The thing about the original moon landing programme was that it had a great clarity of outcome and timeline.
What: Land a man on the moon and return him safely
When: Before the decade is out
That meant NASA could really focus and throw out everything that wasn't directly on that path.
Reusability - take too long, we'll build each craft from scratch.
Permanent mission - Too complicated, keep the missions very short.
Multi-launch architecture - Nope, too complicated again. Launch it all together.
Crew size? Two on the moon so they could help each other, one in the CM to aid in docking. Want a larger crew? Sorry, no. Three is the minimum so that's what you get.
Complicated re-entry vehicles? Nope. We know we can make ablative work.
What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows.
It's impossible to run a clear programme if you don't know what it's for!
That won't happen again for political reasons. The moon landing is seen as Kennedy's achievement. He died six years before it happened, but that doesn't seem to matter. It's his legacy.
No president (or congress) would let that happen again. When a president of party 1 sets such a goal the next president of party 2 will shift the goal to make it his achievement instead. Repeat ad infinitum.
I think Apollo was lucky that Johnson came in after Kennedy. I think if a republican had won in 1964 probably there wouldn’t have been a moon landing. By the time Nixon came in there was already too much momentum to cancel it.
Everything I’ve learned about Nixon tells me he would have kept it to avoid losing to the USSR. This is exactly why he escalated Vietnam despite campaigning on withdrawal - they weren’t going to lose on his watch.
The Russians were working on the same problem and were so confident they refused Kennedy’s suggestion they do a joint effort. You can’t blame them either - they beat the US on every milestone except a manned moon landing.
Any attempts to change the game would have been seen for exactly what it was: weakness. He may have hated Kennedy but he loved the US more.
The country, the Democratic party and Kennedy for that matter were lucky Johnson wound up in the oval office. Johnson was very good at actually making deals and getting stuff done (e.g. ensuring the budget that gets to his desk includes NASA). If it weren't for Johnson Kennedy would only be remembered for getting us into Vietnam then getting shot.
Johnson accomplished a lot and, more importantly, in the correct order to make sure things got done. I think you're right though (and that he probably felt the same way) that he'll always be the Vietnam president. That may be a little unfair but it happened on his watch so that's what history will rightfully focus on.
Except that he did cancel it and effectively disbanded what was at the time arguably the greatest engineering team ever assembled. Apollo 18, 19 20, never launched due to Nixon.
Moon program maybe but the space program was already in full swing by 1960. Space was immensely important to Eisenhower for national defense purposes and Nixon was his VP.
Amy "Vintage Space" Teitel's "Apollo's Legacy is Keeping Us Grounded" is a good exploration of the politics and lingering (negative) legacy of Apollo. Longish (27m) but good:
As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of manned space missions is to redirecting taxes to congressional districts and defense contractors. The secondary purpose might be to inspire interest in STEM, but it seems much less successful at achieving that objective.
The other cynical view is that the moon program was really military.
As in, if the Soviets got to control the ultimate "higher ground", they could rule the world from it. Apollo made sure no one could control space, and we now have peace in space.
I kinda believe in this, though I don't know how historically verified it is. It's of course not what you ever say in your rousing speeches to the nation and the world!
There was fear that if the Russians got to the moon first they might set up a base, and having a base they could shoot down any other landing attempt (literally, with guns mounted in their moon base). Thus the moon could become Russian domain, which would not just grant them great research opportunities but also a virtually unreachable weapons platform. (Remember that the first crewed space station was 2 years after the moon landing, and also Soviet)
On that basis the military was advocating for a moon mission years before Kennedy's speech. It's hard to tell if this actually played a big role in the decision to go to the moon, but it was the cold war after all.
Also the Soviet Union was winning most of the relevant milestones in space (first satellite, first animal in orbit, first human, first woman, first space walk, etc), and this was a great source of national pride. Beating them had great propaganda value.
Shooting people from the moon is probably the least practical military endeavor ever seriously contemplated, and that is saying a lot.
The Cold War resulted in a lot of really nutty thinking so I can't rule it out entirely, but it's hard to imagine what such a base would look like, especially with 1960s tech.
Getting from the moon to earth is trivial when compared to launching anything from earth. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculation a Atlas B ICBM from 1959 has enough fuel and thrust to deliver over 5 tons of warheads from the moon to earth. If you launched from the far side of the moon I imagine early warning and interception aren't on the table with 1960/70s tech, providing excellent first strike and second strike capability.
Of course actually getting ICBMs on the moon is a whole other endeavor.
Early warning satellites would be a heck of a lot easier to install than the missiles. Basically once someone started building such a plant it would be impossible to hide what you're doing.
You'd never get first strike launching from the Moon, regular ICBMs would be all over you long before the moon IPBMs made the 1 day journey back to Earth. Even with the faster travel speed from only having to accelerate out of the Moon's gravity well, you're talking about a distance of 384,000km vs. 8,000km. Your missiles arrive to a planet that is already a radioactive moonscape.
It doesn't have to be a one day journey. With a 3 ton payload the Atlas B seems to have > 8000km/s delta-v. Getting from moon to earth took Apollo about 4800km/s delta-v, leaving our little Atlas 3200km/s spare fuel. If you use that to accelerate to 3200km/s travel speed you arrive on earth after about 2 minutes (if we ignore the time it takes to accelerate).
I think we can simplify this further. It seems reasonable to assume that any weapon deployed on the surface of the moon would be devolved and dedicated specifically for that purpose, so we can ignore playing theoretical math games :).
It would also be fairly obvious that someone was trying to move several thousand pounds of hardware onto the moon, and launch detection satellites would be even more effective at monitoring the moon. So you've got a first strike, that will be detectable basically immediately, and weapons that now need to travel ~385,000 km and survive even more serious re-entry than the ICBM's based on Earth. Or you've got a second strike capability that cost you billions of rubles/dollars.
Once you look at it like that, its pretty easy to see why the submarine launched weapons were the preferred method for threatening rapid first strike while providing a guaranteed second strike capability.
Besides acceleration at the moon side, wouldn't there need to be deceleration before entering the atmosphere? I'm thinking an IPBM traveling that fast would rip apart in the upper atmosphere and/or explode too high to cause any real damage.
If you can land a ship on the moon, you can land an ICBM on a house in Moscow. It was less about launching from the moon. It was more about getting it to land where you want.
>Also the Soviet Union was winning most of the relevant milestones in space (first satellite, first animal in orbit, first human, first woman, first space walk, etc), and this was a great source of national pride. Beating them had great propaganda value.
I would rather say that the Soviet Union was winning the irrelevant milestones, precisely for the propaganda value. First woman in space means nothing, really - you put a woman on your spaceship, wham, easy win. The moon landings forced the USA to tackle real engineering challenges - rendezvous and docking, piloted spacecraft and piloted orbit changes, functionally useful EVAs, keeping humans alive in space for long periods, etc.
First satellite and first man in space are not irrelevant. They're very challenging engineering problems.
First woman in space is technically easy, but it does say something about the two cultures that the Soviet Union put a woman in space almost immediately, whereas the United States didn't do so for decades.
That's the point - it's a propaganda win, not a technical achievement in any way. Not to belittle the symbolic importance of it, but cmon - first dog murdered by being launched in a rocket, first time running two manned missions at the same time, first nap in space - a large proportion of the Soviet "firsts" were just low-complexity stunts.
One of the last major "firsts" was "first organisms to circle the moon" - they barely squeaked this one in a few months before Apollo 8, and they accomplished it by shoving some tortoises into a Soyuz (no food or water required!).
Do you have a source for this claim? A base on the moon is a sitting duck for an incoming missile -- it's easier to figure out how to guide a missile near the moon than to shoot down an incoming high-velocity missile.
There's also a lot of value in the research NASA/JAXA/ESA/Roscosmos does in space. Some experiments are only really doable under long term microgravity The US runs it as a national lab and many companies use it for experiments. Maintaining it that way makes it way easier for companies to run experiments in space, with out the ISS each company would have to design, build and launch their own satellite for each experiment they wanted to do. That could be done but it would be very complex and quite fragile compared to having an established station where humans can do the work.
The catch 22 is any experiment that you can only do in microgravity is also only really relevant in microgravity. That’s fine if we have a larger goal, but not really useful on it’s own.
Sure simply learning this stuff is interesting, but the costs are so extreme it’s effectively a vanity project.
This generalization isn't true. One modern example is manufacturing optical fibers like ZBLAN[1] -- they work great when you bring them back to Earth. Another new example is 3d printing organs in microgravity[2] to take them back to Earth.
The traditional example is doing basic physics that needs long duration microgravity.
These sorts of research aren't a large fraction of what's currently done on the ISS, but it's also not zero.
Then I totally didn't get your point. These are things that you manufacture in microgravity that are then usable in gravity. Isn't that what you said did not exist?
I am saying testing say crystal formation in space is only relevant for crystal formation in space. If that’s what you’re going to do aka manufacturing in space then sure experimenting in space is required. Getting the economics to look promising for actually manufacturing in space then that’s a separate thing.
Aka Manufacturing would be that larger goal I was referencing.
It's not though the crystals are used to determine the structure of the molecule itself through XRay crystallography. We have to grow larger crystals that are then used to determine the shape of the individual molecules. Some crystalize easily and we were able to study them using crystals grown here on Earth but others were more difficult and had to be grown in space. Just because the research takes place in space doesn't mean it's only applicable in space!
You can do that same XRay crystallography on the same substances on earth. Going to space is pure cost benefit analysis for growing crystals, not some exclusive experiment you can only do in space.
That said, when you get a massive subsidy by NASA, these costs are less obvious.
You can't currently because we've not been able to grow sufficiently high quality crystals here on Earth with gravity. Basically anything that needs more than 30-60 seconds of microgravity can't be done anywhere on Earth no matter how much money you want to spend. NASA is already up there to learn about the effects on the human body (which again we can only really do holistically actually IN space) so trying to put the whole cost amortized over all the experiments isn't going to come up with a reasonable number.
But even beyond that this is precisely what governments are supposed to do, gather and distribute costs that would make little sense for individual companies or even massive conglomerates to do.
Actually not true in the slightest. Microgravity removes one more confounding variable present in all experiments gravity. One example, in addition to those already mentioned, is crystallography; where it's much easier to grow the crystals we need for experiments in space than it is on Earth where gravity is constantly present affecting the growth. Those results are useful here on Earth but can only so far be achieved in space.
Even beyond things like that the only real way to study the effect of space on the human body is to put people up there for a long time and test. There are some analogues available here on Earth but they can only really test a few things at once like fluid redistribution and not the entire set of effects.
I'm not sure that the information from such experiments is only really relevant to applications in microgravity environments. (Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your point too much.)
The data points from microgravity experiments don't exist in isolation; presumably there are data points for similar experiments at surface gravity. Removing gravity from a system could say very much about how gravity affects the system, and thus how the system works on Earth.
We also might discover effects so important that it would be worth going to microgravity to get them. Stepping out into the unknown just to learn how it works is important.
(Disclaimer: I know jack about what kind of microgravity experiments are going on.)
I almost down voted you in a knee jerk reaction. I believe that manned space exploration serves a very important purpose in advancing humanity . . . however, from the typical Congress critter's point of view, I suspect you're right.
I suspect GP underestimates the scientific value of Apollo missions. It's so much difference to e.g. study samples brought from the Moon (and taken with reasonable care) in Earth labs than to send robots to do the same.
There is a POV that robots are good for scientific missions up to certain price point. After that manned missions become more cost effective.
The money spent on Apollo would support a large number of robotic missions, including sample return. And they could visit a bunch of different areas.
If we were trying to maximize science per dollar, every manned program would have a lot of robotic preparation. Are we doing that? No. We've spent almost nothing on the Moon and only a tiny, tiny fraction of the manned budget on robots to Mars.
Retrieving a sample is cheaper with a robot - Luna-24 costed a fraction of Apollo. Knowing what to retrieve while having flexibility of choosing surface regolith, separate rock, samples dug out from a better place or else - that's where humans win.
and that's really just the cost the actual mission. Consider the impact of having to prepare a program that meets acceptable risk levels for humans vs. machines. This is a huge consideration. I'm not suggesting unmanned exploration can take a trial and error approach, but losing a robot is sad & expensive while losing a human astronaut can terminate the entire program.
I would bet good money that when Starship makes its first safe return to Earth after a manned lunar landing mission, there's going to be some serious-as-a-heart-attack talk within the worlds' universities about pooling cash for manned missions.
especially when you look at the scientific pay-off from relatively cheap unmanned space exploration vs. what we get from shooting humans onto the space equivalent of the front step of the house.
On one hand, this got everyone to focus and things happened fast.
On the other hand, the result was only what was asked for. We went half a dozen times and then that was it. You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for.
Without JFK’s challenge, I’m sure we would have taken longer, but maybe it would have been more sustainable.
> You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for.
Could be specified as well:
"Internationally organized base station (ISS style) on the Moon by 2030, permanently staffed after 2032, an experimental ecosystem to work towards self-sustaining O2 and food generation set up by 2037, usable as launchpad for Mars missions by 2045"
That would at least provide clarity on priorities but it's risky: the success would make you famous forever (see JFK) but so would failure.
On the other hand, it requires the next 7 administrations to support a programme that will make _you_ famous, not them.
I’d rather see a focus on projects that are doable with existing capabilities, and separately an effort to develop new capabilities.
It seems like if you immediately aim for something you can’t do, then you develop a bunch of technology and infrastructure that isn’t very good for other tasks. You end up with a stunt that doesn’t really go anywhere. That gets you rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo. We’re doing it again with SLS: a big, catastrophically expensive rocket built to achieve a specialized goal. It’s not going to be very useful and it might not even fly.
Compare with SpaceX’s BFR. It has much more general capabilities. At first blush this might look bad: why lug a heavy heat shield all the way to the surface of the moon and back? Why all this focus on reusability if your goal is to send just a few missions? But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing.
Or just look at the space vehicles of the era. Many of them are still flying today, with lots of evolutionary improvements. How many Apollo-derived vehicles are flying today? I don’t think there are any.
Apollo makes me imagine a Roman emperor declaring a program to send an expedition to the South Pole. They can’t even get there! You need to work on your ships before you set such a specific goal.
As a bonus, steady, incremental improvement is the sort of thing you can sustain across political changes, if you can just get to the point where people stop asking for moonshots.
> [...]rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo[...]
The cost per launch for the Saturn V was around a $1 billion in today's money. That's lower than some estimates for the per-launch cost for the Shuttle. It wasn't unsuitable, the US could have continued with it just like the Russians continued with the Soyuz.
> But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing.
Perfecting the rocket is opportunity cost eating up missions you could be flying today if you just mass produced your existing but flawed rocket. The US could have had something like a hundred moon missions many the ISS's mass many times over in orbit by the start of the 90s if they just continued improving on the Apollo architecture.
I suppose the important bit is really that there's universal buy in (and with the moon landing thing that was supported by making it a matter of national pride).
With incremental progress you risk things looking invisible (just like AI is always just the things we can't yet do, while newly possible tasks are merely computations).
"Do some notable thing in two terms" monument building exercises risk being shot down on budget reasons when any part of government ends up under new management (see Congress).
So I guess you can go incremental (but solve the visibility bit somehow) or grand vision. Right now, NASA seems to be going through the worst of all.
Kennedy himself had doubts about the cost as soon as the day after the speech! It was an immensely expensive programme which just managed to achieve its objectives. Had the objective been "build a permanent base" the cost would not have been palatable. It was barely tolerable to people as a one-off race to achieve a particular objective.
Yes, though a lot of the Apollo infrastructure was in retrospect massively over-engineered, based on a very high estimate of required numbers of launches. This was partly because they needed to start the infrastructure before settling the mission mode but still, the plans were ambitions beyond what was strictly required to get to the moon by the end of the decade.
The flip side of that was that we are left with nothing but fond memories. No space stations or moon bases. No legacy of Apollo-derived manned spacecraft. We're essentially picking up from where we left off in the 1970's...now.
> What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows.
In the past 10 years, NASA has had an answer for all of those questions. Two different ones over time.
Also, SNC's Dream Chaser isn't ablative, and it's funded by NASA's CRS-2 program.
The thing about the moon landing is that there was a rival superpower at rough technological parity, and the technology in question could be used to lob nuclear weapons at one another with great accuracy.
It's not about the mission, it's about the motivation. Societies only do great things with the proper motivation. Without the specter of American greatness being eclipsed by evil red Commies, what can get 2019 America to feel urgently this should be done?
It’s kind of ridiculous how often NASA has to reallocate their focus. Personally, I’d like to see a longer term 5 - 10 year plan that is voted on by congress and basically the funds are deposited in an escrow.
It’s insane the waste that occurs from random political moves like this. I understand the need to be able to direct NASA, but that should be in addition to the described 5 - 10 year plans. This would give the flexibility needed, while at the same time ensuring skills and contractors are maintained and long term visions are still possible.
I kind of view the “gate” in its current state as NASA knowing it’s the correct choice technically and trying to politically make it viable. Shouldn’t we listen to the experts here?
Since Bush every incoming president has set up a “vision” that scraps all previous work and which then in turn gets scrapped by the next guy. I wonder how the people working there can keep motivated knowing that most of their work is just for show. Seems unmanned missions are fine but manned missions are just a mess.
From what I've heard, a lot of people have left NASA as a result of the month-long government shutdown this year. NASA is a political football, and it's not going to get any better: it just takes too long to see a big mission (i.e., manned ones) through, so they're never going to get done with the way our government is running these days. The probes are usually OK because those can get done a lot quicker.
> From what I've heard, a lot of people have left NASA as a result of the month-long government shutdown this year.
I've got two friends there, a civil servant and a contractor, and I've heard no such thing. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but I'm curious whether there's any data to back this up. You'd have to be careful looking at that data, too: a lot of people are retiring from NASA simply because they're old.
Nothing that's happened to NASA lately is a new phenomenon.
Likewise, I'm a NASA contractor and I heard of exactly one person leaving after the shutdown. Granted anecdata isn't proof of anything, but it's clear that wasn't any kind of mass exodus.
Today, the President signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017, which funds the U.S. government for the remainder of the fiscal year. NASA received $19.65 billion—its best budget since 2010—and the Planetary Science Division saw its budget increase to $1.846 billion—its best budget in more than ten years.
They also are pushing NASA to send men to the Moon before Trump leaves office, without also giving them the budget necessary to do such a task (which honestly, with any budget, is still a ridiculously short schedule). They already had one main guy at NASA just quit because he knew this plan was unrealistic.
SpaceX? Or if your science isn't specifically on materials for rockets/physics for rockets/etc... you could be funded by a university or research institute and simply pay for (part of) a launch on a SpaceX rocket.
NASA still does quite a bit of science work though, so I wouldn't count them out entirely. Administrations come and go. Sometimes you just gotta keep your head down and keep doing your job until someone better is voted in.
That's the point... Private space is ramping up quickly, but they're building rockets, not doing science. If you're and American astrobiologist (for example), NASA is where you want to be. There's really no competition.
The problem is that since there's always a switch between Republican and Democrats, each president has a different perspective on the overall NASA mission (plus each one wants to leave a big mark), so they keep changing.
I think what the people actually working there try to do (as it can be seen here) is find a way to fit what they have already done, with what the new mission statement is, so that they won't have to scrap everything they have done, only the limited amount. That's good is some senses (less wasted work), but the result is then usually not the most fitting solution.
I don't think it's accurate to say there are any partisan components to the NASA mission. I guess the exception is the Republican party is trying to cut Earth observation satellites because the data coming back is politically inconvenient. However that's a pretty small part of NASA's budget.
I am working in a different industry (which calls itself an industry but is a joke and a god sent heaven for marketing consulting gig) but with the same kind of political minefield.
Public servants get demotivated and set to mediocrity.
Hired cattle gets demotivated and try to get out.
Only managers and middle managers are driven by the ego boost coming from "changing things".
As a governmental entity, NASA will never be removed from politics. A million different things could completely derail any sort of 5-10 year plan, not to mention that as soon as NASA got a "guaranteed" fund-for-5-years-and-leave-us-alone budget, every other federal agency will clamor for that too.
Long-term planning requires alignment of incentives. In government, the incentives of top officials are short-term in the extreme: get re-elected at all costs; grow next year's budget at all costs (e.g. waste all the ammo at the end of the year). Of course, more authoritarian states often tout their 5 Year Plans, but you're making quite a few tradeoffs of civil and economic liberties to get there.
Until there is market-driven demand for humans to be on or around the Moon, politics will dominate the story.
Of course people (including many at NASA) have been speculating about how to generate market-driven demand for a very long time (at least for as long as NASA has existed in the case of reports coming from there). The more I learn about the (lack of) history in commercialization of space, the more I doubt I will actually see significant exo-terrestrial colonies within my lifetime.
Oddly I agree with your description but not the solution. NASA doesn't need longer term goals - it needs shorter term goals. I'd say don't fund anything that takes longer then a single presidential term. That would limit what's possible but increase the likelihood that something will get finished.
If the president says my goal is to land humans on Venus (with asbestos booties naturally) in 20 years then odd are in 4 years the new non-crazy president will scrap that goal and change it to land on Jupiter in 20 years. And then it will be to put a flag on the Sun. And so on.
With 4 year goals the goals may be idotic but they will probably be finished because it'll be a single lunatic from start to end.
It's also possible that from one crazy administration to the next there could a chance to build on what was accomplished so at the very least something will be accomplished.
This would be nice if it was possible, but 4 years is simply too short of a timeline to do things like the moon-return project. We might as well shut down the manned space program at that point.
I was talking with my daughter about this yesterday and it really occurred to me that it's probably important to look at NASA through a realist lens.
Here's their Vision and Mission statement: [0]
Vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind
Mission: Drive advances in science, technology, aeronautics, and space exploration to enhance knowledge, education, innovation, economic vitality and stewardship of Earth
Given the history of using the space program as a tool of political/nationalist/defense goals it's probably more realistic to simply act as if the stated purpose of the agency is really a kind of "marketing" that is significantly independent of the "lived experience" so to speak.
At minimum I would expect that a mental model of NASA that ignored the vision and mission statements would result in much better predictions about what NASA was likely to do.
I should add that I consider all of this deeply unfortunate and I'm not defending it in the least.
For long time NASA announced a space program after space program only to be canceled at an unfortunate moment.
We have to understand that our problems with advancing manned spaceflight are mainly organizational. And because of that, it's beneficial to focus efforts not on a grand goal, which may not survive the next budgetary fight in Congress, but instead on capabilities which can mostly be used for whatever goal we'll have in mind at any particular moment.
We're well on the way along this idea already. Whatever payload can be used for on LEO, we already have means to get some 20 metric tons there reliably. This, as Heinlein put, is already half-way to anywhere in the Solar system. We also work on manned spacecrafts, which, while useful for getting to ISS and back, can also be used - mostly - for much more distant trips, to near-lunar space and more. We're growing a network of automatic stations, which can provide early reconnaissance for various sky bodies, navigational beacons and relays. A bunch of companies have growing experience with controlled landing and launching of one-stage rocket devices.
Gateway has a good property in that it's another component on the way to the Moon - and elsewhere - which has higher chances to survive another organizational shakeup because it's easier to build Gateway than to mount a sizable manned program to the Moon surface. Gateway is an ISS on steroids - in terms of getting to a much higher point - but not much more in terms of complexity, and we became pretty good with building and maintaining ISS. A smaller ISS in Moon vicinity can be less risky and less expensive than many other projects. As for usefulness - given that Gateway is in place, it's much easier to manage risks for more bold manned and unmanned projects on the Moon. Here I disagree with Griffin - he doesn't seem to recognize organizational challenges which Gateway allows to solve.
Gateway has benefits in easier construction (you don't need to land heavy modules on the Moon), better understanding of international cooperation (e.g., ESA will get experience launching modules towards the Moon), uses other than Moon (for later stages, when we might have some flow of materials from the Moo surface), easier return to Earth (so less risks), better coverage of Moon surface in terms of accessibility etc. IMO, not bad for something which actually has a better chance to get funded to completion than existing alternatives.
Finally, a sensical comment. You're exactly right.
Given the constraints of politics/funding, NASA can't pull off long-term & ambitious goals like they used to in the 60s-70s, and the administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, knows that.
Using your term: ISS on steroids, the next stepping stone would be the Gateway on steroids: an orbiting station around Mars.
Here's a cool pdf from NASA that goes into details:
There are multiple launch systems that will have the payload capacity to go straight to the moon within the next few years. Why not just use those?
No one will care about a Lunar space station, it's not enough of a step forward to capture the public's attention. It's sad that NASA's 'futuristic' new proposal is to do half of what we were able to do 50 years ago. People will quickly vote to cut funding for it, and maybe they should.
> There are multiple launch systems that will have the payload capacity to go straight to the moon within the next few years. Why not just use those?
Maybe SLS and BFR - but those are not nearly ready, and SLS may not be able to launch directly to the Moon what we may require to launch this time.
Remember that one of the problems of today is significantly lower risk tolerances. We'll want system to be much safer, and that will translate into more mass of the system for all kinds of backups. So Saturn-V or similar payload throwers won't cut it this time. BFR may - but this is much less visible on the horizon.
> No one will care about a Lunar space station... People will quickly vote to cut funding...
I doubt. ISS may be seen as a giant step back from Apollo (even if it has a pile of its own benefits). Comparing to ISS Gateway is a significant step forward. Just imagine: deep space instead of "just" 400 km up, Moon vicinity, flights measured in days and not because one need to synchronize orbits; platform for telescopes which are much more stationary and aren't obscured with Earth every hour...
And launching expedition to the Moon from Gateway can be that much more convenient.
The idea of NASA becoming smart enough that it reroutes its plans around administrations is a nice idea. It's pretty hopeful. It also seems wrong: if it were true, NASA would've gotten us somewhere by now.
Sort of. Gateway looks like an example of how could we try to get to the Moon, but to do that not in a single Apollo-sized project, but splitting the task in easier chunks - and yes, incurring some overhead, but also opening up new opportunities.
See, for Gateway we have much better TRL (technology readiness level) than for, say, short trips to the Moon surface, not to say about longer term Moon-surface activities like maintaining a base there. For Gateway we need technologies which are similar to ISS, with main changes being:
1) the modules need to be transported to Moon vicinity. That means that in practice, for example, each module needs to be pushed there - so the module should include its own booster (I think it's not very good, as that spent booster won't be used afterwards) or each module should be mated to a booster temporarily. Then modules should be assembled in Moon vicinity similarly to how they are assembled into ISS.
2) we have worse radioactive environment for Gateway than we have for ISS. That means all habitat modules have to additionally include means of protection - be that extra layer of passive material, or active external plasma generators which would reduce radiation by getting it through a weak layer of particles around the module, or something else. A new and a challenging problem, for sure, but with certain payouts in the future if we will ever want to venture from Earth.
There are other differences, like navigation, space debris environment, communications, ways of getting there-and-back etc. but that all seem to be much more attainable than direct Moon missions. And after having Gateway in such a shape, subsequent Moon missions can obviously employ those existing capabilities - i.e. missions would start from Gateway, which is much closer to the Moon, not from Earth, as the path to Gateway would be already well developed.
And we have better hopes of actually having that built before critical changes will happen - so we'll have taken at least some steps forward.
It's terrible because they effectively canceled the asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) when they chose to fund the proposals that did not include any de-spin mechanisms. This leaves them with literally 3 possible asteroids to try to bring in. Useless.
The point of the lunar gateway was to have a close (in time) place for resources and the like. But without any ability to capture and bring in asteroids it's just a waste of space.
> Aware of such criticisms, NASA is defending the Gateway. In May, the agency quietly distributed a white paper titled “Why Gateway?” [PDF] that makes the case for the space station.
Casey Handmer's take on that document, the best I know and strongly critical, is here:
> The SLS is derived from the shuttle core propulsion system, but despite adding a stage and 30% more fuel somehow lost 40% of its lift capacity. If you know how this happened, please let me know.
All this "get back to the moon" stuff makes me wonder what the purpose of going to the moon actually is. It's definitely different for different people.
If the whole point of the endeavor is just another space race exercise to demonstrate American prowess like the we did in the 1960's-- perhaps that's a waste of effort? Do we really need that symbolic achievement at such an enormous cost? Not to mention the opportunity cost of having to drop more scientifically productive robotic missions?
The fact that the dithering idiocy of our current "administration" is even uttering anything about a moon mission sort of makes me think they see this as just a baloney "show-the-world" stunt.
What if, instead, there was a focus on true science, unmanned missions, and perhaps steps towards actual space applications: mining, asteroid protection, and staging for permanent space installations ?
JFK didn't have any particular love for the scientific discovery of a moon mission. It was the same kind of thing that you're describing today: demonstrate American "greatness" in a world that seemed increasingly hostile - just substitute Islamicists/Terrorism for USSR/Cold War.
I think that tells us two things:
1) We can still accomplish great things even from lowly motivations, and
2) We shouldn't necessarily take those lowly motivations as proof of a craven administration.
I agree that people who get involved with space programs will be glad to "take what we can get" in terms of funding whether that means deep-space robotic missions or another manned moon landing.
Good things will happen with both. But why not choose the bestwayforward when it comes to space exploration?
Why not free ourselves from the strictures of yet another "space race" with low-brow nationalistic goals where we again end up citing uninspiring spin-offs as the reward for "winning" the race?
I don't think the 'space race' notion can really apply here, since at least in some of the plans for their mission, they planned on doing it in a joint effort with several other space agencies (including the Russian).
I agree that it really does seem like at least the official objective of the current administration (mostly the white house) only care about showing the world/the country/someone else that they're the best, that they have done everything, etc, etc, etc. Just like I think it's clear why they wanted to land on the moon specifically until 2024.
I would like to believe that at least for (most of) the people actually working in NASA, they view their work in a more focused way (science, global cooperation and improvements), and it can be seen by the projects that for example are currently being researched by the NASA astronauts in the ISS.
The purpose is likely to generate interest in space, and to rebuild the technology the US had to conduct missions there.
The average person doesn't care much about a probe landing on a comet, even if it is extremely impressive technologically. If you can show people walking on a celestial body, the average person can put that into perspective.
This might be a radical idea, but after reading that article, my thought was, "At this point, the most merciful thing to do might be to put NASA out of its misery." Specifically, this would entail:
- The US government getting out of the business of designing launchers: We'd acquire launchers the same way the Air Force gets airplanes: define requirements and solicit bids. This isn't perfect (see: F-35), but it's a darn sight better than the current SLS process. After all, in World War 2, it's not as if the US Army Air Corps (and later, the US Army Air Force) designed every plane that it acquired. It put out requirements and solicited designs from aircraft manufacturers like Boeing, Curtiss, Vought, Douglas, etc. Now that rocketry is no longer an unproven and speculative endeavor, we should do the same, and seek to build up multiple competing rocket manufacturers
- Giving near-Earth science to NOAA: Right now, Earth-focused satellites are split between NASA and NOAA. Giving a single agency responsibility for Earth-focused scientific satellites will ensure that they have a single clear voice advocating on their behalf
- Sending the astronaut program back to the Air Force (or maybe create the much ballyhooed "Space Force")
- Creating a new, smaller, more focused organization for exploration of deep space (i.e. space beyond Earth's gravity well). While this organization could wear NASA's logos, I think it would be better if there were a clean break with the past and the organization got a new name and new branding
define requirements and solicit bids. This isn't perfect (see: F-35)
Isn't the F-35 program criticized for short-circuiting a major part of the traditional procurement process? I'm not so sure you can completely compare the traditional procurement process and what happened with the F-35.
This is a terrible idea. NASA is still the best agency in the world for moving humanity forward, even with bureaucratic inefficiencies. No other agency will have the funds to do what NASA does for non-military reasons.
For every tax dollar spent, the U.S. still gets about 7 times the return.
What do you mean by "7 times the return"? In productivity increases via. technology? In just the fiscal multiplier effect? In keeping decrepit, middle-of-nowhere NASA departments up and running?
Less dramatically, I don't like just how much the military is the primary domain of non-military objectives. They shouldn't be the leader in nation-building, establishing rule of law, running propaganda in foreign nations (all state department/CIA) or being one of the only avenues for getting free college unconditionally through the government.
NASA has been keen on the idea of shifting their R&D focus to manned deep spaceflight and deep space research, and letting "industry" work more freely i na bid process for LEO. That's basically what is happening.
Crazy idea that likely won't ever occur, but imagine if we had a program like the military, but for NASA, where you sign up to "join NASA", and after a stint, you can either stay, or retire out with funding for college (maybe with the option of returning to NASA if the education you receive is relevant for their missions)?
In a way, Trump's "Space Force" could kinda lead to that, I'd just rather it not be a military focused effort, but something that advances humanity's best things towards space travel and exploration, rather than its worst (violence).
Polls show that ordinary people don't care about the Moon and Mars.
There is actually more support for planetary protection from asteroids, space-based observation of both Earth and Sky (people love the Hubble), resource utilization in space, etc... That is, the real Gerard K. O'Neil stuff.
If it were me I would set a goal of building a sunscreen at the Earth-Sun L1 point (e.g. planetary protection) using lunar or asteroid materials -- something like the lunar gateway would be an ideal crossing point for that. Space-solar power could be a byproduct of these efforts. This should have the urgency of Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers.)
The lunar gateway is also essential to long-term deep space exploration. One place where Obama was totally wrong was going to Mars without going to the Moon first. Since a Mars mission is going to be isolated from Earth for so long, we need to know that all of the technology is completely reliable and the best way to do that is get it to the point where going to the Moon is like riding the bus.
Radiation exposure in deep space is a known problem with the known solution of using space resources to build a radiation shield. This could be lunar or asteroidal rock and ought to be an early goal.
I am also very curious about Lunar geology and also the possibility that the moon has hidden sources of volatiles. People talk about the water, but you also need Carbon and Nitrogen as well as Phosphorous and Potassium to grow plants and run an economy. (Also you can't breath pure oxygen unless you want to end up like the Apollo 1 astronauts)
One of the things the anti-station crowd misses is that giant rockets like Apollo are pretty expensive and wasteful. Apollo was great for getting us to the Moon first, but not necessarily for continuing to go there.
An ideal would be at the very least a place for the lander to dock and refuel during the return trip. Then you don't have to haul a lander on every single mission, and thus can use a smaller/cheaper rocket with just the (reusable!) crew module.
I think one of the great potentials of commercial space exploration (and exploitation) is better long term focus (and stable leadership). Changing the mission every 4 or 8 years is not conducive with this stage of space exploration.
The earth-orbiting ISS is only marginally useful. Who needs another money drain around around Luna?
Moon Direct probably makes the most sense. It needs only the Falcon Heavy (about $150 million per launch) as a booster. That's a real rocket that's flown. No need for NASA's vaporware Space Lanch System ($14 billion spent so far over 8 years, still unfinished, zero launches.)
Apollo did it with one giant launch, but now that assembling systems in orbit has been done many times, there's no real reason to build something the size of the Saturn V again.
The whole idea of the Senate Launch System (SLS) is flawed from the start. When NASA has been at its finest, it has been on the edge of innovation. Think Apollo, Shuttle, ISS, all the Mars Landers, the Voyagers, Cassini, New Horizons, etc.
So why is NASA wasting billions to make a rocket, something we've known how to do reliability for more than 50 years? The reason is simple - politics. NASA is a political agency. They suffer from the same short-sighted, narrow focus thinking that a lot of other areas in policy live with. This is what hamstrings NASA the most, the constant change in directive, especially with regards to human spaceflight.
There are commercial alternatives that can already provide heavy lift capability, or at the very least are well positioned to take $1-3B and get one with even heavier capabilities flying. NASA is far too risk adverse these days to be building a rocket or a crew vehicle. They figured this out for commercial crew, why can't they figure it out for other architectures? Imagine NASA being able to cut the $2.5B/year line item that SLS has ballooned to and redirect that to other human spaceflight goals. Leaving commercial companies to build does not mean NASA is entirely removed from the process, for example ULA/SpaceX have been heavily reliant on knowledge transfer and oversight from NASA on their path towards commercial crew.
Honestly, having just graduated from a top aerospace/electrical engineering school and having experience in the industry myself, this is why you see the top talent going to places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a whole host of other commercial companies. These companies have a clear vision that NASA lacks. The NASA centers recent graduates gravitate towards are Caltech/JPL and APL/Goddard because they operate (almost) entirely independently from the rest of bureaucratic monster with serious research and a get-it-done attitude. A lot of the work at other facilities is farmed out to commercial companies, leaving a lot of NASA people in oversight/paperwork heavy jobs. This is not a blanket statement, but there is certainly a lot of "one technician doing the work and 5 engineers watching him" going on.
So if you follow the idea that NASA belongs at the forefront of research, what type of work do they do? Well, they are research heavy and build only the most advanced tech as a result. They research Mars and build rovers/architecture to further that research and get humans there. They conduct research on the ISS to further medicine for people back on Earth and learn about long term "0g" exposure. They research deepspace travel and build lunar gateways and architecture to support that. They build drones to go to Titan, build probes to fly by outer planets, etc. And then, they pay a commercial company to fly it for them (just because NASA did the bulk of the research that enables current rockets to be so successful does NOT mean they have to continue being the one making the rocket. Yes SLS has Boeing as a primary contractor, but the point is it's branded as a NASA rocket).
on one hand I agree that a lunar base would be a cheaper option for a wealth of reasons including not having to refuel orbit keeping rockets, however, landing supply is far more risky than docking supply, which compound with the mission's distance and scope: failing a shipment is always an eventuality, but losing it at launch is far worse than losing it on arrival, in the first case you know immediately, in the other you know 2-3 weeks later, and that influences how large your stockpile needs to be.
what I'd say would be useful is if this station was the stepping stone for a lunar space elevator. then it would be a great investment and a true stepping stone for a permanent lunar presence, but a stationary orbit around the moon is impossible (too far, you'd fall on earth), so the tether would actually have to anchor the station.
Given the exponential nature of Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, I don't understand why its not common to perform multiple launches from the ground to LEO, and then rendezvous in orbit and go to the moon, or mars, or whereever.
If I'm understanding the mechanics properly (informed mostly by kerbal space program!) the biggest "expense" in traveling most places is getting into LEO. And every doubling of payload requires more than doubling of fuel. All of which requires significantly larger and more complex rockets.
Either I'm misunderstanding the true costs of launches (I know the fuel itself is relatively cheap) or I'm underestimating the complexity of linking two spacecraft in a robust and rigid connection while in orbit.
TNSTAAFL. I think you're misunderstanding that equation?
You're trying to get to orbit, so hold v and delta-v constant. Then you have the ratio of "wet" to "dry" masses constant. So the more you're launching, the more fuel it takes, and that is linear. I don't see how physics would work otherwise?
The ratio of wet and dry masses for a launch vehicle also depends on ISP, thrust, and aerodynamics. You can have an extremely high ISP and thus a lot of theoretical delta-v but you waste it all because your thrust ratio is below 1 and the vehicle can’t leave the ground.
Over a certain size you can’t build up anymore and have to make the vehicle flat. This is because a certain surface area of exhaust nozzle can only provide so much thrust. So you get to about 100m and then your rocket can’t leave the ground because the mass of propellant is higher than the available thrust.
Then there’s thrust to weight, meaning that to get off the ground and about two minutes into your launch it is far more important to have a lot of thrust than to have high efficiency. The rule of thumb for KSP players is 1.2 thrust to weight on the ground. You will fight gravity losses and end up with about 0.2g acceleration off the pad. This increases gradually as the mass of the vessel is burnt off.
Later in flight the major force to overcome is atmospheric drag. The faster you go, the worse it gets. Fat rockets will have a harder time. So you can’t go too wide, you can’t go too tall, and there are many trade offs to be made along the way.
But the short version is no, you don’t hold v and delta-v constant. There are many more variables to consider when launching a rocket from a standing start where gravity and an atmosphere are involved.
Yes of course rocketry is complicated. ITT we're discussing the specific question that parent raised: are a bunch of small-payload rockets more efficient than on big-payload rocket? We assume that actual engineers have done the work of designing rockets that actually reach orbit, whether small or large; that's why we assume equal velocities. Any particular orbit is characterized by a specific orbital energy. Tsiolkovsky certainly considers the effects of gravity; that's the point.
The genius of LOP-G is that it can be converted back to an asteroid intercept platform (its original purpose) should the next president decide to change NASA's mission yet again.
Is there anyone from NASA or SpaceX here that could offer some opinions on how much closer we could get to deflecting / mining mass extinction asteroids?
It took many attempts to get a successful moon mission where we landed. How many more before we could dig into the rock for a habitat? Now multiply the time by the round trip to Mars. The fantasy of being on Mars in X years is fraught with dangers that include our own imperfection in execution. Don't expect a man on Mars in your lifetime, at least not one who comes back.
No, earth is the best place to develop technologies to settle on another world. Planning a moon base when we can't even build and run a sealed biosphere on earth is like looking for sponsors for your F-1 team before learning how to drive a car.
Why would you need a fully sealed biosphere? It's not like we're going on a solitary one way trip. We've kept the ISS running for enough years to prove that, in terms of biosphere anyway, we have the technology to build a base on the moon or Mars.
>Indeed, the Moon is the best location to develop and perfect technologies to settle on another planet and to live there autonomously.
So which is it? Do we need to build a base on the moon to develop technologies to let us settle Mars or do we not need to go to the moon at all because we already have the technology to build a Mars base?
I responded to something you said. You're quoting something that I never said at me while completely ignoring the substance of my comment. That's no way to have a rational conversation.
What: Land a man on the moon and return him safely
When: Before the decade is out
That meant NASA could really focus and throw out everything that wasn't directly on that path.
Reusability - take too long, we'll build each craft from scratch.
Permanent mission - Too complicated, keep the missions very short.
Multi-launch architecture - Nope, too complicated again. Launch it all together.
Crew size? Two on the moon so they could help each other, one in the CM to aid in docking. Want a larger crew? Sorry, no. Three is the minimum so that's what you get.
Complicated re-entry vehicles? Nope. We know we can make ablative work.
What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows.
It's impossible to run a clear programme if you don't know what it's for!