A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars
online.liebertpub.com
online.liebertpub.com
Advancements by SpaceX have not been released. They haven't even been patented because SpaceX is competing against governments, so Musk does not want to disclose information to them. And since the product (rockets/spacecraft) can't be examined by the public, there's really no incentive to public domain the tech and give it to competitors.
I keep saying it... There are billionaires alive today, who might actually chose to die on Mars. They could do it.
If James Cameron, Richard Branson, or Elon Musk decided they wanted to die on Mars, I think they could make it happen. And I don't think it would be a big departure from their personalities.
And I don't think it would be a PR disaster.
I think it would be inspiring as hell.
"All men die. Not all men truly live. Follow me to Mars. Colonize it. Make it a second home for humanity. Life is too precious to keep all of it in one basket."
It might be, depending on how you write it.
"Millionaire crackpot Elon Musk and his crew asphyxiated on Mars today, after the Banks Dome suffered a catastrophic failure. Musk spent over six billion of his personal wealth to get himself and his crew of seven to the red planet. He is survived by his wife and five children, all of whom have launched lawsuits against SpaceX, arguing that he was clearly not of sound mind."
Billions do not buy you much in terms of comfort on the way to Mars.
Yes, it Will be hard for non-billionaires, too, but they will give up less, and have more to gain; they aren't famous yet.
He also worked as a truck driver for a while...
...and he'd probably bring VR along, and have multiple crews back on earth filming anything he wanted to see...
And I'm talking about them near the end of their lives... I could envision it happening.
We can send a robot mission to Mars or build another Olympic(tm)(r) stadium. I wish I was joking.
Anyway, you can directly donate to NASA. They just aren't allowed to promote it or somesuch.
http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?Internal_ID=N_PD_...
I'd wager that most people would vote to allocate the money to themselves, one way or another. Fixing potholes, hiring more police and firemen.
How many people would choose to fund researching things that might not pay off in their lifetime?
edit: thinking about it now, basically populist politics.
To fund the great achievements of the 1960's space race, NASA's budget was only twice as much as it is today. Bringing it back up would take a whopping... 0.5% more of the federal government budget.
That 0.5% also accounts for one third of the total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.
Also considering that federal government spending is about half of the total government spending in the US, your total taxes would only need to be raised by about 0.25%.
Pretty sad when you think about it.
Example: you have a reusable 10 ton vehicle and you need to send a 150 ton mass to orbit. You fly once per week for four months and it's there. After that the vehicle/capability can be used for something else. Think of it as renting a standard truck. It's cheap since there's a large supply because of a large market. Their utilization rate is relatively high, meaning when you use them, you only need yo pay a small portion of the investment and upkeep. You can rent many for long periods of time if you need to. On the other hand large custom moving equipment is expensive and not always even available. And they can stand idle for long periods of time.
But to avoid the costs of the Ares V, we wanted to do the entire thing using nothing but existing off-the-shelf available LVs to do the entire thing. If we'd gone the route of even a small custom LV, we would have the constant overhead of maintaining multiple launch pads that sat idle for 2 years at a time, just to launch something each launch window to Mars. Instead, our plan began with the Delta IV-H lobbing payloads trans-Mars. It has a payload of just over ~9T doing that. It could also fly three or four payloads per launch window, Vandenburg and the Cape, both at the start and the end of the window for a two week turnaround on each launch pad. Of course, suboptimal timing and suboptimal inclinations will cut into that 9T slightly. Further, we could make use of things like the Mitsubishi H-IIA [2], Atlas V 551 or Heavy (would need modest new development, or the 551 which is a bit weaker), Ariane V and maybe Proton (tho Proton is quite weak on high energy flights). Falcon 9 Heavy could eventually be added to that list (I think we were already talking about F9H in 2007...). That gets you maybe 6-9 payloads per launch window to Mars, of 6-9 tons depending on the launcher. That was our working budget for each payload.
We managed to account for just about everything to do with the surface base using nothing but those small payloads... Planned out a standard design for a small descent vehicle in I think 1500kg to 2500kg which could land most of the rest of the mass as payload. We could do Earthworks (or Marsworks... dirtmoving / digging) using using some small remote-controlled construction equipment of 2-3T each. [3] Food, water and other supplies could pretty easily fit in smallish pieces like that. Used solar panels in place of Mars Direct's nuke for political feasibility / scalability to small payload deliveries. Also talked a bit about assembling a shelter using either the landed capsules for rooms, or assembling rooms from parts (I don't remember which). A part I was a bit uneasy about that some others thought was trivial enough, was building a new launch vehicle from parts on the surface... We'd be using small modular segments to build stages, scaffolding to assemble everything together and connect the stages, and all of this would be done outdoors. I was kinda worried about getting sand between the staging components or in the engines.
The part we didn't manage to fit into the initial constraints of 9 ton payloads, all direct-to-Mars, was the actual crew transport there (we were fine-ish for the return). We stretched kinda far, pulled compromises nobody would really take, and got a 1-crew capsule to weigh in at 11T-12T. And that's with basically no redundancy! The entire thing would be a small can with a solar wing for power, life support for 6 months, and no way for the pilot to survive a launch failure from Earth. The capsule would fly straight to Mars, pilot would don a suit, depressurize the capsule and get in a MOOSE-alike [4] module and travel to the Martian surface in that. They would also be dependent on the entry trajectory for their life, as they'd have to walk to base on landing.
From there our plans started to look a bit more "traditional" with either an HLV snuck in there just for the crew (and not the base) or orbital assembly of an orbital ship. Say, something with plenty of life support of its own, just does Earth-Mars-Earth and gets the crew to and from the base. The ship itself would be a rather substantial project to build, but at least it could ignore landing much payload. And the ascent vehicle from Mars would only need to worry about orbit, not escape velocity.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20070810053610/http://uplink.spa... Ok, so the thread Mars 9 Tons at a Time wasn't archived at all. But there it was, August 2007.
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-IIA
[3] http://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/excavators/m... For example, is a smallish piece of equipment which can take many different parts on the end of the arm, work very slowly as a bulldozer, and fit inside our payload budget. We'd need something mechanically different, but probably that size / style of machine, to work remotely in very low temperatures. Shortly after our that thread, one of the construction equipment companies produced concept art describing something like that on The Moon with actuators (I think) in place of the hydraulics. Some folks complained that they were just advertising their stuff on The Moon to look cool.
[4] http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm Not terribly confidence-inspiring.
If you want to avoid space assembly, you can always just refuel. Even that gets you far since in many cases propellants are a large proportion of spacecraft mass.
But why would you avoid docking?
Even Apollo had it as a critical part of the mission. Twice! (The CSM turned around and docked to the lunar module after translunar injection.)
and
"Furthermore, although not considered here, international contributions could offset some of the cost"
oh Americans, there is a wider world out there across the border you know...
I think space exploration is a great chance for human solidarity.
Funding, control, bureaucracy and such can still be challenging, but I think the scientists and engineers themselves would generally be on board. The public also, I think/hope.
Planting an earth flag instead of a national one kinda makes simple sense that I think will appeal to people. You land in a new land, you claim it for your land. Land on a new planet, claim it for your planet.
On the other hand, I'm totally behind anyone who wants to internationalize it. Like I said, I'm pretty optimistic that if it starts people will dig it.
I would be proud to see an earth flag flying on new worlds, especially if they have wind. I think other people would be too.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bA-pR_9s6Ng/VVeBWoDKeHI/AAAAAAAAAc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
So why propose something much more expensive with much less return? Because scientists have learned that the NASA projects which get funded and stay funded aren't the projects which are most cost-efficient; they're the projects which spread the money around to as many NASA centers (and, more importantly, states which correspond to the senior members of the Senate Appropriations committee) as possible. That's pretty obviously the guiding light for this architecture; its innovation is that it proposes to do so within existing budgets rather than radically expanded budgets. But that doesn't make it minimal or cheap by any measure.
I appreciate your POV, Mars Direct is a compelling plan, but it's weakness is that none of its components except the launcher are any use for anything else except another Mars Direct mission. Anyway it's a bit unfair to thrash these guys for wanting to work within what is already actually happening.
To illustrate, here's a simplified example. We can buy one of two Mars missions: Mars Mission A, which costs $100, of which we have already paid a $10 non-refundable deposit, and Mars Mission B, which costs $30, but we have not yet spent anything on it.
The $10 we have already spent absolutely does have future value -- $10 worth of future value, if we pursue Mars Mission A. Its future value is, however, irrelevant, because Mars Mission A has $90 worth of future costs, compared to $30 of future costs for Mars Mission B. The Sunk Costs Fallacy is to believe that the $10 continues to have any relevance in such a scenario. In truth, the future costs are the only costs which matter.
Has docking with (unpiloted) prepositioned stages been demonstrated in real life? Is it reliable enough to use when crew lives depend on it?
On Mars the easy option is to live in a cave.
And, considering the other risks involved I think many would trade a significant increased risk of cancer in their lifetimes for the journey.
In the end it does not matter as you optimise to the level you need to attract the candidates required to do the job. Anything else is just over engineering.
Edit. I don't think we would have a major problem attracting Apollo-level candidates even if the chance of success was less than 50%.
I was being a bit playful with 2001: A Space Odyssey
Jhttp://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFFF0.pdf
The weird thing is that this is the second time I've seen it today, and I don't think I've ever seen it before...