VP Pence recently is quoted as saying that the US is going back to the moon in 5 years. This at the same briefing where NASA told him the current schedule is 8 years. OK…
Skipping over the fact that saying we are going to the moon in 5 years a) according to the news this fulfills Trumps promise to go back to the moon biggelly and b) conveniently after the next election so they don’t actually have to live up to their promise.
My question-is ANYONE actually working on a lunar landing vehicle? I noticed that a start-up got a whole $10million in Aug 2018 to get started on their idea. So does anyone take the administration seriously, or NASA for that matter, when they say they are going back to the moon? Or is designing a shuttle that can get from orbit to the ground and back really that simple? I know back the the 50s NASA and the Air Force looked at literally a flying pogo stick to get from orbit to the ground. The energetics of the trip aren’t that hard, but there are details that have to be planned for.
Does anyone know what the current progress is on actually building hardware for this 2024 mission?
I haven’t been following super closely, but as far as I understand it there’s no actual lander hardware, not even prototypes. Just a lot of powerpoint concept slides, some backed by design studies and maybe a first round of evaluation by NASA.
For the Lunar Gateway, there’s some mock-up hardware but none that’s anywhere near a fully-functioning prototype.
The Lunar Gateway seems like something that is the worst combo of what we could be doing. The US spends it’s resources to put and maintain a RV sized spacestation in lunar orbit and allow other nations to dock to it if and when they explore the moon. Sure getting out of LEO for longer stays should be somewhat helpful to science, but all and all we would be running a low budget motel on the highway exit ramp to the beach.
It just seems like a way to sideline the US space program, but Trump will claim we, because of Trump’s leadership, are back to the moon.
The Lunar Gateway is a whole other subject.
For that, I simply note that most of NASA’s current staff and contractors are used to building and maintaining space stations not space ships. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the main NASA focus is doing another space station…
Nevertheless, I am interested in the actual Lunar Lander. Going to another space station may make the current NASA staff more comfortable, but without a lander it really doesn’t matter much where the new station is. A trip to the moon requires a lander. Is anyone working on one?
Yes, when hoax believers yap away about how we didn’t have the technology to go to the moon, I’ve explained to them about how the most technically difficult part about the whole thing was the Saturn V. Having said that, Tom Kelly’s book was a real eye opener about all the problems they had developing the Apollo LM. It’s no wonder it was late for Apollo 8. Really speaks to the dedication of those folks back then working all kinds of crazy hours to correct all those problems.
This article on nasaspaceflight.com sums up the situation. The only plans for a lander are several years old, and nobody’s been working on building it.
Even administrator Bridenstine’s the proposal/threat to use a commercial rocket to launch the first Orion capsule seems more like a way to put pressure on the SLS teams that a realistic proposal.
The Bad Astronomer thinks it’s all moonshine. Almost every president since Bush Sr has wanted NASA to go to Mars and some back to the Moon, and I’m really surprised Reagan didn’t as well (he just wanted a space station, which we got, but not the one he wanted).
So…uh…could SpaceX rig something up before the 5 year deadline if they had the money? I mean, the SpaceX way, they’d probably have a design within a year. A prototype within another year, launched on an actual rocket, sent unmanned to the Moon.
It would fail. But they could iterate every 3-4 months and by the time the 5 year mark is hit, would probably have more than a dozen successfully landings, with the last 6 or so being a hardware “frozen” (no further design changes) version in an effort to build confidence.
I mean most likely it would be just some hydrazine thrusters, very similar to the ones used in the Dragon spacecraft, and some landing legs, and a tall trunk on the lander to hold the propellant mass needed for the landing.
The only design that is done by NASA are the system level requirements and interface control definitions. All of the detail design for each segment is done by individual contractors and their subcontractors, and the integration and testing would be largely done by a contractor as well.
As Chronos notes, the lander is the “easiest” vehicle in the overall mission concept to design, since it neither has to propel itself from Earth’s powerful gravity well nor survive hypersonic reentry into the atmosphere. That being said, it isn’t trivial to design any spacecraft and particularly a crewed vehicle. The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) was a pretty barebones vehicle that was just barely capable of delivering two astronauts and a lightweight rover to the Lunar surface for a few days and returning the crew and a small amount of surface samples. If the goal is simply to repeat that mission then you could design something similar to the LM with modern avionics in a straightforward manner, but that begs the question of why we would be repeating the Apollo missions. A more useful mission would deliver a larger complement of astronauts, a habitat and power supply for an extended stay, and explore the near polar regions where water ice may be available, but that would require a significantly large vehicle with a more extensive life support capability and much greater propulsive capability. Masten Space Systems was working on such a vehicle for several years (the Xeus) but it was cancelled last year.
There are also significant issues for an extended duration lunar surface mission including protection from solar charged particle radiation, dust contamination (see “The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions”, NASA/TM—2005-213610, J. Gaier), and for a mission that has to endure the 14 day lunar dark period, being able to power and heat the habitat without solar incidence. And this begs the question of what astronauts will do on an extended mission that could not be done more inexpensively with uncrewed rovers or probes; the limitations of operating in a pressure suit make the supposed advantages of having astronauts on the surface far less practical than it may seem notwithstanding the extreme cost penalty and effort for having to keep a crew alive and return them at end of mission.
Of course, nothing about this “proposal” has anything to do with science or space development; it is purely cosmetic grandstanding as witnessed by the lack of funding to support such a mission. If planetary science were the objective, more uncrewed missions to the outer planets and their moon systems would be the priority.
By “shuttle” you mean a lunar lander which descends from lunar orbit to the surface, then ascends, rendezvous and docks with another spacecraft in lunar orbit.
For an unmanned vehicle you can just “go for it” and if it fails, examine the telemetry and try to figure out what went wrong. For a manned vehicle, more testing is required.
Designing and properly testing a crewed lunar lander is extremely difficult and expensive. For Apollo it required managing a large industrial infrastructure.
On Apollo, the lunar module was a key pacing item for the entire program. That one spacecraft was so difficult that the mission schedule was modified to accommodate its lagging development. E.g, Apollo 8 was flown without a LM.
Grumman got the LM contract in 1962. Yet the first crewed LM test mission in earth orbit did not happen until Apollo 9 in March 1969. So it took seven years for the first crewed test.
Separately the LM propulsion system required testing in a terrestrial vacuum space environment. The Apollo LM propulsion system was test fired many times in a large vacuum test chamber at the AEDC test facility (Saturn S-IVB shown in J-4 test cell): https://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1758/42804469471_1002a694dc_b.jpg
I don’t know if all these test facilities still exist in a configuration for testing manned spacecraft and their propulsion systems. If they don’t, they would have to be re-created, refurbished, or a decision made to gamble on landing humans on the moon without testing lunar spacecraft and propulsion systems in a simulated space environment.
All of those facilities still exist. Technically the J-4 test cell at AEDC was destroyed in an explosion during Peacekeeper development but was rebuilt though it is currently in an inactive state; J-6 is active and could be used. The Space Power Facility at NASA Plum Brook (part of Glenn Research Center) was actually featured in the opening of The Avengers as the facility where they were performing experiments on the Tesseract (the streamers in the background which read “Joint Dark Energy Mission” weren’t set dressing but refer to the actual JDEM project) and Plum Brook also has the In-Space Propulsion Facility.
In order to have any hope of achieving this timeframe an existing vacuum engine with reuse capability like the J-2, RS-68, or the venerable RL-10 would have to be used, although it would still have to be qualified for the lander application, and the lander itself would require extensive subsystem and system level testing, particularly if it was intended for an extended operation time. The logistics of such an effort alone would make the development, testing, and integration of such a vehicle extremely challenging to be available for a 2024 mission even if the requirements were finalized and contractors were selected. And it is not an exageration to say that with the state of government contracting today, it might be five years before NASA could even get through proposal and contract award.
While I assumed extensive earth-based testing in a simulated space environment would be required, I’m not sure that SpaceX did that for the Dragon2. They obviously did lots of atmospheric testing but I’m not sure they vacuum tested the engines until the recent unmanned orbital flight.
The Boeing Orion service module will apparently use a shuttle OMS engine which was already flown on a mission: European Service Module - Wikipedia
I guess progressive unmanned testing is OK but traditionally only earth-bound vacuum testing can be fully instrumented.
Originally the space shuttle program wasn’t going to vacuum test the APUs since they had passed atmospheric testing. However the program manager Aaron Cohen got nervous, found some more funding and tested them in a vacuum chamber. They exploded during the test due to a heat shield effect which only occurred in a vacuum. Had this not been done the first shuttle mission might have been unsuccessful.
As you said, today some existing pre-tested propulsion systems exist but many other subsystems do not exist and those would require funding, design, construction, earth testing, space testing, etc.
While there is low tolerance for error on any manned aerospace application, a manned lunar lander is even more stringent. It can’t do an emergency deorbit if something malfunctions – it’s 240,000 miles away. Every subsystem on the Apollo LM was designed for extreme reliability and simplicity. Prudent design of a new manned lunar lander would require revisiting all those aspects, along with the need for unique new subsystems and testing.
E.g for simplicity, you might want pressure-fed throttleable hypergolic engines which are ablatively (not regeneratively) cooled. The SpaceX SuperDraco engines are throttleable pressure-fed hypergolic, but they are regeneratively cooled. With enough LEO testing maybe those could eventually be qualified for a manned lunar mission.
There is an argument that with current easier, lower-cost access to LEO, some things can be tested there. With Apollo it was expensive to put a CSM or LM into orbit so earth-bound testing was needed.
But whether tested on earth or in LEO, a lot of design and testing would be needed. That in turn implies a new lunar lander would be very expensive or take quite a while, or both.
Flight testing is great because it tests the entire system in a way that doesn’t have any of the compromises one has to make in ground-based testing—such as the fact that you have to test the environments such as thermal vacuum/cycling, vibration, shock, and acceleration separately—but it is difficult to obtain the same fidelity of measurement, and it isn’t possible to test with qualification levels or test to failure to determine margins. In order to have enough tests to demonstrate the same reliability as testing to typical margins as specified in standards like SMC-S-016 or NASA-STD-3001 you’d have to run several hundred test flights, and even then, without testing to margin or testing to failure, you really have no idea what the true capability is and how close it is running to failure if the vehicle experiences loads beyond the maximum predicted environment (MPE). And of course, in the case of a flight test failure, there is often little or no physical evidence to examine to come to root cause, which is why the so-called “blizzard of paperwork” of certs and build documentation exists despite the labor required to maintain it.
There are those advocates who believe that analysis and lessons learned from previous design failurescan substitute for component and subsystem level testing, and you should just be able to design a vehicle and run a single “all up” test as verification of design integrity, but without exception these are people who have never actually worked on a launch or space vehicle development program. I cannot think of a single launch vehicle development program that didn’t have at least one significant failure during testing despite all of the analysis and systems engineering to implement lessons learned because launch vehicles and spacecraft are incredibly complicated systems that experience loads and environments that are difficult to estimate and that have complex interactions which can result in unexpected failures such as the destructive pogo effects that resulted in premature engine shutdowns on Apollo 10 and Apollo 13 (fortunately recoverable as the S-II had five J-2 engines), so testing components to margins which exceed the expected MPE is crucial to design robustness and reliability.
I currently work at a company that believes in the “blizzard of paperwork” approach. Here’s what irks me about it. It’s not that each of these tasks - each check, at each level of hierarchy in the organization - need to be done.
It’s that the way my company does it, the paperwork *itself *eats up ages of time to complete. All these difficult to use, cantakerous electronic forms, hosted by buggy software on a remote server that sometimes goes down. All these rules that are too rigid and just don’t apply to the thing I am trying to do. All these requirements to interrupt someone else’s workday to get them to inspect the document and approve it. Like 5 different people.
I kind of suspect that government aerospace is like this but 1000 times worse. Where the *process * overhead eats up most of the engineering labor and talent.
That is to say, I don’t mean the necessary and good checks that need to be done. The technicians visually inspecting each component, the engineers rechecking each figure, stress testing for each extreme parameter, testing to failure.
I mean all the time wasted because some form requires the same information another form already has, some electronic tool that wastes more time than filling out paper would, needing an authorization and the only manager who can give it is on leave, working on a component that has been pigeonholed into some category and there is a test you are supposed to perform that you can’t.
Anyways, this would probably be why the USA can’t get a working and safe lunar lander ready to fly in 5 years, even if the money spiggot to fund something of this scale was turned on.
Well, when you look at what SpaceX is doing with landing their first stage boosters on a sea barge, it would seem that they already have the hardest part done. Were we able to transport one of these to lunar orbit, it would seem quite easy to have it land on the Moon, as compared to a barge at sea.
Take that technology, and build a useful lander around it, rather than just a booster, and you’d be pretty close to finished.
We are talking about a manned vehicle capable of enduring the space environment several days during lunar transit, then supporting humans on the lunar surface for several days. The requirements are totally different from an unmanned lander. The SpaceX booster is a cryogenic stage using turbopumps. It is not designed to stay in space several days while traveling to the moon. It does not have the thermal control, consumables, redundant systems, long-duration electrical power, RCS sophistication or reliability needed for landing humans on the moon.
The original Constellation “Altair” lander planned on using a turbopump-fed cryogenic descent stage, but the ascent stage was pressure-fed hypergolics just like the Apollo LM. I suppose they reasoned if something went wrong they could jettison the descent stage and abort on the ascent stage: Altair (spacecraft) - Wikipedia
Even though performance and mass ratio is better for turbopump-driven cryogenics, the idea of trusting human lives to that complexity 240,000 miles away is daunting. This wasn’t even planned for the propulsive landing on earth of the Dragon capsule. That used redundant pressure-fed hypergolic engines. The current plan is Dragon won’t use propulsive landing on earth but obviously a manned lunar vehicle would.
Just for consumables and thermal control, these documents show how specialized a man-rated lunar lander would be. This was for Altair but any new manned lander would face the same issues.
Again, the “build a useful lander around it” is actually the difficult part particularly if you want to accomplish anything more than the Apollo “flags and footprints” mission, notwithstanding that storing liquid oxygen and keeping RP-1 from gelling in fuel lines or cloging an injector after spending days on route to the Moon and a couple of weeks or more on the surface, hence why the Apollo LM used Aerozine 50/NiTet hypergolic propellants that were sealed in state.
There is the mistaken notion that SpaceX did something revolutionary in the controlled landing of a rocket on pad, but it had been done before (albeit not upon a barge or as a returing stage at suborbital trajectories). And the idea that SpaceX accomplishes stated goals within tight timelines is given lie by the fact that they have missed nearly every single stated scheduled operational target, often by years. The Falcon Heavy, which was supposed to be flying by 2012, is still preparing for its second launch now, which has been delayed for over a year. SpaceX has done some remarkable things and in their singular focus upon space launch has been able to achieve technical goals that people working in the space launch field have known were possible but for which there was little political or corporate will to work toward, but it isn’t a magical unicorn that makes unrealistic goals happen just because Elon Musk wills it so.
All true. However, SpaceX does have an appropriate rocket engine for the task. The Crew Dragon’s abort and orbital maneuvering engines do use hypergolic propellants, are intended for extended durations in orbit, and SpaceX already has the necessary control systems and software to make a soft landing.
Also, they have one other large advantage over Apollo : prototype landers can readily be tested on the real Moon, over dozens of flights if necessary, without crew.
In principle, “all” that is needed is a lower lander stage, landing gear, and obviously some scheme for the propellant tanks. (where do you put the extra tankage needed for takeoff from the lunar surface? Do you design a new ascent stage from scratch or try to use the existing engines on the Crew Dragon in their existing mounts?)
Actually, another bigger problem is the rocket to get there. The Falcon Heavy has the RP-1 problem you mention : the return to Earth orbital transfer burn is something SpaceX doesn’t have a vehicle for. You could do the Lunar transfer burn with the remaining fuel in the upper stage of a Falcon heavy, the landing with a new lower stage for a Dragon Spacecraft, externally mounted tankage on the Dragon for the return to Lunar orbit, but there’s no way home. You need a vehicle to dock with able to supply the dV for the return trip and also the lunar orbit deceleration burn.
Obviously, the liquid methane fueled “starship” could be used as such an orbital transfer vehicle, if that thing ever flies.
