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  #1  
Old 11-10-2015, 10:50 PM
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Default "Been there, done that"

I found this commentary on the Obama administration's opinion of returning to the Moon somewhat discouraging.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-b...village-concept

On the other hand, I think NASA has made itself largely irrelevant to space travel anyway. The future of space innovation seems to be in the hands of wealthy industrialists like Elon Musk.
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Old 11-11-2015, 11:17 AM
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As a nation, we will never do what we did until we clean up our act on this earth, which will never happen in my life time. It will take the planet as a whole world to reach out into space, the moon , Mars any where out there. Sad but true!
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Old 11-11-2015, 12:07 PM
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You expect leadership from people who have PROVEN they are incapable of providing leadership in ANYTHING?? Gee, seems like a recipe for disappointment...

Obama shot down Bush II's "Vision for Space Exploration" in his speech at KSC years ago... Bolden was content to the be mouthpiece for Obama at NASA, and retask NASA with such important things as "reaching out to the muslim community" and other such nonsense. There's a joke that's floated around for years now, and deservedly so... "NASA" means "Not About Space Anymore".

Of course, Bush II didn't do much to ensure the success of his "Vision" either... Basically his "VSE" space program was just a retread of something his father proposed on the steps of the Capitol in 1989 on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, again with Buzz and Neil at his side, IIRC... the "Space Exploration Initiative". It too was a "mega-program" to return humans to the Moon and then on to Mars... yes, the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" was started way back by Bushie's daddy, not in the wake of the Columbia disaster. Problem was for Bush I, he had appointed an ill-equipped "buddy" to head NASA, in that case former shuttle astronaut Dick Truly, and he was cool to the idea, and basically let NASA "run amok" with the planning... every time the proposal came back from NASA, it got more expensive and expansive... Bush I kept sending it back asking his "buddy" to "trim it down to size". Instead, it kept coming back ballooning in cost and difficulty each time, with everybody in NASA proposing SOMETHING that "was vital to the mission" that they'd need a huge budget line item to do... Bush 1 had bigger fish to fry, and after awhile the entire thing was laughed out of the Congress, after having ballooned to a $450 BILLION dollar proposal, and gaining the well-deserved moniker of "Battlestar Galactica"... Bush 2's entire presidency was dedicated to "correcting the screw-ups of Daddy's one turn at bat" and thus Gulf War II (second Iraq war, or "the search for the missing WMD's") and VSE standing in for SEI at NASA...

Bush 2 also changed leadership at NASA, getting rid of Sean O'Keefe and replacing him with Mike Griffin, an old buddy... sound familiar?? Then of course Mike Griffin replaced O'keefe and Admiral Steidle's plans to use "spiral development" to gradually increase the power and capabilities of our already existing and underused EELV rockets (Atlas V and Delta IV) to fulfill the needs of the VSE in an affordable and sustainable manner, and instead adopted his own plans to develop the largest and most expensive space launch vehicle ever proposed-- what would later become known as Ares V... and of course to adapt shuttle hardware into a crew launcher later called Ares I to go with it... Except of course that Ares V was too expensive, Ares I didn't work as advertised and cost FAR more than anticipated, and more and more of the mission requirements were shuffled onto the Ares V proposal due to the inadequacies of Ares I, so Ares V ballooned into something that couldn't get the mission done anyway regardless of how much money and power was thrown into its design... the whole thing was coming apart a year or two before Obama even arrived, and he just put the final bullet into the entire thing... Congress couldn't live with that and having all their shuttle jobs disappear back in their home districts, so they revived Ares V as the "SLS". Griffin had "fast tracked" the retirement of the shuttle and used a "scorched earth" policy to ensure that it could not be extended or revived, to leave no alternatives to his Ares I/V proposals. The Orion capsule, already severely hampered by repeated redesigns to shave weight off due to the problems with Ares I, was given the ax at the same time, but revived by NASA/Congress, first as "zombie-Orion", an "escape craft" for ISS, then finally reinstated as a program for the "MPCV" spacecraft we have in development today. Congress dropped the useless and troubled Ares I and went for a "downsized" Ares V, the so-called "Ares V lite" proposal that is now SLS. With development contracts safely in place and the jobs back in the space states secure, Congress has pretty much ignored the entire thing ever since.

Okay, enough with the recent history lesson and the political stuff... What exactly is NASA doing??

Well, they're developing the SLS, a "super-duper uber-rocket" with NO defined mission, goals, or end use. It will be a system designed to fly only once every 2-3 years, which doesn't even make it really suitable for the "Mars mission" for which it is supposedly being developed. Due to the low flight rates, the overhead is going to make it THE most expensive vehicle system ever constructed... assuming it's ever operated at all... It cannot achieve the mandated goals of 130 tons to orbit without a billion dollar plus development program for new super-boosters, which will have to be approved and paid for at some point... along with an all new second stage and in-space stage program as well, which will probably be billion dollar development programs in and of themselves... NASA farmed out the development of an Orion Service Module to the Europeans, who are adapting their MPLM ISS resupply vehicle to the task... but the contract is only for (IIRC) TWO service modules... where they go from there is anybody's guess... Orion (MPCV) is continuing in development and flew a flawless (so far as anybody knows) test flight last year on a Delta IV (the same Delta IV that it was claimed "could not launch Orion" by Mike Griffin back in the 2004-5 timeframe when he was selling Ares I/V).

Obama had preferred a "commercial space launch" solution to replacing the astronaut and resupply launch services that shuttle had been providing before it was retired. COTS (commercial resupply) of ISS was too far along to be hamstrung by Congress, and has flown successfully a number of times (as well as suffering two very visible failures in recent times) but did manage to consistently underfund the Commercial Crew effort, to funnel the money into SLS/MPCV development, a vehicle FAR too expensive and limited in launch rates to EVER serve any function in any role related to ISS... nevermind the fact that ISS will be resting on the bottom of the Pacific in pieces before SLS/MPCV will ever fly, or have money to do anything.

Meanwhile, there is NO mission for SLS/MPCV anyway... various proposals have all been "non-starters" within NASA or on Capitol Hill... Plans for using a pair of Orions, one stripped of heatshields and other Earth-return systems and outfitted as a hab/lab, the other carrying the crew on launch and landing, to fly out to an asteroid and explore it on a roughly six month mission, were nixed early on (the Plymouth Rock mission). There was no money forthcoming for development of a proper dedicated hab/lab module, and without it Orion/MPCV can do NOTHING beyond the two-week missions Apollo could do. Plans for a "gateway station" in the vicinity of the Moon at one of the Lagrange points, to gain experience in deep space operations, return to low lunar orbit and teleoperate rovers and such on the lunar surface from there, or conduct remote sensing operations, as well as study the deep space radiation environment, operational requirements and practices, etc. never gained traction... Without the development of a hab/lab module and sufficiently powerful stages to propel Orion/MPCV and any other modules in space, Orion/MPCV isn't even capable of achieving and returning from lunar orbit by itself, unlike Apollo... the only "plans" for Orion are to do a "loop around the Moon" mission (calling it a re-do of Apollo 8 would be misleading-- it's actually closer to the Zond missions that preceded it, which looped around the Moon but didn't orbit it, since MPCV cannot orbit the Moon with the available propulsion capabilities). Proposals to go out and "lasso" asteroids with robotic spacecraft and then drag them back to the vicinity of the Moon (but in a retrograde orbit, not lunar orbit) so than a billion dollar SLS launch can shoot a hamstrung and hobbled Orion MPCV out to meet it and "explore" this washing-machine-sized space rock that they would drag back to cislunar space robotically are IMHO rather stupid on the face of it... if you're sending a robot out to drag the thing back, just equip it with drills and stuff and let IT do the sampling and return the samples directly to Earth via a reentry capsule... WHY spend billions to send four guys up there to run a drill and stuff bits into ziplock baggies and shove them all in a suitcase?? It's patently ridiculous...

Other than that, there are NO funded plans to use Orion/SLS for ANYTHING. NO modules have been approved or are being developed... it will take about a decade to do so once they HAVE been green-lighted and funded by Congress... so SLS will sit around doing *nothing* but costing enormous sums of money. Obama shot down *ANY* "return to the Moon" programs with his "been there, done that" speech years ago... nevermind the fact that only 12 guys walked on the moon and basically just scratched the surface... and nevermind the fact that we've had ZERO hours of manned-deep-space operations experience since 1972... IOW, in my lifetime basically, and I'm 44 years old...

Later! OL JR
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  #4  
Old 11-11-2015, 12:47 PM
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Basically, going forward, our space program is going to look at lot more like the Chinese space program than to what we've become accustomed to...

Back in the Gemini days, missions were launching about every 3-4 months... sometimes within a couple weeks on certain missions... Even in the heyday of the shuttle, we only roughly matched that flight rate. The most shuttles that ever flew in a single year was 9 IIRC... and that was before the Challenger explosion.

Heck, even in the last few years of shuttle operations, after the Columbia disaster proved what a brittle system the shuttle was and its retirement was announced, and when its sole purpose was to finish and resupply ISS, when shuttle was only flying a couple times per year, is going to look good compared to SLS flight rates...

Apollo sent missions off to the Moon about every six months... SLS will only launch about once every other year, or every third year... that's 2-3 YEARS between launches... That's why they're only refurbishing ONE launch pad for SLS... they only NEED one at that flight rate.

That's what flies in the face of SLS's supposed reason to exist-- for Mars missions... by NASA's own DRM (design reference mission), their "plan" to go to Mars, it will take a MINIMUM of six SLS launches to assemble a Mars-bound spacecraft stack with the requisite supplies and propulsion... at SLS's existing PLANNED flight rate, it would take a minimum of a dozen years to assemble the Mars craft in Earth orbit and send a crew on its way... It also requires technologies that NASA itself is loathe to develop and won't request funding for or design programs to develop, because it would eliminate the necessity of "the world's most powerful rocket" to achieve the mission-- specifically, cryogenic in-space propellant transfer, among other things... NASA doesn't want a "propellant depot" in space because it would obviate the need for mega-boosters, since smaller rockets could launch empty stages and propellant tankers and the entire mission could refuel in orbit. Of course, with a super-booster like SLS block II (assuming it ever gets built; block I can't do it as it stands), they COULD launch fueled propulsion stages for a Mars stack-- but they'd have to be used within HOURS of launch, due to boiloff of cryogenic propellants... unless of course you develop the capability to handle and recapture boiloff, in which case you've developed the necessary equipment for a propellant depot... LOL The other thing they won't develop is a realistic and viable nuclear reactor for in-space applications... such a reactor will be a necessity to operate for any length of time on Mars, and of course has applications for advanced propulsion and other missions.

Nevermind the radiation problems and operations for YEARS in deep space without resupply (there won't be a train of Progress freighter/tankers and SpaceX Dragon's flying out to resupply an outbound Mars mission...) None of those problems are really being addressed or studied meaningfully... and NO, ISS isn't *really* studying the problem-- it's safely inside Earth's magnetic field and protected from the major hazards existing in deep space radiation-wise-- galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) from heavy-nuclei near the speed of light, and solar particle events (SPE's), ie "solar storms"... BOTH of which will have to be OPERATIONALLY dealt with before ANY manned Mars mission can proceed... not just theoretically dealt with...

The Moon is a "relatively safe" testing ground for the technologies we'll need if we're ever to go to Mars... it's only 3 days away and we can get there and back with existing technology... and we can build there and have the capability to stay there if we so chose... The only thing we COULDN'T realistically test on the Moon for a Mars mission would be in-situ propellant production (from hydrogen brought from Earth reacted with Mars' atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and methane rocket propellants) and Mars entry heatshield designs... considering Mars' tenuous atmosphere, testing of Mars surface hardware and equipment on the Moon would be very close to conditions we could expect on the surface of Mars...

We SHOULD be testing ISRU propellant production via a Mars Sample Return Mission, but we're not even doing that... we backed out of the European "Exo-Mars" project for a sample return mission...

We've basically ceded leadership in manned space exploration to others, despite all the cheap talk and pretty speeches about "going to Mars" (in 20-30 years, which has been talked about since the 1970's, BTW). The experience aboard ISS has mainly taught NASA to "go it alone", which is why the VSE plans for a "return to the Moon, on to Mars, and Beyond" did not include "partnerships" with the Europeans and/or Russia, or anybody else. ISS was a political necessity that fit the times in which it was proposed and approved-- the Soviet Union had just collapsed, the Europeans and Japanese were burgeoning to get into space in a bigger way, and the US had a shuttle program with no realistic reason to exist... and the US had plans on top of plans for a US space station that had gone through multiple redesigns and was SO expensive that Congress didn't want to cough up... hence ISS... we hire the Russian rocket experts rather than have them developing nuclear missiles for Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, propping up their ailing space program at the same time (and using their Mir space station as a stop-gap, by flying shuttles up to it in the "shuttle-Mir program"... a make-work program if ever there was one!) Then of course ISS was designed around shuttle capabilities... and using the Russian Mir 2 core modules as the "expensive bits" (the service and utilities modules, which NASA was going to need billions and another decade to design and work the bugs out of, construct, and have ready to launch). It also gained access to Russian advances that the US had ignored in it's "shuttle or nothing" attitude during the 70's and 80's... specifically, the Russian capabilities in their unmanned freighter/tanker "Progress" spacecraft, which could resupply, and more importantly, REFUEL the space station's required re-boost rocket's propellant tanks... something the US didn't have (and still doesn't, in the form of an operational system). When the US decided to "change course" and decommission ISS in 2016 under the plans of Mike Griffin, in order to free up money for the development of the VSE program (and specifically Ares V and the canceled Altair lunar lander), the "European partners" screamed and threw a fit about their "investment" in ISS going to waste... We needed good relations with the Europeans due to the foreign policy problems facing us abroad, so Congress caved and NASA found itself shackled to the ISS for the foreseeable future... So NASA learned it's lesson about "foreign entanglements" so to speak... committing to a program where the Russians, who strung NASA along for years in the development of ISS modules, and the Europeans and Japanese, who were committed to running ISS "as long as possible" to "maximize their investment" in the station, were hamstringing NASA plans for the future... and hence any such "international partnerships" that put these "partners" on the 'critical path' was to be henceforth completely avoided... IOW, NASA never wants to be committed to something again in such a way they can't change course and back out at will whenever they want... or cannot move forward without some other country's participation if *they* drop out of the project...

NASA has dropped out or phased back their participation in a number of projects, including "Exo-Mars", a European project aimed at launching a series of probes to Mars culminating in a sample return mission.

I wouldn't count on NASA to be involved in ANYTHING... they're quite content to fulfill their Congressional mandate to develop the largest, most expensive rocket ever conceived, that has NO mission or plans beyond a handful of test flights... and of course "navel gazing" about Mars missions 20-30 years down the road... maybe, perhaps, someday...

If that isn't the definition of having ceded leadership, I don't know what is...

Later! OL JR
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Old 11-11-2015, 01:49 PM
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OK Luke, how are you posting an hour after me and yet I'm in central time zone like you?
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Old 11-11-2015, 01:50 PM
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It's 1:50 when I post this.
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Old 11-11-2015, 03:29 PM
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Beats me... its 3:28 here now as I post this...

Course I was in Indiana for a month until last week... so maybe that has something to do with it... might've screwed with my computer's clock...

Later! OL JR
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Old 11-11-2015, 04:12 PM
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If you want to see men on the moon again, I'd put my money on the People's Republic of China. Seems to me that they're the ones who are moving fast to get there again. Other than them, I'd bet that it'd be private companies, unless something changes and we begin to fund NASA again.
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Old 11-11-2015, 04:31 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by K'Tesh
If you want to see men on the moon again, I'd put my money on the People's Republic of China. Seems to me that they're the ones who are moving fast to get there again. Other than them, I'd bet that it'd be private companies, unless something changes and we begin to fund NASA again.
I'm surprised the Chinese are not there already. I'm pretty sure, when they do go, they're gonna use a different scheme. I'm expecting them to just starting climbing up on each others shoulders until they reach the moon. With 1.25 billion people, they have plenty of reach

Doug

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Old 11-14-2015, 11:43 PM
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I fully expect that the US will be buying seats on the second or third Chinese Moon landers for NASA astronauts. Assuming that China is feeling charitable at the time and they have been able to dispose of all traces of previous US visits.
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