Apollo on Steroids
Today NASA announced how we are planning to implement Pres. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration. The folks responsible for creating the website have done a terrific job, so if you have a decent bandwidth, it's well worth checking out. If you don't, and this is even remotely interesting to you, a visit to your library's computers would be worthwhile. Just go to http://www.nasa.gov, and it's the first thing to pop up.
A lot of these plans have been rumored for some time, so depending on what you've heard, there won't be many surprises, other than the glitz of the webpage. To me, it's "Apollo on Steroids." A four-person Apollo capsule gets launched on a two-stage stack to low Earth orbit. The first stage is a Shuttle solid rocket booster, and the second stage is powered by a Space Shuttle main engine. This stack will be twice as tall as the Shuttle on the pad, and nearly the height of a Saturn V. There's a separate launch of the (uncrewed) lunar lander and the trans-lunar injection stage. This stack has a central core of 5 Shuttle main engines, with two solid rockets on the sides, so it's like Shuttle only just as high as the other crewed stack. The crew rendezvous with the lander and injection stage, then head for the moon, where all four of them descend to the surface. At first it will be for only a few days, but later, we want to send them to establish a permanent base on the south pole, because we think there may be ice there that they could use. When they come back, they ride parachutes, but they will end up on the ground, not the ocean. We are going to try to make it as much as possible like a mission to Mars, so the lessons learned will be relevant.
You should save this post, and compare it to what we actually are doing 10 and 20 years from now. When Shuttle was in this stage of design, they were going to fly it like a commercial jet, one mission per week. After all the compromises, we ended up with a pretty amazing vehicle, but it was lot less than the initial vision.
Despite all this, I'm optimistic. As near as I can tell, the folks who came up with this have been at it for most of their 20-ish year careers. They've had a lot of false starts, including two since I've been here, first under Bush I, then again under Clinton when we thought we might have found archaic micro-bacteria fossils in a Martian meteorite. What's different this time, from where I sit, is that it has finally sunk in that we won't by flying the Shuttle until we all retire. We will do something different, or NASA as we know it will wither away. Even if what we end up with looks a lot different from today's shiny computer graphics, the decisions we make today will be with us until our children are running the show, and maybe theirs as well.
One of the things I've been working on is how we will communicate with that crew at the lunar south pole, if that's where we send them, and how they will navigate. It's a real challenge, since there is little to no direct line of sight back to the earth. Think about that: being stationed in the bottom of deep crater, 30 times further away from home than your own home is from the other side of the planet, and never even being able to catch a full glimpse of where you came from, and where your family is waiting for you, except on the computer. Just like Space Odyssey. And just like on Everest, we will probably end up with corpses there. I hope it's not in my lifetime.
I know we had a topic on this last year, but do you all think we are on the right track? Can NASA do the job -- or should we let entrepeneurs take these risks? There would still be plenty of scientific missions that NASA might be best suited to undertake, things like studying whether the Earth's magnetic field will continue to shield our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind, searching for Earth-like planets around other stars, and finding the gravitational echoes of the origin of the Universe. For now though, it appears that the die is cast. (If you prefer Roman allegories, Caesar put this "alea iacta est" when he crossed the Rubicon to invade Italy; for him, the gamble paid off.)
A lot of these plans have been rumored for some time, so depending on what you've heard, there won't be many surprises, other than the glitz of the webpage. To me, it's "Apollo on Steroids." A four-person Apollo capsule gets launched on a two-stage stack to low Earth orbit. The first stage is a Shuttle solid rocket booster, and the second stage is powered by a Space Shuttle main engine. This stack will be twice as tall as the Shuttle on the pad, and nearly the height of a Saturn V. There's a separate launch of the (uncrewed) lunar lander and the trans-lunar injection stage. This stack has a central core of 5 Shuttle main engines, with two solid rockets on the sides, so it's like Shuttle only just as high as the other crewed stack. The crew rendezvous with the lander and injection stage, then head for the moon, where all four of them descend to the surface. At first it will be for only a few days, but later, we want to send them to establish a permanent base on the south pole, because we think there may be ice there that they could use. When they come back, they ride parachutes, but they will end up on the ground, not the ocean. We are going to try to make it as much as possible like a mission to Mars, so the lessons learned will be relevant.
You should save this post, and compare it to what we actually are doing 10 and 20 years from now. When Shuttle was in this stage of design, they were going to fly it like a commercial jet, one mission per week. After all the compromises, we ended up with a pretty amazing vehicle, but it was lot less than the initial vision.
Despite all this, I'm optimistic. As near as I can tell, the folks who came up with this have been at it for most of their 20-ish year careers. They've had a lot of false starts, including two since I've been here, first under Bush I, then again under Clinton when we thought we might have found archaic micro-bacteria fossils in a Martian meteorite. What's different this time, from where I sit, is that it has finally sunk in that we won't by flying the Shuttle until we all retire. We will do something different, or NASA as we know it will wither away. Even if what we end up with looks a lot different from today's shiny computer graphics, the decisions we make today will be with us until our children are running the show, and maybe theirs as well.
One of the things I've been working on is how we will communicate with that crew at the lunar south pole, if that's where we send them, and how they will navigate. It's a real challenge, since there is little to no direct line of sight back to the earth. Think about that: being stationed in the bottom of deep crater, 30 times further away from home than your own home is from the other side of the planet, and never even being able to catch a full glimpse of where you came from, and where your family is waiting for you, except on the computer. Just like Space Odyssey. And just like on Everest, we will probably end up with corpses there. I hope it's not in my lifetime.
I know we had a topic on this last year, but do you all think we are on the right track? Can NASA do the job -- or should we let entrepeneurs take these risks? There would still be plenty of scientific missions that NASA might be best suited to undertake, things like studying whether the Earth's magnetic field will continue to shield our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind, searching for Earth-like planets around other stars, and finding the gravitational echoes of the origin of the Universe. For now though, it appears that the die is cast. (If you prefer Roman allegories, Caesar put this "alea iacta est" when he crossed the Rubicon to invade Italy; for him, the gamble paid off.)
posted by R @ 7:31 PM
4 Comments:
At 8:09 AM,
Unknown said…
The present plan appears to be about the best that can be done with chemical launch technology. We take advantage of systems developed for the Shuttle and merge them with a proven system for going to the moon.
(Something vaguely like the "Shuttle C", it seems, will finally launch. :^)
Perhaps you have fond memories of Dan Goldin, and maybe he did many a good thing at NASA. But from an outsider's perspective, the whole business about "not going back to the moon because we've already done that" made me feel (ten and more years ago) as though *years* were being wasted on a completely unrealistic non-plan for the station and Mars.
Finally, we have what looks like a real plan that is actually believable. And I feel that if we spend resources on it, then we are not just wasting time. I, for one, have been waiting a *long* time for this.
Yes, we need to keep doing good robotic science missions. But the moon is such a *perfect*, nearby place to develop and test manned, long-duration off-planet excursions, that for us to have ignored it for so long is just evil.
As I wrote last year, I still think that developing an independently functioning ecosystem on the moon should be one of humanity's highest long-term priorities. I know that it's more than a hundred years away, but we should be about it.
Now, if we could somehow figure out how politically to sell a nuclear launch vehicle, then I should be truly optimistic about the future of spaceflight.
At 1:57 PM,
cvo said…
Great presentation on the NASA website. Easy to digest and visually rich. Hope more people take a look at it and get enthused about the project.
I think the merits of the "science" behind the project are irrefutable. The bigger concern is convincing the Feds and the American people to budget the mission on a regular basis.
Beyond the competitive nature of keeping up with countries like Russia and China, NASA officials will need to find financial reasons to go forward with the mission. One of today's stories mentioned that the Moon could be a source of the rare element Helium-3 which could fuel fusion reactors for generations to come. That kind of resource return on the investment will be crucial to convincing bureaucrats to leave the budget alone during the next 12 to 15 years.
At 2:16 PM,
Unknown said…
Curtis, for what it's worth, the report that I heard on NPR yesterday suggests that the program will be executed without substantial increase to NASA's regular yearly budget.
According to this view, selling the program to Congress (and to the people) amounts, essentially, to selling the idea of maintaining NASA at its current level of funding.
At 2:20 PM,
Unknown said…
Doh! Curtis, I somehow missed the meaning of your last sentence when I first read your post. Sorry for the noise coming from my direction.
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