ESA – Terrae Novae: Europe's exploration vision
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I'm reminded of Holst's complaints about Arianespace [2]. Because Europe is actually planning cool stuff in space, e.g. the lunar gateway described on this page. But its bureaucracy seems unwilling to focus on a small set of ambitious goals versus sort of doing everything everywhere.
[1] https://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/HRE/Terrae_Novae_2030+str...
[2] https://illdefinedspace.substack.com/p/arianespace-the-only-...
> to enable the first European to explore the Moon’s surface by 2030
Maybe I'm unambitious but I'm pretty excited to see this.
They'll be paying for a ride on a US mission, flown from US soil on an all-American launch system (no European can even get near its engineering thanks to out of control European immigration policies and ITAR). It's not like Europe could do it on it's own.
Millions of dollar so that bureaucrats can have pictures of an European person on the moon and claim "look, 'we' did it too!". Absolutely no European engineering involved.
Is this the European vision for space?
The lunar gateway is the only mission target that I find appealing. The support for LEO economy is nice, but there is no concrete plan for it, our launchers just cost too much right now for it to develop to an acceptable level.
What about the lunar gateway is appealing to you?
IMO, it's a complete waste of time and money. Even the overt justification is basically that it'll help to politically stabilize Artemis, not that there's some sort of engineering or scientific reason for its existence.
And if Artemis is even marginally successful, there'll be lunar ground facilities that will quickly supplant the importance of the gateway - making it more of an albatross than an asset.
And if mass and diameter are launch constrained [1], why not chose an inflatable tech? Again, congress, because the defense contractors don't like inflatables. If we wanted a true lunar station, it should be large enough to live in long term, not suffer in for pork spending's sake.
There are plenty of vocal, inside critics [2,3].
1. https://www.space.com/lunar-gateway-station-claustrophobic-a...
2. https://spacenews.com/former-astronaut-criticizes-lunar-gate...
3. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/former-nasa-administ...
Not having a window is very disappointing, I agree, but whether it is inhumane or not probably depends on the duration of the stay.
If we're going to set up a lunar orbital habitat for actual work and habitation, great for humanity, but chucking a billion dollar can for maybe a week to satisfy a congressional spend is beyond pointless.
The only reason it exist it because it allies a bunch of different interest in NASA and its partner, those people who believe electric propulsion for Mars, space station people and the micro-gratify biology mafia.
Everybody know that the Gateway and the SLS/Orion are just political buyoffs for congress, so they can funnel money into an actually innovate and revolutionary solution, Starship.
The goal is to get Starship going and then do an end-run around congress and sell them on more Moon/Mars missions, finally killing all these terrible projects like Orion, SLS and Gateway. Since the development money for those projects will have largely been spent by then, the politically usefulness is mostly gone, so they will let them go in exchange for some bullshit new bullshit contracts.
It's sad because the EU has a lot of resources and could have a great space program if there were more of a push for it. Also a friendly rivalry between the continents would help speed up progress in general. The EU isn't even trying to be the first to send humans to Mars, while a nation that was completely underdeveloped up till the 80s and relied heavily on technology transfer from Western and Eastern developed countries is now attempting to beat the US to it. Talk about a fighter - vs the old money kid with few ambitions.
Inspiration is sort of like a dim star, isn’t it? If you stare at it head on it vanishes.
I know this is an unpopular opinion around here, but I'm very glad they aren't. It's wildly impractical (humans can't survive on Mars without a lot of external help, and unlike the closest things we have to it, Antarctica and the ISS, emergency help would be months away at best), astronomically expensive, and would serve what goal exactly?
I don't want my tax euros wasted on unrealistic vanity projects. Let Musk('s children) run his dystopian colony there first and we'll see how it goes.
But reality is all that SLS/Orion stuff will continually be delayed and eventually canceled.
Setting your hopes on the future on the Gateway project, is a terrible, terrible idea. Gateway was never considered a good idea by most of the people interest in space. Its basically mostly done to give allies of the US something to do, so they can feel good about themselves while SpaceX solves the actual problems.
For example, in microgravity a person missing one or both legs would not have issues with mobility.
As I'm guessing, is this because after Apollo the next mission was designed around the Apollo suits, and then the next suits designed and that mission, etc?
I imagine that would be quite complicated if you didn't have any legs, and it would probably be hard to keep from swaying side-to-side of you only have one leg.
I'm sure there are other complications too, microgravity is a much more hostile environment than you might think!
Ultimately it all boils down to cost. There's a lot of things that could be designed around (I imagine missing one or both legs would be one of the easier cases) - but that is costly, and if it increases variety by e.g. introducing new kinds of equipment or training protocols, that increases risks of failure (both hardware or human error), again increasing costs. Etc.
These things will get easier and cheaper once we ramp up the amount of space missions - the vicious cycle I'm hinting at can eventually turn into a virtuous one.
Do you see the problem here?
While I don't think a physical disability is necessarily a blocker for astronauts, it wouldn't be unprecedented.
So it works like this: A fitness salon should have elevator for the disabled not because they will hire a disabled yoga instructor but because they can hire an accountant on wheelchairs.
Additionally, when in weightlessness, a missing leg is not that much of a hindrance.
The first is a whole bunch of practical questions. Do they need to modify the spacesuit to account for the prosthetic? Is it better to create a new prosthetic to fit the suit and/or the station? Does the missing leg cause issues with the exercise equipment on station? What other practical limitations are there?
Secondly, it's simply a way of seeing how it goes. We don't expect any big obstacles, but you can never know for sure until you've tried it. Once it's been done, and we know the obstacles, it can become just a normal thing to do.
Ok, but if that works, why not make that part of the regular requirements then? Why discriminate in the first place and then pat themselves on the back for being so progressive as to make exceptions? Calling him a "parastronaut", making big announcements about it and all. Everyone can see this is political, they're sending a token to space.
It's typical for our times, the administrators are almost more concerned with that sort of stuff than the research they're supposed to oversee.
1. That poster for the benefits of space exploration is quite awful. Side-ways text?
2. It's a shame, because some of the artwork is really nice, especially the one at the bottom.
3. The "what they are doing this decade" section is terribly structured and phrased. The first point is to inspire the next generation of engineers etc. The second point is somewhat DEI agenda (concept of "parastronaut") [0]. The third is...yet again about the next generation of engineers etc. The forth is a vague "we will prepare" statement.
The actually awesome content is buried 5-6 points down, for example regarding the construction of Lunar Gateway modules, the design of Argonaut (worst spacecraft name ever?), etc.
4. Super pumped for Rosalind Franklin
[0] Although I don't view this as inherently bad (since we will eventually need to learn about how disabilities affect space exploration), I just think that there are much more important activities that need to be done right now, all on an already shoe-string budget in a recessive economy. I mean, jeez, they even admitted that it's just a PR stunt..."Demonstrate our commitment".
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
Some of the goals are flat out contradictory.
So in summation here is the strategy:
- Do everything ourselves
- Maybe be a minor partner but still be able to do everything ourselves
- Be a minor partner in all human space flight activities for the next 40 years
- Be a leader of partners.
Now I provide the non marketing translation for those that don't know enough about European space politics:
- HELP! we are forced to pay Arianespace unlimited amount of money so they can maybe figure out how Falcon 9 works and not go bust while doing it.
- We don't have funding to anything ourselves so we just go along with NASA on everything and do some research to convince ourselves that we could do it to if we had the money.
- Pretend we are not totally and utterly reliant on NASA and SpaceX by doing small project with UAE
Whats the issue with that?
I think their brand team is aware, as it is explicitly pointed out as wrong to do their logo as (E)SA. See page 10:
A Dyson Swarm is a collection of orbitals. With current technology and materials we could build O'Neil Cylinders that are 2-3 miles wide and 10-20 miles long that could house millions of people if necessary. Cover the whole thing in solar panels and fly enough of them around the Sun to capture the total solar energy output and you have an unbelievable amount of energy at your disposal and an unfathomably large amount of living area.
It's estimated humanity currently uses 10^11 Watts of power. Using all the sunlight that hits Earth would take that to 10^16 Watts. The orbitals of a Dyson Swarm take that to 10^26.
This can be built incrementally and requires no new physics of theoretical materials. It's just a truly massive engineering problem.
The most important problem we have now is reducing the cost of getting payloads into orbit. The Apollo/Shuttle era had costs of around ~$50,000/kg. Factoring in reuse, Falcon 9 may well be under $1,000/kg now. Starship may ultimately take this down to $100/kg. This needs to keep getting cheaper.
But here's my big problem with the stations we're building like the ISS and what the Europeans want to build here: they're all zero-gravity. What we should be doing is working on spin gravity stations to work out the issues and see how humans cope with that long term.
Yes, zero-gravity is useful for experiments but this isn't an either-or situation. You could have a spinning wheel attached to something not spinning for zero-gravity work environments.
Which makes very little sense from a delta V standpoint. I’ve yet to see a good justification for the gateway, especially after NASA selected Starship (which contains more useable living space than the proposed gateway) as its lander for Artemis.
Unless you're getting fuel from the moon, the sensible way to do that is to do your refueling in LEO. Otherwise your tankers of fuel are going to need to refuel in LEO to even get to the lunar gateway in the first place.
That's in fact Starship's architecture:
It's going to launch on a SuperHeavy booster, and then refuel in Low Earth Orbit, utilising tanker-variants of Starship.
There are some Venus mission planned but non with balloons or anything inside of the atmosphere.