained, compact reactors.

Anything containing the word "nuclear" is a non-starter for political reasons. Sure we all want it and we understand that it can be safe, but it's still a non-starter until some non-western country does it - then western governments might take more of an interest.

2. Indefinitely sustainable environmental system.

I refer you to Biosphere2. AFAIK there has been very little progress since then towards a truly closed ecosystem.

3. Magnetic Shielding.

Great idea that I hope will happen. For now the cost and development time is too great versus conventional shielding. Also the actual risk from radiation may not be a severe as many people assume.

4. "Artificial" gravity.

Definitely should be more work done on this one, but it does present serious engineering challenges and a development cycle that most program managers see as too long.

5. Lastly...engines. Banks of ion engines, the infamous and yet to be proven EM drive

Hopefully we'll see results from space-based EM drive tests soon, but this and ion drives are still a very long way from being practical for crewed spacecraft.

...we need to think long term (i know, I know) instead of to the latest publicity stunt.

Therein lies the problem. No one with the power to make these decisions thinks that far ahead, so these things are likely to remain on the wish-list. At least with conventional technologies we have a pragmatic way forward. My only hope is that you turn out to be right and the things you're talking about do get development funding soon, but realistically I don't see it.

Re: Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all we have wrong with our society - nobody thinks longer than a few years ahead. Politicians plan for the time they stay in power and even if they plan something farther ahead - the next one in house will cancel the previous plans. A big leap could only come from China or another country run by people who are not limited by public perception.

Re: Hijacked!

[sysrammer]

A big leap could only come from China or another country run by people who are not limited by public perception.

This is certainly one of the advantages of dictatorships and monarchies. If, and a big if, the person that managed to get the job is actually capable of doing something else besides what it takes to get the job.

Re:Hijacked!

[sycodon]

Maybe $23 billion could answer these questions.

I don't believe not knowing the answer has ever stopped us from trying.

Re:Hijacked!

[Ol Olsoc]

Robots should be part of it for the dangerous work but we need to send people too. What's life without risk? There's no shortage of volunteers willing to risk all for the opportunity. I'd like to see a serious effort to build a serious ship designed for system exploration that would hold at least a dozen people and sustain them for 10 years. To go to Mars and other places and orbit there and conduct experiments and explore. It's crazy that we put people on the moon over 4 decades ago and haven't done shit since. It's like we got there, looked around and said okay, that's it! Then went back home to stay.

This. If we aren't going to send people at some point, there is no point. The science is all well and good, but I want people as the main focus.

To the point that a full fledged rocket slut such as myself supports unlimited assets to be applied if human meatbags are in the mix, and if no human presence, I support exactly $0.00.

Re:Hijacked!

[Ol Olsoc]

See number 1, how the hell are you going to power it as steam engines don't work that well in space.

We get it. Much too hard. Just like most everything.

Re:Hijacked!

[Ol Olsoc]

Maybe $23 billion could answer these questions.

I don't believe not knowing the answer has ever stopped us from trying.

Someone will try. As America cedes the technological high ground to other countries, other countries will take up the relay.

We'll be in a closet selling our hats to each other and pretending to make money.

Re:Hijacked!

[dryeo]

The questions were already looked into back in the '60's, the math is pretty basic. Basically for a reactor in space, you need a heat dump and all that works in space is a radiator. I don't know the math but I'm pretty sure a radiator that can dump 80 MWs of heat would be very big. Same with a centrifuge, though there you can take shortcuts such as having 2 capsules connected by cable spinning around a central point or better connected to a central object such as a booster.
It's engineering on a very large scale, in space. $23 Billion would be a start just like the ISS is a start on learning how to build stuff in space, which turns out to be quite hard.
Just like the first ship building started out by building small boats and then scaling them up while doing lots of learning, space ships will be the same. Be nice to learn more about reactors in space (along with on the Moon and Mars) but we'll have to start small and then scale up.

Re: Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. 20b would fix a lot of stuff here in the USA. What the government should be doing is opening hospitals and med care facilities. Same doctors, no greedy board of directors. And of course government energy.

Re:Hijacked!

[dryeo]

It's physics, it's hard to dump 80MWs of heat in space and wishing won't change that. Invent a better way to extract electricity from nuclear fuel, perfect fusion, or use solar panels seem to be the current choices. It would be nice to have some breakthroughs, especially a reaction less drive that uses little power.

Re:Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

You instantly lost all credibility with EMDrive. You dream. Unfortunately you don't dream with any constrains on reality. Your dreams will never come true. While Musks on the other hand....

Re: Hijacked!

[Dread_ed]

The moon is made from the same stuff the Earth is. Simple, establish a base on the moon. Mine it for the required *stuff*. Build what you want. Boost it out of the Moon's minor gravity well and you're done. Ta da!

Re: Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

PS: 1mW = 0.001 W. A milliwatt.

Re:Hijacked!

[Ol Olsoc]

It's physics, it's hard to dump 80MWs of heat in space and wishing won't change that. Invent a better way to extract electricity from nuclear fuel, perfect fusion, or use solar panels seem to be the current choices. It would be nice to have some breakthroughs, especially a reaction less drive that uses little power.

Breakthroughs are nice, but seldom achieved without increments. I worked on some "breakthroughs" that appeared to most people like venus rising from the sea fully formed. They were actually based on a lot of incremental steps over a surprising amount of time. We have to let them do the work, and try stuff. Iron out the problems such as it were. The Saturn V was the result of decades of work. Present day rockets are incrementally better, but so far, not much of a breakthrough.

Now will we get that breakthrough? I suspect. I don't believe it will be this reaction-less motor though The present levels of "thrust" show both a remarkably awful efficiency as well as the "thrust" can be explained adequately by differential thermal heating and energy transfer to the particles bouncing off the thruster side. Cold fusion-ish, but with a plausible explanation for the effect.

Now, if I were to put on my prognostication hat, I wouldn't be too surprised that if we get to the point of working on actual starships, we may need to do the proof of concept well outside the orbit of earth and the inner planets. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there might be some serious space time warping happening that we might not want to happen in the neighborhood. There we use the robotic option. Then if warping the crap out of the local spacetime doesn't cause problems (and works) we can start building the starships near earth. I suspect the source will be something dealing with both magnetism and gravity. I'm doubting ZPE will work, but not ready to articulate that doubt.

Anyhow, don't hold me to that stuff, as it is what we call a wild-ass guess. I don't often bring this stuff up in a world where one is expected to make up their mind before puberty and never change it.

Re:Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet you're against life extension and the leisure society though. I got it, that wasn't covered in the pulp sci-fi you grew up reading...

Re:Hijacked!

[Neuronwelder]

Regarding reactors: I was told that heat is the biggest problem to get rid of on a space ship.

Re:Hijacked!

[Ol Olsoc]

I'd bet you're against life extension and the leisure society though. I got it, that wasn't covered in the pulp sci-fi you grew up reading...

I'll address those in reverse order. The leisure society is a fine idea. Having retired way early at 55, I have to say that it beats the shit out of working. I still keep busy but mostly doing what I want. We are truly entering a time when al most no one will need to work to survive. The alternative is either rejection of advancements or mass popucide, purposefully killing off most of humanity.

Life extension? That depends on where the extension comes from. The problem today is that it all comes on the old end. Which means we spend the last 20 years of our lives drawing down any omney e set aside, and are the healthiest demented people in the nursing home.

Re:Hijacked!

[quenda]

1. A very powerful and long lasting power source. Think naval reactors or other self contained, compact reactors.

The naval analogy has already broken down. Naval reactors provide cruising power, but a spaceship only needs large amounts of energy for starting and stopping (initial and final delta-V) . For 99% of the time they are ballistic, so why carry a big heavy motor? A small reactor onboard for electricity will do, and large power sources placed at either end of your journey for the delta-V.

Ion engines make more sense for slower, unmanned exploration vehicles.

Re:Hijacked!

[dbIII]

We are talking 80 megawatts of power or more

So a bit less power than the engines of a Boeing 747 supplied on takeoff from 1970 onwards?
Also nukes are heavy, hence solar panels all over the place since the dawn of the space age and not a lot of nukes (nukes mostly in spy satellites that need to brush against atmosphere from time to time with their highly elliptical orbits). It may be trendy to attack solar for political reasons but in Earth orbit it's perfect for the niche.
Point 5 - why open yourself up for ridicule?

exploration is a matter of packing up the food and drinks and heading out

FFS! Did an astronaut kick your puppy or something?

Re:Hijacked!

[dbIII]

Life extension? That depends on where the extension comes from

The method a few SF writers are playing with that seems to require the minimum number of impossible things before breakfast is to "upload" a copy of someone's personality/soul/whatever-the-hell-we-are and that copy becomes relatively immortal given shifts in hardware. Assuming the hardware to run the copy doesn't weigh much and is radiation hardened that creates possibilities for long range space travel where people are going to get zapped by very nasty radiation (a cost of travelling at relativistic speeds) and it's still going to take forever to get anywhere.
Of course if we can actually get a copy of someone to work on a machine we'll probably be able to do something approaching an artificial intelligence by then and just send that out.

Re:Hijacked!

[dbIII]

I refer you to Biosphere2. AFAIK there has been very little progress since then towards a truly closed ecosystem.

You refer to a stunt. NASA has been quietly working on things one little problem at a time so there has been progress. One little inexpensive project that has been fruitful was in Antarctica, growing tomatoes in simulated regolith during the polar night. Artificial soil that could be based on moon rock and artificial light.

Re: Hijacked!

[Joce640k]

Yeah, 'cos send all those buildings and machinery to the moon is easy.

So is growing food, etc.

Re:Hijacked!

[Joce640k]

Maybe $23 billion could answer these questions.

Nonsense! For $23 billion we could have another F35 instead, and run it for two years.

PS: Where would this "ship" sail to...?

Re:Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

> The future is not in chemical rockets. Period.

You've been reading too much science fiction.

You list five points that your ship would consist of, but none of them is actually capable of launching the ship out of Earth's gravity. Nuclear power, ion engines, etc... yep, they're great, but they won't get you to orbit. For that, we're going to be using chemical rockets for the foreseeable future.

Re:Hijacked!

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit more thought than "poo poo" may be warranted for your assessment of the "magnetic" shielding. The ion shield you linked only helps with solar wind. Not with the other nasty things like neutrons. So we will need more than what you suggest for human survival.

Re: Hijacked!

[Dread_ed]

It is decidedly not easy. Nothing in space is. But, the sooner we start the sooner we finish.

Re: Hijacked!

[amiga3D]

I've seen government pour money into social programs and such with little if any impact over and over again. It sounds great, everyone likes the idea and then it's like, WTF? The space program in the 60s was terribly expensive but it ended up benefiting everyone in some way by pushing technology and expanding infrastructure. Building something like that has all kinds of benefits that filter around through society. We can dump that money into hospitals and a few years later all we'll have is more sick people. Lets make something.

For $23 billion you could build a HUGGGE wall

[mspohr]

Why waste all that money to go to the moon when for the same amount you could build a really nice wall here on earth (the best wall ever)... the moon is a loser.

Re:For $23 billion you could build a HUGGGE wall

[Gavagai80]

Not really. The wall is estimated at $25B and will doubtless end up far more expensive than that after various lawsuits are sorted out and they learn that smugglers dig holes and decide to make the wall a hundred feet deep.

Re:For $23 billion you could build a HUGGGE wall

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, the Chinese will be soooo jealous when they look down upon Earth from their moon base and see that our wall is more beautiful than theirs.

Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Just so you can spend some money? If an accidents happen, I'm going to laugh my head off. This Robert Lightfoot seems like a serious dickhead. And Jim Bridenstine says "The moon, I believe, is necessary.”. How the fuck is it necessary? Does he know what the word necessary means? What a dumb shit.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Bartles]

Imagine how much real spaceflight could be done with the money that NASA wastes on outreach and Climate Change study.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[religionofpeas]

We need to fund Climate Change studies so we can Terraform the Earth next century.

check two boxes at the same time

[Thud457]

build THE WALL from COAL.
It's not like anybody wants the stuff right now.

Never mind that coal is inflammable...

"three-week trip around the moon"

[Anonymous Coward]

SLS, "the most powerful NASA has built".

A "European service module to put three astronauts inside the new Orion space capsule" to the moon.

$23 Billion! That's more than NASA's yearly budget!

"acting head Robert Lightfoot" has to be the equivalent of a "mop handle" masquerading as an idiot bureaucrat!

Cancel NASA !

Re:Crony Commission

[Anonymous Coward]

And you know this as an IT worker or Best Buy sales person how?

Go Fever? I hope not

[TheHawke]

For everyone's sake. Putting unmanned vehicles into orbit with test loads is one thing, but loading up an untested booster with people and then sending them on a field trip round the moon is another.

Remember Apollo 1. Remember Challenger. Remember Columbia. Go fever has a nasty butcher's bill that we pay every time this happens.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Bartles]

That's great. It's not NASA that should be doing it. NASA studies travel through air and space.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[thinkwaitfast]

Why do you need astronauts in space?

To fix the toilets when they break

Only three around the moon for $23B? Child's play.

[Anonymous Coward]

For just $2 per passenger, I have proven plans to carry 7 billion around the sun and I am ready to launch as early and 24 hours after the cheque (check) clears.

Private Sector Only

[Anonymous Coward]

The public sector did the moon once.We've achieved that high aspiration. If the private sector has no application for moon launches/landings, then it should not be done. Why should such a thing even be considered? Because, "Ooo, cool?" Because, "Technology, dude." Public spending on space is going to crowd out other spending. Those other projects will develop cool technology too.

If the Earth's billionaires want to spend their coin, I am 100% for that. But please don't spend my pennies doing this. I already owe the creditors of the US $67,000 and my net worth is about zero. I'm done with public spending on space as much as I can be done with it.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[religionofpeas]

Maybe, but NASA is doing it now, and moving the exact same operation to NOAA would only waste money.

$23 Billion here, $23 Billion there,

[mea2214]

Pretty soon, you're talking real money

Apollo 8 patch

[istartedi]

I love the Apollo 8 patch. That's a logo designer's dream. It practically designed itself. I almost wonder if they made sure it wasn't 7 or 9 just so they could do that.

Anyway, that mission made sense as a stepping stone to landing on the Moon. Doing it again *sort of* makes sense just to dip our toes back into something other than LEO operations... but if Mars is the next target maybe other missions are more logical steps...

Re: We are finally getting over

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, you wants concerning NASA are irrelevant. You aren't a citizen.

50 Years late

[stooo]

NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket ???
Article is about 50 Years late

Dead border-jumpers pay for the mission

[Anonymous Coward]

Grind-up border-jumping wetttbakkks and use therm as fuel ... and don't feed or support the escapeeez. At $17K/peon that requires rejecting ~ 13K invaders ... but it's a useful start at immigrant depopulation.

The SLS doesn't get much respect

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the SLS is its low flight rate. A rocket should fly a few times a year, preferably several. I guess the Ariane 5 is an example of a good old space Western government rocket. The Ariane 5 flies 6 times a year, and is optimized for putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit.... where Hydrogen becomes a lot more useful there than kerosene. The SLS is based on mature parts from the Space Shuttle program, SSMEs, 8.4 meter hydrogen tanks, and 3.7 meter solid rocket boosters. If there's something which should be criticized, it is Orion.

Reactors can lift themselves (just barely)

[raymorris]

> And how do you intend to lift your nuclear reactor to orbit? Nuclear reactors are pretty heavy.

*Current* reactor designs produce just barely enough energy to lift themselves. You'd need rocket assist to lift everything else. Of course you'd also need to do the engineering to convert the nuclear power to thrust efficiently, but on it's face it's not impossible.

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how much real spaceflight could be done with the money that NASA wastes on outreach and Climate Change study.

Ok, that's none then.

Now let's imagine a sparkly unicorn shooting rainbows from its horn. So pretty.

That's great. It's not NASA that should be doing it. NASA studies travel through air and space.

Nope. Sorry, but NASA actually makes use of their travels through air and space to conduct further scientific research.

This is why they operate the Hubble Space Telescope, will soon operate the James Webb Space Telescope, and why Congress specifically instructed NASA to be the ones to operate the Earth Observing System, among other tasks.

Sorry, but your monomaniacal approach to organizational methodology is simply fraudulent reasoning, which nobody outside of your circle-jerk believes.

Really, the best possible interpretation, is that you're just pointlessly shuffling desks around, but with the history of deceit on your part, it's bogus.

um...because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither the Bush(43) or Obama admin spent ANY money designing, building, or testing a modern lunar lander suited to the new SLS rocket and designed to word with a modern crew capsule. Bush did not because he started the "Constellation" program (which SLS is a mutant remnant of) but did not fully fund it - so all the Bush era money went to the crew capsule and the launch vehicle for the crew capsule (the now-cancelled Ares I). Obama did not because he did not want to go back to the moon and did not actually want Mars either (Obama kept zero-ing out the budgets for Mars and trying to cancel the Mars rocket but congress kept fighting him and forced the funding of the SLS rocket)

No lunar lander == no lunar landing.

But WHY?

[RubberDogBone]

We've already sent multiple Apollo missions around the moon, and several that landed, and numerous robot craft to land and circle the moon.

So what the fuck is the point of doing this again? We already did it. 50 years ago. It hasn't changed appreciably in that time and there is still nothing significant there that requires humans to be there to see or record or observe it. We have robots that can do the same things for far less money and risk, in far less time.

Jesus this is like spending a ton of money on a fancy new car so you can cruise around an empty mall parking lot, that we cruised around before. Oh look, the potholes are still the same. And how much did we spend to find that out?

NASA should focus on doing something new and different. Don't just waste the meager funds they barely get at all on repeating what has already been done.

dumb argument

[Anonymous Coward]

"We've already done this a couple of times" REALLY???

We've already flown airplanes... I guess we should give up on aviation. We've alreay driven cars... I guess we should junk them all. We've already sent men to Australia and Antarctica... I guess nobody should bother with those two continents again!

I despise this brain-dead faux reasoning of the Obama era. The moon has a surface area about the size of the African continent and we have had a dozen men explore an area of it that's a few square miles over the span of a few hours.... and then the man-child moron Obama anncounced "been there, done that". It's hard to find that much willfull ignorance and idiocy packed into a single skull. The same era and the same political leadership produced a similarly idiotic meme: pipeline building jobs are only temporary and should not be counted. Well DUH! Unless you are an incompetent moron, ALL CONSTRUCTION JOBS ARE "TEMPORARY"!!!!! The key is to line up a bunch of construction so the workers move from new project to new project because you have a thriving economy and that economy demands all kinds of new infrastructure. Obama had a great talent for reading teleprompters, and a great set of academic mannerisms and speaking styles....but none of that was evidence of intellectual curiosity or actual intelligence. The media endlessly hyped the man as super-intelligent, super-wise, and so-on but his actual actions provide little evidence of these qualities.

The worst excuse in the world for not doing research or exploration is "been there, done that", particularly when the previous activity was only preliminary and very incomplete. Most of what the Apollo program was about was developing the hardware, techniques, capabilities, and experience of getting to and returning from the moon; the science was an add-in that was tucked-in where possible, with the assumption that as we got good at the Earth-Moon transport the science would ramp-up. The evidence for this, beyond the documentation, is that the last mission, Apollo17, carried the first (civilian) scientist (geologist Harrison Schmitt) whereas all the previous astronauts were military test pilots.

Tell me: After we put the first human on Mars, should we abandon the thing and cancel all future Mars flights because we've "been there, done that"????

Re:Manned space flight is a complete and total was

[Bartles]

Actually, Hubble is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Webb will be operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute as well. NASA just handles the technical aspects of launch,operation, and maintenance as they should.

Suicide

[uvajed_ekil]

And this is why their budget will be cut again - focusing on expensive, relatively pointless shit that has been done before. SLS is dead, and why shouldn't it be? Incremental advances and dead-end projects are of no interest to bean counters. Of course I'd love to see a small percentage of our defense budget reallocated to double or triple NASA's annual budget, but that isn't going to happen, so trips to drive past the moon without even stopping are not going to happen.

This would be merely an unnecessary step toward using the moon or another orbital base as a launch point for a manned Mars mission, and one which would not generate enough excitement to spur budget increases or wider demand for such projects. I'm all for it, in theory, but the minimal benefit doesn't justify the cost, and heaven forbid it should fail or go way over budget.

Beware the space-cadet-industrial-complex

[Anonymous Coward]

It has long been a standard part of the big aerospace and defense contractor argument, enthusiatically supported by space cadets who remember Apollo as a "golden age" and clap like trained seals for anything from Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, to point to the massive piles of cash spent on Apollo and say that we cannot currently do moon missions because we are not spending enough. This is a blatant lie, presented like a magic act - the public is to get so distracted by memories of the glory of Apollo that they pay no attention to the violently contrradictory FACTS.

Consider:

1. When project Apollo began, we did not know how the goal was to be accomplished and what would be needed. Thanks to Apollo, we now know these things and needto spend no time or money figuring them out.

2. When project Apollo began, we did not have the facilities.

2a. The Kennedy Space Center had to be designed and built and outfitted.

2b. The Johnson Space Center (mission control and all the astronaut training facilities) had to be built and outfitted.

2c. Major facilities at Plum Brook (engine test and massive vacuum chambers) had to be built and outfitted.

2d. The Marshall Spaceflight Center (shake testing facilities big enough for a Saturn V, and engine test stands for the Saturns) had to be built and outfitted.

2e. New deep-space tracking and communications facilities all around the world had to be designed, built, tested etc and ships equivalent to these (like USNS Vanguard) needed to be outfitted to cover parts of the world that are covered by water.

2f. Contractors like Rocketdyne and North American Aviation needed to design and built their own test facilities for the components they were building (like the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the test stands in the hills over Edwards, etc

2g. Transportation infrastructure had to be created including everything from rail lines connecting to these new facilities, sea-going barges for trasporting items like the Saturn 1st stage from Michoud to KSC, specialized aircraft like the "super guppy", the giant crawler transporters at KSC, etc.

3. When project Apollo began, we did not have the semiconductors, computers or the software we needed. These things were all created and paid for from that pile of Apollo money, and we have them now.

4. When project Apollo began, we did not have the space suits and life support systems needed for long-duration deep space missions and did not yet know all the requirements. That pile of Apollo money paid for the R&D and we now have the benefit of that experience and knowledge.

5. When project Apollo began, we did not yet know how to do rendesvous and docking in Earth orbit (to say nothing of lunar orbit) and had not fully-developed space navigation techniques. These things were partly developed on the overlapping project Gemini and funded and further developed under the Apollo budgets.

6. When project Apollo began, we did not yet know what the moon was made of and whether the surface was rocky or deep dust. We spent lots of money sending probes to crash into the lunar surface and other probes to land on it to learn what we needed to know to inform the design of manned lunar landers. We now have all this information.

7. When we did project Apollo, we lacked all the automation we have today so nearly everything had to be done by individual technicians and engineers. All the welding and machining was done by expert welders and machinists whereas today we have robots and computers doing many of these things. One reason the Saturn V was so expensive to fly was that in addition to being all hand-built, it was monitored by a huge number of people on the ground - over 300,000 people were involved in the Apollo flights!

It's in the interests of the big contractors to have everybody believe NASA cannot go to the moon without hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding. It is NOT in the interests of the taxpayers, nor is there any justification for it. NONE of the

reuseable 'trip' capsule docked at ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

So I hope they are planning on a reusable shuttle rocket they just refuel at the ISS and make trips out from there. Making something which will stay in space and only travel in space makes more sense then always throwing something away which has to handle re-entry after the long trips. Just send up fuel and provisions and start using the ISS as a base station.

try again after...

[Anonymous Coward]

the guys at SpaceX actually put a man in orbit. Until that happens, we're just talking science fiction with Mr musk.

Incidentally, nobody at Boeing or LockMart has ever put anybody into space either. McDonnell did Mercury and Gemini and while they got gobbled-up by Boeing, the people who did it all got eliminated long ago. North american Aviation (command and service modules) and Grumman (lunar module) did Apollo and while Boeing gobbled-up NAA and Grumman merged with Northrop, none of THOSE people are still at Boeing or Northrop-Grumman. North American Rockwell did the Shuttle, and while Boeing gobbled them up,those people are actually all long gone too. In summary: there are exactly the same number of engineers at Boeing (building SLS elements and their commercial "starliner" capsule), and at LockheedMartin (building Orion) who have experience designing vehicles to put people into space as there are at SpaceX (building Falcon and Dragon) and at Sierra Nevada (building "dream chaser") - namely ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

The hero worship of Elon Musk that leads to all the "give Elon the money and HE will get it done!" yammering is just plain silly; I have not seen him strap his tailfeathers into one of his Dragons for a ride on one of his Falcons yet, nor risk anybody else on one. That said, as indicated above it would be wrong to ascribe more expertise to his competitors.

The "human rated" thing is another issue and and even bigger joke. Until Elon Musk came along, NASA had NO standards for "human rating". The very idea was just a case of regulatory capture whereby NASA and its preferred vendors had a syntheic argument about buying from anybony else and particularly any new upstart businesses like SpaceX. This was exposed when SpaceX started to try to compete for launch business and wastold it would have to wait for NASA and the USAF to create the standards... there was clearly no way the established vendors could have ever been qualified. NASA put two men on the very first shuttle flight even though no shuttle had previously been flown even in an unmanned configuration. NASA currently launches crews on Russian rockets which are not "man rated" to the newly-written NASA specs. When Alan Shepard became the first American in Space and later when John Glen became the first American to orbit the Earth the Mercury capsule design had spent far less time in space (HOURS unmanned or with chimps aboard) than Musk's current cargo Dragons (which have spent MONTHS in space) and had fewer successful reentries and splashdowns than Musk's Dragons. This whole "man rated" argument about Musk's Dragons would have become moot had Musk found a non-NASA volunteer and spent the money and exhibited the guts to fly a man on a cargo dragon for several orbits a year or more ago - LockMart and Boeing would have been exposed.

SLS another white elephant

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the shuttle, the SLS is a big pork project designed to wreck the US space program by spending all of the money on a launch system leaving little for actual things you want to do in space. The shuttle was a total disaster, its failure was predicted before it was even launched. The concept was totally flawed. Yet we keep on coming up with new white elephants which cause the space program to stagnate by using all of the money on overpriced launch technology.

Its sad to say the Russians have long had superior technology and realized the right way was to have cheap expendable rockets going up to a space station rather than to have a launching space station, which the shuttle was. the USA spent 3 decades without any of that, no permenant space station, no moon trips, because of the damned shuttle and its outrageous cost overruns that ate up much of the budget, leaving little for anything else.

SLS should be cancelled, the money put into the various COTS--- programs instead

uh, generally...

[Anonymous Coward]

the taxpayers pay to fly a president back to his home at the end of his presidency.

and I say that with a bi-partisan grin and as a mild Trump supporter... it's a good thing Trump won, since the taxpayers could never afford the specialized vehicle required to fly Hillary back to hell after her four or eight years...

It has almost always been commercial space

[dbIII]

While "Commercial Space" sounds cool and all to promote new players like Musk it's worth remembering things such as it being Grumman who built the lunar lander and not NASA.
It has been "Commercial Space" outside of Russia for a bit over fifty years.
It's also worth remembering that currently Musk's "Commercial Space" hype has been about getting paid for government work and not commercial satellites like many others are launching. Not very commercial is it? The old players who are launching communications satellites are a lot more commercial.


I'm not knocking Musk, just a ridiculous misconception and silly free market flagwaving that got badly lost.

Re: Manned space flight is a complete and total wa

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean what is effectively, a NASA subcontractor.

That is indeed, one way that large organizations handle a diversity of applications, by the creation of smaller units, with varying degrees of independence. Similar NASA units include JPL and the National Space Science and Technology Center.

So yes, NASA is doing all of this, and working with other entities within the government of the United States, as well as private industry.

At least they don't have to sell all their miniVans to their Turkish subsidiary before sending them to Canada and back again.

pocket change

[Anonymous Coward]

We spend 2 to 5 times that amount every year to deal with the illegals. Also, you already have the highest estimate I've seen. The lowest I've seen was half that, so spending 4 to 10 times as much every year.

All of this is pocket change. The wall is only 2% of Mexico's GDP, 0.1% of our GDP, or 0.5% of our current federal budget. We can make Mexico pay and they'd barely notice. If we pay, we definitely won't notice, and that isn't even counting the money saved EVERY YEAR by not dealing with the illegals.

Re:Space malaise

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating a vessel capable of supporting a hundred crew members is challenging, but I'm confident that NASA's engineers will pull through. Personally, I hope to witness their historic solar landing sometime in my lifetime.

Re:Crony Commission

[IWannaBeAnAC]

If Congress wanted Constellation, then they would have funded it. That was one of Obama's options. The status quo was ridiculous. The options were fund it, or kill it.

ISRO

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it to ISRO.. they will do it for $5 million.

Re: Manned space flight is a complete and total wa

[Renaissance Slacker]

Terraform for the lizard people secretly running the world, you mean.

How come TWO launches 23 billions? Think Columbus.

[syntotic]

Think Columbus exploring American on equivalently sized costs, Europe would still be wondering if it is a new Continent or India what Columbus reached! Oops! This can be calculated quite well having the time and resources to make a meaningful comparison, but you get the idea it is how it feels. We ARE used to have antigravity drives and wormholes taking us several parsecs away to colonize a new system before the Quacko Empire does, in videogames... Here in Real Life we have to get comfort from the idea we are launching satellites galore and that is all, anything more exciting is decades and billions away! It also looks that at comparative costs going satellital would have us still in academia experiment rather than commercial application levels. Not that it is a novel thing... space is now pretty well assimilated and most basic problems solved. I would expect much better leverage for 23 billions, but maybe NASA still does not get the idea, industrial is the way to go, mass production, in series, etc. Sure you do get the idea we must have much more expertise and know how than artisanal by now...

While we are torquing about it

[dbIII]

The coders in this place mostly won't know about bending moments but it's a good concept to look up to get an idea as to why it was so insane to strap the shuttle onto the side of a rocket instead of on top. NASA did incredibly well to get it to fly at all.

Re:While we are torquing about it

[Ol Olsoc]

The coders in this place mostly won't know about bending moments but it's a good concept to look up to get an idea as to why it was so insane to strap the shuttle onto the side of a rocket instead of on top. NASA did incredibly well to get it to fly at all.

Dunno if you recall, but Columbia came close to breaking off the stack in the first launch. .It's interesting to watch a shuttle leave the pad versus a Saturn 5. Because while the 5 looks like a leisurely takeoff - around 8 seconds to leave the launch tower -, the SRBs and main engine make for a real shit and git around 4 seconds. Tower height is less, but so is the stack. https://www.history.nasa.gov/s... A lot of pressure and inertia and placing the vehicle right in the middlle of it instead of on top.

Now all that being said, if you ever have the chance to get to KSC, their Atlantis Shuttle display and the entrance to is is breathtaking and stunning. I was left speechless for a good ten seconds, and I'm not rendered speechless easily. You could tell who the engineering types were, and it added to the moment the shuttle that was actually supposed to be there.

The plus side of small things

[davidwr]

It is much easier to prove there are no software (including firmware and microcode) bugs in a system that small than in a modern $5 single-board computer.

There are systems where a single-bit computer with 40 bits of storage is the right tool for the right job. Maybe not many systems, but they do exist.

Needs confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm fine with NASA's manned flights taking more risk to accomplish more and sooner, but it seems like the Dragon capsule is the "safer risk" given it's inherent safety mechanisms.

It's not entirely clear to me why you think Dragon has more "inherent" safety, other than the statements by the manufacturer that their designs are "inherently" safe. I will point out that they also stated that their Falcon-1 design was 99.9% reliable before its first launch because it had reliability designed in.

Dragon has a heat shield designed for orbital reentry. Orion is designed for planetary-return thermal loads, which are about twice as high for lunar missions, and significantly greater than that for Mars. Heat shields are non-trivial; you can't just say "no problem, we'll use this in an environment with twice the energy."