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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.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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 :)
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
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
I forget, what are we going to Mars for?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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? ;)
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
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.
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
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We could have had a permanent moon base by the end of the second Gingrich administration ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.)
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Good luck getting anyone to sign up for that kind of radiation exposure for a "dress rehearsal"...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"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
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"