Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality
blogs.nasa.gov
blogs.nasa.gov
I will be shocked if the Space Launch System (A.K.A. SLS, Senate Launch System) takes humans to the moon, and I will be dumbstruck if anyone uses it to go to Mars. The system is simply too expensive, and the projected launch rate is too low for it to be useful. In addition, the system is too politically vulnerable, as the program would have to survive more than 20 years for someone to use it to go to Mars. Much like the current president cancelled his predecessor's plan, a future president will cancel this one.
Because Obama cancelled Ares I and re-directed that money to commercial crew contracts, SpaceX has been able to accelerate/do a lot more than they would have done otherwise. And the technical gains by SpaceX alone have been... non-trivial.
SpaceX only entered the Commercial Crew Development [1] program by winning funding as part of CCDev 2 funding in April 2011, allowing it to develop the Dragon 2 launch abort system. They later won funding form both phases of CCiCap (Commercial Crew integrated Capability) funding in December 2012. (I believe that's in-flight abort testing etc).
The technical gains (especially reusable rockets) was moved along more by the help funding Falcon 9 initially through the commercial cargo development (COTS) and International Space Station resupply (CRS) contracts (which ensured the survival of SpaceX for a few more years). [2]
Commercial Cargo was actually a George W. Bush era policy - part of his 2004 plan [3], and the CRS contract was awarded before Obama was even inaugurated!
So far, Bush's Space Shuttle cancellation did more for SpaceX than Obama's Constellation Program cancellation (though that may changes once MCT/ICT is up and running and causes SLS to be potentially cancelled)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration
They need public and/or private organisations to pre-purchase a lot of tickets to Mars before they can outright build it themselves, or they'd need to partner with the likes of NASA.
Musk said during the presentation that they're not going to pre-sell tickets to finance development and production (the way Virgin Galactic did).
e:
I mean that there's two types of funding models.
NASA (or some other government's space agency) can put out a call for bids to provide a mission to Mars with certain capabilities (transport this many tons of cargo, this many people, having this characteristics) - then ULA, BO, SpaceX etc then work up bids for their various Mars capabilities to service that bid. SpaceX can go "We can do this using our Interplanetary Transport System".
This would be an ordinary commercial arrangement like the Commerical Crew and Commercial Cargo that NASA already does.
In theory some large enough company could do a similar thing. Like SpaceX / ULA do for Satellite launches today.
At the end of the mission after delivering the cargo/crew/etc SpaceX keeps the hardware, and can sell tickets to whoever else wants to go.
The other approach is that NASA comes along and wants SpaceX to build a system that meets certain capabilities but in a more integrated/directed fashion like was done between NASA and Boeing/Rockwell/etc for the space shuttle, but NASA owns the gear (since it was funding the development)
Both options end up with SpaceX building the ITS, but the way it's funded will determine who owns it at the end of the mission.
The most relevant quote: The bill officially establishes in law that human exploration of Mars, including potential human habitation on the surface of Mars, is a NASA objective. It lauds the progress made by the SLS and Orion programs and requires NASA to submit a critical decision plan and strategic framework laying out the details of how it will achieve the goal of landing humans on Mars.
Here are a couple related articles:
https://www.inverse.com/article/21129-a-new-senate-bill-coul...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/21/senat...
> NASA Authorization Act of 2005...directed NASA to "develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program to promote exploration, science, commerce and US preeminence in space, and as a stepping stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
Indeed, your second article says
> It’s not a legally binding bill. Future presidents or lawmakers, or even NASA’s own administrators would still be able to modify plans at their own discretion — and that’s inevitable given the development of new technologies and fluctuations in funding over the next couple of decades.
> Nevertheless, by using explicit language never before used in federal legislation related to NASA authorization measures, the bill would make it tougher for future administrations to cut funding for the Mars mission or scrap the mission altogether.
I'm not impressed by the "explicit language never before used in federal legislation" when comparing it to what's come (and gone) before.
Or, a tremendous waste of time and money, existing only to keep govt. dollars flowing to the same contractors who profited from Shuttle?
The reason it exists at all is because average voters pay no attention at all.
Space X has a long long way to go and they play a completely different game to ULA/NASA.
The SLS is expensive but it's not only needed its long overdue.
Additionally, two successful strategies will be far more helpful than one. Consider that when a space shuttle exploded, it shut down the entire US space program for a lengthy span (sometimes years) while everything was reevaluated, refit, and recertified. When we shut down the shuttle program, we no longer had a viable route to space except through Russia.
If we have two viable craft from two viable contractors to get to space, we're able to rely on a persistent strategy that can weather unexpected events or problems.
SpaceX can implode tomorrow, it can be sold to China, it can decide that it doesn't like Emperor Trump (shivers...) and it won't launch anything anymore for the Americans.
NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account.
Yes they are job projects, yes they feed contractors, but this is OK, the space program needs to be a job program this is how you reap one of the main benefits of it which is the distribution of knowledge and ideas across the industry there would be no SpaceX without NASA. If we learned anything from the Apollo days is that you can't stop making big rockets because once you do it would take you ages to regain that capability, the cost of the SLS and any follow up project after that would be worth it if nothing than to preserve knowledge, skill, and manufacturing capabilities for future generations.
And on a side note I am very skeptical of SpaceX's "interstellar rocket" yes I'm just another ahole with an opinion but they are effectively trying out the same thing that the Russians did and very unsuccessfully as the new SpaceX design is effectively the Soviet moonshot rocket.
The N1 had 30 engines, the design was deemed "ingenious" (even by the americans) the Russians could not build big engines, but they had an extremely safe, effective, and very very powerful small engine design that is still used today the NK-15/NK-33. So they put 30 of those on the first stage of the N-1 rocket and it failed badly, all 4 attempts failed for "different" reasons but all of them tied to a single thing - too many "moving parts" any problem with a single engine even a slight thrust imbalance would lead to disastrous results, and having 30 engines on a rocket that have to operate with near impossible tolerances was simply not something that was achievable then (and perhaps even today).
There wasn't anything wrong with the engines, each engine on it's own was working pretty flawlessly, and on smaller scales the issues that the N-1 encountered during launch would most likely been controllable, or at least possible to compensate for long enough for the damn thing not to explode on launch or very shortly after it (the idea of an N-1 type rocket launching anywhere near a populated area is a freaking scary one).
Now it's true that many things have changed, the Russians had to control the engines electro-mechanically, there was likely no software involved but still when you add parts to a system you increase the chances of failures.
Both Blue Origin and ULA/NASA are basing their big rockets on a small number of big engines, SpaceX wants to use 42 Raptor engines which were initially designed for an upper stage single engine usage, I'm honestly very skeptical that this system can be reliable enough to get off the ground with that many engines.
Isn't it nice to have a development program that can study a large number of flights?
That's not what really happened, and anyway, Raptor is a 35% larger engine than BO's/ULA's BE-4. So by your definition, if ULA's/BO's engines are "big", then SpaceX's engine is "even bigger".
Didn't the shuttle have around two orders of magnitude larger cost/lbs to orbit than originally promised? (Is that some form of world record, btw?) And set back space research for decades?
NASA's job programs just aren't working. No one can afford to do anything worthwhile with those launch costs.
If we delay real space colonies for a few more decades, it can mean the extinction of humanity. That is important -- job programs are not.
No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
The shuttle had its problems but it was an important project.
>NASA's job programs just aren't working. No one can afford to do anything worthwhile with those launch costs.
Eh, show me another country/entity/organization that does as much space exploration as NASA.
>If we delay real space colonies for a few more decades, it can mean the extinction of humanity.
Nonsense, our species is 250K+ years old, all of a sudden 50 delay years would mean extinction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...
NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:
If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
Your comments re cost/lbs to orbit seems weird. Can you post a link discussing this, from the early days?
It doesn't seem supported by wikipedia. There was nothing on e.g. the introduction on the page I link above about the promised cost without crew and with crew, regarding the original sell of the program from NASA.
(Also -- there are big threats to human existence today. One example: Just a bit of lag for development of counter measures to better technology for developing biological weapons. If relatively primitive groups/countries can develop doomsday weapons, we have a real problem. It is a risk the coming 1-2 decades you can't just dismiss seriously.)
I feel that building a 100% successful planet-killing doomsday weapon is far harder then establishing an independent, self-sufficient Mars colony... That will not be affected by it.
Consider a contagious plague with an incubation time of a few days put into fresh food imported into a set of countries -- it will not be stored in dusty warehouses for weeks before reaching the population.
Large states should be able to do something similar now (this might need a start up time, since the biological weapons research was closed after the cold war) and soon major terror organizations or rogue states might be able to.
Will counter measures (creating vaccines quickly, etc) be ready before alQ have similar capabilities? I have no clue. The first targets would probably include geographic areas with the universities/agencies that could do something about this type of attack anyway.
(Frankly, I'm surprised that I needed to write that. With increasing technological possibilities the power to do harm increase too. If the power to stop harm increase slower...)
It is much, much easier to kill off the human race using nuclear weapons. And I'm not sure that's possible.
The weaponized diseases were worse than anything natural (e.g. optimized to get a really toxic immune system reaction and so on). And multiple ones could be used at the same time, with different spread mechanisms and incubation times.
But about Ebola -- I have no clue if the kill ratios can be engineered to not go down for a fast spreading disease. (And if I did, I would not be able to talk about it, of course.)
Those militarized diseases are easily enough for an economical (/civilization) collapse, that would take the world at least generations to recover from. Which is bad enough, but is no extinction of course.
I don't know if nuclear weapons are on the table again, despite that they are spoken about in Russia -- it is probably just psychological warfare (maskarovka), everything new from there seems to be a smoke screen.
But how hard would it be for Iran or North Korea to build a Cobalt bomb, the doomsday machine out of Dr Strangelove?
>NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:
No this isn't what he said, this is why I hate wikipedia they quote mined a sentence from the very last paragraph and made it look like it was saying "if we didn't had the shuttle we would've been on mars", he did not say any such thing, not even remotely.
Here is the full paper: http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...
The Shuttle had many issues, technical, conceptual and also political/budgetary overall it was a chicken and the egg problem with which resulted in that the Shuttle did not fly enough to be economical and was not economical enough to fly ;), and after the challenger disaster the shuttle program also lost most if not all of it's DoD contracts which made things quite worse.
The challenger disaster being on the 25th launch and the "risk aversion" of the US space programme didn't work that well for the Space Shuttle, but nonetheless the Space Shuttle did flew 135 mission which is technically more than the Soyuz (it's on 131 or 132 now), it had 2 loss of crew incidents which is the same as the Soyuz. That's not to say that the Soyuz is not a great programme on it's own, yes the shuttle was expensive but at the end it wasn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be for some reason.
And again this isn't an argument for the Shuttle, NASA did what it could with the shuttle, the Air Force wanted it, it was supposed to be the cornerstone of space Station Freedom and many other projects including Star Wars and NASA got stuck with it and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.
Two loss-of-crew incidents very early in the programme (the last in 1971 if I'm reading right) paints a quite different picture from the Shuttle's history.
>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.
[Edit: 600$/lbs is in "modern" dollars. In early 70s dollars it was ~ 110$. The real costs were somewhere between one or two orders of magnitude larger, depending on what year you select the dollar. The differential costs can only be a fraction of that.]
>> the Air Force wanted it
As far as I've read, NASA sold the Shuttle to the air force with unrealistic promises. That is why they wanted it. It isn't so?
>> No this isn't what he said
That full paper contained e.g.: the expense of owning and operating [the shuttle], or any similar system, is simply too great. Any new system, to be successful, must offer a much, much lower fixed cost of ownership.
And this was from someone that was as tied to not making NASA look bad as anyone can be!
[Edit: I really can't see that Wikipedia misrepresent Griffin's position, as you claim? Please be more specific about that claim. You really need to show quotes to dismiss wikipedia today.]
>> NASA got stuck with [the shuttle] and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.
The Shuttle ate a large part of the NASA budget (30% at least some years), which contained lots of aviation and other programs. The shuttle was a gigantic job program -- that gave NASA, with a big weight to throw around, an incentive to kill off all competing launch systems! There was probably a reason not much happened in launch systems until the Shuttle died...
[edit: The point was, there were no other launch systems not just because the Shuttle took such a gigantic amount of the total budget but also because NASA had motivation to keep the job program going.]
[edit 2 on this: If you put your foot in a trap and can't afford the tools to get the foot out of the trap, because the trap was so expensive -- you're not "stupid"? :-) ]
And, to go back to the original subject, the Orion seems to be another cuckoo, eating up most of the food in the nest. :-(
When someone (at least) seems to know a lot about a subject area and have to dismiss Wikipedia without sources, it is just funny. Or sad.
The original claim was -- "NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account."
To support that weird statement, dogma1138 had to make multiple unsupported claims about the Space Shuttle. Like "unique" statements about the horrendous costs and that a NASA administrator is misrepresented about the Shuttle eating the budget (despite other quotes in the same document support that was his position).
Enough for me, I feel a bit dirty.
The Orion space craft is the only current deep space capable manned spacecraft that has flown to space and returned. Meanwhile the Dragon v2 has only completed a launch abort test and will initially serve low earth orbit only (it's designed to be upgraded to deep space capable, but this is years away).
The Falcon Heavy and SLS rockets are both still development programs, and by the current schedule, the FH will fly (probably a satellite payload) only a year earlier than the SLS (which will fly with the Orion). The SLS has higher payload (70 vs. 55 metric tons) too.
The SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System is just a visionary roadmap at this point and should be treated as such. They've only completed the first (but important) baby steps with the Raptor engine tests and composite tank manufacturing so far.
SpaceX is doing a very good job, but the SLS + Orion program is a long way ahead of them if their schedules hold.
SpaceX target cost per person to Mars: $0.2M
Govt target: $10000M (estimated)
While SpaceX may not reach their target, one can't help but notice factor of 50000 difference.
SpaceX's reusability is brilliant but it's currently not considerably cheaper than ULA, if you count the fact that the a lower end Atlas V rocket launch costs about 100M and it's currently a more reliable system than the Dragon.
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/05/ula-fires-back-at-spacex-...
It's like calling a 5 year car lease cheap after putting in a 20k down payment and ignoring that as a monthly cost.
PS: There is something to be said for reliability. But, if your satellite costs less than 500M and Space X had a 20% failure rate that's still generally a better deal.
But I'd be very surprised if they are 10000 times over budget.
But I'd be even more surprised if the govt program was 20% under budget. Or if it ever made it to Mars, actually.
Pretty sure that their costs for sending the first few humans to Mars are on similar orders of magnitude to Govt plans.
What they outlined in their presentation was a long-term vision. We should be comparing to their "Red Dragon" efforts.
SpaceX has done great stuff but they also have a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Falcon Heavy was supposedly going to launch last year. Right now they don't even have a rocket that's cleared for flight. I wish them well but talk is cheap; let's judge them on what they've actually done.
Yup the most unmaintainable and most ocmplex ever made and the one that is now super old... Welcome to Space Shuttle once again !
Much of the complexity associated with the RS-25s is necessary complexity in such a high-efficiency, multi-paradigm (i.e. sea-level and exo-atmospheric) system. To be honest, I'm unaware of an engine that would be better suited.
There may be other reasons that it's an issue (orbit locations?) above and beyond the valid one that you listed - these grand projects exist at the whim of the president's successor.
The private sector may well do something here and perhaps NASA will hitch rides from those private actors rather than the Russians (how much longer will that be a viable option anyway?) At the end of the day, you probably get probes sent out, but U.S. Government sponsored human spaceflight is on its last legs in my opinion... unless a direct military need comes to the fore, and even then robotic seems more likely.
Note that I say all of this without any regard about my personal feelings about should NASA be involved in human spaceflight or not: those thoughts are not relevant to my observations/judgements on the state of affairs of such endeavor.
Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility.
Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).
This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire.
To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.
No doubt you also want an ever growing number of highly skilled people to build things since they will doubtless be faster than remote operated stuff from earth. Plus you may as well make use of the infrastructure you're building.
But beyond that I don't see why you'd send people who will have a very real chance of over-burdening your infrastructure and dying possibly taking down others with them.
Plus building a remote operated robot factory on earth sounds like awesome fun, surprised no one seems interested! I don't see what other open hardware & software project could make a bigger difference to human space colonization.
The Curiosity rover has traveled 9 miles in 4 years and is remotely operated. That sort of statistic shows a little bit of how a human on mars could be many orders of magnitude more productive.
I personally think we should go as soon as possible and I would love to see a lot more competition in this area. Maybe if China starts making major progress towards mars then probably the head will start rolling in the USA and maybe even Europe.
The proposal of a self sufficient makerspace here, were we can even place at the neighborhood (just make it a hassle enter the building) is something that is:
# Cheap; # Possible to start now; # Open to research by several people all over the world; # Required if we want to go anywhere.
Whatever people decide to do on the space front, there are other fronts to act on.
If we fully automate building residences, small administration buildings, and reclamation plants, on Earth then we can save we have sufficient tech to do it elsewhere all the while making this world a better place for those who are truly in need
Humans simply require too many resources to survive. I believe Mars should be colonized by bots who terraform a small part enough for humans to survive.
That's not how the 3rd world works but the the idea is that those robots could do a) be perfected on earth and b) do something useful while they are at it.
This sounds like the "proving ground" stage described in the text.
> Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).
This sounds like the "NextSTEP" program.
"NASA has already begun laying the groundwork for these deep space missions. In 2014 we issued a “broad agency announcement” or “BAA” asking private partners for concept studies and development projects in advanced propulsion, small satellites, and habitation as part of the newly created Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or “NextSTEP” program. Six companies received awards to start developing habitation systems in response to that “NextSTEP” BAA. The idea is that these habitats or “habs” would evolve into spacecraft capable of sustaining and transporting astronauts on long duration deep space missions, like a mission to Mars. And their development would be achieved through new public-private partnerships designed to build on and support the progress of the growing commercial space sector in Earth orbit. The work done by those companies was so promising that earlier this year, we extended the NextSTEP hab program into Phase 2 and opened it up to new entrants. In August, six companies were selected to produce ground prototypes for deep space habitat modules."
Sci-fi loves the idea of domed city's or little domed greenhouses, but frankly Mars is to cold for this to work out. You need to waste a lot of energy to keep stuff on the surface warm and deal with a lot of nasty radiation long term.
What will happen if on landing on Mars, we find that the Oxygen cycle isn't good enough, or that plants don't grow, or ...
I would love to see more work on problems like "what's the smallest device I can send to another planet that's capable of making some kind of bricks and stacking them into vaults/domes that can be covered in dirt and then sealed from the inside to form a habitat?" or "can we build a robot that can assemble a personal computer from a stack of components in their retail packaging?" or even "what does it take for a general-purpose robot to be able to tie shoelaces?"
But I think the main problem we need to solve is the overconsumption of the planet we currently inhabit.
As a result it will be constantly under pressure from earthly issues that need money now. For example if you are a congress critter and asked to choose between funding a $1B for Zika virus research/abatement and using that $1B for 1/5 the cost of developing a new space booster system, people always choose the 'today' problem and delay the 'future' opportunity. No one wants to say "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent that money on a rocket."
This is why I am a huge fan of the Commercial Crew and other 'private' industry programs. Let private industry develop the tools and techniques for space and unshackle from them the cold war restrictions.
And yes, that is the elephant in this particular room. While the "west" wrings its hands over the PRK developing an operational missile capability, have you ever thought what a Falcon 9 looks like through that lens? As a military weapon it could be considered the first Intercontinental Ballistic Bomber. Think about that capability, a Falcon 9 with a payload capable of some re-entry steering, launches from a base in the US, lets fly the payload, and then flys back to base for the next payload. Ten of these sitting on pads in the Dakotas could put 100 tons of conventional explosive on to any target in the eastern hemisphere in about 45 minutes.
That is the kind capability that SpaceX could "market" to third parties. And it isn't something nation states like private companies to have.
So the first question is will it be our civilization or another. The second is will you see it or not. The third: why delay the benefits.
But the biggest question is this: is the point of life merely to be a safe, comfortable and predicable at all costs or is it to devote at least some resources to seeking out challenges, knowledge and unknowable benefits.
Also there's a false dichotomy in your words. That hypothetical billion price tag for a Zika cure could be fully funded by a 20% tax on ice cream. Should we give up the space program just to eat a few more scoops of ice cream, smoke a few more cigarettes buy a bit more makeup?
First: missiles needs to be always ready. They need to fire as soon as needed. A rocket like Falcon 9 uses liquid oxygen which cannot be stored for long period of time. Nowadays most missiles uses solid fuel (as the ones used in the Shuttle boosters)
Second: A booster that lands is not immediately reusable. you need to refill it, replace the pyrotechnic chains, put back the payload on top of it, etc. During that time, your missile is at risk of being destroyed by an enemy counter measure.
Submarines dispatched around the globe are already packed with nuclear missile using solid fuel that can already destroy any place any time.
When you consider fueling options, its true that solid rocket fuel is a much better choice for a weapon system that is not re-usable. But when the possibility of re-use is there, the calculus changes. The US ICBM system is a "last resort" type system and as such doesn't have a good re-arming (or re-fueling) capability. But the reasons for that are that lobbing tens of megatons of nuclear fire over the horizon really means that there isn't going to be much left of civilization when you are done. When you consider the submarine fleet or the bomber fleet (the other two points of the nuclear trident) there is a lot of infrastructure and cost associated with refueling capability for the delivery platform which are planes and subs. Until SpaceX (and perhaps soon Blue Origin), there hasn't been a "reusable rocket" delivery platform and so refueling capability has never added value over non-refuelable solid systems.
Further, intercontinental missiles are not generally considered a conventional delivery mechanism because of their expense relative to their payload. They only made "sense" economically delivering nuclear weapons since the cost of a nuke was high, but its impact was also quite high, and so as a means of projecting force on a global scale it had high utility. But that changes too if your "marginal cost" is the payload and fuel. It is a well understood process for creating LOX and LH2 on site, Kennedy space center already has that capability.
Your second point, about turn around time, is also a good thing to consider for any weapon system. For conflicts against enemies that don't possess and intercontinental capability, cycle time for firing from the Dakotas in the US can be quite long as it would require a conventional army to traverse a large portion of the US or Canada before it could get to the base. That is very expensive and hard to do. Thus even if it took a month between firings you would not be in any danger of being destroyed. But systems design also tells us that we can finesses long cycle times with parallelism, so a network of 30 bases could fire one chunk of payload once a day (once from each base) continuously. That is just a question of money.
But all of this sort of speculation simply reiterates the point around peaceful capabilities (resuable rocket boosters) which have very real strategic implications. And space (and NASA) are particularly compromised by this. The US rocketry program was lead by Werner Van Braun after all, who had been using his developing knowledge of rockets to bomb London from Germany. The entire early space program was simply a palatable cover activity for developing reliable ICBMs with systems so integrated that nearly all of the satellites the US flew into orbit used an ICBM rocket body to launch them. This history has influenced NASA policy since its inception, delicately walking the line between "It's Science!" and "It's Military Superiority" in the capabilities they researched and deployed. As private companies develop more of these capabilities they won't stop because "it could be dangerous" and the military will have the same problems it did when the semiconductor chip industry ran ahead faster than the military could. You have to reach a new place of understanding where "commercial tech" >> "military tech" for some definition of 'tech'.
This kind of argument always gets to me. There's no inherent value in money, it's just a means to the end of organizing society. If the financial system prevents us from going to Mars and providing health care simultaneously, you should not give up on either, but fix the broken system.
Sadly, we're apparently too greedy and stupid to do it...
"Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that in wars over oil".
"Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that propping up dodgy financial institutions".
"Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that making Hollywood movies".
.. yawn
We don't have additional resources to feed more researchers (and it takes a lot of iPhones and trinkets to motivate an engineer to give up 60 years of his social life for science). We're currently altogether:
- creating iPhones (30,000 employees at Apple),
- have smart rocket engineers (5000 employees for SpaceX, 18,000 for NASA),
- smart medical doctors (800k doctors in USA)
- medical research (if you want to fund future research, you need to give a few dollars for every drug that you consume – We could think about another scheme of retribution, but sooner or later we need to pay researchers and their management for the work they do),
- and trying to create new social spying tools (I'm joking, but seriously innovation keeps 4 million people in the Silicon Valley busy with pitching their start-up or supporting people who pitch their start-up or cleaning the clothes of people who pitch their start-up).
You could reallocate people from Facebook to NASA, but it takes a few more skills, training and hardware to do rocket science than PHP. The assumption that "we have enough smart people and food" to make a leap in space exploration is an understandable concept of "Look at all those numbers! We sure could mix them up and dedicate ourselves to colonizing Mars without caring about finances!" But every resource is currently allocated, and if you want to get more people onto space exploration, you'll have to remove people from other sectors which may be equally important for our future. Finance is just a medium that acts as a proxy of the actual constraints of nature. Removing finances doesn't remove the constraints of nature.
Mostly though, it seems to be extremely cynical PR aimed at people who should know better. Never mind the questionable value of trading one gravity well for another, never mind the issues of getting people there alive and healthy, and never mind the "why"...
As a contrast, in my field (computational science) Obama signed an executive order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/execu...) to enable the rapid development of exascale (next generation) supercomputers.
Funding is arguably even more critical for space exploration, and without substantial action on this front I am skeptical this is going to have meaningful impact.
Uh, no.
But the biggest problem longterm is that Mars will be a pretty miserable place to live.
Right now you can move to Antartica if you really wanted to. Do you? I don't. And Antartica is a much more pleasant place to be than Mars for many reasons: you can breath the air, it's got water, it's quite a bit warmer, and you get almost twice as much sunlight.
Yes, Antartica is less miserable than Mars. So what? Antartica is, crucially, part of Earth. It is missing the main thing Mars has to make it desirable, which is being another planet. If you don't get the point of ever leaving Earth that's fine, but don't pretend that $random_inhospitable_place_on_Earth is automatically better, for 'being on other planets' purposes, than another planet is.
It is worth splitting the species across multiple planets as some kind of insurance policy. But the long term viability of Earth in the worst of circumstances may still be better than any colony in space or on another planet in our own solar system.
Such a colony would likely be dependent on Earth in many ways for a long long time into the future, and in many ways this may be desirable.
For me the major reason to be positive about space exploration and colonizing space is similar to the reasons why some people will climb mountains: it's there, exploration is in our nature and meeting challenges is something we generally feel positive about. Setting foot on another planet in the solar system alone would be a huge milestone, even if we don't manage to establish a viable outpost.
And for that purpose it doesn't matter much which planet we pick, Mars is for many reasons the best candidate.
Here's to hoping it happens in the next 20 years. It may, it may not, I'm not going to hold my breath but I'm really happy to see some actual progress since 1969 on this front.
I can still hear that roger beep...
Without a plan to make Mars more habitable for humans, Mars will be a lot like ISS or Antartica: a place where a small number of lucky scientists go for a few months before returning home.
If the issues surrounding transit can be addressed, Mars is by far a superior target for colonization.
When scientists talk about "water on Mars", they think they've found a river.
When they hear how far it is, they think it's only twice as far as the moon.
It even has an "atmosphere".
For some reason, people think that it's easier or more useful to build cities on Mars than in the Marianas trench
Last time there was an AMA on Reddit from an antarctic manual worker there were lots and lots of people just asking how they could sign up for it.
http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/expeditions/ant...
Maybe Musk and SpaceX will succeed, maybe not. But either way, he's not playing the same tired tune I've heard my entire life.
... me too. Fact is, NASA is currently not even doing human spaceflight. If it wasn't for the Russians and the Chinese, human spaceflight would be a thing of the past.
Musk is disrupting the status quo, thank God. I fear he'll end up more like Preston Tucker than Henry Ford, but I'm glad he's charging ahead.
SpaceX employs a lot of rocket scientists, who have delivered pretty impressive results. What do its life scientists have to show us?
That's a smart move to foster an ecosystem of companies specializing in other aspects. Once it becomes possible to send people and cargo to Mars for a reasonable price, it starts to make sense to create a company specializing in, say, inflatable habitats.
Bigelow Aerospace [1], doing exactly that, inflatable habitats, could benefit immensely from cheaper transport of cargo to LEO and to Mars.
I mean their worst case is you get bored and take up space on a flight home. Slightly less worse case you die and provide some fertilizer for other brave colonists. Best case, martian backup to earth civilization and a whole bunch of new expertise for humanity.
Assuming you give a damn perhaps you should look into it yourself?
That said, we have decades of experience with habitable spacecraft. Mir was inhabited for over 12 years, and the ISS has been inhabited continuously for nearly 16 years. That part of the technology we have a pretty good grasp on.
We have no experience with building, or maintaining self-sufficient - or even somewhat-kinda-sorta close-to-self-sufficient biospheres. Without them, Mars is a pipe dream - it would be far too difficult to maintain any kind of colony.
Unlike building rockets, the thing with ecology is that we don't even know what the hard parts are going to be.
http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vis... https://www.rt.com/document/57fc69bac46188c6758b4599/amp
Making underwater habitats is far more practical in the short term. Experience in making closed environments for human habitation of the ocean would be useful when the problems with space exploration are solved.
In space... well...
The issue though, is that people want what's out there, they want to mine asteroids and somehow that laudable goal has been conflated with colonizing another gravity well in some minds.
2. If we assume an orbital platform is like a ring (similar to Halo), and if the diameter of this thing is 2km, then it would need to spin very fast (70m/s). This is okay, until you realize, that so much speed means a lot of difference in gravity from the floor to ceiling. For example, a man who is 2m tall, would feel 1g on his feet and about 0.95g = 9.3m/s^2 on his head. The difference in g would give rise to different health issues. You could make the station bigger, but then it would be probably better to stick to a natural body that is similar size instead
Assuming 5% variation from head to toe is tolerable, a 40m radius habitat would suffice, which could be rotated at 20m/s.
There has actually been research done on how humans tolerate rotational gravity (although not long term, AFAIK.) A 30% gradient at 0.5g is reportedly "disturbing". But perhaps long term one could become acclimated, just as one does at sea.
At the 1km radius you give, a 2m human would have head at 0.2% lesser acceleration than feet. Am I miscalculating? Note that 1g is just one place in the design space, though an attractive one for a big enough station.
(So what's wrong with g = v^2/r? Nothing -- both v and r change in that change to g. To first order, they cancel out in the change to v/r, leaving only a linear factor.)
Having lots of people with lots of babies in a floating tin can is not a problem we can easily solve with our current level of technology.
Within my lifetime, I have much more faith that we'll be able to construct habitats out of dirt on planets with an atmosphere than modules out of asteroids in the vacuum of space, and that's the appeal of planets in general, and Mars in particular.
I also wonder how much of this was brought about just to point out that the US will not be supporting SpaceX's hopes of a Mars mission.
http://spacenews.com/nasa-to-move-ahead-with-plans-to-offer-...
The Skunk Works produced the U-2, the SR-71, and the first stealth fighter. They're really good at building things. They have money. They have very good people. If anybody can make this work, it's them.
[1] http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... [2] http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/05/...
And then spends the next paragraph talking about something they did in 2014. The whole page is like that.
(Put it another way: how important was R&D done in the name of human space exploration to the development of ICBM capabilities?)
Not very important. By the time of the Gemini program, ICBMs had reached the capabilities needed. All the human rated launch vehicles after that were developed for manned spaceflight exclusively (unlike Mercury and Gemini programs which used missiles) and didn't have a lot of overlap with ICBM development.
There might be other areas of military interest that overlap manned space flight efforts, though.
Nuclear thermal propulsion has been demonstrated on Earth[0] and Nuclear electric propulsion has been flight proven[1].
NASA had a serious effort to develop and flight prove a high power(200 KWe) nuclear reactor[2]. This would have been used to power the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter[3] which would have explored Europa, Ganymeade, Callisto, and Io if things were favorable. The reactor enabled high power electric propulsion, high bandwidth communication(10Mbit/s), and even a full scale ice penetrating radar. This much power is hard to come by as far out as Jupiter.
The entire effort lasted about two years before it got canceled because NASA needed to free up money for the (now canceled) Constellation Program. The thing I would like to emphasize here is that this was a serious effort with money on the table and a mission in place. The nuclear propulsion work NASA is currently working on is either a concept study, that is just investigating whether an idea can work at all, or not very well funded.
The issue is getting the funding to develop the hardware and actually following through
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1867 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter
Project Daedalus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus) in the 1970s was the last time people looked seriously at theoretical proposals for nuclear powered interstellar flight.
First, it needs to be recognized that we don't know how human biology is going to cope with the radiation and gravity environment encountered in space. More precisely, we know that our biology copes poorly, and we don't know how to fix that from a biological perspective. The only solutions we have in our grasp are one, bring the gravity up to 1G with a rotating habitat, and two, shield humans from the radiation experienced in space with magnets and mass. Any reasonable plan to "settle" space must begin by addressing these.
Second, Mars is just not the place to start, because it's too far away. People are fond of pointing out that Mars's atmosphere makes landing there less costly than landing on the Moon, but this ignores the fact that you have to bring life support and food along for the 4- to 6-month long trip. (The atmosphere is also very little help, for example, for Musk's plan.) It is more accurate to say that it is slightly less costly to land on Mars for a day than it is to land an entire Lunar base and live on the Moon for 6 months. Add to this the return trip time to Earth for emergencies (or the time it takes to send emergency supplies and crew), and the Moon wins, hands down. (Indeed, a better place to work out how to survive on Mars would be if you could find places on the Moon where we couldn't land and had to rely on weeks of overland travel from a landing site to get there.)
Third, the absolute first step should be an experimental, shielded, rotating habitat (probably built from Lunar materials) in orbit either outside of Earth's van Allen belts or around the Moon. This habitat should be of sufficient size to address the effects of, at least, Moon-like (1/6) and Mars-like (1/3) gravity on human subjects for multiple years. It needs to either be able to spin up and down to these values, have separate sections for Mars and Moon gravity, or we need to have a separate base on the Moon. We already know that space kills us in many, many ways. Until we have characterized how we're even going to survive there, there is absolutely no sense in talking about settling there.
Any announcement that doesn't address these directly is just PR.
I get these types of concerns, but ultimately they are counter productive, especially since we are orders more prepared for a Mars shot than we ever were for our Moon shot.
Either we go or we don't.
The ISS and shuttle are (or in the case of the shuttle "were") broadly considered a waste. There was a recent article posted here that described how they really only existed for each other ... and to give NASA a public facing "expedition".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw&list=PL35721A60B...
They might have just googled for their abbreviations first, so that they wouldn't collide with an important historical operating system [0]. I get that it's hard to find an unused three-letter acronym, but with 8 characters you really should be able to find something unused.
> Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier. In all the history of human conduct, it’s as clear to me as day follows night that private enterprise won’t do that, because it’s expensive. It’s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you’re dealing with things that haven’t been done before. That’s what it means to be on a frontier. [...] The government is better suited to these kinds of investments. They have a longer time horizon. They’re not shackled to quarterly reports like you see in a private enterprise.
I tend to agree with him. I'm betting on the government to get humans there first. But I'll be happy to eat humble pie.
More importantly: How can I (or any other individual) help? There's precious little actionable data in this release.
Read some blogs about life in a frozen hell before you go - you may very quickly realize whether or not this kind of thing is for you. Most people find that it's not. [1]
> Antarctica’s problem is that you’ve run as far as a person possibly can to “escape”. I heard about every relationship shattered by the distance to the Ice…and all the ones that ended before you even thought about coming to Antarctica. The strings of jobs and towns abandoned as you tried to make a new start, a new life, in the next town, or state, or country over. But once you get to Antarctica, there’s simply nowhere further to go. Then the station closes for the winter with no more flights for nine months. When things start going wrong for you again, because the common denominator in all the situations you’ve fled from is you, you’re trapped. So you’d better get acquainted with yourself OR you can just drink yourself to oblivion and kill the days so that you aren’t even there. I’m not going to put a number on how many people took the latter route, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any that really made the former work.
[1] http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2013/06/alcoholism-in-antarctic...
Meanwhile, we have rovers on Mars that have outlived their mission parameters by years.
You're going to have to explain how we're going to settle Venus before Mars.
Even so, I fully believe we're capable of building a floating habitat on Venus, but I think it'll be like our Antarctic bases: A valuable scientific outpost in a hostile environment totally dependent on outside supplies, and not a frontier for human colonization.
This is what is ultimately compelling about Mars, we can live there, thrive there, and eventually, breathe there.
So one thing that makes Venus attractive is the atmosphere contains everything needed to make breathable air, water, fuel, and plastics[0]. On Mars, water is hard to obtain as one has to extract it from dirt. One of the issues with systems that process granular materials is that they don't work very well. They are over designed, always break down, and typically operate at 63% of their design capability. Oh and scaling laws don't apply to granular materials as they do for fluids, making scale up expensive.
Mining the atmosphere of Venus could be a much simpler process[2]. Currently, liquid oxygen, a product which we 'mine,' from Earth's atmosphere is about as expensive per ton($175) as concrete. In addition air separation plants require so little maintenance that they are often unmanned. At the very least most places that process granular materials require a person to periodically unjam things.
[0]http://selenianboondocks.com/2013/11/venus-isru-what-do-we-h... [1]http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2005019... [2]http://selenianboondocks.com/2013/11/venus-isru-benefits-of-...
On Venus, you will be importing every ounce of steel, glass, and soil you need for a long, long time, because what's accomplishable with a shovel on Mars will require the Venusian equivalent of an oil rig to reach down to the surface and bring resources back up.
You will have to pry every square inch of livable space from Venus, much of it with imported materials. That is not a colony, that's an outpost. (and to be clear, an outpost I think we should have)
But that's the near term game. Show me a feasible plan for terraforming Venus and I'm all ears. Ultimately what makes Mars more appealing is that ALL of the land will eventually be habitable with protection in simple structures that provide shelter, some sort of air processing, a window or two, and maybe a fence to keep your dog from digging up your neighbor's yard. Where as on Venus humanity will be stuck in manufactured bubbles for millennia.
A Venus settlement requires flying cities. I have a hard time imagining how anyone thinks that's easier than a greenhouse on Mars.
Wiki says:
> Furthermore, water, in any form, is almost entirely absent from Venus. The atmosphere is devoid of molecular oxygen and is primarily carbon dioxide. In addition, the visible clouds are composed of corrosive sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide vapor.
Your point still stands, however, regardless of exaggeration :(
The planet has been much different in the past.
No scientists at all, think that our effect on the planet is going to make it literally unlivable.
Trillions of dollars in damages over the next century maybe. But trillions of dollars in damages is just an Iraq War.
Most of this past is incompatible with human civilization, as we know it.
For example, many scientists believe that the Permian extinction happened due to a rapid release of greenhouse gases, and rise in temperatures - by ~6C. 95% of the Earth's species were wiped out in a few years.
These kinds of events aren't trillions of dollars of damages. They are billions of human deaths, as ecosystems collapse, as the tropics and subtropics become uninhabitable.
Unfortunately for us, while CO2 may not cause such a drastic change in temperatures over the next few decades, methane release very well might.
1. It's closer.
2. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity.
3. It has an atmosphere that can shield you from radiation and meteorites.
4. It's closer to the sun, so solar power works well there.
5. The atmosphere makes available a variety of useful elements that would be difficult to get on most other parts of the solar system.
6. As it happens, there's a fairly happy medium in the atmosphere in which pressure is something generally like Earth pressure and temperatures are something generally like Earth temperatures and that part is also above most of the really corrosive stuff in the atmosphere.
The downsides:
1. You have to develop floating habitats. Those seem possible in theory, but would certainly be an engineering challenge, to say the least.
2. Every element that is not prevalent in the atmosphere of the planet (such as, for example, every metal) is wildly inaccessible.
3. It's a deep gravity well to get into and out of, and also you'd have to land and launch from flight, which is another big engineering challenge.
The flying fortresses is one thing, but not being able to get at solids to build with necessitates all materials coming from other planets. That would make it extremely expensive to grow beyond a non-permanent establishment.
The solar and gravity advantages seem relatively small. The distance is on average 1.5 times as large, which I'd guess is not a major difference in the kind of planning you have to do for the trip.
So you need the same life support as you need on Mars (enclosed space with atmosphere to breathe in, water, food) plus a couple of extra downsides. But as a bonus you get radiation and meteorite protection. That doesn't sound any easier to me overall.
1. We don't at all know what the gravity advantage is. It might be a net disadvantage -- like, maybe there's no real advantage of earth gravity, and it makes launch and land more difficult.
But, on the other hand, maybe 10 or 20 years of Martian gravity causes disastrous health consequences for humans. We don't know! We're pretty confident that 10 years of zero gravity would cause disastrous health consequences. It is reasonable to imagine that Martian gravity would be a lot better. On the other hand, it would also be reasonable to imagine it wouldn't be enough better.
Venus gravity is pretty clearly safe for humans.
2. There are a lot of advantages to being surrounded by abundant gasses that you need to create your own atmosphere, and also to have a much less than 1 atmosphere pressure differential between your hab and your surroundings. On Mars, you could mine dry ice to replenish your atmosphere, but only in some areas, and with a lot more infrastructure than it would take to suck in some Venus atmosphere and process it into breathable atmosphere.
3. Radiation protection is a pretty big deal for long term habitability. Like, it's not necessarily a giant problem for a scientific outpost, but if you want human habitation to cover hundreds of square kilometers and be viable over centuries, how are you dealing with the radiation on Mars? Is everything subterranean? (subarean?) That's a huge amount of additional effort.
Don't get me wrong. I think space is cool and fun, but that's what science fiction movies are for, and the discovery channel/books, if you want non-fiction.
Don't get me wrong. I think utopian fantasy is cool and fun, but that's what Star Trek television series are for, and the history channel/books, if you want non-fiction.
Sociological problems are at least an order of magnitude more difficult than space problems. When you send a robot to Mars, you don't have to worry about how much power it will embezzle from the communications array, or whether it will refuse to take its meds, or whether the value of the work it is doing is enough to pay its mortgage. You could quite easily spend 100 times the cost of a Mars colony on the people problems here on Earth, and achieve absolutely zero visible results from it.
Besides that, unless you're going to force students into social work education rather than aerospace engineering, there would be a lot of skilled laborers leaving university with no useful jobs to do. You would be spending your money on them sitting at home, uselessly dreaming about space, rather than spending just a bit more for them to be actually working to advance technology.
Mars is cool, but I don't think a Mars colony is realistic. I'd rather pay to see what the last two planetary systems look like.
Wait, why? Why do we have to?
Not to be the eternal downer, but I just can't understand how we haven't figured out proper income distribution but think we'll be able to deal with becoming extraterrestrials.
(If someone's response is that it's okay specifically because Apple is a private company, then well honestly I'd be a bit concerned about the preconception that capitalism is automatically moral. If minimizing the number of people starving was the goal that beat other goals, then taxes could be raised on companies like Apple until society put more effort into reducing starving than building iphones.)
OR
Set up a moon base to help the plan
OR
Help nuclear pulse drives for the interplanetary trips.