NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s colossal
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The crux of the matter is getting a fueled rocket onto Mars that can launch back into low Mars orbit and rendezvous there with a waiting satellite. The size and weight of this return rocket is itself constrained by its ability to fit into an aeroshell and survive entry and landing without breaking. You quickly get into a regime where you're trying to land the heaviest thing ever attempted on Mars, which makes the landing conditions harder so the rocket has to be sturdier, which makes the landing vehicle heavier, and so on.
The Martian atmosphere gets you both coming and going. On the descent, it is thick enough to make supersonic retropropulsion very complicated and potentially unstable, but too thin to slow a really massive re-entry vehicle down sufficiently with parachutes. You end up having to fire rockets that kick up a lot of rocks and dust during the very last seconds of the landing, while at the same time relying on your onboard computer to find a safe landing spot.
On the ascent, the atmosphere is thick enough that you have to deviate from the most efficient launch trajectory and worry about aerodynamic forces on the ascent rocket. Because of the atmosphere, the launch rocket has to be staged, which makes it bigger and heavier than you'd ideally want. And you can't use the most efficient cryogenic fuel, because there's no way to keep it from boiling off on the long trip over to Mars and down.
There are also non-obvious couplings between the lander and the ascent rocket, like center of gravity issues when you pack the rocket into the aeroshell, the question of how to get the samples into the rocket and point it up, and constraints on the design imposed by the hard conditions of atmospheric entry (15G acceleration) and the low surface temperatures.
None of these problems are insurmountable, but they are thorny enough and interwoven enough that it's very easy to see how the price tag climbs into the billions, even before you factor in organizational dysfunction and inefficiencies at NASA. The fact that it has to work on the first try (since political factors rule out trying it piecemeal) is also a huge cost driver.
There's a great paper that goes into some of these challenges in detail: "Drivers, developments and options under consideration for a Mars ascent vehicle", DOI 10.1109/AERO.2016.7500822
The very obvious price comparison here is that Mars Sample Return has a price tag meaningfully bigger than the two winning HLS bids combined, including demonstration missions. Yes, the moon is closer, but also HLS is moving living humans, not small rocks.
With infinite mass in Mars orbit, you'd presumably want to scale up, but while this marginally hurts aerobraking performance, you have vastly more mass margin to just bring a bit more propellant.
If course, you'd probably still want to land something in scope of what you can launch from Earth dry in one flight, but for sure we're still talking >5 tons there, probably more like 10.
That’s a steal. The entire US Department of Defence spends 800 billion.
The fact some of that can’t be shared for a one off project is deeply frustrating.
Then think how many there are.
It is not funded by tax payers and it starts paying for itself after a few years (they extract $250,000 worth of oil per day on average, up to double that).
I don't understand your comparison?
Both are an amazing scientific and technological accomplishment, but one is also historic.
Imagine the smallest possible rocket that can take off from Mars with samples aboard. How much does it and it's fuel weigh?
Now imagine how big of a craft you'll need to slow that rocket down from interplanetary speeds and land on a target on Mars. How much does it weigh?
And how much fuel will it need to accelerate to interplanetary speed after lifting off from earth? And how big will the rocket need to be to lift all of that into orbit?
The answer to all of this is making fuel on Mars. SpaceX called this it over a decade ago, and they aren't wrong.
For ten billion dollars, you could just pay SpaceX to send a Starship to Mars and have a human on board grab your samples directly.
A striking example is the large amounts of money NASA spends on SLS, which is in most places already an extremely conservative vehicle which reuses as much as possible and keeps any innovations at a minimum. With the JPL lander the situation could be even worse.
So yes, the mars fueling idea is compelling, but let's not assume that the people doing this for a living, and proposing this plan, are just worse at this than random undergrads.
SpaceX, AI, robotics, etc will make significant improvements over that time.
“If NASA manages to develop and launch the Sample Retriever Lander by 2028, the samples could be returned to Earth in 2033”
NASA developing these one-off projects is expensive and time consuming. We need most of the technology to develop commercially.
The thing is, companies fail more easily financially than governments do. It's a good use of gov funds to minimize risks of productization for the private sector, to give them a competitive leg up.
This is how the US space industry is winning, imho - spoken as a European.
It’s quite simple. The budget doubled to $10 billion. Cancel the project.
We’ve been promoting a faster, better, cheaper NASA for 3 decades. It’s not working. Let’s find a better way to increase innovation.
https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/2000/03/15/NASA-study-faste...
It's a good use to spend public funds to boost private profit?
Well it certainly is a good use, but only for one of those parties.
Further, you could basically solve homelessness in CA or build a vast network of public light rail for $10B. Obviously you couldn't do any of that because you need 1-3 layers of consultants and 10 layers of subcontractors to do anything.
These stories frustrate me. Heres a link to Patrick Collison's blog section fast[1] so we can review what it was like when we could build things and do science in this country.
I
All of us alive today can benefit from assistance given to the least of us.
I want the space future too. However, I also want my time here to be better.
I won't see the space future. Sadly.
I could easily see a cleaner, more harmonious world.
Being human can suck. These discussions are one of the ways it does.
contrary to what many say, space exploration is pretty useless. the most barren, remote part of earth is more interesting biologically, geographically, scientifically, and historically than any part of our solar system or the nearest solar systems. even if 99% of life on earth was wiped out by a catastrophic event, it would still be more livable than any planet or moon in our solar system. there are no novel elements or materials on other moons or planets that earth doesn't already have in abundance, and if a civilization was established on mars it would take at least a century, more like 2, for it to have any exports; it would be purely an import economy 100% reliant on earth. its a great jobs program and its pretty cool, but it isn't even close to helpful for pretty much anybody on earth except a few dozen.
that being said, agree 100%. so many things could be solved easily if things were streamlined, which is a good thing about authoritarianism. FDR pushed through the new deal and so much because he had supreme power over the executive branch, dems controlled both houses, and he packed the courts in his favor to prevent opposition. the most authoritarian president by a mile, but ushured in incredible change that was absolutely required to get past the great depression. obviously this was supported by the new deal coalition which would be difficult to construct nowadays because both sides disenfranchise large parts of the other. unity is required, but neither party wants it, so its split and nothing gets done. eventually something will break the camel's back and it'll shift, but until then everything will kinda suck
I can't think of a single piece of software that exists in the world today that couldn't be rewritten with $800M in capital.
Has CA actually spent that money on those problems and shown that it couldn't solve them? If not I don't think that statement is true?
(10B / $6 / 4 quarters / 10 years)
Edit: fwiw, assuming 115k homeless in California (which incidentally is 1/3 of the US total), we get $2,170/person per quarter over ten years. Which does sound like enough to make a real difference in people's lives if you just handed it out.
https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/
A statewide light rail system would probably run closer to a trillion dollars.
They could probably do the statewide light rail for $100 billion if private property rights were ignored. But $10 billion doesn't sound plausible. Maybe just the single already planned line could be built for $10 billion, if private property were ignored and the state did good planning.
Of course this makes it obvious why California can't do it for $10 billion, $100 billion or even $10 trillion: wherever you put your rail network it will inconvenience someone, and that causes massive delays and cost overruns, or makes the project politically untenable from the start. Even if you put the rail underground you would get massive protests from nearby residents because "poor people" can now get there easier.
How does that follow? There's plenty of reasons why there's no high speed rail in the US, none of them have to do with lack of money.
Color me dubious on this one. 1700 miles / 234 days = 7.26 miles/day = 0.444 feet/second, every second of every day for about 8 months straight.
Even if you had 10 teams working in parallel the entire time, that’s a lot of road.
Is the materials, exotic and rare stuff?
Do you need custom microchips/fabs or something?
Is it the engineer salaries, thousands of highly paid people times N years?
That's why a lot of the "new space" oriented programs emphasize "commercial-off-the-shelf" solutions so much. They're only just barely catching on to the relatively obvious bit that costs can be reduced a lot by relying more heavily on existing commercial solutions. Space isn't the most extreme environment compared to what a lot of industrial gear has to be able to deal with.
Some examples which come to mind are the cameras which were used to record video of Perseverance's landing, as well as most of the Ingenuity copter itself, were COTS parts. IIRC as a result Ingenuity has more processing power on board than Perseverance's main computers. These were all low cost lower priority components, but they did a great job of showcasing the usability of COTS parts.
This is not the case. Of course every component had to be tested for space worthiness and possible interference with other systems. All that takes time, money, and specialised facilities.
It's also important to keep in mind that the helicopter was a technology demonstrator, a proof-of-concept that played no critical part in the overall mission. Its job was to perform one flight to show it can be done. It's a big difference if your components only need to do their job once, or if you have to have a guaranteed minimum endurance and the entire mission depends on them.