Moonset
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Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.
The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:
– NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.
– The Moon is no longer the first stop in the exploration program, replaced by the so-called Flexible Path which really does not mean anything: “We are not sure where we are going, whether to the Moon, asteroids, empty space (Lagrangian points) or Phobos, so we will spend years and billions of dollars thinking about it while deferring any real mission development.”
– NASA human spaceflight will concentrate on International Space Station (ISS) flights, using commercially developed hardware (whatever that means: NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems).
– There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.
Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).
This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.
On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.
My Moon mission, of course, is still on.
Take a look at what Buzz Aldrin had to say back in November.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/why-we-need-better-rocket_b_351335.html
Sound familier? I’d rather have Obama following Buzz’s plan instead of wasting our money on Ares.
Buzz responds to the new NASA budget today!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html
My strength is in history not in rocket science.
The English attempted several times to establish colonies in North America. However, they were largely unsuccessful until those colonies in the new world could provide something that was wanted in the old world.
In Virginia and the south, this was mainly tobacco. In the North it was, initially, service to the Cod fishing industry. Cod was perhaps the most important source of protein to Europe in the 17th and 18th century because, unlike with meat, once dried, it would not spoil. To put in perspective the importance of this, the demand for spices to make salted and semi-spoiled meat palatable is what drove the whole age of exploration.
Once these colonies were established, they took on a life all their own, but getting started, initially required providing something useful to the old country.
What has this to do with the moon? Well, much like Sir Walter Raliegh’s colony at Roanoke, the moon and beyond won’t be our destiny unless it provides commercial possibilities.
What commercial possibilities are available to the moon?
Nothing less than energy production, it would seem to me. It appears to me that the moon is made up of the things necessary for the production of solar cells. Solar cells on the moon could capture sun light without any obstruction. However, all surfaces of the moon spend half their time in the dark. During that time those areas could be used for production of nuclear powered electricity.
Solar and Nuclear sourced energy could be relayed to the earth by short wave relay stations set up between the Moon and the Earth.
This would create the critical early industry. By importing our energy from the moon, the environment on earth would be under much less stress.
After this, the moon, like England’s North America colonies, could take on a life of it’s own as it discovers other uses for itself: production of drugs and other items that prefer low gravity environments and as a space port for deep space projects, like reaching Mars.
When I was a kid in the ’50’s I remember that about once a year I’d see a “picture phone” on the cover of Popular Science suggesting it was the coming thing. I saw those for close to fifty years until “picture phones” precipitated out of the internet. They were not even brought to us by the phone companies. Space flight to the moon I think will precipitate out some advanced materials technology that makes space elevators practical in the next ten years or so. All of a sudden (relatively) it won’t cost thousands of dollars a kilo to get stuff up there and a moon shot like a picture phone will not be a big deal.
Bob, you’re wrong on this one. Finally Obama got something right! This does exactly what the space program needs – get the gov’t back in the role of expanding the technology, and let the private sector take over the more mature parts of the mission. No way that NASA needed to be in the booster business, not with Atlas and Delta already flying a lot (and easily adapted to manned missions), Musk ready to fly Falcon 9 this year, and Bezos even getting some government money. This will give us a space INDUSTRY, not a space PROGRAM.
And yes, I actually AM a rocket scientist. For real.
Actually, I’m a rocket scientist, too, by education, (though by profession, its been several years).
I’m not sure that I completely agree with you. Yes, an “industry” COULD emerge from this, but we need the 21st Century equivalent of a spice trade. We don’t have that. Not even close. Unless there’s something to mine on the moon, Mars or an asteroid, and be economically viable, there’s no chance anyone will raise the capital.
Your Atlas and Delta comments are well-taken, but of the two, only a previous version of Atlas, (40 years ago) was man-rated. Could be a toss-up in terms of cost to get one of them man-rated vice developing a whole new vehicle.
The SpaceX guys have a lot to learn. Its one thing to fly unmanned missions, altogether different putting astronauts on board and expecting them to live. While I am hopeful that the new, “dot.com” blood may yield some fresh new ideas, I am not confident it will be very soon. There will be many setbacks.
In the meantime, ISS is in deep kimche. Without a heavy-lift capability, it will be difficult to sustain 6 crew. Progress modules don’t have the capacity, and there won’t be enough launches per year to make up for the loss of Shuttle. There’s be the occasional (perhaps annual) launch of an ATV, but not more than that. For all its faults, it is actually fulfilling the mission for which it was designed: re-supplying a space station. Following its retirement, there’s a big hole in the requirement to sustain ISS.
Also, O2 generators on ISS aren’t keeping up with the extra load, and the engineers have not been able to figure out why. The failures are not on the fault tree. That means scaling back to 3 crew. Without only 3 crew, science will be significantly curtailed. If it drops back to 2 crew (unlikely) science comes to an end. Cargo brought up on Shuttle was making it possible to sustain the 6 crew.
Net-net, while the new budget provides some opportunity, it left serious deficiencies that will not be fixed in perhaps 10 years. But, I’ll grant you that the old Cx-based plan didn’t address the near-term, either.
Man-rating is really a meaningless term – what you really do is decide what an acceptable probability of loss of crew is, then figure out how to get your launch system to meet that requirement. It’s highly unlikely to require an effort equal to the design of a new vehicle (i.e., Ares 1) to get Atlas or Delta to that point, especially given their historical flight rates. The REAL way to get safe systems is to fly the hell out of them and learn all of their problems – never possible with the Shuttle (which never met any of the old man-rating requirements), and would have been just as impossible with the inherently low-flight-rate Ares 1 and 5.
And you don’t need a new heavy lifter either – develop the on-orbit propellant depot infrastructure and ship huge stuff in pieces. Yes the depot infrastructure needs development, but that’s the kind of stuff that NASA should actually do.
All the gloom and doom just baffles me…
“…And you don’t need a new heavy lifter either – develop the on-orbit propellant depot infrastructure and ship huge stuff in pieces.”
So, you still need the ability to lift the propellant into orbit from earth to the depot.
Either you launch a few large rockets with the propellant (unmanned of course) or many smaller rockets. Regardless, you still need the launch capability, which has just been cut back by the recent budget.
“Man-rating is a meaningless term…”
Not so. A system designed – from the ground-up, so to speak – to carry human beings is going to have the “acceptable” probability of loss (low) factored into the vehicle’s architecture and design. A low acceptable risk, will usually drive engineers in a different direction than a higher acceptable risk. Retro-fitting to accommodate humans long after the vehicle has been flying a different set of missions will cause the engineers to make necessary compromises (to deal with constraints imposed by the original, un-manned design) that would not have been made with a purpose-built, “man-rated” vehicle.
You are correct in your statement that the only way to positively “assure” a low risk is to “fly the hell out of it.” I also agree with your statements about flight rates for Atlas and Delta, vice Ares I and V, and their effects on mission assurance. But, you can never really learn all there is to know about any complex system, (ask Toyota). You can’t know what new flaws are being introduced in a retro-fit design, because its impossible to know how apparently “small” changes may drive “big” problems; (i.e. the “butterfly effect”).
It is a complete myth to assume that modern launch system are designed to greater probability of loss requirements than one designed for manned use would be. I assure you that nobody in the launch system business – at least, the launch systems that could be adapted to manned use, such as Atlas and Delta (and SpaceX’s Falcon 9) – is willing to accept loss rates for a mature system that would be more than anything Ares 1 (or the Shuttle) could muster. And a great many launch system failures can be mitigated by a crew escape system similar to that used by Apollo. So I definitely take issue with your insistence that either Atlas or Delta would have ended up much different than they are today if carrying astronauts had been their primary job from the beginning. I believe that SpaceX always had human cargo as a requirement for Falcon 9, though.
And to KM: Either Falcon 9 or most of the Atlas / Delta configurations would be fine for propellant lifting. Lots of smaller rockets are definitely preferable to a heavy lifter for this – makes a loss of mission much more tolerable, plus drives the inherent reliability up by driving the flight rate up over the expensive heavy lifter.
Asteroid Capture
The most economically worthwhile goal is probably the asteroids. Minerals, ores, chemicals and water (hydrocarbons? – ie. “oil”) – not hampered by being in a gravity well.
Currently lithium is the dream mineral. Capture a lithium rich asteroid and bring it home and make mega-bucks. Pick a mineral, any mineral, including radiological minerals.
Do the easy things first – extract liquids that could be used as fuel – in place. Just moving a liquid rich body closer to the sun would bring about changes in the state of the liquids present and could be used to extract useful products.
Later, bring selected asteroids to the Earth-Moon system, maybe at a LaGrange Point and extract all useful materials.
Being able to move asteroids around would have the added benefit of being able to prevent a cataclysmic NEO strike.
The entire NASA budget is about $17B. This is a tiny, tiny part of the total US government budget of $3T+. Apparently the world renowned space scientist in the White House has other priorities.
Priorities like a couple of messy wars and a near-wrecked economy that he inherited from the last guy. Yeah, I think he made the right choice.
I’m not sure whether to take consolation from this or not, but there was a gap of nearly 500 years between the first Europeans reaching the Americas and the start of sustained exploration. Apollo is looking more and more like L’Anse aux Meadows. I hope this time we can manage a shorter gap.
RIP Constellation. I think NASA lost “the Right Stuff” when the Apollo generation retired. It’s interesting that NASA brought back a few Apollo-era engineers to help get through Ares I-X, which did work, after a fashion.
I think the next step for manned spaceflight by the US will come from the Air Force, not private enterprise.
I’m an idealist turned cynic, by hard experience. I grew up with Apollo and the moon missions, later the space shuttle. I’ve watched post-Apollo NASA limp along, just barely surviving, until the latest budgetary setback.
Let me put out a thesis, namely that when the past 40 years are considered, NASA has actually been remarkably successful.
Some people say that politics is the art of the possible. The cynic says that politics is the art of doing nothing while appearing to be doing something. If you commit to doing something that entails risk, it might fail; or, worse, it might succeed, and then you have to keep funding it. Better to pretend to do something and make it look like something substantial.
The recent NASA budget changes are an outstanding example of this principle, in my mind.
World politicians in general, including American politicians, are very short-sighted. The only thing that matters is getting re-elected. The four year terms mean that usually only those ideas which can be translated into very short-term programs will actually be implemented.
One exception to this, perhaps the only exception, is if you can get a sufficiently large number of your fellow citizens behind the idea. Then, a longer term program just might withstand the short term focus. The idea can acquire sufficient emotional momentum so as to make it past the four-year short term limitation.
Space exploration is not a short-term program. Kennedy knew this when he launched the space race back in 1961. Man on the moon by the end of the decade was ambitious to put it mildly. It played on people’s fears of the Soviet menace to acquire that momentum. Even then it was a near thing. NASA’s Apollo budget was being severely cut back even at the height of its successes.
Somehow, in the 40 years after Apollo, NASA has managed to keep manned spaceflight alive with the flying-compromise that is the space shuttle. It has been able to do so, in my opinion by not being seen to be excessively over-ambitious, as well as morphing itself into the very picture of a bureaucratic agency.
Is it any wonder that NASA is seen as stogy and risk averse, so unlike the NASA of the 1960s? It had to become so in order to survive the four-year short term thinking of its political masters.
Obama’s budget for NASA is more of the same of the past 40 years. It pushes the need for concrete action, with a definite timeline out beyond Obama’s potential terms of service, yet does not actually kill NASA, nor necessarily lead to forced firings of NASA employees (the employees of companies with NASA contracts are another matter).
So here is NASA in circa 2003. The President appears to give tacit approval for more than just Low Earth Orbit operations, with lukewarm approval for another moon landing program. NASA, working within its budgetary limits, makes plans, and actually commits to actually implementing its plans. The result, the Constellation program, with the Ares series of rockets and the Orion and Altair spacecraft. NASA actually gets to the point of test launching a rocket in the Ares 1 family.
And then, just when momentum is beginning to build, the legs are kicked out from under the agency. No heavy lift capability, no spacecraft to fly anywhere. Just idealizations of what might be achieved in some future time.
You can probably argue that Constellation, and Ares in particular, was flawed. So too was Apollo/Saturn V in its early stages, and yet the 1960’s moon landings still occurred.
So, now NASA plans have been curtailed, in the name of financial expediency. Meanwhile military spending is increased…
Well, unlike the younger readers, I still have my Apollo memories and my telescopes. I can look at the moon and remember that once, humans were actually there.
B O has screwed us again.The NASA program gave the good old USA a tremendous technical advantage over the whole rest of the world and we are living off of this tech boost today. Even with Russian and Chinese spys stealing our info as fast as we could generate it we still stayed way ahead. Mr. Cringley most of what you have done depended on the extreme push to make things smaller and better and faster and better again and better again, and etc.
NASA was the closest thing we had to a National R & D program and they have lost it all with out political direction.
Mr. Cringley maybe you write an artilce on what good NASA has done for us over the past 50 years. Of course an article on how NASA changed your life would be better. Just the Hubble has given us enough data on space for quite a while to go.
I firmly believe a colony on the moon would provide us with so much more info on how to better manage resources from everywhere. Can you imagine what we could learn about saving the earth from our selves with this info.
Well you know B O ain’t JFK. Talk about a lack of vision.
I did not need any more reasons to vote against Obama and his party for eternity but now I have another one.
Manned space missions are ludicrously expensive given the complexities of the life-support system required.
It’s uncertain that we even have the technical expertise required for a manned Mars mission.
We’ve been getting much more bang for the buck from the unmanned probes recently.
Man going into space is a curiosity driven by ego. Not to put a pall on all this space scientist engineer stuff. We better focus on this panet cuz we ain’t leaving it, and even if where we gonna go?
Spend the money here. We need to help the enviorment stay
well enough to substain us here not on Mars. You could not build
enough ships to vacate this planet. I meanwhile am moving to
higher ground. I live in New Orleans…oh yeah !
“Who Dat say they gonna beat dem Saints”.
Think of how much better off our economy would be today if all those billions of dollars spent on moon landings and space stations had instead been invested in profitable businesses here on the ground.
Not much at all. The NASA budget is less that Wall Street’s bonuses. Think how much better off our economy would be if those bonuses were invested in space technology!
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