What use is space?

Great Debates
61

And yet you have presented no evidence to back up this claim. Although I haven’t found a formal report on ISRU progress since 2012, here is a presentation to the AIAA SciTech Forum in January of this year. As you can see on page 6, TRL levels on some components is 4-6 but, and I quote, “However, significant work is needed to mature these technologies.” Slide 12 shows the nominal development schedule, which plans for beginning system testing in FY2021 with a planned ISRU demonstration mission sometime after FY2028. Note also that “Soil water-based ISRU (top track) likely to require more time to develop to TRL 5/6 than Mars atmosphere-based ISRU (bottom track),” indicating that the uncertainties and efforts in resource extraction from regolith is more complicated (which is understandable).

On the Moon, of course, there is no atmosphere to extract resources from, and what we know of the lunar regolith is that it is an often challenging material do deal with; if you search on the NASA Technical Reports Server for “lunar dust problems” you’ll find dozens of papers on the impacts and challenges on mechanisms, thermal management, instrumentation, and astronaut health. The best terrestrial analogue to lunar dust is pyroclast (fine volcanic ash) emitted from a violent eruption, and any geologist or someone who has lived through a volcanic event can tell you how difficult that material can be to deal with and how it damages equipment sticks to everything like cement even without the undispersed electrostatic charge that the regolith surface picks up from solar charged particle impingment.

It is far from “pretty obvious that we have the tech to do it,”; in fact, it is “pretty obvious” that we are more than a decade from demonstrating feasibility of practical extraction even if you believe the most optimistic projections.

Again, a challenge identified as being an “engineering problem” doesn’t use mean that physical laws don’t prohibit it. The practice of engineering is taking already demonstrated principles and applying them to a problem without doing significant technology development or innovation. Building a bridge, or refining existing photolithographic processes to create smaller integrated semiconductors, or building a new class of airliner is an “engineering problem”; developing new techniques, materials, and processes for extracting resources in a novel environment requires innovations that are beyond the current state of the art. Diminishing this to “just an engineering problem” is like saying saying that becoming fluent in a foreign language is “just a vocabulary problem”. Yes, you have to learn new words, but they don’t just map one to one to your native language; to be fluent you also have to construct an understanding of the cultural and social nuances, and then build up the ability to think in that language in order to develop fluency.

We are not going to take off the shelf components and existing processes to make propellants from raw elements extracted from regolith-laden ice. We don’t even do that here on our native planet; we distill petroleum to produce high grade hydrocarbon fuels, produce hydrogen by reforming natural gas, and condense oxygen from our thick atmosphere where it comprises 21% of the molar content of air. This is so trivial for us to do terrestrially that it is difficult to imagine the effort and complexity of having to extract it from Lunar or Martian sources in “soup to nuts” fashion, but developing the technology to meet this challenge is yet far from being “just engineering”.

Stranger

62

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
And yet you have presented no evidence to back up this claim. Although I haven’t found a formal report on ISRU progress since 2012, here is a presentation to the AIAA SciTech Forum in January of this year. As you can see on page 6, TRL levels on some components is 4-6 but, and I quote, “However, significant work is needed to mature these technologies.” Slide 12 shows the nominal development schedule, which plans for beginning system testing in FY2021 with a planned ISRU demonstration mission sometime after FY2028. Note also that “Soil water-based ISRU (top track) likely to require more time to develop to TRL 5/6 than Mars atmosphere-based ISRU (bottom track),” indicating that the uncertainties and efforts in resource extraction from regolith is more complicated (which is understandable).
[/QUOTE]

Neither have you, however. None of this is proof that if NASA sent this out for RFP that they would get no responses and there would be no winner of the contract, which is the bar you set for ‘feasible’.

I disagree…again. This is nothing near as complex or difficult as, say, creating a new stealth fighter. The reason we haven’t progressed in this or solved some of the challenges you present is that we haven’t focused on it wrt either a mandate or funding. While I’m not trying to say it would be easy (nor did I ever say it would be off the shelf tech), I think it’s completely within our abilities, today, to do this…if we chose to do so. We have and continue to choose not to focus on this sort of stuff, and from NASA’s perspective it makes perfect sense…they don’t have a mandate to send people to the Moon or even Mars, don’t have a mandate to do so in such a way as to actually use in situ refueling, and don’t have the funding to waste on doing more than the groundwork for testing or proof of concept. This, however, doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it if they did have a mandate and the funding to do so.

This isn’t like nuclear fusion. You couldn’t send that out for an RFP and get valid responses because we haven’t gotten far enough into even entertain such a thing at this point. But there is nothing about this tech or the mission that is beyond the scope of our tech today…we simply don’t have the focus to spend the money it would take to do it.

No, because no one has had the mandate to make anything like this yet…so there is no shelf of components to do it, aside from those built specifically to test the principals in a lab as a proof of concept. But the components don’t have to be on a shelf to make the project feasible…they simply have to be within our capabilities to engineer, test and deploy.

I’m asking you in all seriousness…if NASA put out an RFP to the various large aerospace companies for this project as defined in either of the papers linked so far (or the myriad others on this subject), do you seriously think that they would get no response or that all the responses would be tossed out because they failed to meet the RFP? If you can seriously tell me you believe this then we are at an impasse, and one I don’t see how it could be resolved short of it actually happening.

63

I am happy to change terminology, I just have not come up with a better term than “engineering problem” complete with the scare quotes. I see it as problem that you give to your engineers, not to your physicists, not to your material scientists, not even to chemical scientists. There is no new fundamental knowledge that needs to be learned before we can accomplish these tasks.

R&D problem maybe?

I have no reason to think that we would be using off the shelf components, or that it would be easy. I just do not see any reason why these things cannot be accomplished should we choose to do them. They will take resources and time and brainpower to fix out all the kinks, but the only reason that we will not do it is because we choose not to do it.

And that is the concern that I have, is that we will not choose to expand into space, because it’s not easy, because there are problems and challenges that come up that we choose not to confront, not because it is impossible.

64

Oh, so I haven’t proved hypothetical negative, therefore I must be wrong? You are flailing to justify an unsupported claim.

If NASA issued an RFP for companies to produce an in ISRU solution for extracting and producing propellants from the lunar regolith within a typical contract time frame–say, five years–to a TRL of 6-7, then no, there would be no credible responses based upon adaptation of currently available components and existing methods. It is very clear from the 2017 presentation I provided in the previous post that even as of this year NASA views the development and technical maturity of ISRU suitable for practical demonstration to be a long term effort more than a decade out at best. Just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean some provisional team of engineers can make it happen in some arbitrarily short timeframe any more than Elon Musk can actually build an Iron Man-type suit or we can construct a space elevator from the surface of the Moon using existing systems and materials. That is the reality of our state of technology, and wishing the limitations away does not make them disappear.

This is not true. In fact, while there are certainly engineers working on the ISRU program effort, there are also physicists, material scientists, and chemists, as well as supporting efforts to better understand and characterize the nature and behavior of Lunar and Martian regolith which is very different from terrestrial soils.
Stranger

65

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Oh, so I haven’t proved hypothetical negative, therefore I must be wrong? You are flailing to justify an unsupported claim.
[/QUOTE]

And, amusingly, I feel the same way. It’s hard for me to ‘prove’ we COULD do it when we haven’t budgeted for it and have no real pressing need for it either. It’s a back burner project that’s been kicking around for well over a decade since they initially were doing a basic proof of concept work on it. It gets dusted off every once in a while, but NASA isn’t exactly putting the best or brightest on it…nor have they actually asked, in the form of an RFP, for the main players to build anything. You read the same stuff I did on this, and you arrived at a different conclusion. You are, as always in these kinds of threads, unwilling or unable to extrapolate where we are and WHY we are where we are with where we could be, given adequate funding. Yes, NASA says (vaguely) that it would take 10 years to develop this concept…but that’s 10 years at current funding and the current pace, and also mainly in house. Just looking at where we were in 2007, 2012 and today you can see exactly why they feel that way…and, from the perspective of reality (i.e. the reality that NASA isn’t going to get a big boost in funding, isn’t going to get a funded mandate for repetitive manned missions that would necessitate something like this, etc etc) they are correct…hell, they are probably being optimistic.

But we aren’t going to agree on this, so there doesn’t seem much point in continuing to beat this dead horse. You’ve backed up RickJay’s originally assertion, and while you don’t see my point I acknowledge yours is valid, even if I don’t agree, so I’ll leave it there.

66

This is an asinine statement. I am not “unwilling or unable to extrapolate”, but your claim that “it’s completely within our abilities, today, to do this…if we chose to do so,” is simply not based on any evidence or apparent knowledge of the effort required to develop this technology. I’ve worked on technology development efforts, and it is never just an issue that if we had ten times the funding we could do the work in 10% of the time, and I’ll also note that schedules for technology development are inevitably optimistic as they cannot account for unknown roadblocks that require more development effort to overcome, or can even require a different route than originally planned. The idea that we understand the basic physical principles of electrolysis of liquid water into its constituent elements, and therefore the problem is essentially solved is like saying, “I can boil water, therefore I can make a great lasagna,” with no notion of any of the couple of dozen of other steps you have to master.

Stranger

67

But did you check the teeth on that dead horse while you beat it in mid-stream to verify it was a good deal to accept as a gift?

I could parse this and respond, but it would be as pointless as your response here. I disagree with your assessment. I disagree based on reviewing the same elements you have. I don’t believe that it’s overly optimistic to say building this technology is do-able today, nor do I think that it’s equivalent to saying "I can boil water, therefore I can make great lasagna’…this would be more like "I can make sauce, I can make noodles, I know how to bake stuff, I can cook sausage and I’ve experimented with ricotta though only in tests. I’ve never put them all together because I can’t afford them all and just haven’t wanted lasagna before this…but I think I can put these ingredients together to make something edible. If I had the funds I could try and put them together and see how it turns out, and perhaps refine my recipe, changing the temperature or maybe adding some additional ingredients necessary to make it really good.’ It’s not like we have never been to the Moon, never sent autonomous robots to the Moon, don’t know what elements are on the Moon, don’t have a rough idea of what the environment will be like or the composition of the soil we’d be trying to extract in situ fuel from. Frankly, it’s just engineering, which really means it’s just money, time, effort and testing. It’s sort of like the castle in the swamp in Monty Python…to paraphrase, while the first one sank into the swamp and the second one burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp the third one stood!

We basically won’t be able to resolve this disagreement, since no one is going to fund building something like this full scale and deployed…which is the only metric you would accept that it works. Instead, NASA will screw around with the concept in small steps, refining and reviewing and rewriting papers about it until we actually decide to build one because we have a funded mandate to do more serious manned exploration that necessitates its use. Stop beating the dead horse…frankly, no one here is going to accept my narrative over yours on anything concerning this subject (or probably any subject), so you don’t have to keep fighting the hypothetical here.

68

I’m reminded of the short story “Columbus Was a Dope”. It revolves around a debate by some bar patrons over whether interstellar exploration is worth it. The kicker at the end is the bar in question is on the Moon.

The knot of the problem is that if no one has ever gone into space, by definition we’re getting by without it. And if we’re getting by without it, what’s to go for? This is probably explained by the exponential curve of anything new: for a long time growth in a new field is painfully slow, before enough feedback kicks in for increased expansion to finally be worth it.

Before you can do anything in space, you’ve got to get there; and getting there has until very recently been a very expensive proposition, mostly piggybacked on rocket technology originally developed for military missiles. For decades, almost all US activity in space was carried out by the military, NASA and the defense contractors that built the rockets- a military-industrial complex that kept space expensive and limited, but crowded out private development. What finally changed was the end/failure of the Shuttle program and the commercialization of Russian launch capacity, which finally forced something like an open market onto the space field.