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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.
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.
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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?!?"
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!
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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?!?"
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.
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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
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!
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.
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