NASA's Curiosity rover: 3k days on Mars
bbc.com
bbc.com
Heat shield to use the atmosphere to aerobreak. Then it opened the largest hypersonic parachute ever to slow it down further (dropping the heat shield after it opened). Then eventually it cut off the parachute, turned on rockets, and flew sideways so that it didn't run back into the parachute. THEN, to avoid spitting up too much dust during landing, it lowered the rover on a 21 foot tether down to the surface, while hovering above it, before flying away to crash somewhere safe.[0]
It's so ridiculous you'd think it came from a movie. And it worked.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Curiosity%27s_Seven_Minut...
The tank burned up in the atmosphere. But it would’ve been nice if it flew back and landed instead.
So you should have built an RP-1 or Methane single booster without solids and then you could have done it.
The Soviet version where you simply have a space plane on the side of a independent booster was much better design that had much broader use case. It would have been much easier to build ISS if you had that capability.
Remove the Solid Boosters and make the Core Booster better to further reduce risk.
Once you are there you can just make the first stage land like SpaceX Falcon 9 does and have the Orbiter land like a plane.
Even better to put the Space plane on top of the booster, rather then the side to reduce risk.
And if your at that point, you realize you don't need the massive cross range capability, you can remove the massive wings.
Then you are already pretty close to SpaceX Starship design.
But to be clear, events happen concurrently, eg NASA knew _when_ relative to earth time and _perceived_ events, each stage was "happening" local to Mars vs Earth (assuming it all went well).
They made videos about this "7 minutes of terror", I forgot the name of them but linking here [0]
Each time I by pass integration tests it always fails at the integration points :-)
> There are [places] on Earth that do have these sharp ventifacts, but we hadn't seen them on Mars and we didn't test against them
This is whats so curious. In their testing on Earth after the fact, they found:
> Bedrock with lots of rocks: ~8 kilometers
> Lots of rocks, not on bedrock: 13-14 kilometers
> Bedrock with few rocks (think flagstones): 30-40 kilometers or more
It's just very surprising they didn't think to test on more varied Earth terrains, looking for worst case scenarios, where they would have clearly found this limitation. It is my understanding that the wheel damage became a major limiting factor of Curiosity's mission.
I believe its name is Perseverance.
I honestly think for the next decade or two that NASA should double down on propulsion science, energy science, and robotics. Instead of trying to send a few men and biospheres to Mars, lets send a greater quantity of increasingly advanced robots/AI on increasingly challenging missions to study Mars and the Asteroid Belt.
Use NASA's limited budget to advance theoretical and applied AI, robotics, and new propulsion/energy generation technologies for industrial use in space, with the ultimate goal of creating a fully robotic space mining and refining industry and supply chain back to Earth.
Keep the ISS of course, as a relatively less expensive way of studying the effects of low-G on the human body, space agriculture, and human sustainability in space. But for anything beyond Earth orbit, let robots prepare the way for humanity.
If NASA had an unlimited budget, then by all means do it all. But unfortunately that's not the reality right now. The robotic missions of the last several decades, from Mars Rovers, to Hubble, to probes of asteroids and the outer planets, have had such an amazing track record and ROI that they're worth doubling down on for the foreseeable future. The rapid advance of both AI and robotics is also expanding the mission capabilities of this technology, and its worth pushing that envelope hard for another decade or two.
Finally, given limited budgets, we can send a greater quantity of robotic missions than we can manned missions. Quantity is an important factor in quality, as I think the tech world has learned in the last decade or two.
Edit: Look. Robots are not boring. Ok.
But the fact of the matter, is that they just don’t excite us the same way as sending a human to explore it ourselves.
Yeah, I don't think sending humans excites enough people anymore to generate the broad political support required for doing that. Over the past ~20yrs, America has cannibalized our middle class to enrich the 1%. Expensive, manned Mars missions are an absurd luxury to the many who can't afford healthcare, whose small business has gone bankrupt due to COVID, or has to wait in food lines to feed their family.
It's quite possibly the case now that manned Mars missions will have to be handled by the private sector, which as someone above commented, is already working towards that.
It doesn't feel like NASA has a budget at all. Sure, they probably know how much discretionary cash they can spend this year, but for large projects, don't they pitch them to Congress and get them approved or denied?
Congress has effectively an unlimited budget, so if NASA have multiple exciting ideas, they "just" have to sell them each to the real bosses.
The ISS is actually very expensive.
> If NASA had an unlimited budget, then by all means do it all.
NASA is not free to decide these things by themselves.
It is true that the robotic side has been more successful, but that is simply because human spaceflight has been totally mismanaged for the last 50 years. It is not inherently the case.
The new Mars rover was about as expensive as the complete development of Orbital human flight at SpaceX. And for that SpaceX was also able to finish the most advanced reusable rocket and make it human rated.
Actually getting humans onto Mars together with robots to work locally will actually produce a much bigger bang for the buck. Having local labs, local control of robots, human scientists directly on sight. It would also advanced the technology for transportation, agriculture, medicine and so on.
Specially with SpaceX already development the technology need to build a base on Mars, not taking advantage of it and only sending rovers out there, is in my opinion a bad policy. Its both bad from a scientific and from a political view.
Endlessly doing low-G research and getting more details on Marsian stones, is simply not on the same level as human permanently occupying Mars. And a Mars base is in my opinion not outside of the current budget if it were spent in a smarter way.
I wonder much of this choice is due to political risk. A policy to send humans to Mars would have to span multiple administrations and risk being put on the chopping block due to multiple re-prioritizations. Maybe they think a less optimal sure bet is better?
One of the major issues is simply that NASA for human-space flight could in the past not build on top of commercial rockets and NASA has been terrible at developing launch vehicles.
Simply put, Marshall Space flight center, Boeing and Alabama is where the money is going. There simply is no accountability. The money just keeps flowing there year after year no matter what is achieved or not achieved. No matter if the president changes or not, no matter if you are going to Moon, Mars or an Asteroid.
Before that the Shuttle was all consuming program that limited you to LEO, partly because you have very little budget left over as long as you had Shuttle operating.
This is likely not gone change unless there are some real power shifts in congress.
I agree, but also think this is part of the design. Both government orgs like NASA and the contractors who support them spread their jobs/money across enough Congressional districts to reduce the risk of reduction in funding. Haven’t you ever wondered why NASA designed a naturally inefficient system by spreading the country? Programs in Marshall also stretch their tentacles into Johnson, Glenn, etc. I wonder if part of the blowback is that it makes it less palatable to prioritize big, bold projects (also factoring in how bad estimating these projects is and the fact they will have inevitable overruns). It’s not actually an inability to hold people accountable, it’s that they don’t want that accountability because it puts their districts at risk. Listening to a few talks by the NASA administrator led me to believe political risk is at the forefront of their mind
It's not a hard problem but pulling it off on Mars is an exercise in attention to detail. You have to get thousands of little things right to pull it off.
That lander is kinda super-saiyan-level-cart-pole !
Would love to know what sorta of algo's they use for lander ?
Brilliant people are working hard to make that happen.
The only thing I own that's broken in recent memory is this duvet cover I bought in 2008 that I've used every night since then... it developed some big holes after 13 years and I threw it away.
None of my tools, computer parts, furniture, etc. have broken. I've honestly never even broken a mobile phone, though I have dropped them a couple times.
I agree that computers from 10 years ago kind of suck when asked to run modern software. That's not "planned obsolescence", that's more like "software engineers made more complicated stuff more quickly; the downside is that you need a new $300 CPU instead of a decade-old $300 CPU". I'm okay with that.
I got at as a Christmas present and didn’t expect much but it turned out to be one of the best books I have read:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Roving-Mars-Steve-Squyres/dp/14013...
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Engineering-Curiosity-Performs...
The power will last 20 years. The wheels are damaged from being too thin. If funding becomes tight, other missions will have precedence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
The next Martian new year by this convention starts on Earth date 2021-02-07, and lasts through 2022-12-25 (Christmas day!).