The 'vision thing' and Nasa's new path
It's that "vision thing", or the "grand picture". We like the big ideas to be simple, easy-to-understand concepts.
George W Bush's call to "go back to the Moon" was straightforward enough. The trouble was, Nasa found it very difficult to implement - and very expensive.
Some $9bn has already been spent on the Constellation programme and the first mission is still years away.
And so on Monday, the current president, Barack Obama, substituted a new vision.
He's killed Constellation with its two Ares rockets and Orion capsule, and replaced it with a whole new way of doing space [PDF 1Mb].
In future, Nasa will no longer lead the design and development of space vehicles. It will instead leave this to the private sector and become a customer for transport services.
The market will need to be stimulated, of course. So Nasa has been given a budget to run competitions. Winning companies will be offered fixed-price contracts, with rewards triggered only when they deliver on promises.
The hope is that Nasa - and by extension the US taxpayer - will get access to a broader range of space vehicles, faster and at a fraction of the cost.
The immediate reaction might be to gulp, but there is actually something inevitable about all of this.
Today, when we board a plane, we don't fly "Government Air"; we fly American Airlines or British Airways. We fly with commercial operators.
We take for granted the excellent safety records of the carriers and concern ourselves only with issues of price and quality of service.
This is the future of space transportation that Barack Obama and new Nasa chief Charlie Bolden want us all to embrace.
Already, there is a queue of entrepreneurs waiting to seize this opportunity. Next month we will probably see the maiden flight of Falcon 9, a private rocket developed by the PayPal founder Elon Musk.
The rocket and its Dragon capsule are intended in the first instance to carry just cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). But Musk has designed his vehicles in such a way that they could carry people, also.
He claims his astronaut carrier would be ready for service just two-and-a-half years from first contract, with a seat price of $20m. To put that in perspective, the Russians are currently charging $50m per seat for a Soyuz ride to the ISS, and that's a fraction of the price of the outgoing space shuttle.
As Peter Diamandis, the chairman and CEO of the X-Prize Foundation, observed on Monday:
"It's been the pattern of what the US capitalist system does well - the government starts something and industry takes it over and injects innovation, brings down the cost and increases reliability.
"We've seen this in every industry that's been transferred from government to the private sector. And, frankly, space needs it more than anybody else, otherwise we are going to lose the race. There's no question - China, India and other parts of the world will eat our lunch in space on a price-performance basis."
With the budget request on Monday came an announcement from Nasa that it will be giving an immediate $50m in seed money to the winners of its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) competition.
This is a precursor to what will eventually be a $6bn commercial crew programme.
The largest award in going to Sierra Nevada Corporation which is working on a six-seat vehicle called Dream Chaser that would launch atop an Atlas rocket.
As you might expect from the themes most frequently pursued in this blog, I'm intrigued now by what impact this development is going to have in Europe.
How will it change - how should it change - the business of governmental space on this side of the Atlantic?
Europe has talked for years about having its own crew carrier capability but it's always been deemed to be too expensive.
Is there a mechanism here that would make an independent European space transportation system finally realisable and affordable?
You can be sure journalists will be asking that question of European Space Agency and member-state officials.
The next few months will be fascinating, to see how all of this develops.
It's clear already that elements in Congress will try to restore Constellation. Senators and representatives from states that have Nasa centres where Constellation plays big will need a lot of convincing that "new space" offers the same job security for their constituents as "old space".
Like many, they will have winced at the revelation that just to close Constellation down will cost the government an additional $2.5bn.
And coming back to that vision thing, I think we're all looking for a bit more detail on some of the long-term issues - how humans will once again go beyond the confines of Earth orbit.
That really does need a big rocket or some "game changing" approach. At the moment, the talk is merely about an aggressive R&D programme on heavy-lift technologies.
I did manage to get a question to Lori Garver, the second in command at Nasa. I asked her if she thought she'd ever see a human walk on the surface of the Moon again in her lifetime. She believes "new space" could see many people manage it:
"I absolutely believe that; I believe I could still do it myself as a matter of fact. What this does is open up more people to be going more places. We're going to be investing in those technologies that allow that to happen in the future for many more people, and to do a lot of different things [like] going to the asteroids and to Mars."
I’m 
© 2012~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~45~RS~)
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I can see the logic in this but I'm not so sure we'll see the technological innovation that came with the Gemini and Apollo programs. It certainly doesn't seem to fire the imagination like the moonshot did. If NASA does come up with new technologies, how will that be passed on to those in the commercial sector? And how many years has the US now lost to others?
Europe seems to lack the will or budget or cooperation for a major investment in manned spaceflight - maybe though, we will see something happening if this new economic model rubs off in Europe as well.
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There is certainly no shortage of ideas or enthusiasm out there but the question is will there be the cash to see them to fruition? The sad fact about space projects is that they almost invariably come in over budget and behind schedule. And if the private sector fails to make the grade then what? Could America be without any indigenous manned space capability within a few years?
Sadly a lot of chickens have come home to roost for NASA, as well as the agency's chronic underfunding since the early 1970's, the habit for America of developing an all new launch system for each project which needs an entire new support infrastructure to be built is prohibitively expensive. The Russians have only ever used one basic rocket for manned flights, in the same time America has developed 6 and was planning 2 more! That sort of extravagance was possible in the 1960's but not now!
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..and the winner is ... China!
followed by Russia whose Soyuz will be the only way of getting astronauts to the ISS after 2010.
As JPSLotus stated, this Soyuz design is basically the same one that lifted Gagarin off the pad !
The US had a fantastic man-rated heavy lift rocket...it was called the Saturn 5.
As Neil would say "A giant leap backwards for man..."
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As 3 said!
Would be interesting to hear what the guys who went to the moon think of this idea!
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As a person that was born before Sputnik, I have been fortunate enough to be alive during a fantastic period of emerging space technologies. I am also saddened by NASA's inability to conntrol its finances and its lack of forsight in programme continuation as stated in previous posts.
I was amazed in the 1970's when the United States had a perfectly servicable system for manned moon exploration and cancelled it after only a small number of missions.
I also believe that NASA has lost its courage and is unwilling to take the calculated risks that lead to real progress.
Having said all of that, there is hope in this new appoach, If we look forward to the SpaceX Dragon 9 launch (hopefully in March or April) we will see the start of a true commercial space transportation system (and good luck to them). Others I am sure will follow.
So lets not look back at what might have been but forward at what could be. We are still at the threshold of great things and perhaps with more international collaboration (its a shame that the Chinese have developed an in flight docking system that is not compatable with the current Soviet / US system), we will see developments just as memorable over the next 50 years as we have over the past half a millenium!
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#3 Yes, in hindsight what America should have done in the early 70's was to carry on with the Apollo Applications Programme, keep developing and evolving Apollo through the proposed Block III and Block IV upgrades, just as Soyuz has been developed through the T, TM and TMA series. The Skylab project could have continued by using the "wet-eff" model that could be launched by the cheaper Saturn IB rocket until a new heavy launcher, perhaps similar to Proton could have been developed. This would have allowed America to build up the experience of long duration spaceflight that the Russians obtained with Salyut and Mir.
But political machinations ensured that NASA went with the Shuttle, which was nothing like the vehicle they originally proposed, mainly due to the need to service the Pentagon's spy satellites. How costly those decisions have turned out to be!
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I bit off a kick in the teeth for ESA, NASA was meant to provide the transport while we did the less flashy sciencey bits. Looks like we will have to go and ask the Russians very nicely.
I wonder if ESA could keep Constellation alive, I think the French space agency had a look a while back if the Ariane rockets could carry the modules. We need to stop looking to America to lead and get some Europeans on the moon!
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My first thought was to recoil in horror and say "I told you so" (I predicted this in a recent book). If you take away NASA's exploration role, you do wonder what they have left. Certainly, it would suggest a slimming-down of NASA from the top, down. NASA was born, not to launch satellites, but to send astronauts into space.
Certainly, having spent so much time and effort and launched the X-1 with so much fanfare (Time magazine voted it the most important scientific news story of 2009), to cancel it now AND to spend 3 billion more to cancel it makes one wonder what the (deleted) is going on here.
After a pause for thought, this could just be an opportunity to break the shackles of a NASA ever-more bogged-down in burocracy and top-heavy with administration. The same agency that went from they first sub-orbital hop to a man on the Moon in just 8 years, has shown that despite a supportive administration, it can't reach the Moon with a running start, with most of the technology already decades old, in any reasonable time-frame. This is an admission of failure that should horrify the whole NASA structure (but probably will not - President Obama's implied reprimand will be spun as an exciting new opportunity).
NASA has made a series of bad calls over the years, starting with scrapping the Saturn fleet and selecting a Space Shuttle that never, ever achieved even a fraction of its objectives. Too small and too late for the military, it was far too big for delivering relief crews to the ISS. Who in their right mind will regularly send a luxury coach to pick up a group that would fit in a taxi???
Of course, the Air Force doesn't (usually) develop aircraft: it puts out a request for tender and let's companies pitch their designs and bids. It then picks a winner and flies the aircraft that it delivered. What we are suggesting is a similar model for NASA. The difference is that you know in advance that aerospace is a profitable market and you will have no problems getting bids from industry. Manned spaceflight is a much more expensive market and it is yet to be demonstrated that private enterprise can make it profitable. If it is not profitable, they will not stay in the market and the whole idea of private companies as suppliers to NASA will fall apart, leaving NASA without its own launchers, or anyone else's.
Of course, if it DOES work. If it DOES take off (literally and metaphorically), it could be the final coming of age of space flight from the Stone Age to something approaching the situation with modern aviation. It is apalling that 50 years into manned spaceflight, anyone of thousands of possible single-event failures can still result in "loss of mission, vehicle and crew". It is also apalling that a basic seat on a flight to the ISS is a "mere" $50M on the cheapest operator... if aviation were as costly, would anyone still be flying aircraft?
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When I first heard the rumours about President Obama's new vision for NASA, at first I was shocked. However after thinking about it I believe this is the correct approach and should hopefully spur a boom in the private commercial space industry.
After all this is how it should be - NASA has shown us how do it, now its time for private enterprise to carry it on - encourage innovation, efficiency and competitiveness. One can hope that this approach filters across to Europe and hopefully the UK. It should hopefully see a rise in new high tech companies supporting the space industry with hopefully many spinoffs serving industries here on Earth.
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The Sci-Fi author Ben Bova has foreseen this in a series of books looking at the near future of space exploration and commercialisation. To me it makes sense to put the development of transport vehicles in commercial hands. When there's no competition, it results in long delays, huge budgets that are often wasted through "feather bedding" and "jobs for the boys." Commercial companies are always looking for ways to manage costs, and bring in projects on schedule. Will a company like BAE or Airbus Industries take up the challenge, I wonder? It would be a great way to create jobs at the cutting edge of engineering and technology; two disciplines that we can still compete in if we have the guts to take up the ultimate challenge.
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As a Europe-based competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE I can tell you that it would be fantastic to have this kind of competitive contracting approach in Europe. Unfortunately, I think it is very unlikely to happen. ESA is a conservative and risk-averse organisation, which is exactly the approach that the respective governments of its member states prefer.
Not only is it unlikely for European governments to fund such projects that require tens of millions of risk capital, but there are also very few examples of rich individuals in Europe who are interested in putting their money where their mouth is. The result is that true innovation is virtually non-existent in the European space sector, particularly at the level of complete launcher or spacecraft systems.
The good news for those who wish to innovate (like us) is that we don't have much local competition!
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I am a true fan of commercial space, but I think one should not overestimate what the private sector can do. The private sector is good at reducing costs only, and optimize existing technologies.
If one thinks about it, Spacex with its Falcon 9 and Dragon is just trying to re-do what the russians have been doing for decades. I wish them success, but I see no game-changer here.
And, talking about costs, let's look at the russian program history and consider what they were managed to achieve with ten times (roughly) less money than the US!
Now the russians are talking about an in-space nuclear propulsion system. We should take them seriously, because the russians, contrarily to the US, do have a vision for space.
Yes, this the main problem of the Obama proposal: no vision. Except for some exotic in-orbing fuel depot. This idea of in-orbit refueling is ridiculous and so much short-sighted. Imagine us in 15 years with, on one side a russian nuclear powered spacecraft capable of reaching mars in weeks instead of months, and on the other side an american mars mission failing because of some leaks in a fuel reservoir that costed billions to send in orbit. And we should call this a vision? This is very very sad indeed.
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Ever since the end of Apollo, NASA has been asked to do great things without the budget to actually do them.
Now the budget and goals match, pity the goals are so lack luster.
But this could be either the best or worst thing to happen to NASA.
Lets hope that NASA is able to reshape itself, create it's own long term strategy, and the tech to carry it out.
The alternative is that the small goals will be subject to even more changes brought on by politician wanting a slice of the pork pie. NASA gets diluted looses any national relevance, .... gets broken up
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TasInParis, that is not true. NASA has had the budget, but has spent it on administration and on projects like the Space Shuttle that have swallowed countless billions that could have been saved by now throwing away completely what they already had developed and working.
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So... when do we get our space elevators? Rockets are rather last century.
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Europe has a clear choice: to purchase manned spacecraft (Dragons, Dream Chasers, etc.) from America in the same way European airlines purchase Boeings, or to encourage indigenous European passenger-carrying access to space.
Given the unbeatable designs with have in the UK with Spacebus and Skylon, and given expanding commercial activity in manned spaceflight to demonstrate the emerging market for these types of vehicles, obviously I hope we'll support our local companies. This new emphasis on commercial in the US could just be the catalyst Europe needs to change its culture.
You also query how we'll get back to the Moon. I envisage that first there'll be a period of expansion of private visits to space hotels in LEO, and then in high Earth orbits. The latter will demand large quantities of propellants and radiation protection, thus creating a market for water mined from near-Earth asteroids. Over some decades, this then sets up the infrastructure that can make a manned return to the Moon affordable and sustainable.
Post 12 above ridicules in-orbit refuelling, without suggesting any very sensible reasons for doing so. The question is whether orbital refuelling will be cheaper than, say, the nuclear propulsion advocated by post 12. This can only be decided by practical experience. Just remember that, if asteroidal water is used for making propellants and radiation shielding, this gives us a rather large (trillions of tonnes) resource which is available pretty much everywhere in the Solar System, and does not need to be hauled up from Earth. The combination of nuclear thermal with in-space refuelling with water as reaction mass may be even more powerful.
Constellation was being designed on the same basis as Apollo: all resources are hauled into space from Earth, all flights are for elite astronauts at vast expense only. It deserved to be cancelled.
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Reply to Post 16.
Thanks for your comment, and here is one practical example: please consider the number of times the Space Shuttle launch had to be delayed for days or even for weeks because of a leaking hydrogen valve. And this was here on the ground, so I let you imagine the difficulty thousands of miles high up in space, with no possibilty to repair quickly. In-orbit refuelling would just add one level of complexity to the architecture.
Your point about using resources from asteroids (or from planets) is something different. It might be worth considering, but this would not come before a very very very long period of time.
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"Constellation was being designed on the same basis as Apollo: all resources are hauled into space from Earth, all flights are for elite astronauts at vast expense only. It deserved to be cancelled."
Agree. Lets hope Nase an commercial companies an ESA can all work together to come up with better an more practical, an most of all cheaper ways of reaching space.
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NASA is DEAD killed by:
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1. the Ares-1/5 LOBBY that wanted to earn over $50 billion of US taxpayers money to (just) develop two (BAD designed and NOT working) rockets
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2. the Augustine Commission that has given to the US politics the ILLUSION that a "commercial space" exists and can replace the Shuttle and the Orion
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3. the global economy and financial crisis that forced all governments (and especially the US one) to cut all unnecessary expenses and programs
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but the most amazingly humoristic part of the new US spaceflight plan, is the $20 million (NOT $20 billion!!!) awarded to Sierra Nevada Corp. to ("""just""") develop and build a new Space Shuttle... :-)))
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Stargazer, to be fair to NASA, many of the worst decisions were forced on them, the primary example being the Space Shuttle.
It would have been much more logical, as others have pointed out, to continue to refine Apollo based hardware, after all those $ sunk into them.
A modernised Saturn 1 based system (perhaps with J-2 engines in both stages), would in time become more economic to build and launch for the same reason the R-7/Soyuz based system did, the more you produce and the more operational experience you gain, the cheaper (and safer) it becomes.
As also pointed out, with a series of Skylab based stations.
Also, the Apollo CSM had plenty of room for more development, perhaps with a simpler 'lite' version for purely LEO flights to and from stations.
Political pressure was behind the Shuttle, jobs in politically sensitive states, the USAF involvement, either that or have no manned flight after the Apollo-Soyuz link up in 1975.
The Shuttle was so complex it never could attain anything like a mature operation, it would always be very expensive to operate, a similar price tag to get to LEO each time, as to launch a Saturn V to the Moon.
It seems the new idea is to, in effect, make NASA's role more like the US Federal Aviation Administration for civil aircraft operations.
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SONICBOOMER, perhaps. The Space Shuttle was sold as the space truck that the military needed for its heavy lift capability. However, the scaling-down of the Shuttle meant that that never happened and the Challenger disaster meant that only wrong-way orbits with very small payload could ever be reached from Vandenberg.
Was the decision forced on NASA? Good question. How much credit does it reflect on NASA that they allowed themselves to be pushed around that way? The fact that they decided after a 30 year detour to go back to something that looks remarkably like an Apollo Command Module atop something that looks like a stretched Titan-II, not long after a NASA study showed that a modernised (not even upgraded) Saturn V would be by far the cheapest and most efficient way to get back to the Moon, shows just how much time was wasted. There is also the not insignificant item that Gemini was attaining higher orbits in the mid-'60s than the Shuttle has ever achieved and could achieve even with a minimum crew and no cargo!
Shuttle was complex (although I don't know how many other places you can find 5 1/4-inch flopies), but the concept was based on the Dynasoar proposal from the early '60s. As has been pointed out above, maintenance is becoming a nightmare because most of the avionics is almost a museum piece. Even if the fleet were not retired it is arguable that it would become almost unflyable in a few years. The - we now know, totally unrealistic - idea was that each Shuttle would fly at least 100 missions: how many have reached 50, so far?
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Replying to Ratmo, post 17.
Are you saying that all possible fuels are as difficult to work with as hydrogen? How about methane or kerosene? I believe that orbital refuelling has already been done to a small extent on Mir.
Asteroid resources a very long time away? Agreed, if nobody bothers to do anything about them: it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. My point is that we should explore the near-Earth asteroids aggressively and with utilisation of their resources in mind. Then it won't take quite so long.
Stephen
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One should make the point, I suppose, that one prominent European company is already involved in this new approach. Thales Alenia Space is a major partner with Orbital Sciences on its Cots cargo ship, Cygnus. And although there will be many new entrants, it doesn't mean that all the companies which have been doing "old space" will suddenly disappear. There were some very familiar names in the CCDev announcement.
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Thanks for your Post 22 Stephen,
I will not speculate on which type of fuel is the most difficult to store and handle in space. My opinion is just that chemical propulsion, with or without in-orbit refuelling, is no game-changer. If we want to send humans to mars, we need a qualitative jump in propulsion technology. In relation to that I recommend this video, where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden presents the new NASA budget:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9YvIESqDUk&feature=player_embedded
It is pretty long, but if you go the Q&A session towards the end you will see a Charles Bolden emphasizing on VASIMR or new ion propulsion systems. I really hope the new NASA research program, will reflect this.
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Look, guys, I am beginning to get a real sense of deja vu here. The best thing to do is to forget the Moon and Mars until our politicians are taken out of the loop and all human spaceflight is put in the hands of a unilateral body which starts projects and sticks to them. 9 billion would clear the national debt of a large country (or rebuild Haiti).
Its too much to waste like this.
Until that happens, use the Russian boosters for ISS servicing and develop robotic missions to the inner and outer planets, asteroid belt, comets, etc ... Europe, China, India and US can all play along with those, with fixed budgets and set goals.
A scenario for you ... Man has got to Mars, there is an emergency and they need to come home. Government says "sorry, we cancelled the programme ..."
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A few other points to mention ....
Saturn cannot be rebuilt. The powers-that-be decided to destroy all tooling after the last was built (also a particularly acrid Thatcherite policy, although she cannot be blamed for this one).
Shuttle cannot be saved. The US has, in fact, become a lame duck in terms of space exploitation for the foreseeable future.
Europe has ATV already. This could be modified for manned ISS missions, as it is used for its current role. It would need a return system for the troops though.
Extracting propellant from asteroids? Hmm, power needed to do this would require nuclear fuel and if you could get away with nuclear, why bother with Star Trek-type dreams?
Ion propulsion? The technology has a long way to go yet. Stick with chemical rockets and place robotic servicing posts around the Cosmos.
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Ratmo, I would suggest that in-space refuelling using materials sourced in space may yet have a role to play. Consider a vehicle that shuttles between LEO and an Earth-Moon cycler orbit. If it uses chemical propulsion, then on every round trip (assuming it uses aerobraking to return to LEO) it needs to burn roughly 1.5 times its own mass in propellant. If it makes say ten round trips before returning to Earth for servicing, then a 50-tonne vehicle would need to be supplied with 750 tonnes of propellants. The question then arises as to whether this can be supplied more economically from Earth or from a source such as a system for robotically mining the near-Earth asteroids. I don't know the answer. But the possibility that returning asteroidal water to LEO for this purpose might be economically worthwhile should be energetically pursued, in my opinion.
The problem with ion propulsion is that it is very low thrust. This is great on a months-long interplanetary trip, but not so valuable within the Earth-Moon system -- for example, Smart-1 took about a year to reach the Moon on ion propulsion, and that was starting from a geostationary transfer orbit.
The advantage of asteroidal water is that it has potentially two major applications: as feedstock for making propellants in orbit (to which carbon dioxide needs to be added if we decide to make a hydrocarbon fuel), and as radiation protection for passenger accommodation in high orbits (including Earth-Moon cycler orbits).
Since robotic miners can take many months to do their work, I imagine they could be powered by solar arrays. Obviously, nuclear would be nice, if we could get it, but perhaps not essential. But the point is, not whether we should be planning all this here in this online debate, but whether space agencies should be energetically pursuing these possibilities on our behalf. The fact that so far they are not indicates their lack of interest in economic expansion in space, and hence their adherence to the old-space paradigm of manned spaceflight for science, prestige and spinoff alone, and space travellers an elite of government specialists alone.
I love Callisto's suggestion of inventing a "unilateral body which starts projects and sticks to them". I wonder how such a body would avoid political interference?!
Stephen
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Stargazer, well NASA, being a government body, is by nature a political football.
Interesting point about the Shuttle, though they did do two I think major flight deck upgrades, to more modern 'glass cockpit' standards.
My username reflects a job I once had with my employer, in the Engineering dept for a well known, now retired airliner.
In 1997, NASA visited us, since they wanted to see how, I quote, 'another very small fleet of unique air vehicles, long out of production, copes with maintaining systems'.
When orders are small and often infrequent, often the vendors from the previous order are not around or not aerospace certified anymore.
(Worth noting here that Challenger's replacement Shuttle was built mainly from components left over from the original production run).
With hindsight, it was a mistake to develop Ares 1, with LEO support as part of it's mission, maybe if they had done then what they are proposing now for ISS support, just focussing on Constellation/Ares V (or DIRECT).
But the Lunar base plans did make me wonder, for the extended stays they were proposing, about rescue capability.
Clearly something, even just an unmanned lander, maintained in Earth orbit, which brings to mind this talk about in orbit refuelling, with the issue of propellent 'boil off' after an extended period.
To the issue of 'what if an asteroid or comet was heading our way?' Well in that sort of emergency, assuming plenty of prior warning, one way would be to dust off the original Orion concept from the late 50's, where understandable concerns about a vehicle launched by setting off nukes would be offset by the need to stop something with our name on it.
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What killed Ares-1 was the soaring development costs. It was originally intended as a relatively cheap and quick to develop rocket that would get Orion in LEO by about 2014, it was originally intended to use a standard 4 segment Shuttle SRB and an upper stage powered by the SSME engine. But then it started to fall apart, the SSME was never designed to be restarted in flight or to be used in the vacuum of space. It is also a horrendously expensive engine to build as it is reusable, so NASA revised the rocket to bring in the J-2X engine which can be restarted but would need additional development costs, in addition it wasn't powerful enough. The solution was to add a fifth segment to the SRB which resulted in more development costs and the concerns about severe vibrations in the stack as the first stage approached burn out which could have been uncomfortable for the astronauts.
The result of all this was that the development costs rose dramatically and the whole programme fell apart. Questions do need to be asked as to why NASA allowed Ares 1 to get as far as it did, had they accepted it's problems a few years ago then they may have been able to re-jig the programme around another rocket
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I noticed some people wondering what the astronauts who landed on the moon thought of this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html
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Sonicboomer, if it ain't gonna work, you don't agree to work with it :-). NASA did create a rod for its own back and raised ludicrous expectations about the Shuttle. Anyway, that chapter is almost over now. Was it a success? Well, it cost 14 lives, never reached expectations and seems to be a dead-end now, so people can reach their own conclusions on that one.
I see with some disquiet that "Son of Ares V" is getting pushed back now to 2020-2030 (we all know what that means). It seems that the lack of direction is still there, especially as Ares V is based on the Orion design from... wait for it... 1962! Each time NASA changes direction you can add another 10 years and X billion to the project. With the Indians now looking at manned spaceflight in the next few years and the Chinese at a manned Moon landing, I wonder if the American public will be happy to sit quietly by and watch.
I still live in hope that the ATV and Ariane 5 may finally get man-rated, but neither I, nor my colleagues are holding our breath. The political will for manned spaceflight in ESA seems pretty tenuous although, at least Hermes was cancelled before it became an expensive white elephant (I was hearing rumours that its cargo to orbit might have been negative just before it was cancelled).
For now, it seems that NASA will be relying on Russia to launch its astronauts. If a new Cold War starts it may live to regret that.
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