Um, no. I’ve seen both our preliminary proposal and our competitor’s proposal for CEV. Neither version is designed for anything but Earth orbit and cislunar transfer. A vehicle capable of transit to the L4 or L5 points (the stable libration points) is going to require significantly more propellant than the CEV/booster has available. CEV is conceptually nothing more than Apollo Plus, albeit with a different booster system. Nor is it suited for interplanetary transit. In fact, the mission profile specification limits it to about the same mission duration as the ED capabilty on the STS.
You wouldn’t want to place a space observatory at a libration point for any number of reasons. First of all, they’re hard to reach; you have to accelerate to get away from the Earth, then you have to decelerate to stop at the L-point. Second, Lagrange points are a natural locus of accumulation for dust; it’s actually just about the worst place you could put a telescope. Furthermore, except for the L-4 and L-5 points, the other points are only quasistable and readily perturbed. A nice stable circular or long-arc elliptical orbit is much more predictable. It takes relatively little energy to reorient the telescope, even continuously.
First of all, $98B (or $104) isn’t for “the Moon and Mars”. That’s just the cost of a Moon landing. If that’s the ticket for the Moon, you can imagine what Mars will cost. The quoted figure is absurd, by about an order of magnitude, given the technology used. Second, the CEV (which is the crew vehicle, not the booster system) is sufficient only for a relatively short-term Moon mission. According to this article, the intent is to size the CEV for a six-man Mars mission…which is patently absurd. It’s an attempt, like the Shuttle, to design too many capabilities into one vehicle, rather than develop individual designs that build upon each other. A six man crew in an Apollo Plus sized capsule makes about as much sense as holding the Democratic National Convention in the cafeteria of your local grade school.
The concept–using mature technology as an interim solution to maintaining a manned space program–is fine. But it is already being sold as the end solution for manned space transportation for the foreseeable future, up to and including an estimated 2035 mission to Mars. In other words, the intent is that we are going to be using this CEV, or something very like it, for the next 30 years. This is the same sort of thinking that has left us locked into the STS despite its manifest problems. This isn’t a long-term development program; it’s a quick and dirty Band-Aid solution that is going to plague the space program for years to come, and at a cost that is absurdly overestimated, given that it merely adapts largely mature technology rather than developing any new propulsion or launch systems.
This is another half-baked, politically-controlled, short-sighted program by a government agency that is more interested in maintaining itself than pressing forward, and if history is any guide, $100B will increase to $125B, and $150B, and it’ll be a surprise if the end result comes in below twice the initial price tag. Meanwhile, NASA continues to guy unmanned exploration and research programs of high merit, and people at JPL are running around trying to save what they can of half-completed projects that are on the cutting block.
If I’m reading correctly, the author feels that the operational costs of the new program will be on par, or perhaps greater, than the shuttle. This seems about right to me. On that basis, the $108b figure looks awfully misleading, since this is just the development, and not per-flight cost of the system. Thoughts?
Other thoughts (for Sam or whomever):
I was a bit taken aback – and perhaps I’m misreading the source material – to see that the main booster for the new heavy lifter will be solid propellant. This seems like a radical approach. and certainly a departure from Apollo, to build a 36-story disposable solid-fuel booster (!). Am I missing something?
It’s also a somewhat radical departure for the program to use Earth Orbit Rendezvous vs. apollo’s Lunar Orbit Rendezvous flight plan. I think this is a good idea, it places a much larger spacecraft in lunar orbit, as well as allowing for far larger payloads in general for non-lunar destinations. But it is something that has not been done before on this scale.
The first stage of the CEV booster is in concept essentially the STS Solid Rocket Booster. This is a booster that has seen 176 launches (since the critical field joint redesign) without a critical failure, which makes it, to date, the most successful man-rated booster in existance. The limitations of the SRB–the lower specific impulse in comparison to a liquid fueled booster, the problematic field joints, the high acceleration, and lack of shutdown/abort capability–are offeset by the simplicity, cheap cost, and maintainability of a solid fueled booster. While they liquid hydrogen-based boosters that are traditionally favored by NASA offer a greater specific impulse than solid fuels, they require cryogenic conditions and the greater complexity (turbopumps, cooling systems, rapid fueling and defueling ground support); whereas solid boosters, once cast, can survive decades without refurbishment, if Minuteman and Peacekeeper can be taken as examples. On both a cost and reliabilty basis a solid fueled booster as at least one of the stages is quite defensible, espeically one as proven as the ATK SRB. (I still have some questions about the field joint design–while the redesign reinforced the joint, I don’t think it has entirely eliminated the underlying problem–the fact is that it is a proven, mature booster with a high success rate.)
The overlying mission objectives are more questionable, however. Will this suit long term goals for transplanetary space exploration? CEV is a first step–not a permanent, final stage–for extensive exploratory programs.
That is mighty expensive inspiration by anone’s standards: who are these hoopleheads who will be inspired not by evidence of simple extraterrestrial life or stunning photos of star formation regions, but of moving a sack of cells a long way without undergoing necrosis? I’d suggest that manned spaceflight actually runs counter to the pioneering spirit: it is doing what’s been done before instead of real progress. Yes, there may be some scientific benefits, but when compared to those from terrestrial or unmanned projects it is clear to the scientist where the money should be spent.
And I’m afraid I have never really understood this talk of humanity escaping the planet: it will be someone else living somewhere else, indeed in a bland artificial cocoon sealed against a vacuous or toxic environment. So frigging what?
I would much prefer, in my lifetime, an explanation for my existence on this planet, whose most inhospitable regions are still a veritable paradise compared to anything we could ashion elsewhere. And if you want a cost-benefit analysis, there’s always that of not turning it into fucking Venus.
Stranger On A Train, I see that I misread the NASA material: the solid fuel booster is used for the first stage of the crew vehicle, and as boosters for the cargo vehicle. My impression had been that the main stage of the cargo vehicle was also a solid-fuel rocket, which seemed like a baffling decision.
In my defense, the NASA site seems intentionally gee-whiz on the whole mission concept, and you have to wade through pages of grade-school text and flash presentations to discover basic facts about the proposed systems.
We’re including the Challenger kabloowey in this rating, correct? I didn’t think that we’d had 176 launches since then, but I admit I’m not tracking it closely. Does a single shuttle launch count as two booster launches?
I’ll assume you misspoke here – those traits are a problem?
Agreed. My other question might be if the Cargo vehicle (the acronym has slipped my mind) really has suitable capability for a Mars mission. The NASA site claims it does, but there doesn’t seem to be any specs available on lifting capacity. Maybe they’re buried in there, but I’m getting a bit tired of Flash presentations and PDFs of ancient missions.
Maybe it’s changed since I read it, but the CEV proposals I looked all had a modular approach to building a spacecraft. If you need to go to the moon, you add a lunar injection stage to the rocket stack, etc. The early proposals showed potential stages for missions beyond the moon, including large habitation areas, fuel storage, etc.
Current CEV proposals may not include detailed designs for pieces of the puzzle that will take us past the moon, but my understanding is that the architecture is designed to facilitate this. Is that not correct?
How do large arrays fit into that equation. If you want to fly 20 telescopes in an array, and have them maintain precise positioning with each other, wouldn’t you want to use a Lagrange point?
No, the $104 billion includes the design and construction of the heavy lifter, the CEV, and the new LEM. Correct? That’s not just a ‘moon launch’. That money also gets you a new LEO craft for getting to ISS, a new lifeboat for ISS that’s large enough that you can actually put more than 3 people on it so you can get some research done, and a heavy lifter that can be used to fly up pieces of a Mars mission or anything else we need to put into space. So we’re not exactly starting from scratch when we decide to go for Mars. All the same pieces are in use. Now we need to add fuel for interplanetary flight, more habitation, a Mars lander, and all the food and equipment for the trip. But now we have our heavy lifter, so we fly the stuff up and assemble in orbit. The $104 billion is not being spent on a one-shot ‘flags and footprints’ mission to the moon like Apollo basically was - it’s just the first stage in a larger, more robust space program.
Unless you add something like a Trans-hab to the stack. Then you’ve got living space.
Not a false analogy, just incomplete. I should have added that the person in the valley has pictures of the outer world, but doesn’t know the many things he could only learn by going there.
Posted by me, quoted by UncleBeer:
Posted by UncleBeer:
No, you don’t, and neither does NASA. The Moon has about a quarter as much land surface as Earth. A small fraction of that has been explored on foot or photographed at ground level; nobody knows what we might find out with a thorough, long-term exploration.
More complete perhaps, but still false. We have more than photos; we have actual physical samples of the moon here on this planet.; we have also remotely sampled the sufrace of Mars with two successful landings there. Both of these is things, separately or together, provide far more information than mere photos. You analogy is also false because we have means, other than human, available to us to physically sample the “other side of the hill.” Additionally, there are instruments currently being operated which can investigate certain characteristics of space, and the bodies in space, of which no human is capable.
I’m not calling for the abolition of NASA; just this pointless, redundant and far-too-expensive return to the moon.
Not in excruciating detail, no. But exhaustive analysis of the 840 pounds of samples we have here, we know that the make-up of the moon isn’t significantly different that earth. And again, there are ways of analyzing the composition of the moon without actually landing a body there.
The stable points are bad, because they accumulate dust. The unstable points are good, because they do not accumulate dust. This is why, as Loopydude points out, the Webb is being put in one of the unstable points (and also why WMAP is already there). They also offer other advantages: Solar observatories can be placed such that they always have a view of the Sun unblocked by the Earth, and anything else can be placed such that the Earth always blocks the Sun. Because of the instability, one does need station-keeping thrusters at these points, which have a limited amount of propellent and therefore put a limit on how long the mission can last. But by careful telemetry, you can make that propellent last a very long time, and any mission will have only a finite lifetime anyway.
There have been 88 STS missions, with two SRBs each, for a total of 176 booster launches since the redesign of the field joint following the loss of Challenger.
The problem I have with the field joints, even after the redesign, is that while the joint is now reinforced to maintain positive closure and inverted to prevent liquid contaminant buildup, it is still a compromised design that if out of tolerance (as it will become through repeated reuse) can allow the same burn-through problems as the original design. The field joint inspection and repair is one of the most maintainence intensive features of the SRB and the booster temperature still has to be monitored to ensure that it doesn’t fall below the approved temperature for operation. On the other hand, there hasn’t been a critical launch problem with the joint in those 176 launches, so whatever faults it may have are likely well understood and mitigatable, so it qualifies as a mature technology that won’t require major development.
Conceptually, yes. But there is no provision in that $100B+ budget for such development. Recall, too, that the semi-reusable stage-and-a-half Shuttle Orbiter and the SRBs were originally intended to be the first phase of a total STS program that would result in a true reusable two-stage Orbiter (with twice the payload of the Shuttle) and a liquid-fueled fly-back booster that could be turned around for reuse in a matter of hours. Instead, we got stuck with the highly compromised Phase 1 system, which was further compromised by Air Force requirements (polar orbit launch from Vandenberg with a 1250km cross-range for single orbit mission and rapid turnaround, payload bay size) which have never been used. Lesson to be learned? If you don’t “hardwire” your key system requirements upfront, they’re going to be the first thing jettisoned when Congress starts cutting funding or your program goes overbudget.
In any case, a CEV capable of orbital servicing or cislunar missions isn’t going to be the same craft suited for interplanetary flight, and vice versa. This all-in-one approach is how we ended up with the Shuttle, which does a lot different missions poorly.
In other words, it gives us exactly what we had in 1975, when we terminated Apollo and cancelled Saturn V production. (Actually, we cancelled production in 1972.) The $98B (or $104B) just brings us back up to the standard of Apollo at roughly 250% of the cost, before inevitable overruns. And all of this is, apparently, to beat the Chinese to the Moon.
As far as I’ve seen the only provisions for a Mars transit are vague references to modularity and undeveloped requirements for a six person crew complement. Neither of the proposals includes a single detailed study of any aspect of a full-up long duration mission. A Mars mission will require:[ul]
[li]A much larger habitable module,[/li][li]A propulsion system capable of high specific impulse, constant operation to get there and slow down without exaggerated low energy orbits which subject the crew to the threat of radiation and space hazards for an unacceptible period of time,[/li][li]Quadruple or quintuple redundant systems, or systems whose reliability and duration are much greater (and correspondingly more expensive) than a cislunar module,[/li][li]Radiation shielding and mitigation,[/li][li]Provisions for extensive medical facilities,[/li][li]Some kind of simulated gravity for the health of the crew on a 18+ month mission,[/li][li]A Mars Excursion Module (MEM) that is capable of landing in an atmosphere and much heavier gravity than the LEM.[/li][/ul]As an example of how ill-suited the CEV is for a long duration mission, right now it is proposed to use lithium hydroxide filters to scrub CO[sub]2[/sub] from habitat air. This worked fine on Apollo–though it takes up a lot of space–and we’ve resorted to using it on the Shuttle because of the risk, weight, and energy requirements of the replunishable Extended Duration scrubbers that were installed on Discovery. So we don’t even have that problem solved, nor will the CEV design address that issue.
I see no evidence that NASA is “more robust”, and the only expansiveness I see in this program is in its budget, not its reach. $100B to get back to the point we were at 30 years ago (over 40 by the time the system is scheduled to begin operation) is absurd.
Well, it’s a Solar-Earth Lagrange point, presumably to get it as far away from the Earth and Sun as possible while keeping it in a free-fall orbit that doesn’t epicycle with the Earth. (A normal circular orbit at that distance would have the Earth pacing the telescope, rendering it out of contact for significant portions of each year.) And being of of the quasistable points (L-2), it doesn’t tend to accumulate dust like the L-4 and L-5 equilateral points do. This transient stability also means that you have to perform constant stationkeeping lest you be cast out the libration point and into a highly elliptical orbit about one of the primary bodies. So you have to bring along additional propellant, and since we’re not going to be able to service the thing it’ll have a limited lifespan. If something similar to the infamous Hubble mirror error occurs, we’ve just acquired a very expensive bauble at the solar L-2 point. (I’m sure the relevent parties are double- and triple-checking everything and probably waking up in fever sweats in hopes that this doesn’t happen.)
But there’s really no reason to place anything smaller than a multi-kilometer-sized habitat at the Lagrange points unless you have some reason for collecting dust. (And in fact, that may turn out to be a valuable activity.) They’re expensive to reach, they collect all the garbage you normally try to avoid, they’re too far from the Earth’s magnetosphere to receive protection from charged solar radiation, and they aren’t any more stable than any other orbit. The only thing that is particularly neat about them is that you maintain a stable orientation with respect to the two driving bodies, which isn’t of any particular advantage for an orbital telescope, save for the above musings.
I’d like to support a stronger, more expansive space program…and I think that $100B would be a cheap ticket to an almost unlimited amount of resources that await just outside our grasp. But CEV is a brass cannon that we continue to polish because it pays the bills and keeps the aerospace industry occupied while we’re not building new bombers and missiles. It is not well thought out or controlled by technical decisions; it is yet another political porkbelly, a sop to keep “The Team” from being benched or replaced. And at a cost that makes Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, or even the bloated STS look like milk money.
Either photography from a hundred miles up and a few scattered ground visits counts as “fully explored” (in which case the former “valley” took a few months, not “several lifetimes” to fully explore), or it doesn’t (in which case only the former might be “fully explored”, and the latter most certainly is not).
Actually, upon reading both your response, and the response from Chronos, the problem is in my not distinguising between the L2 and the more stable L4 and L5 points. It should have been clear to me that, L2 being only quasi-stable, it wouldn’t accumulate dust like the L4 and L5 points would. I honestly didn’t know that before reading this thread, so it’s entirely my bad.
Why is accumulating dust a problem at Lagrange zones for spacecraft located there? I’d think the dust would have an insigificent velocity, so impact damage isn’t a big worry…?
Are there observable debris accumulated at any of the Lagrange zones?
The reflectors and detectors on modern telescopes are equisitely fine and astonishingly sensitive. Dust, any dust, must certainly be major bad news for a variety of reasons, including pitting, sullying, and obstructing.
We’ve spent less than a man-month exploring small areas in relatively smooth sections of the Moon’s equator facing the Earth, using technology from several decades ago. Tell me; how much ice water in the polar craters? How much He3 is on the surface? How much mineable platinum group metals can we find in the bottom of some of the craters?
Nobody knows, and nobody’s going to know until we do thorough exploration.
It is an idea who’s time has come. We did it before, but just barely (but then again we rocked at doing it bearly), but now is the time to colonize the moon and to move on to mars.
