That’s one word for this plan, that Tariq Malik uses, presumably to be polite:
The co-founder of a rocket launch firm has proposed an audacious plan to send astronauts on a one-way trek to Mars using a pair of tethered U.S. space shuttles that would parachute to the Martian surface.
Inventor Eric Knight, a co-founder of the rocket firm UP Aerospace, detailed the plan – which he’s billed “Mars on a Shoestring” – in a thought exercise designed to encourage unconventional thinking for future human spaceflight.
“My thought paper is a mental exercise to encourage new ideas,” Knight told SPACE.com in an e-mail interview. “I also hope it spurs a re-evaluation of the timeline for human exploration of Mars. Twenty years seems like an eternity, given that we were able to get to the moon in less than 10 years – and we were essentially doing so ‘from scratch.'”
I’m less polite, so I’ll just call it what it is — insane. I don’t have time to detail all of the things that are wrong with it, but have at it in comments.
Well, the first obvious problem is that it’s one way, and one would have to find suicidal astronauts.
Though for a thought exercise I suppose we can overlook that.
“suicidal astronauts”
Sounds like a good name for a band.
“Mars on a Shoestring”
A likely name for the first album.
But seriously, “……..Knight intends his proposal to serve not as a technical blueprint.” Oh gee, I’m glad they cleared that up.
I remember when I was kid I’d always think how cool it would be to see the Space Shuttle land on the Moon. I guess this guy is just getting around to exploring this fantasy.
I was about to put a list together, but reading the actual plan is worse. He solves each flaw with something worse. For example, Space Shuttles unable to support life for the needed amount of time? No problem! We’ll just send them supplies every few weeks. We’ve turned a trip with maybe 2-3 launches into a trip with a dozen launches, perhaps more. No way this “shoestring” is going to be cheaper.
And it’s supposed to be a permanent Martian colony? So how long are these freighter shipments to continue before we have a colony that makes most of that stuff itself.
As I see it, ideas are cheap. Implementing them is where the sticker shock occurs.
Without even looking at the specifics, the first question that comes to mind is:
Considering how thin Mars’ atmosphere is, just how many parachutes would these shuttles need to keep from making two new craters on the surface? Wouldn’t they need at least one additional shuttle just to carry them all?
Might as well surround the shuttles woth balloons and bounce your way down to a landing.
Seriously, these are one shot plans, like Apollo was back in the Sixties. We need infrastructure like space stations, and a way to make a buck like mining the asteroid belt. The rest will follow.
Well, the first obvious problem is that it’s one way, and one would have to find suicidal astronauts.
No more than the Mayflower did.
Remaining on Earth does not ensure immortality. Everyone is going to die, eventually. Living out the rest of one’s life on Mars is not necessarily worse than living it out on Earth.
With current technology, one-way Mars missions actually make a lot of sense. Getting a crew back from Mars is in many ways the hardest part. Burt Rutan proposed a one-way mission several years ago, and someone who works closely with the astronaut office told me the idea is getting some serious consideration within NASA.
(Besides, the author does not contemplate a one-way trip. He’s counting on Mars Direct to come and bring them home.)
The real problem is the way the author glosses over technical details. For example, What would comprise the propulsion stage? How about an enhanced Earth Departure Stage being developed by NASA for the Constellation Program? Or perhaps a pair of these stages, side by side?
Of course, NASA hasn’t done any work on the Earth Departure Stage, let alone an “enhanced” Earth Departure Stage, and the author gives no hint of what “enhanced” means. Nor is there any chance of the EDS being ready before the Shuttle retires.
Then he suggests, perhaps we could explore creative cryogenic refueling of a retrofitted upper stage of an existing propulsion system.
Perhaps we could, but which existing propulsion system? Details are crucial.
400,000 lbs of payload fairing (penalty mass).
‘Nuff said.
I recommend R. C. Hoagland as Mission Commander.
Brainstorming doesn’t require ideas to be sane. If the point is to generate ideas, this post and it’s comments are evidence that it worked.
One way? Not insane. It has to happen at some point.
Using shuttles… ok, that’s insane. We argue about how, but any good engineer should be able to come up with a reasonable start on an off the shelf solution. One way or another we’ve done everything we need to do to send people to Mars already. The issue is not technical.
That’s not to say there aren’t technical issues. I’m just confident that SpaceX and others are well on there way to taking care of those issues.
The issue is will. One billionaire with the will could start a colony in much less than a decade. We don’t need any more launch capability than what we already have.
The shuttles are for sale. Not that they would be of any use, but they could be brought along as well. It’s not the issue.
Still more points:
* The time, effort, and money required to bludgeon the shuttles into this mission would go much further if they were applied instead to designing a system to do it right. Even if you wanted to reuse off-the-shelf hardware, there would be better off-the-shelf components to use.
* What’s the point of sending the SSMEs to Mars if you aren’t going to use them? But you can’t leave them behind: How would the shuttles get into orbit without them? How could you jettison them?
* We have a grand total of three, count ’em, three shuttles left. This plan requires two of them for a single one-way trip. There can’t be any meaningful incremental testing, of course. But even if it works (and it won’t), that’s the only time anyone will ever get to Mars in this way. So how do the supplies and/or rescuers get there? We’d have to design two entirely different systems to get to Mars, one of which will be thrown away in all respects after it has been used one time.
* When it fails, it will poison the well. Public reaction against the idea of going to Mars will be huge.
No thanks. I do like Gary’s idea, though …
Want to reuse something? Why didn’t NASA come up with a plan to reuse even one external tank, for anything, in a quarter-century of flying the Shuttle?
I asked an astronaut at a public forum why the external tank wasn’t used. His reply was that the astronaut office had raised the same question, and that the higher-ups in NASA had determined that it not be left in orbit lest it be used for something else.
NASA began to fail when it turned into a “jobs for the boys” program by the bureaucracts, and will remain such from now on. Launches, science and other things are just a feature. The real mission is making sure the bureaucrats have jobs.
I’ve looked at the math on the ET scenario, and it’s not as simple as ‘leaving one behind’. The mass of the external tank is very close to the maximum cargo weight for a shuttle, meaning that you would essentially need a dedicated shuttle flight to leave an ET behind. Even the SLWT masses almost 26,000kg.
This doesn’t take residual propellants or alternate flight profiles into account.
Does anyone have better information on this?
The mass of the external tank is very close to the maximum cargo weight for a shuttle, meaning that you would essentially need a dedicated shuttle flight to leave an ET behind.
There’s one big flaw in your math. The External Tank is almost at orbital velocity when it’s jettisoned.
I think I see what you’re getting at, but so is the orbiter. I’m pretty sure that two OMS burns are required to achieve orbit, and my calculations (buried in notes from long ago) said that the additional OMS propellant drove cargo mass to near zero. I’m pretty sure that I was looking at a 28 degree orbit. 52 degrees (ISS inclination) wasn’t part of the math.
As far as I know, there shouldn’t be a problem with getting it to orbit. Let me rephrase what Edward Wright wrote: The External Tank is almost at orbital velocity when it’s jettisoned, even when the Shuttle is carrying a full payload, so missions that don’t involve a lot of mass in the cargo bay ought to be able to haul it into orbit just fine. I believe I’ve read that it actually requires a small amount more fuel to ensure that the tank doesn’t go into orbit than it would take to just carry it along for the ride.
Early on in the Shuttle program, NASA and other groups were openly discussing various ways to use the ET. If I recall correctly, the tank even has a four-foot-wide access hatch. Big, empty habitat modules for the ISS? Aldrin cyclers, maybe?
If nothing else, you could use it as … an external fuel tank for a new mission, once you have a fuel depot up there. Or you could even build the fuel depot itself out of a few of ’em.
One problem with leaving an unmodified ET in orbit would be foam insulation spalling off, but there are plausible fixes for this. (They’d cost money and add mass, of course.)
o
OK guys, being told repeatedly that the tank was almost in orbit didn’t convince me, but I re-did a part of my calculations. It looks like I made some sort of bad assumption earlier, or I over-simplified this time. Today’s wrinkled-printer-paper numbers show that, with an orbiter at GLOW for Endeavor reported on Wikipedia and a SLWT, an OMS-2 burn would require 241kg more propellant (1231kg vs 990kg, about 3% of the total load) . That sounds like a do-able amount, though it doesn’t take into account OMS-1 (though that shouldn’t be any different) or flight rules on propellant usage.
If anyone has a serious analysis on it, I’d be curious to look. Too bad it never happened.