I have some thoughts this morning, over at Pajamas Media.
Category Archives: Space
Why Mars Is Hard
Jim Oberg has a good piece today. It’s just not as easy as the Barsoomophiles want to believe. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be an ultimate goal, but we need to put first things first — reducing the costs of launch, developing critical technologies (particularly propellant handing and manufacturing from ISRU) and preliminary scouting to the moons before it will be practical to put people on the surface.
[Mid-afternoon update]
It’s official: NASA is a jobs program. Not that that’s news…
“…critical skills”, “industrial base”, and “workforce retention” have been frequently-mentioned items in the committee’s deliberations to date, so I suppose I should have seen this coming, but it’s still one of the starkest illustrations I’ve encountered why government programs and NASA in particular will never accomplish the goal of making humans a spacefaring species.
Fortunately, there are alternate paths.
In Defense Of Phobos
This WaPo piece by Joel Achenbach has something missing:
The panel will give the administration a menu of options that includes some that require a boost in funding for human spaceflight, which currently costs a little less than $10 billion a year, including the shuttle, the station and the Constellation program. Those options will include variations of a lunar program — the committee appears to prefer to see astronauts making sorties to various locations on the moon rather than concentrating on a single outpost at the moon’s pole, which is the current plan.
The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the “Deep Space” option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds. Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere.
Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn’t land so much as rendezvous, in the same way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But the Deep Space option steers clear of “gravity wells,” which is to say the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently beyond NASA’s reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario, the committee has determined.
Note that there is absolutely no discussion of refueling, though that was a key feature of several of the Augustine options. The piece seems to be entirely focused (as the press tends to do, in its simplistic reporting) on destinations, and their various attributes, desirable or otherwise. This notion of a “long way to go without touching down on the planet below” seems to be an artifact of limited imagination.
First of all, once you’re at Phobos, if you send the right equipment, you might in fact be able manufacture the propellant needed to descend to the surface, manufacture propellant there, and come back up. The additional mass needed to do this would be trivial, compared to the IMLEO (initial mass in low earth orbit) required to do a Mars landing staged from earth. All it would take is a refuelable lander, and the equipment necessary to process the asteroid (which is what Phobos or Deimos are, other than their location).
But beyond that, what’s wrong with Phobos? I think that John Logsdon’s attitude is blinkered as well (not that that would be anything new):
Any strategy going forward must cope with the obvious problem that the United States has already visited the moon, and the solar system offers earthlings few other appealing places to go that are anywhere close at hand. Logsdon said he wasn’t sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on “flybys” rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public.
“I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive,” he said.
This from a guy who has never expressed any interest or desire to go himself, but thinks he knows what people want from a space program. First of all, you aren’t “not landing anywhere.” You are landing on frickin’ Phobos. The fact that it’s a lot easier than having to descend into a gravity well doesn’t make it less interesting. Yes, obviously, most people would rather walk on Mars, but (at least in NASA’s plans) most people aren’t going to be able to do any of these things. And on such a huge planet, even if someone lands on Mars, will it be the most interesting part of Mars? Not initially. Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility not for any particular points of interest, but because it was the biggest flattest mare they knew of on the near side. It’s not like the first Mars explorers are going to climb Olympus Mons.
Seeing the earth from ISS, through glass and with their own eyes, unfiltered by electronics, is the most fascinating thing that astronauts there do. Why would we think that looking at Mars from Phobos would be of any less interest?
While I’m not that big on the voyeurism inherent in the NASA human spaceflight program as currently executed, I would think that having humans orbiting the Red Planet, and reporting back their experiences in their own words, would be pretty damned exciting (though I’d hope that given how picky they can be about astronaut selection, one of the criteria they would use was communications ability and articulateness, and even poetic ability — a lot of astronauts are good at this, but many aren’t, and when they are, it seems to be accidental, e.g., Mike Collins). There is no reason that you should have to descend into a deep gravity well to make deep space exploration exciting, and I tire of the notion that there is.
Thoughts From Augustine
He was on the Newshour last night. You can listen here. It’s nice to hear him making the airmail analogy for providing commercial space markets.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’m listening to the Jeff Hoffman interview, and he’s using the same analogy. It would be nice to get this meme into the main stream.
Ares I-X
…isn’t getting much love in comments over at Space Transport News. At least not the kind that its supporters would like to see:
Perhaps NASA should keep the Ares I-X in storage until the 4th of July next year. I imagine the flaming propellant debris cloud would be pretty cool to watch.
Posted by Neil H. at 08/15/09 12:28:554th of July is too long to wait. I vote for New Years fireworks spectacular.
Posted by john hare at 08/15/09 13:02:52How about Labor Day, send Summer out with a bang.
Posted by anonymous at 08/15/09 13:16:56
This “test,” which isn’t testing actual flight hardware, has cost (so far) a third of a billion dollars. That’s about the same as the estimate for the launch escape system for the Dragon. Sometimes it seems that people who advocate more money for NASA seem to have no concept of cost and value.
The President’s Space Policy Dilemma
A good wrap up over at the Orlando Sentinel:
For NASA allies on Capitol Hill, news that the agency does not have enough money to do what it wants is not so shocking. For years, members of congressional science committees have complained about underfunding.
But in a time of enormous budget deficits, a major boost is seen as unlikely.
“NASA is getting $18 billion a year. That’s more than all the other [space] agencies in the world combined. It’s very difficult to make the argument for more money,” said Vincent Sabathier, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Sabathier said NASA’s best hope lies in giving a greater role to its international partners to develop key components of an exploration system, such as using a French rocket to launch a U.S. capsule.
One point that people don’t understand, though, is that it isn’t a budget problem per se. It is a budget problem in the context of the politics. As I said over at Space Politics:
It is disheartening — but not surprising — to read that the Augustine Commission doesn’t see any way the current NASA budget can get us back to the Moon or to any of the spectacular alternatives that have been contemplated in anything like a reasonable time frame.
Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.
A long as we have a political requirement to maintain thousands of jobs at KSC and Marshall and Houston, it’s going to be hard to reduce costs. That’s a point that needs to be made strongly in the panel’s report. If the politicians want to shut down human spaceflight, or dramatically increase the budget, we should at least be clear on why those are the two options — it’s not because it is as intrinsically expensive as NASA always makes it. By the time Dragon is flying with crew, Elon will have spent far less than a billion dollars, a tiny percentage of what NASA plans to spend on Orion and Ares I. And the difference in size doesn’t explain the difference in cost. What does explain it is that he’s spending his own money, and his primary focus is on developing space hardware that closes a business case, not “creating or saving” (to use the administration’s wonderfully nebulous criterion) “jobs.”
Plane-Crazy Fly-In
This looks like fun. If I weren’t flying back to Florida tomorrow, and it were a few weeks later, when I’ll be definitely living in LA again, we’d drive up to see it.
Stepping Stones To Mars
More Augustine Thoughts
…from Clark Lindsey. I have to say that Sally Ride has risen considerably in my esteem in the past couple months. And I’m a little disappointed, but not shocked that Bo Bejmuk (with whom I worked at Rockwell) doesn’t quite seem to get it. Operational costs are key. NASA simply can’t expect to just have money shoved at them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Lindsey versus Coppinger. It’s quite the beat down.
I was going to respond, but haven’t had the time. I read Rob’s stuff, and sometimes I just shake my head. He has an apparently massive capability to delude himself on both the politics and the economics. He’s been whistling past Ares I’s graveyard for months.
A Defense Of DIRECT
Stephen Metschan emails, per my recent piece in The New Atlantis:
I agreed with much of what you wrote especially with the lead up to how we got to where we are today. In fact even key elements of what you wrote as solutions to going further are actually part of the DIRECT plan which goes far far beyond the Jupiter Launch System which is just a one component of that plan. One day I wish you would at least publicly acknowledge this. In fact the CE&R were very informative in help us come up with a good compromise between the two extremes of Ares or an exclusive existing EELV approach. Also for the record we are no longer anonymous to the Commission as I promised them. In fact Leroy’s question of who are we was a call to arms. To suffice to say what they found will result in some significant changes shortly to NASA middle management.
You continue to have three key blind spots in three very different areas of physics, politics and experience.
Starting with physics. Whether we like it or not the rocket equation governs our current reality. In addition, RLV will always have higher mass fraction than ELV. As Carl Sagan once said “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition”. Changing who the government writes the checks to won’t change physics or the golden rule. Further the dynamics of how young, efficient yet inexperienced organizations turn into old, inefficient yet experienced organizations, given enough time and money, won’t change either. While the last one is not strictly physics its durability across human organizational history is almost an axiom of the human condition which in turn mirrors the life cycle of individuals only on longer time scale.
Politics, you almost got it with the statement of the Iron Triangle but you failed to weave that into a broader understanding of solution that works. Politics is the art of the possible. As long as the space services customer base is dominate by government, elected representatives of the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill will have a dominate influence. Until something ‘like’ Lunar He3 comes along (ie this particular idea may never be possible) the space industry will be dominated by government, the market niche of joy rides for millionaires not withstanding. For now telling the likes of Senator Shelby that your plan is to shut down MSFC is like taking grocery bag to a tank fight. In addition, the Jupiter launch system is not just slightly better than Ares but is less than half the cost (development, operational and fixed). The fact that our plan saves so much money has actually been the problem with the Senator from Alabama. Any guess on how well a plan that destroys NASA as we know it would be received? In addition our fixed cost (ie no launches) is less than 20% of the Human Space Flight budget, well below Ares and an improvement over STS. At launch rates that far exceed our mission budget that percentage number barely moves while the cost per kg to orbit drops below $4,000. The biggest problem we have is that the incremental cost per launch is even lower than this already extremely competitive full amortized cost thereby make any conceivable ELV or RLV approach based on existing physics by any nation or organizational paradigm ‘more’ expensive not less. So your cost argument is completely backwards. In a Jupiter world the government will need to subsidize the ‘commerical’ market not the other way around by paying much more to launch the same payload via multiple smaller launchers than the incrementally cost of what one more Jupiter launch would entail.. Besides their is no absolutely no reason why the Jupiter couldn’t be designed, built and operated by a ‘commercial’ industry consortium or FFRDC for the matter. Again I see little difference between the commercial companies of USA, ULA, SpaceX, Rent-A-RLV, etc. They all are ‘commercial’ companies of one size or another yet the golden rule will still hold sway. Bottomline: lets not throw out the high volume heavy launch infrastructure and workforce out with the NASA management bath water.
Concerning Experience. You also continue to neglect for some reason the fact that launch cost is only 20% of the overall mission cost. As such even if a time machine delivered a device, that for some mysterious reason would only work on Earth, which could place any mass you wanted into Earth Orbit using Duracell battery you would only lower the cost of space exploration and development by 20%. On the other hand we have lots and lots of cost date from real programs that prove that attempting to pack 10kg of spacecraft into a 5kg box increases costs many times that of the actually launch cost think JSWT and MSL. Further even in an EELV paradigm the ISS would still cost more, have less capability and weigh more than Skylab which the Jupiter could put up in one launch. I for one much prefer Skylab over the ISS rabbit warren for trips Beyond LEO.
So in summary I agree with a lot of what you wrote by the ‘close’ on some of your key recommendations only make sense if you ignore physics, politics and experience.
I don’t have time to respond at length, but briefly, there is no correlation between mass fraction and launch costs of which I’m aware. If there is one, it’s certainly second order, relative to flight rate and whether or not you throw hardware away. So I (as always, as I did in a previous piece in The New Atlantis) summarily reject the flawed and false argumentum ab physics.
As for the politics, while closing down MSFC might or might not be a good idea, I do in fact recognize that it is politically unrealistic. I don’t, however, think it politically unrealistic to apply that resource to something useful, that actually advances us beyond LEO, rather than building Yet Another Launch System. For instance, propellant depot development should in theory be in their wheelhouse. Having them do it wouldn’t necessarily be the most effective way to get it done, but it may be the kind of political compromise necessary to at least get the agency to start doing the right thing, if not doing the thing right.
I also recognize that cost of launch is (currently) a small fraction of total mission cost. What I don’t recognize is that this is an iron law of aerospace, rather than an artifact of the way we’ve been doing space for the past five decades. And in fact, for a propellant delivery, the cost of launch dominates, and the vast majority of mass that has to be delivered to LEO (at least until we start to utilize extraterrestrial resources) for extraterrestrial missions is propellant. Also, I share the enthusiasm for Skylab over ISS, in terms of volume, but one can get volume without a heavy-lift vehicle. Just ask Bob Bigelow.
So I plead innocent to all three charges.
[Thursday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has a response to Stephen’s thesis.
[Bumped]