Buzz Aldrin To NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP To Reach Mars (space.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said. "We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost." Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space or other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said. Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" -- spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.

Comments

OR -

[sheramil]

- attach boosters to the ISS and SEND IT TO MARS.

Re:OR -

[sheramil]

I didn't say send humans to Mars.

Re:OR -

[Snotnose]

What a waste of a good space station. Attach boosters to it and send it to congress.

Re:OR -

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to send a message, you don't need to land something as heavy as ISS at congress's doorstep. Just use a small launch vehicle (Pegasus, for example), with a small reentry vehicle (deploys parachute, jettisons fairing, needs a rather low CEP), whose payload consists of, in order from bottom to top:

  * Crush zone
  * Paper bag filled with frozen dog poop (reinforced as necessary), a small amount of accelerant, and an ampule of a hypergolic ignition fluid designed to rupture on impact (or equivalent electrical igniter).

Re: OR -

[ColdWetDog]

Wait, you mean there's more to going to mars than just building big rockets and putting people in them? Going to mars is more complicated than anyone knew.

No, that's healthcare. Going to Mars is easy compared to rejiggering the American Medical Industrial Complex.

Re:OR -

[silentcoder]

None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.

It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us.
The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.

That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.

Re:OR -

[silentcoder]

1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.

2) Only a factor if you think it's critical the colony trade with earth from natural resources. Not really a factor if the major point of the colony is to exist - colonists can always trade with each other, and they'll certainly develop other things to trade with us later.

3) You're wrong about how space works. There's a reason we say "low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere" - once you're in orbit the cost of changing orbit is relatively low compared to the massive cost of getting into orbit. Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.

4) Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ? There is basically nothing that the moon lacks which Mars does not also lack. You cannot answer me questioning an assumption by restating that same assumption without providing any new information.

5) And if you understand why that is true, you understand why you're wrong in number 3. But it DOES take a lot less energy to LAND on the moon than on Mars - you have a much smaller gravitational force to overcome with your slow-down actions. And it takes a GREAT deal less to get back up again (whether to mine an asteroid, ship trading goods to earth or whatever). A colony means landing a great deal of extremely heavy things - the kind of things parachutes aren't much help with (and the thin Atmosphere on Mars makes them only a little useful anyway) - it's going to be mostly rocket-braking to land anything safely. The moon is a MUCH easier target for that.

Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[m.alessandrini]

I think that, yes, in a few decades it could be theoretically possible, given the proper money, to send some people there and back. But then it's so far, so expensive and so uninhabitable, that I'm afraid it will remain a proof of concept, and Mars will be forgot for the following century, much like going to the moon.

Maybe it would be better to start sending material and structures, and only then sending actual people. It's sad in my mind, but maybe we should give up seeing men on Mars in our lifetime, if we want it to be something more than a passing experiment.

Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as the world can't even make a simple semi-permanent habitation on the moon, something that's only four days away with current rocket tech, there's zero chance at putting people on Mars. Space propulsion engineering has barely moved on from the 1960s, and that was based on German 1940s long distant bombs.

The whole "Mars" wankfest is a job creation scheme to empty the tax payers' pockets into a select few mega-corp pockets with a few crappy factories popping up to justify it.

Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[DerekLyons]

Lots of things are actually easier on Mars. The atmosphere removes a large portion of propulsive braking; the Moon requires 100% propulsive braking.

No, landing is actually harder on Mars - the gravity is too high to use propulsive braking, and the atmosphere too thin for aerodynamic braking. Which means mixed mode braking, and freakin' enormous parachutes. Not long ago it was estimated that a LEM sized lander would need total parachute area larger than a baseball infield - and they'd have to go from packed to fully inflated in under .1 seconds. (Meaning that at one point in deployment, the edges of the chute and the shroudlines would be moving faster than the local speed of sound.) It's much harder to land on Mars - which is why the various rovers have had to use such Rube Goldberg methods.
 

On Mars, return fuel is easily available in substantial regions of the planet

In theory. In practice... well, we don't know. None of the hardware required has moved off the prototype bench and none has been tested with anything resembling the toxic materials that make up Martian soil.

Private only? Really?

[getuid()]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...

Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.

Re:Private only? Really?

[slew]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...

Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.

Okay, I'll call you a communist. Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it. Of course with public infrastructure, the government is there to consult, kibitz, cajole, zone, and regulate it, and inevitably foots most of the bill, but of course owns the artifact at the end of the day.

Often as an incentive to reduce public outlays, concessions are offered to the public companies to reduce the actual net present cost to the public for the infrastructure. E.g., build a dock or railroad and you get this adjacent land for development, design a spacecraft for us and you can take the technology to build rockets for private launches, etc, etc...

Eventually, these *concessions* to private companies can form the seed for whole new private enterprise that accelerate the economy of a country. Call me an evil capitalist, but that's the way it works... the even the socialist (pseudo-communist USSR and China) world...

How does this work in your theoretical communist world?

Re:Private only? Really?

[Rei]

The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:

1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and
2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

Re:Private only? Really?

[tehcyder]

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

If someone wants to rely purely on free market capitalism to fund a manned trip to Mars, good luck to them. Presumably the fact that they have costed it and realise it would just lose them money is the main stumbling block?

Re:Private only? Really?

[angel'o'sphere]

Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it.
That is completely wrong.

Historically nearly all infrastructure in Europe was state owned (Railways, Telephon, Roads, Water distribution, Gas distribution, Electric Grids, Post/Mail, Power Plants etc.)

Since the mid 1990s most European countries started to privatize parts of the infrastructure. Some countries with success, some failed misserable in certain areas, e.g. the British railway system.

E.g. the French Power Company is still 85% state owned.

Give the money to Elon

[wisebabo]

His Interplanetary (Mars) Colonial Transport is so much more economical than the other proposed alternatives ($500,000 for a first ticket dropping to 140K later) that even if he's off by an order of magnitude it'll still be (much) cheaper.

Will he be able to pull it off? Frankly I have no idea but if you had asked me 10 years ago if he could get a 10 story booster to fly back to its launch pad and land, or build an electric car company worth more than GM or become one of the biggest solar providers in the U.S. I wouldn't have stopped laughing.

Give him a chance, it's almost assuredly better than you or I or certainly those idiots in Washington (maybe not the scientists but certainly their politician masters) could do

Re:Give the money to Elon

[Rei]

Every time you try something radical it's a toss of the dice. Musk's successes don't mean that everything he does will be successful. I generally am in agreement with the logic processes that lead him to each approach he wants to try to revolutionize new industries (it's generally just looking at them as a ruthless optimization problem, requiring as few new technologies as possible - for example, with the Boring Company: tunnel costs are roughly linearly proportional to boring cross section, while diameter is constrained by number of lanes, space per lane (which is much higher than the width of a car), shoulder/pulloff space, etc. So have cars ride on automated sleds to reduce space per lane, move them very fast to increase throughput and thus reduce the number of lanes (while simultaneously cutting travel times), cut the tunnel width in half, and you're cutting the boring cost by 75%, at the cost of having to engineer and build sleds; combine that with simultaneous casing rather than bore/stop/case, borehead improvements, etc, and push it down further if you can). But there's always a gamble with everything he does, and there can always be failure. Past success is no guarantee of future success.

ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. Now, to be fair to them, there has been a lot of low level research in the past several decades, and attempts to improve the technology seem to have been going well. And it's also understandable that they'd want to move away from aluminum to composites - the strength to weight ratios are far higher, and strength to weight is everything when it comes to high payload fraction rockets. But it's a risky endeavour.

To get costs down as far as they want requires revolutionizing everything, from the pad to range services to telemetry to thermal protection to the state of the art on reentry design and so on down the line. They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance (although their initial signs on that front are promising - your biggest concerns are erosion, and they're reporting that with the new alloys they're using erosion appears to be minimal). The scale of the challenge they're taking on with this one is much bigger than that they took on when founding SpaceX, or Solar City, or Tesla - and I'd argue bigger than Hyperloop and the Boring Company as well (although not as extreme as what they're taking on with Neuralink). Expect long timescales. Expect glorious, pad-destroying failures. Expect initial prices much higher than their ultimate goal, and long periods of time to get them down. And to fund it, their satellite venture is going to have to play out. Which it probably will (improving communications and satellite technology has thrown this opportunity in their laps - Blue Origin is trying for a piece of the potentially massive market as well), but it's another case of breaking-new-ground which throws another risk into the process.

But kudos to them for trying. With everything, really.

We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

We are still lacking the technology for establishing even a somewhat self-sufficient colony on any celestial body.

Here's the short list:

Power. Except for the moon, Venus and Mercury, where solar power may be feasible, I don't see any option other than nuclear fusion for sustainably fulfilling a colony's power needs.

Flexible, small scale chemical engineering. We need a way to synthesize almost arbitrary chemical compounds out of simple precursors. Basically, a machine that will produce a spoonful of sugar out of CO2, H2O and power. Or one does of acetaminophen out of H2O, CO2 and NH3.

Flexible, small scale manufacturing. We need to reduce the size of the smallest manufacturing unit that is capable of producing a copy of itself as well as producing other useful outputs.

Medical technology. We need better ways of easily diagnosing and treating a number of diseases, especially cancer (which will be a problem on any extraterrestrial colony).

Launch-to-orbit technologies. Especially ones that don't involve the vehicle having to contain all of the fuel and reaction mass necessary to reach orbit.

Life-support and maintenance. The colony needs to remain habitable for decades or centuries, unlike our current and past space stations that were simply de-orbited when they became too dirty.

Easy and flexible genetic engineering of microorganisms, plants and possibly animals, to adapt them to the colonys needs.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[FooAtWFU]

Power. Except for the moon, Venus and Mercury, where solar power may be feasible, I don't see any option other than nuclear fusion for sustainably fulfilling a colony's power needs.

Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.

No, not willfully blind. I have excluded fission after careful technical consideration. Nuclear fission requires very specific resources that may cost more energy to acquire and process on an extraterrestrial settlement that the amount that can be gained from them as fuel.

And a colony that depends on regular shipments of fuel from Earth fails one of the very basic criteria of self-sufficiency. It is an option during the ramp-up phase to self-sufficiency.

To be more precise: The technology needed is at least D-D fusion. Deuterium should be common enough on most celestial bodies (especially those farther away from the Sun than Earth) that self-sufficient energy supply is possible.

Getting along? What are you talking about.

[Ihlosi]

$3.5 billion, pfff. Imagine the leaps in science and space exploration we could make in no time if those silly humons just got along ..

Sorry, but a world where 7 billion people magically get along with each other is a fantasy.

It would be laudable, however, if humanity would just spend a little less money and effort on not getting along.

Re:NASA to Buzz Aldrin

[geekmux]

NASA to Buzz Aldrin: Whatever. You won't be going on it, Mr Did-it-second.

Out of a population of over seven billion humans, a total of twelve of them have walked on the moon.

First, second, or last, it's one of the most exclusive clubs in the history of mankind.

Re:or sell it

[Rei]

ISS is not designed to operate out of LEO. There are plans to build a new station around the moon (in a rather curious orbit). NASA wants it to be effectively a Mars spaceship, just parked around the moon, while the Russians want it to be a permanent fixture around the moon. So the plan appears to be to develop it so that a "Mars spaceship" portion can undock from the rest at an arbitrary future date.

Who knows how far along the design and development will actually get.

As for buyers... great if you can find them, and sure, get whatever money out of it that you can. But let's not fall for the sunk cost fallacy here. In a way, building an ambitious space project is akin to buying a computer. It may be the shiniest sleekest piece of modern technology when you make it, and it serves your purposes, but it's quickly rendered obsolete by advancing technology. ISS is increasingly obsolete, with modern technology allowing for structures that are lighter, more maintainable, and more capable for a given cost. For example, compare ATK Megaflex or Ultraflex to the ISS's solar arrays. Furthermore, part of the whole point of building such things is to advance technology. You don't advance technology by continuing to use old technology and just incrementally improving it. That may be the best option for a period of time, but eventually you need to start over with a new design that incorporates the knowledge accrued since your last design.

Re:Should we allow ourselves off-world?

[Baron_Yam]

>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?

Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.

Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.

What the ISS does is important

[mhollis]

I met Buzz Aldrin some years ago when he was on a book tour signing books. Very nice guy. I respect him but I think he is wrong on this issue.

Firstly, right now, they are testing how fire works in micro-gravity on the ISS. Knowing how to deal with fire aboard a craft on the way toward Mars is essential research. Some people on earth don't know how to deal with a kitchen fire and training astronauts in necessary knowledge can prevent unnecessary deaths. Apollo 1 happened in my lifetime (as well as Buzz Aldrin's) and that was caused by fire in 1G. Apollo 13 had an explosion (fire) that could have killed three astronauts on the way to the Moon.

We continue to learn more about long-term weightlessness on the ISS. We continue to learn more about EVA (spacewalks) and repairs to the exterior of a spacecraft. We continue to learn about how the surface tension of various liquids works and we are learning about how to grow plants (that can process Carbon Dioxide into oxygen safely) in micro-gravity.

In short, the ISS is serving an excellent function.

What Buzz Aldrin needs to to is to start encouraging a priority change for NASA. When we mounted the Apollo program, NASA's budgets were very high. After all, we were in a space race. We did not achieve all of the planned Moon landings because NASA's budget was cut. Surely Aldrin recalls this. So, were I to meet up with the distinguished gentleman again, I would ask why we're spending so much on war that could be spent on NASA and engage many of the same companies who are lobbying for war contracts. We need to change the US priority from war to the peaceful use of much the same technology for exploration.

Oh, and Martian regolith may well be poisonous, so were we to begin colonizing Mars, we would need to address that.