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I'm rather surprised to see this topic dug up: IMO, it never gets the attention it deserves as a near-term interplanetary system that blows the lid off of the usual ways it's done.
samy:
I'm not talking leaving LEO, I'm talking about bridging interplanetary distances, for which 0.1c velocity can help a LOT. Going to Mars in days instead of months is a whole different ball game and you're not gonna get that out of current conventional rockets.
I'll go further and say that you're not likely to get that out of anything as close to coming off the drawing boards as Orion.
This is presumably for one of Dyson's daydream interstellar versions. I could see it used for interplanetary use, out to Oort cloud colonies. Up to 40 million tons, using megatonne yield bombs in propulsion charges of 1300 tons each. Several hundred thousand of them... (Note that this one was his own baby; no official work was done on it. The smaller, nearer-term ones were very heavily investigated by scientists & engineers in all applicable fields of specialization.)
Here, I'm not thinking of a magnetic field that "extends the pusher plate", but totally replacing it. For these future huge .1C ships, instead of improbably huge shock absorbers and plates, think of Mag-Orion, throwing huge clouds of plasma at the ship's magnetic sail field. Absolutely no consideration for plasma/matter interaction, no radiation other than what cosmic rays make it through the magnetic sail field. Ships big enough on trips long enough to extend dumbell arms for spin-G (if they don't go all-out for the mass of a torus).
I can't find much online about the Mag Orion, but from what there is about the Magnetic sail, it's not too big a stretch to make one to intercept a deliberate pulse of plasma from a big stand-off bomb.
Again, acceptable superconductors for the magnetic sail coils are far more readily foreseeable than breakthroughs that allow any other high performance ship.
samy:
No, its claim to superiority is its immense thrust, which works just as well in space as in atmosphere, except in space the pollution is much less dangerous...
Again I'll go further, and say if it's for space-use, then environmental concerns become nil. Completely negligible.
jumpboy11j:
Orion is practical, but not allowable. I don't want that many radioisotopes in my solar system.
I hope you don't mean floating around in space... That's a good analogy of what space is like! (radiation blasted waste) If you mean having that many nuclear explosives being built, transported, and detonated by every big ship out there, then that's another concern.
We've addressed international cooperation in building one of these. Diamond cutters/sellers don't let a tenth of a gram per year of material "go missing".
A lot of thought here about the potential cost of relying on nuclear explosives, a very tricky item. I'd bet that is an over-estimation. The original numbers they worked out still stand, and I doubt that anybody would know it better than Dr. T.Taylor. It was surprisingly inexpensive, by the numbers they were using. Maybe it's more expensive now, if only because of cleanup concerns at the factories where the metal is machined into the parts of the pit of the bomb. (I've read a lot of what they're going through with the Rocky Flats trigger factory)
Until we can speak of space manufacturing, the only reasonable use for Orion (where it still outperforms everything else which could be made as readily) is the 10 meter HLV-sectional lifted, space assembled ship. ~550 tons starting in HEO. Either slow trips with ~50%+ being cargo, or lightly loaded ones taking incredibly fast "leaps" across the solar system, totally ignoring synodic periods and typical interplanetary trajectories.
What other sort of nuclear propulsion that can be built today, offers this in ships under a thousand tons?
OK let's take the Shuttle. Besides being unreliable, expensive and unsafe what's wrong with it? It's the most capable human launch system ever built.
"Besides being unreliable, expensive and unsafe"... let's see, if those points are ceded, it failed every one of its design criteria.
What's good about it? -besides it's the most expensive transportation scheme ever devised. That's good, if you're a politician or a NASA money manager.
It was good for graft and politics, and utterly useless for advancing us in space. Great for the NASA bureaucracy and the political machine that didn't care to do anything meaningful in space, but it spread as much tax dollars around as many congressional dstricts as possible, so at that, it was an unparalleled success.
They say an elephant is a mouse built to government specs. I'd say that the Shuttle as a NASA version is a diploducus, and it has to have 5 heads, and can't take any action unless at least 3 of them agree, so usually it starves.
The most capable launch system? All things considered, the R-7 blows it off the launch pad.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=855
"Not Culture but Perhaps a Cult"
Op Ed on NASA and the Shuttle
by Homer Hickam
August 29, 2003
(snippet)
Much has been made over the report produced by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). I have since read newspaper articles that called the report "scathing." Hardly. Its polite recommendations probably had Shuttle managers who made poor decisions dancing down their office hallways with relief. Essentially, it gave them a pass by proclaiming "culture" made them do it...I do not believe there is a NASA culture other than a willingness by its engineers to work their butts off to keep us in space. It might be said, however, that there is a Shuttle cult. It is practiced like a religion by space policy makers who simply cannot imagine an American space agency without the Shuttle. Well, I can and it is a space agency which can actually fly people and cargoes into orbit without everybody involved being terrified of imminent death and destruction every time the Shuttle lifts off the pad.
With some important reservations, the CAIB recommended to keep the Shuttles flying but with more inspections, more bureaucracy... and more money. But I think piling on more inspections and people and dollars won't make the Shuttle any safer...
The truth is no amount of arm-waving and worrying about "culture" can fix a flawed design. Every engineer knows a design that tries to bypass the realities of physics, chemistry, and strengths of materials by applying complexity will fail eventually no matter how much attention is given to it.(cont'd)
I think it makes sense to think of a crew vehicle as re-usable. If we're moving beyond a ballistic capsule, a thing like a spaceplane makes sense, just don't call it a "mini-Shuttle" or "Shuttle-2" in the sense that the Shuttle was designed with so many extra bells & whistles. We're talking about a safe economical crew plane.
It doesn't make too much sense to ignore the old NASA Langley work on the HL-20 and HL-42.
(linkys below)
If you do it the NASA way, it'll try to be 15 times this size and cost as much as the NASA budget for 5 years to decide that it's getting too big & expensive to be feasible... They say that an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. I'd say that a diplodocus is the NASA version, but it's got to have 5 heads, and can't take any action unless at least 3 of them agree on it, so usually it starves.
Zubrin wrote that there's no good engineering reason why a Titan rocket booster costs more than a 747. It's the governmenet way to make projects cost as much at possible, to spread the tax dollars around as many congressional districts as possible.
K.I.S.S. should apply, even if we're adding every possible extra we can to make it excel at its primary purpose of moving crews from the ground to space and back.
First of all, is that it doesn't launch cargo, beyond removing seats and strapping stuff in, and it doesn't stay for a long time in space, running experiments or repairing satellites. Just enough supplies to do its purpose, and maybe stay locked onto a station dormant, waiting to be needed for a trip down.
Uragan Space Interceptor; competitor to the X-20 DynaSoar
www.astronautix.com/craft/uraeptor.htm
www.astronautix.com/lvs/spil5050.htm
www.astronautix.com/craft/mig10511.htm
BOR-4 test article (Soviet unmanned sub-scale shuttle test plane)
www.astronautix.com/craft/bor4.htm
and the HL-20 (see especially the text about the hypersonic tests of the lifting body, how it seems superior to other types of spaceplane. It's still being investigated, in recent pre-"Columbia" OSP designs from Grumman/Orbital Sciences, and in the SpaceDev "Dreamchaser" spaceplane.
www.astronautix.com/craft/hl20.htm
and finally the HL-42
www.astronautix.com/craft/hl42.htm
... Our bodies are evolved to require exertion. The current Western sedentary lifestyle does not automatically provide it. Hence, a higher gravity would only be restoring something that societal development took away.
As far as we know, the minimum to keep us healthy is one full Earth G.
We have absolutely no experience with low gravity, and the experience with microgravity paints a grim picture.
We do have some experience that says that low G will be bad, all the S.F. stories of long lives on the Moon or in low G to the contrary.
Marathon runners and others who constantly stress their bodies against gravity generally live longer than couch potatoes, and long-term patient bedrest involves virtually no stress against gravity. Wouldn't this seem to indicate that living in low G will make your heart & muscles atrophy, which generally leads to a lower life expectancy and less health?
Conversely, we do have a lot of experience with centripetal hypergravity (spinning habitats for higher than Earth G).
Uniformly, critters from plants to mice to chickens which are raised in hypergravity are more healthy, with longer life spans.
Rats have legs like little elephants and walk like super-rats, their hearts are huge strong dense nuggets of muscle. Generally, their legs are stronger up until about 3.5 G, when they no longer use their legs to get around...
There's a book dealing with topics of transhumanism, including space colonies to spread human and Gaian life across space. It's called "Great Mambo Chickens and the Transhuman Condition", because that's what the chickens were like, after being raised in 2.5 G
(and orgasms, like every other muscular response, are only improved by regular strenuous exercise. Do your Kegels)
If this meeting of unnamed people happens and if it announces a new plan to visit NEOs and Lagrangian points instead of the Moon then this would be a bad plan. NEOs are interesting places to visit, but they are far longer voyages than the moon.
but there's something there to work with, immediately on the first mission's touchdown.
There's free energy, as much as you want, 24/365 (or whatever the particular rock's day/night cycle is, it's irrelevant because you can aim mirrors and power beams from/to anywhere near/on it)
They are not helpful for testing habitats or low gravity physiology research.
With free access to anything from zero/microgravity to any level of gravity you might want? With relatively easy possibility of building/booststrapping habitats with full shielding and full Earth gravity to remove any pressing need to rotate crews home... The list goes on & on, of things you can do which are utterly impossible on/in any large body.
The Moon is far more accessible, has a far larger area for exploration, a great variety of resources for ISRU and low gravity.
They call the Moon the slagpile of the solar system, beause its "resources" are about what an asteroid miner would toss out as not economical to process further.
It makes more astronautical sense to go to NEAs to start an infrastructure, to allow reasonable access to the Moon. By the time you've got asteroidal resosurces, the Moon is irrelevant as a resource base.
NEO's should be part of the plan to go to Mars but not the whole plan. It's would be a very limited and poor vision indeed.
By giving us leverage to open the rest of the solar system? I don't see it.
Not only volatiles, which the Moon almost utterly lacks, (unless you posit all the infrastructure to get at the little at the Lunar poles -which came in from asteroids in the first place) but metals which could finance the entire space effort and organics & volatiles which are needed before you can open the Moon's surface to regular access.
NEOs are still too massive to move by any human means, except by a full out nuclear assult which'd be best reserved for averting a colliding one.
Not according to a few decades worth of studies in all areas of astronautical engineering. There have been plans since the late '70s to bring back a small one or a chunk of a larger one, and they're all far more beneficial than going back to our Moon, or more likely than colonizing Mars (with expendable rockets).
The valuable metals in a small, typical stony asteroid would more than pay back the mission investment, but pay off the national debt. You'd still have several hundred kilotonnes of iron, aluminum, rare earths, organics and water to play with, building GEO antennae platforms for more profits, interplanetary stages for travel, and space habitats for the workers & scientists.
I fail to see the problem with a longer trip time, than going to our Moon. If you want to test long duration space flight, you need to be in space, not on the Moon, and if you want to experiment with variable G spin R&D, you need to be in space. If you want to bootstrap our way to a more robust space infrastructure, you need more than the dry desert on the Moon.
So it's a shorter trip to get to the Moon: You can take more payload to an NEA, you get better resources, more easily, with cheaper, more efficient rockets (even a solar heated steam rocket, for that matter. Lots safer than the contained explosions we need to get down to & off from the Moon. Working at an NEA you can also get fully shielded full Earth G, which is impossible on the Moon.
BTW, the only application for nuclear power seems to be reactors for power generation in small compact applications that can't manage large mirror areas, or nuclear thermal rockets (or nuclear pluse, IMO). Nothing about nuclear arsenals or "assaults" to it.
The idea is not to launch a mars mission from the surface of the moon. Nor is anyone seriously suggesting sending a mars craft to the moon to refuel.
Depends on who you ask. This is precisely the "conventional wisdom" we're up against. That's what this current VSE & ESAS talks about. Everything about going to the Moon to prepare the way to go to Mars is based on the same sort of false assumptions.
As for the rest of the recent comments, None of this is good argument for going to our Moon first, or any time soon, except for more of the current robotric exploration.
Carrying on my favorite digression (on three threads now?) of going to NEAs or Mars' moons instead of our Moon, it must be pointed out that for every ton of finished goods from Lunar resources, you need from 7 to 10 times the finished mass in water and process chemicals, only some of which is reclaimable. Plus the rocket fuel to get there & back -and no, EM catapults don't make a difference until we've got large-scale transportation infrastructure in place. You're not going to make good economic sense landing such a large infrastructure effort on the Moon using expendable rockets from the ground.
You can't get it from the Lunar poles without a large front effort to get there and get it up into space. For all such Lunar schemes to use space resources, the NEAs of Mars' moons offer better chances, and asteroids also offer far better resources than the Moon.
It seems to make sense to open space first using NEAs or Fear & Dread, while using robots to investigate Mars & the Moon, until we can afford to lift reasoable payloads to LEO for interplanetary exploration, by fueling the upper stages in LEO. You need this scale of resources to open up the Moon's surface to regular travel.
Sooner than SSPS, GEO antennae platforms offer near-term profitability. This is nothing but rolled & stamped metals, drawn metal wire & cable, and artificial rock (erzatz "concrete"), and metal foil mirror, all of which are easily done in a near-term space factory.
Next, before SSPS does more than proof-of-concepts, is asteroidal platinum group and precious & strategic metals.
[url=http://www.aviationweek.com]www.aviationweek.com
Space Leaders Work To Replace Lunar Base With Manned Asteroid Missions
Jan 18, 2008[/url]
I'll post more later, but for now I'll say that this seems to go well here, maybe with links in appropriate threads in the "Human Missions" topic (not cross-posting, but shared links to relevant things are good.)
Build the thing up from HLV-boosted sections (~80 to 100 tons per "Ares-V CaLV", if it ever flies). Send ship sections up unmanned as big dumb booster cargo, and send crew up in a safe crew vehicle.
Just about any common Mars mission plan (aside from Mars Direct) uses at last a few hundred tons in LEO for start, and this should be plenty to send some sort of hab along, which could be bootstrapped at Mars' moons into a fully shielded, full Earth G hab.
It'll very likely take 2 or 3 such space assembled ships to get up to a base which can use regolith to make truss & cable spin-arms capable of spinning a fully shielded hab (it'd be too massive to send on the ship). On the way out, they have (SWAG?) 1/2 G unshielded to keep the spin-arm mass down, with a non-spinning solar flare shelter.
Long past time for this. The fixation on going to our Moon first, as if it had any relevance with "on the way to Mars" has been irritating. The whole Shrub space "vision" from the beginning has looked like it was thrown together from tabloid-level common-wisdom by White House PR flacks and Karl Rove (which, of course, it was)
[url=http://www.aviationweek.com]www.aviationweek.com
Space Leaders Work To Replace Lunar Base With Manned Asteroid Missions
Jan 18, 2008[/url]By Craig Covault
Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration"--one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.
Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).
Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.
Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.
The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a reality.
There would also be some different "winners and losers" compared with the Bush vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.
Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars operations--the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.
If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be flown to an asteroid in about 2025.
Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there's little public enthusiasm for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.
Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.
"It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar, a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.
The prospect of challenging new manned missions to asteroids is drawing far more excitement among young people than a "return" (as in going backward) to the Moon, says Lou Friedman, who heads The Planetary Society, the country's largest space interest group.
The society is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with Stanford. A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so yesterday," says Friedman.
"It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high cost, it offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars operations."
Under the alternative VSE, even smaller, individual lunar sorties would be reduced, or perhaps deleted entirely, says Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories before heading all of NASA's science program development. He also led Lockheed Martin Spaceflight System.
Hinners believes the group should examine dropping all the lunar sorties to accelerate the human push to Mars in the revised VSE proposal to the new administration.
The James Webb Space Telescope, with a 21.3-ft.-dia. mirror, will be launched in 2013 to one of these "L" points. With little fanfare, it was recently approved to carry a lightweight Crew Exploration Vehicle docking system just in case a manned CEV has to make a house call a million miles from Earth for emergency servicing. A growing corps of scientists, engineers and astronauts are emerging to argue for this chance to accelerate manned spaceflight operations outward well beyond the Moon--faster toward Mars than can be done by using the Moon as a stepping-stone only 240,000 mi. away.
"The notion that the Moon could serve as a proving ground for Mars missions strains credulity," says Farquhar, who holds the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair for Aerospace at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He also was mission director for the Applied Physics Laboratory's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission that was the first to land a spacecraft on an asteroid (see photo, p. 27).
A return to manned Moon operations has become "a bridge too far" in the Bush administration's VSE, says Wes Huntress, another former planetary mission manager. Huntress is director of the Washington-based Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory and had a long career at JPL and NASA headquarters, where he led NASA space science development and operations--including the highly successful Discovery planetary mission series. He's also helping to organize the Stanford workshop that will have about several dozen participants, including several top NASA and contractor exploration managers.
"There is little left of the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration except the real need to retire the space shuttle," he says. "Even this goal is being pursued with great sacrifice from all other parts of the agency because the administration has simply not put its money where its mouth is."
"Inadequate NASA budgets are leading to collapse of the VSE Moon focus and to incredibly slow progress for the Moon," says Hinners.
"The nation's space enterprise is under great strain even to build Ares I and Orion CEV," Huntress stresses. "There are alternate destinations for human deep-space missions that do not require building a lot of new hardware to [come and go between Earth and the Moon]. These are missions to near-Earth asteroids or to scout the Sun-Earth Lagrangian points for future space telescope construction and servicing," he notes.
The Earth-Sun Lagrangian points (also called libration points) are at the very edge of the Earth's gravitational well, and a mission would represent a first excursion to the limit of Earth's influence in the Solar System--a significant step beyond Apollo, says Huntress. Missions sent to "L" points can stop just there, orbiting only above and below the ecliptic plane without any significant use of station-keeping fuel. Also, L points offer a much cleaner option for advanced astronomy than the dusty lunar surface, where you have to land everything in addition to launching it.
"As the nation seems to be turning to environmental threats to our own planet, a mission to a near-Earth asteroid to assess their nature for good or ill would also seem to be a real winner," says Huntress.
These stepping-stones would allow for the development of a broader vision of human spaceflight than simply reinventing Apollo.
Major lunar-related contracts for the Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle Orion command ship, a lunar lander design and Ares V launcher have yet to be awarded, giving the next administration some breathing room in post-Bush administration VSE contracting.
Some basic asteroid mission design work--part of it volunteer--using the CEV hardware is already underway at the Johnson Space Center (AW&ST Sept. 25, 2006, p. 21). Other, more in-depth and long-standing manned asteroid analysis is underway under International Astronautical Assn. and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum sponsorship.
Scott Hubbard, consulting professor in the Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics Dept., conceived the reassessment meeting. Hubbard was previously the director of NASA Ames Research Center and, before that, NASA Mars program director. "We have planned this invitation-only workshop to elicit frank and open discussion about the future of the 'vision' as the administration changes," he says.
"The Stanford workshop will address a broad range of issues touching on many elements of space exploration. The attendees will discuss the balance between space science and human exploration, the need for continuing and enhancing Earth science observations, the relative utility of humans and robotics, and progress or impediments to human exploration of Mars, asteroids and the Moon," says Hubbard. "In addition, the workshop will discuss the status of access to space and the emerging entrepreneurial space industry. "This is the kind of debate that will go on--beyond whether a lunar base really makes sense. But manned asteroid missions first--ahead of a lunar base--are drawing strong attention," he says. Hubbard and Friedman are co-hosting the event, along with former astronaut Kathy Thornton, associate dean of the University of Virginia's Science, Technology and Society Dept. Thornton flew on four space shuttle missions, including the initial critical repair of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.
The alternative vision would also include far greater private-sector incentives for participation at all levels, an area public surveys cite as very important. Missions to asteroids and Lagrangian points, for example, are likely to carry along Bigelow-type commercial inflatable modules. A recent informal space program survey by The New York Times found substantial public frustration about NASA's doing what entrepreneurs could do better.
Under the alternative concepts, astronauts using an upgraded CEV would initially be sent on long-duration missions, not to the Moon, but to land on asteroids where they would sample terrain perhaps more ancient than the Moon's. These visits would also help develop concepts for diverting such near-Earth objects, should they threaten a potentially devastating impact on Earth.
Although it may be hundreds of years before used operationally, an emergency asteroid diversion would be "the ultimate 'green mission'--one that could save a large portion of the Earth from impact destruction," says Friedman.
To reinforce that point, he notes that on Jan. 30, a 150-ft.-long asteroid will pass close to Mars. The asteroid visit and Lagrangian mission concepts would use much of the same CEV Ares I and Ares V heavy-lift booster infrastructure, but in ways that would be much faster stepping-stones to Mars than developing a manned lunar base. Asteroid and Lagrangian point missions would each last several weeks or months. Both the libration points and asteroids would be about 1 million mi. from Earth, requiring operations more like much longer trips to Mars at least 40-100 million mi. away.
Robotic options for all mission elements also will be reviewed, and one working group will be devoted to better defining manned versus robotic tradeýýoffs. Another issue is international participation.
Aviation Week discussed an unrelated European International Space Station topic with NASA Administrator Mike Griffin last week, who in comments aside also addressed the basic Moon/Mars issues between the U.S. and Europe (see p. 28).
"A large portion of the scientific community in the U.S. also prefers Mars over the Moon," he acknowledged. But "interest in the Moon is driven by goals in addition to and beyond the requirements of the science community. It is driven by the imperatives that ensue from a commitment to become a spacefaring society, not primarily by scientific objectives, though such objectives do indeed constitute a part of the overall rationale.
"We continue to experience intense international interest concerning our plans for lunar exploration," Griffin told Aviation Week.
With Frank Morring, Jr., in Washington.
This story appears in the Jan. 21 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology, p. 24
Of course, there have been several threads dealing with these topics: I'll link to them (and others which have good mentions of them, while beating around other topics).
[url=http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4963&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=martian+moons]New Mars Forum Index -> Human missions -> Phobos & Deimos - Worthy targets for Martian exploration?
Sep 27, 2006[/url]
[url=http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2542]New Mars Forum Index -> Interplanetary transportation -> Phobos and Deimos - The importance of Mars's moons to exploration
Jan 18, 2002[/url]
[url=http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4735]New Mars Forum Index -> Human missions -> Near Earth Object (NEO) missions
Jun 15, 2006[/url]
"jumpboy11j" on Dec 13, 2007 wrote about the hypersonic skyhook, and "terraformer" wrote about it being slowed down, and needing to be re-boosted.
My favorite way around this, is the realization that the cable extends up to orbit, and cuts the Earth's magnetic field. Perfect for a ED tether reboost.
As well, it gets back a little of what it lost while lifting something, when it lets anything go to drop back down. Empty returning passenger spaceplanes or cargo lighters, captured space trash, etc. Of course this won't amount to anything until we're bringing lots of payload back down, like asteroidal platinum group and precious & strategic metals.
In the mean time, it's long past time for ED tethers to be used.
This version of a skyhook is an upper stage, while laser thermal is a lower stage "zero stage". Airbreathing would seem to make the most sense.
It doesn't seem to make sense to investigate laser thermal for anything but close-in to the spaceport where it took off from. Beyond that, an airbreathing jet or maybe rocket is better, and I'm not even convinced that it needs to be very high speed. Just get it moving high and fast, and a spaceplane to the landing/capturing platform on the lower end of the skyhook is entirely within reason.
I have a more difficult time seeing this as a solution for larger payloads. Things that can be lifted in small payloads make sense for it, because it doesn't strain the system (or our credulity to consider it). For a people mover, it makes sense, because it's redundant and forgiving, compared to just riding a rocket up.
It never gets fast enough to need advanced TPS (not much more than the "SpaceShipOne"needed), and it doesn't carry much load of fuel/propellant.
For larger payloads, like station segments or interplanetary upper stages, I can't see anything near term that makes as much sense as BDBs.
We definitely need a modern day look at Aerojet's and Truax's figures for the Sea Dragon. I don't mind that it's basically a big roman candle with only one flight, If it lifts big cargos cheaply.
So antimatter will only be useful to initiate fusion?
to provide the initial prompt "Spark" of the nuclear detonation, which excites and projects the plasma from the "thrust bomb" unit to the aft end of the ship.
I might mention that fusion probably isn't in it, at all. In the old "Orion" designs, the largest "advanced interplanetary" ship, starting mass ~10,000+ tons, the very largest "bomb" used was .35 kilotones.
Two-stage fission/fusion boombs are completely out of the picture.
It could be speculated, that if containment and handling issues of antimatter could be resolved so that it's easier and cheaper using antimatter than making "bombs" of refined expensive fissionable metals, then antimatter "bombs" would be the only explosive there is.
I only wonder if such bombs could be made "clean" at least to the point of making no long-lasting radioactive or extremely toxic residues -or at least, making only little toxic residues, which would decay and become completely harmless before it has a chance to affect people or the biosphere.
If so, and if it's economical, R&D into this sort of thing for dangerous "clean" nuclear weapons could bring about a chance for a ground launch of a big Orion. I doubt it, because there are still some technical issues that make space-only use far more attractive.
Very good stuff, even if the thread is old.
I second the motion, that the moons of Mars deserve a lot more attention.
A lot of my attitude is from ideas plagiarized from Dr.Brian O'Leary's book "Mars 1999". In it, he stresses first going to the moons for a fuel/water plant, and like Dr.Kuck's "Diemos Water Company" it becomes important in leveraging our way into space with fuels in Earth orbit, and for Mars exploration.
Dr O'Leary also suggests possibly not even intending to send people down to Mars on the first manned shots. Instead, they concentrate on building up the capabilities in Mars orbit, around the moons. ("Ph&D" From Dr O'Leary, "Fear & Dread" were the two warhorses which pulled Mars' war chariot)
An interesting addendum to RobS ideas, is to use regolith as a building resource. Very many proposals have been floated over the years on relatively simple early space manufacturing methods to make rolled and stamped metals for trusses and structures, metal cables (Common engineering practices allow much more stress on cables than any other method of building with metals), and rock dust from regolith as some form of artificial rock ("Sinter-crete" or concrete, or possibly as sandbags packed around a hab for shielding.
Most of these are relatively simple with little complex machinery, and allow strong use of local resources.
Trusses could be built up to allow a couple of "tuna can" habs to be shielded and spun up to full Earth G, so crews wouldn't need to be rotated back to Earth, just as they're getting a lot of expertise in exploring Mars.
In "Mars Direct" it's suggested that Mars is made the second most safe place for crews. In this version, Mars orbit is even better.
I submit that it's very premature to suggest that Mars could be a safe place for crews to spend most of their time: we have absolutely no experience in low G living, and no reason to suggest that Mars G will be enough. I'm reminded of the space colony design criteria from the NASA Ames 1970s summer studies, in that building artificial habs with very nearly Earth-normal environment, is the "conservative engineering" path, since readily extrapolated construction techniques allow it to be done with no breakthroughs or new inventions needed, and any human can readily live there completely safely, no "adaptation" needed.
Going to Ph&D and building up infrastructure ASAP, before the first Mars landing, allows a Mars exploration project to be very robust and safe, as crews could be assisted by telerobotics controlled from above, and supported by drops of supplies, and they're never more than some hours away from a hypothetical critical supply drop, or a day or so away from help.
It can't be under-stated, how important a source of volatiles in space could be, in vastly simplifying getting us into space, removing much risk and expense. See the "Deimos Water Company" article, or neofuel.com.
Whenever we launch a payload up to LEO with an upper stage for kicking it beyond LEO to GEO or interplanetary space, 2/3 of the IMLEO is the upper stage, and 2/3 of that is the oxidizer in the upper stage.
"Mars Direct" showed us how to leverage our capabilities in space with in-situ resources, and I leave it to the imagination, what we could do with that much more useful payload, in every cargo we send up.
Antius wrote:
If we are forced to go to Mars/Moon using chemical rocket technology, then actual Mars colonisation becomes too expensive to carry out without some bootstrapping using lunar materials.
I don't care to use the word "colonization" for a long time. We aren't "colonizing " Mars. We're trying to establish a foothold and a beachhead for explorers.
Furthermore, we aren't "colonizing" anything off-Earth unless and until we establish space resources use and space manufacturing. If nothing else, for the transportation infrastructure to get around the solar system.
We aren't "colonizing" anything using payloads lifted into space on top of disintigrating fireworks rockets which can trace their evolution back to WWII long range artillery.
cIclops:
Yes. Colonization would be far too expensive using current chemical technology. Lunar resources won't make a big difference for a long time either as it will be extremely expensive to setup a fuel plant there with enough capacity to reduce the costs of human Mars missions.
Lunar resources won't make any difference for a longer time than that. Really, it makes no sense to go down to our Moon for fuels to get to Mars: by the time you've used rockets to land on and take off from the Mooon, you've used far more than it would take to go right from LEO to Mars. Even if there were refined fuels sitting there, it makes no sense, in any realistic astronauatical sense.
Really... old news. Read Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars". The mission proposal is named "Mars Direct" for just that reason. Go directly to Mars, because there's no logic in going away to the Moon, supposedly "on the way to Mars".
No. Going to the Moon makes a lot of sense to learn how to live on another planetary body and how to engineer systems that are reliable enough for Mars expeditions.
That also makes no realistic sense. Mars and the Moon are more different in every particular, than Mars and Earth.
If you want to train or test for going to Mars, then do it on Earth.
A return voyage to the Moon takes about one week, a return voyage to Mars takes one year.
And a trip to Mars moons, if using Mars aerobraking to assist into Mars orbit, takes less fuel than going to our Moon. That means you carry more tools & equipment.
You also get fuels easily, right away on the first mission there, without building up a huge industrial infrastructure.
For going back to Earth orbit from Mars orbit and its moons, you use aerobraking at Earth, and again, it takes less fuel than going from our Moon back to Earth orbit.
Going to Mars' moons also gives us Mars into the bargain, even if you don't plan a manned landing there for a while. Added to this, in free space over Mars near its moons, you can make a habitat capable of supporting crews in Earth-like conditions, so they don't need to be rotated back to Earth at all. Put "tuna can" habs on the end of a truss, cover them in sandbags of regolith or concrete from regolith, and spin it for 1 G.
The Moon is useless, unless you want to explore it (not that I'm against it, but until we've got fuels in space). If there were concrete on the Moon, they'd mine it for water! On Mars moons, you dig down uder the regolith covering, and scoop up a bucket of stuff. Apply solar heat, and you get a bucket of water, that easy.
The say our Moon is the slagpile of the solar system, because its "resources" are so poor that an asteroid miner would toss them out as not economcal to process further.
I already linked to David L. Kuck's excellent article "the Diemos Water company".
From the archives here, here's another informative look.
These considerations for Mars' moons show another reason to fixate of Mars, and by-pass our Moon, at least until we've got a ready and large source of fuels in Earth orbit. AFAIC, find a NEA in a close solar orbit, and either process on-site, or drag the entire thing back to Earth orbit. Forget Mars until we've got fuels in orbit.
(For every payload we launch into LEO, which has an upper stage for kicking it out to GEO or beyond to interplanetary space, fully 45% of the mass we've put into LEO is the oxidiser in the upper stage.)
(Phobos and Diemos "Fear" and "Terror" (or Dread) were the two warhorses which pulled Mars' war chariot)
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2542
New Mars Forum Index > Interplanetary transportation > Phobos and Deimos - The importance of Mars's moons to exploration
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2542
See also neofuel.com
Nope. The treaty simply says Mars can not be appropriated by occupation, just as Antarctic bases do not justify claims of sovereignty. Occupation is not prohibited, neither are habs or colonies.
It's specifically said that anyone who puts or builds something there must maintain control over it. They may not refuse reasonable requests for entrance from anyone else, but a certain small area around anything you've placed there is under your control.
Courts will agree that maintaining control entails a certain amount of control over who wanders in & around your site.
You could probably evict squatters, if they simply move in and take over.
Another important point is that as they say "posession is most of the law" In this case, it means that if you're there, you're the law. Anyone who has problems with the way you run things, needs to be there to do anything about it.
First off, it needs to be established for certainty by all that using the Moon as a "jumping off point" for Mars is nonsense. Forget about it; it makes no sense what-so-ever, not even in a tabloid article which is where the silly idea usually comes from.
Not for fueling, not for a launching point, not for comparative science and training for going to Mars.
Mars is The Object. Other than Mars, the rest of the solar system is just one big mine. Only Earth and Mars, Terraformed or not, can be a Home.
Completely ignoring space colonies.
How can Mars be a home -or how can we say that for sure, if we don't know a bit about low-G living, what sorts of harmful adaptations there may be? What about the near complete lack of radiation shielding on the surface? the uncertainty of it being able to hold onto any atmosphere we might be able to give it?
The space colony studies of the '70s established that easily foreseable technologies can build habitable volumes anywhere in the solar system given the resourcess which are available free anywhere there are asteroids, comets, small moons. No questions about varying G, because we can build them to Earth normal. No questions about radiation, because we can shield them.
We can also build them for habitation ASAP, with a fraction of the effort required for terraforming a planet (if such is even possible), or even establishing a large habitation on Mars in domes or underground. Comparatively sized habitation, in more favorable conditions can be made in space habitats of any varying size, easier than any inferior habitation can be had on a planet.
Of course this doesn't apply to anyone whose work in space is on Mars. Research bases on the surface, etc, yes, but the largest scale need for habitation will be in space, for the infrastructure that's in space, which enables everything else.
OTOH, I agree that Mars is the next biggest object of study, because of the question of whether it held or holds life. We need a permanent human presence there, with specialist scientists on their own two feet, supported by a robust in-space transportation and resources acquisition infrastructure.
It's also desirable to focus on Mars, because it's politically viable to do so. It's not at all right to say that we don't need to get back to the Moon to stay and permanently for study, but the short-attention-span public and politicians don't understand that. Mars is a big visible politically popular sexy target.
If we get a robust Mars exploration program, we certainly get the Moon too, while the reverse is not as certain.
The key is ices in asily accessible inner solar system space. This must mean either NEAs or Mars' moons, if they're assayed as holding as much water and other ices as they seem to. With Mars' moons, we get the whole inner solar system and a robust exploration effort on Mars, supported by a Mars orbiting long-term habitation base. Completely remove aany supply limitations around Mars, and remove any health reasons for cycling trained and experioenced Mars explorers back to Earth, because they have perfectly fine habitation in the Mars orbiting habitats.
(Not my own idea: plagiarized from Dr. Brian O'Leary who suggested early on, that before we even try to set foot on Mars, we need to establish water mining operations on its moons.
See also
[url=http://spacefuture.com/archive/the_deimos_water_company.shtml]D L Kuck, May 1997, "The Deimos Water Company", Presented at Space Manufacturing II, SSI, Princeton. 8 May 1997
http://spacefuture.com/archive/the_deim … pany.shtml
[/url]
The trouble is that won't work really, Orion requires very specially built warheads. You can't just take one off a missile, put a fuse on it, and throw it out the back.
I wasn't aware that anyone was saying any such thing. It's obvious that an industry of manufacturing and supplying the specially built "pulse unit" primaries is needed. Pu from weapons is remanufactured.
I think the discussion of a ground-launched nuclear pulse ship is wasteful (of discussion). Unless and until you can guarantee absolutely clean bombs (and even then the political will to use it will be scarce) it's irrelevant.
As well, I remember some discussion from G.Dyson's book about technical problems with the ground launch: the biggest problem, paradoxically, is what happens if a bomb doesn't go off.
Space-only use relaxes many issues: Absolutely no pollution issues, if it's fired only above the Van Allen belts. Firing rate drops to only one per 10+ seconds, maybe slower. It never made sense to me to use the same exact stage of ship for ground-space travel, as for interplanetary travel.
The way I see it, is that if you're going to get political clout to use any sort of nuclear upper stage, for a ship massing ~500 + tons, you might as well go back to the Orion 10 meter HLV sectional lifted, space assembled ship.
According to NASA Marshall, the most difficult technical problems are tossing kegs aft of the ship every twenty seconds or so, building and man-rating a system of shock absorbers on such a scale, and re-greasing the pusher plate between pulses. (If you don't agree with their appraisal, you're free to publish countervailing ideas, but you'll need to get them through the peer-review process before your objections are taken too seriously)
I do agree that the best way to use it seems to be the Mag-Orion. The mag sails need to be worked on too.
It seems as if any nuclear upper stage with even close to this kind of performance (100+km/sec delta-V, ~45% of the starting mass being payload) needs some serious breakthroughs before even getting out of the laboratory-curiosity phase of R&D.
Yes, we'll get flak about thousands of nuclear explosives in space. They're NOT weapons!, and treaties are made to be altered, especially by more than one signatory. That's the purpose of treaties.
Excessively nuclear-phobic objections don't concern me either. They're going to protest a completely peaceful multinationally approved, funded and staffed mission, which also happens to completely remove several hundred kilos of weapons-grade fissionable fuels from the planet forever??!? (I'd like to see how they spin it to get around that paradox, and it's even better since Russia and the US have decommissioned a lot of warheads, and it looks like Breeder reactors are being built, which will furnish another whole industry which produces Pu.
Concerns of landing it are irrelevant also. Again, you don't use the same ship for the two very different travel needs.
OTOH, the original ground-launch concepts sacrificed some payload, jettisoned the pusher plate & shock absorbers and empty magazines during atmosphere entry, and exposed landing legs and rockets for the landing ship. Other ships in the convoy which aren't landing, furnished ground-space craft. The landing ship set down a complete finished heavy-duty and fully provisioned research base, in one shot directly from the Earth's surface to Mars (or where ever it's going)
It seems doubtful that this would be any help.
If you could get antimatter to go "BOOM!" any better than a typical old fashioned fission bomb, and if it's more compact and cheaper than an a-bomb (extremely doubtful) it might make sense for an Orion ship.
Important note: the way this would work is not far away from the original Orion: the bomb's prompt explosion doesn't reach the ship. It's just a trigger to energize a plasma made from some ordinary matter. An antimatter bomb, if feasible, would only replace the fission bomb
For the material to be flashed into plasma, tungsten or plastics were some of the things looked at, depending on the velocity/mass you want in the resulting plasma. Some sort of plastic is handy, because it can be made in-situ from planetary/asteroid ices (or even the crew's own biological wastes...) In the original 1950s Orion, the propellant to be flashed by the bomb is up to 2/3 of the mass of the "thrust bombs" carried and ejected aft by the ship.
.
RedStreak Dec 16, 2007
... how the HELL do you latch onto something moving a couple hundred miles an hour faster than you without sheer luck and survive...in less than a dozen pieces
I suspect something similar to the lower end of the rotavator could be used: Reel the lower end out as it approaches rendezvous time, and reel it back in to extend the time available.
Above all, don't even try, if you can't cut your approach speed down to only maybe a few tens of meters/sec, instead of hundreds of km/hr.
Lots easier than trapping on a pitching carrier deck, at night, in bad weather, during a battle.
I suspect that the lower end of the hypersonic skyhook could look a lot like the helo landing deck on a warship. As it sits while waiting for an incoming craft, two sets of cables lie along the edges of the pad (fore & aft, port & starboard. The incoming craft lets out a cable with a hook. When the hook touches down, the cables along the 4 edges of the pad contract into the center, capturing the hook. The helo pilot applies positive collective pitch, while the cable underneath is reeled down, and the landing ear are trapped.
Navy pilots rely on this for their lives, navies to win a battle or the war, and their nation's survival.
The hypersonic skyhook may be looked at as a "cheat" to orbit, like "zero stages" such as a horizontal track along the ground: NASA has seen that if you accelerate a spaceplane horizontally up to mach .8 before firing the rockets, you decrease the fuel to reach LEO by ~30 %. Toss in airbreathing (not even necessarily a scramjet), and an upper stage like the hypersonic skyhook, and you've got a spaceplane that's effectively SSTO HTOHL, without even needing full orbital delta-V or thermal protection.
Each addition to the basic spaceplane is incapable of getting it up alone, but each applies its own strengths, and helps out where it can.
Another nice thing about the hypersonic skyhook, is that you don't need unobtanium like nanotubes. Kevlar is not too far away from what's needed.
To those who seem surprised to see continued reasoned debate about saving the HST:
Please show where in a reputable source, we can see figures backing the assertions (contrary to many other sources from qualified observers) that the HST servicing missions will be so horrendously expensive.
Please show also where the idea comes from that a HST servicing mission is so very hazardous to the Shuttle crews. Specifically, show where qualified writers and the many NASA engineers retract their statements or where good data is presented contradicting the fears that it's too dangerous to fly to the HST.
Also this caught my attention.
> The number one question I have for the Riberioites: So we service
Hubble one more time. Then what? What happens when Hubble inevitibly
starts to fail again? ...There are some in NASA even writing studies for
ANOTHER servicing mission past this one. Where does it stop? When is
just one more one too many? ...And if there is such a limit, why not this
one?
I thought it's been known for a long time, that exactly 2 more Shuttle missions are all that's been talked about. What have I missed? Another one to raise it a bit?
Why not this one? Becaause the hardware is finished, and ready to go, the Shuttle is ready to fly again, and only 2 more flights extend it possibly past 2015 while there isn't a hope of a replacement by that time or anytime shortly after that, where the ISS needs more than 20. Because safety reasons which have been endlessly cited by NASA managers and administrators are nonsensical.
Wall Street Journal Blasts Hubble Desertion Decision
February 24, 2004
For further information about the Mars Society, visit our website at
http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org.
In an article printed in the Wall Street Journal February 20, WSJ
science editor Sharon Begley blasted NASA Administrator Sean
O'Keefe's decision to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope.
Begley's article was based on interviewing numerous scientists,
astronauts, congressmen, and engineers, including Mars Society
president Robert Zubrin. In the course of these interviews she
assembled an overwhelming case showing that the Hubble desertion
decision is unjustified.
Begley's article requires one point of clarification. The
information refuting O'Keefe's contention that ISS missions are safer
than Hubble missions which Zubrin supplied Begley were not Zubrin's
own calculations, but NASA calculations supplied to him by brave
Shuttle program engineers in defiance of a gag order from NASA
headquarters. Other NASA engineers have also chosen to defy O'Keefe
to in order to provide the public with accurate information on this
issue; and a set of NASA documents carrying similar information to
some of that published by Zubrin was posted with the authors' names
removed on the New York Times website in association with an article
on Hubble by Times science reporter Dennis Overbye on February 7.
It is unfortunate that Mr. O'Keefe has decided that it within his
purview as a manager to insist that NASA engineers withhold analysis
that does not support his opinions. It was precisely such managerial
insistence on dictating technical reality to engineers that prevented
any effective action to avert the Shuttle Columbia tragedy. This
illegitimate exercise of management authority was harshly condemned
afterwards by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. In response,
Mr. O'Keefe pledged to discontinue the practice. Apparently, that
has not occurred.
Some excerpts from Begley's Wall Street Journal article follows.
Crews May Be Able To Rescue the Hubble With Little Safety Risk
By Sharon Begley
20 February 2004
The Wall Street Journal
WHEN NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced that the space shuttle
would make no more flights to the Hubble Space Telescope, he
condemned Hubble to a lingering death from loss of battery power and
failing gyroscopes, probably by 2007. Because Mr. O'Keefe said his
decision was based on safety, stunned Hubble fans were left in a
bind. It's tough to argue that solving even the most profound
mysteries of the cosmos is worth the lives of a shuttle crew.
The cost, however, may not be that high. Engineers inside and outside
NASA, including former astronauts, have lit into the claim that
Hubble-bound flights are riskier than those to the International
Space Station, the only destination Mr. O'Keefe wants on the
shuttle's itinerary. His reasoning: Only the station can provide
a "safe haven" where a shuttle crew could await rescue or repair
potentially lethal damage incurred during launch, as happened to
Columbia a year ago when foam tore into its skin.
That argument isn't washing in the tightknit community of former
astronauts. "Give me a break," says one who is now in
academia. "You're not going to launch the shuttle again unless you
think you've fixed the problem that took out Columbia, so that one
[requiring safe haven] won't happen again. What will get you next
time is a problem that keeps you from reaching ISS at all. That makes
a mission to Hubble no riskier than one to the ISS."
IT MIGHT EVEN be safer. NASA's own analyses show that a greater risk
comes from impacts by micrometeor or orbital debris. The station's
orbit is riskier on this score. Using NASA data, aeronautical
engineer Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, calculates
that on the last shuttle flight to the station the probability of a
fatal collision with a micrometeor or space junk was 1 in 250; on the
last mission to Hubble, it was 1 in 414.
Hubble-bound missions are also safer as measured by the risk of
engine failure during launch. Hubble missions usually carry a lighter
payload than most station missions. They, therefore, need less thrust
to get anyplace,which affects their abort capability.
For a station-bound mission to execute an abort-to-orbit, in which
the shuttle parks in orbit while a safe landing plan is worked out,
all three main engines must fire for 282 seconds, calculates Dr.
Zubrin. But for a Hubble mission to abort to orbit, the engines have
to fire for only 188 seconds. That's 94 more seconds of safety.
Hubble missions look even better if your goal is a return-to-launch-
site abort. Whatever its destination, the shuttle's main engines must
fire for no more than 232 seconds if it is to glide back to Cape
Canaveral. If its engines failed between 232 and 282 seconds, a
station-bound flight could not execute either kind of abort (to orbit
or to Florida), calculates Dr. Zubrin. That's a potentially deadly 50-
second window. But Hubble missions have the window from 188 to 232
seconds in which either abort can be performed.
"Safety is a red herring for politics and money," says the ex-
astronaut. "Engineers within NASA have let the agency down by not
coming forward to point out the flaws in this decision." …
One whispering campaign alleges that new ground-based telescopes can
make equally impressive discoveries and that Hubble's best years are
behind it
But the new telescopes will not observe in the many wavelengths
(especially ultraviolet) that Hubble does, and so will lack its
breadth. It's hard to top Hubble's record of discovery, from helping
to find a mysterious "dark energy" speeding up the universe's
expansion to spying the raw materials for planets around stars. And
with the spectrograph and camera the shuttle was supposed to deliver
in mid-2006, "Hubble's best years were going to be ahead of it," says
Dr. Beckwith.
There's one more oddity about Mr. O'Keefe's safety calculus. "If
we're afraid to fly to Hubble, what does that say about missions to
the moon and Mars that President Bush has called for?" asks Rep. Mark
Udall, Democrat of Colorado.
If we aren't going to be serious about those destinations, the
rationale for shuttle flights to the space station -- learning how
long-duration spaceflight affects human physiology -- is pointless.
**** **** ****
A complete discussion and strategy meeting for the fight to save
Hubble will be held at the 7th International Mars Society Convention,
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, August 19-22.
For further information about the Mars Society, visit our website at
http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org.
__
NASA Documents Show Hubble Missions Safer than ISS Flights
Feb. 29, 2004
Documents leaked by NASA engineers show that the agency's own
calculations predict a greater safety hazard on ISS flights than
Hubble missions. This directly contradicts statements made by
Administrator O'Keefe that the agency had evaluated Hubble missions
as substantitally more dangerous. The "Hubble missions are too risky"
line had been used by Mr. O'Keefe as the rationale for abandoning
missions to the space telescope while continuing flights to the ISS.
Only two Shuttle flights to Hubble (one in 2005 or 2006 and one circa
2010) are needed to make the space telescope operational through the
year 2015. Over twenty Shuttle flights are needed to complete the
ISS.
The NASA documents may be downloaded through the links at
http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org.
The Mars Society welcomes information transmitted to it by NASA
personnel seeking to protect the agency's greatest scientific program
by supplying the public with truthful data. Mr. O'Keefe has no
engineering or scientific education or experience, and his position
that engineering analysis that does not support his opinions be
suppressed is not legitimate. If you send us documents that the
public and lawmakers need to see bearing on this matter, we will
publish them. We can also put you in touch with leading journalists
from major news organizations who will present your data while
keeping your identity confidential.
Fight for Hubble. Fight for NASA. Fight for Science. Fight for Truth.
Mobilize NOW to Save Hubble!
March 21, 2005
Over the next few weeks, a series of hearings and meetings between Congress and NASA will determine the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope. It is imperative that everyone concerned with the future of science and the American space program mobilize now to save this great observatory.
The background of the matter is as follows: Built, launched, repaired, and successively upgraded at total cost of some $4 billion, the Hubble Space Telescope has made numerous important discoveries about the nature and structure of the universe. It is the most powerful instrument in the history of astronomy, and far and away the most productive spacecraft that NASA has ever launched. Because it orbits above the atmosphere, which both smears light and blocks out major portions of the spectrum, the Hubble can see things that no ground-based telescope can see, or will ever see. It took decades of hard work by very dedicated people to create Hubble, and an equivalent space-based replacement is decades away. In contrast to the general run of meaningless Shuttle missions carrying silly science fair experiments, the Shuttle flights to Hubble stand as epochal achievements in the history of humanity's search for truth. Indeed, if one considers the moral significance of the scientific enterprise to our society and culture, Hubble emerges not just as NASA's finest work, but as perhaps the highest expression of the human creative spirit in the 20th Century.
At a cost of $167 million, two new instruments, the Widefield Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrometer have been developed and built which, once installed on Hubble, would together triple the instrument's sensitivity. Accordingly, NASA had scheduled the SM4 Shuttle mission, which would both add these capabilities and perform certain other maintenance tasks that would extend the life of Hubble through at least 2010. Since under the new space policy, the Shuttles are scheduled to remain operational through 2010, a final Shuttle mission to Hubble could occur at that time, allowing one last replacement of the telescopes batteries and gyros and a reboost of its orbit, thereby making it functional beyond 2015. If SM4 is not flown, however, Hubble's aging gyroscopes would put the space observatory out of commission by 2007. Incredibly, on January 16, 2004, the technically illiterate former NASA Administrator Sean. O'Keefe announced that he had decided to allow that to happen.
Mr. O'Keefe justified his decision by claiming that Shuttle missions to Hubble had to cease because they were unsafe, since, in contrast to missions to the ISS (to which, under the president's policy about 25 more Shuttles would be flown), Hubble missions offer no alternative safe-haven to the crew. This argument was basically nonsense, since the ISS cannot house a complete shuttle crew for long anyway, and moreover there are numerous other features of ISS missions that make them more dangerous than Hubble flights. For example, Hubble missions depart the Cape flying east-southeast, which means that in the event of an abort, the crew can ditch in tropical waters where their survival chances would be much better than in the frigid North Atlantic and Arctic oceans overflown by the northeast flying ISS missions. Hubble missions also take off much more lightly laden than ISS missions, which makes them safer, as less performance is required of the engines to make it to orbit. Furthermore, the micrometeorite and orbital debris danger in ISS orbits is estimated by NASA to be about 60% greater in ISS orbit than in Hubble orbit.
So NASA's own risk analysis did not support Mr. O'Keefe's claim of higher Hubble mission risk, and while the Administrator declined to include such information in his briefings to congressional committees, NASA personnel were quick to leak the relevant data to the press. Mr. O'Keefe countered by ordering high- level NASA officials who were known to be ardent supporters of Hubble to take public stands supporting his decision. The disgusting spectacle of bureaucratic self-humiliation that followed was more reminiscent of a Stalin-era show trial than a technical debate, and appropriately, only excited derision in the press. Mr. O'Keefe then argued that regardless of the actual risk, the recommendations of Admiral Gehman's Columbia Accident Investigation Board precluded a Shuttle flight to Hubble, but in a letter to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D- MD), a strong Hubble supporter, this claim was rejected out of hand by Gehman himself. Admiral Gehman's response provided Mr. O'Keefe with an exit opportunity from his policy blunder, but the NASA Administrator decided not to take it. Not only that, but when Sen. Mikulski and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) ordered a National Academy of Science review of the matter, Mr. O'Keefe responded by saying that while he welcomed an NAS review, he would not change his decision regardless of anything they said.
As a final dodge, Mr. O'Keefe then announced that he sincerely wanted to save Hubble, but just could not bring himself to risk human life to do so. Accordingly, he would request $1.9 billion in new funds to develop robots capable of performing the mission. This proposal was very disingenuous. A Hubble upgrade mission requires the coordinated effort of seven highly trained and superbly skilled astronauts using a spacecraft and other equipment that has been specifically designed and extensively tested as suitable to this purpose. In contrast, there isn't a robot on this planet that can change out an overhead kitchen lighting fixture. NASA has a system of technology readiness levels (TRLs) that it uses to determine the appropriateness of including a technology on a mission. According to this system, it would be unacceptable to employ a technology in a mission critical role on an important spacecraft any piece of hardware that was rated lower than TRL 7. At best, the robots touted by Mr. O'Keefe as candidates for Hubble repair were at TRL 4, and their advocacy for such a function represented an arbitrary and complete abandonment of NASA mission planning discipline.
In December 2004, the NAS-National Research Council committee reported back, and rejected the robotic repair, calling for reinstating SM4 in its place. Mr. O'Keefe subsequently announced his resignation, but then, before departing, submitted a NASA budget containing no funds for either SM4 or robotic repair. Instead, Mr. O'Keefe requested $300 million to develop a special spacecraft to deorbit Hubble, i.e. crash it into the ocean in a controlled fashion. This proposal is remarkable for its irrationality. NASA calculates that if Hubble were to re-enter without direction, there is a 1/10,000 chance that the resulting debris would strike someone. That works out to a probability of one life saved per $3 trillion spent. If life-saving is the mission, $300 million could do a lot more good spent on tsunami relief, body armor for the troops, highway safety barriers, childhood vaccinations, swimming lessons, take your pick.
Humanitarian and scientific budgets cannot be directly compared, because they serve different objectives. However the proposed Hubble deorbit budget is NOT a scientific expense; its purpose is to save lives, and thus it must be considered a humanitarian expense, and judged accordingly. A reasonable estimate is that one life is saved for every $3,000 spent on Tsunami relief. At that rate, the decision to waste $300 million in potentially useful humanitarian funds on deorbiting Hubble amounts to the willful killing of roughly 100,000 people – mostly children. It is irresponsible, irrational, and immoral in the extreme.
The damage done to NASA and the new space initiative by Mr. O'Keefe's irrational actions has been substantial, and threatens to become much worse and long lasting if his decision is allowed to stand. Effectively, by choosing the most valuable part of the old space program and selecting it for destruction as collateral damage of implementing the new, the former Administrator has branded the President's vision with the mark of Cain. Opponents of the new policy have blamed the loss of the space telescope on the Moon-Mars initiative, and indeed, it is difficult to take seriously the claims of scientific purpose of an agency which chooses to abandon its capabilities so flippantly. Why should NASA receive more funds to build new space telescopes when, like a spoiled child bored with a two-hour old toy, it willfully throws away the one it already has? And how can anyone believe that an agency which is afraid to embrace the risks involved in launching astronauts to Hubble will ever be ready to send humans to Mars? Congress has spent many billions funding NASA to create the hardware needed to implement the Shuttle/Hubble program, only to be confronted with a NASA Administrator who refuses to use it. If Mr. O'Keefe's decision to desert Hubble is not reversed, how can Congress know that after they spend further tens of billions for human flight systems to the Moon and Mars, that the agency leadership won't get cold feet again?
Americans committed to a sane, moral, and courageous space policy need to mobilize now to save Hubble. Everyone should call their own Senators and Congressional representatives, ask to speak to their legislative aides, and demand that the SM4 mission to save and upgrade Hubble be reinstated, and that not a penny of the taxpayers' money be spent on the immoral Hubble de-orbit mission. If NASA has funds available for humanitarian purposes, those funds should be spent to save lives, not wasted to validate the capricious decisions of a Philistine careerist bureaucrat who has since moved on to greener pastures.
Given the decision to maintain the Shuttle flying in a given year, the incremental cost of flying an additional Shuttle mission such as SM4 is only about $100 million. Instead of stupidly and heartlessly wasting $300 million to destroy Hubble, we should use $100 million to save and upgrade this gem of science and civilization, and spend the other $200 million to save the lives of tens of thousands of destitute children far more worthy of our charity than the Hubble deorbit program. Call congress and tell them so!
All congressmen and Senators can be reached through the Capitol switchboard number, 303-224-3121. In addition to calling your own representatives, you should also call the office of House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) [202-225-3665, 202-225- 1891 (fax), and Senate Space Subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) 202-224-5922, 202-224-0776 (FAX). Emails should also be sent to President George Bush at president@whitehouse.gov.
For further background explaining why O'Keefe's arguments for deserting Hubble have absolutely no merit, an article written by Mars Society president Dr. Robert Zubrin and published in Space News February 9, 2004, is reproduced below.
Don't Desert Hubble
Robert Zubrin
Space News
February 9, 2004
On January 16th, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced that
he had decided to cancel all future Space Shuttle missions to the Hubble
Space Telescope, including SM4, the nearly-ready-to-go flight that
would have installed the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Wide
Field Camera 3 instruments. This decision came atop an overall policy
shift by the Bush administration to phase out the Shuttle and
International Space Station (ISS) commitments by 2010, thereby
clearing the way to redeploy their budgets towards supporting human
exploration of the Moon and Mars. While the general redirection of
NASA's human spaceflight program from Earth orbital activities
towards planetary exploration was a valuable and long-overdue step,
canceling the Hubble upgrade mission was a huge mistake.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been the most scientifically
productive spacecraft in history. Through Hubble, we have observed
directly the planetary cometary impacts that drive the evolution of
life, witnessed the birth of stars that make all life possible, and
measured the size and age of the universe itself. Because of Hubble,
we now know that ordinary matter is a very small part of the universe
and that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing
down as previously thought – thereby revealing a new and
unexpected force of nature. The astronaut missions that have made this
possible stand as epic achievements in the chronicles of humanity's
search for truth.
Now we have a chance to push further. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
and Wide Field Camera 3 designed to bring the Hubble to its full
potential have already been built and tested at a cost of $167
million, and promise an enormous scientific return upon delivery to
orbit. With the help of these instruments, Hubble would be able probe
deeper into space and time, helping to reveal the processes that
governed the origin of the universe and that will determine its
ultimate fate. How can the decision abort such a program possibly be
justified?
Certainly not on the basis of cost. If the Bush plan were to stand
down the Shuttle immediately, and save the $24 billion required to
operate it through 2010 so as to initiate the Moon/Mars program this
year with substantial funding, that would be one thing. But given the
decision to return the Shuttle to flight, canceling the Hubble
upgrade would only save a pittance. It takes about $4 billion per
year to maintain the standing army of engineers and technicians that
support the Shuttle program, but it only costs an additional $100
million or so to fly five Shuttles in a given year instead of four.
Thus the additional cost to the taxpayer to fly both SM4 and a
subsequent flight a few years later to replace the Hubble's
batteries and gyros and reboost it to a higher orbit where it could be
functional well into the next decade would only be about $200
million, or less than one percent of the Shuttle program's budget
over its remaining life. From a financial point of view, the decision
to abandon the Hubble upgrade while continuing Shuttle flights
amounts to throwing out the baby while keeping the bathwater.
Safety arguments won't wash either; if the Shuttle is safe enough
to fly to the ISS, it's safe enough to go to Hubble. It is true then
when flying to the ISS, the crew has a safe haven, so that if they
should discover damage to the Shuttle's thermal protection tile
system, they could retire to the space station and survive for a
short time while they wait for retrieval by a Russian Soyuz capsule.
In this scenario, ISS missions would possess a safety features that
Hubble missions lack. But tile damage during launch is not the only
source of Shuttle flight risk. According to most analysis, the
greatest source of flight risk stems from the possibility fatal
impacts by micrometeor or orbital debris (MMOD). ISS orbits are much
more hazardous in this respect than Hubble orbits. For example, on
STS-113, the last Shuttle station flight, the calculated probability
of loss of vehicle and crew by MMOD was 1/250. In contrast, the last
Hubble servicing mission (STS-109) had a much lower calculated MMOD
probability of 1/414.
After MMOD, it is believed that the greatest risk faced by Shuttle
flights stems from the possibility of engine failure during launch.
Because Hubble missions lift off with a much lighter payload than
most ISS missions, they are can deal with this danger much more
effectively. For example, in order to be able to abort to orbit on an
ISS mission such as STS-113 (Endeavor), all three Shuttle main
engines must fire for a full 282 seconds before one cuts out. In
contrast, on Hubble missions such as STS-103 (Discovery), only 188 s
of full three-engine operation is required. This lower full-power
time requirement for Hubble missions is a critical safety advantage,
because the maximum time that either ISS or Hubble missions can
attempt a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort is about 232 s. Thus
Hubble missions have a 50 second overlap during which either a RTLS
or orbital abort is possible, whereas ISS missions have a 50 s gap in
which neither is possible.
If the Shuttle cannot perform either an RTLS or orbital orbit, it
might be able to reach a transoceanic landing site, but in all
probability will have to splash down in the ocean. When they depart
the Cape, Hubble missions fly east-southeast, and they thus have the
possibility to ditch in warm tropical waters. In contrast, ISS
flights leave the Cape traveling northeast, and their crews face the
bleak prospect of aborts into the frigid waters of the North
Atlantic, where their chances for survival would be much less. Thus,
while no true quantitative engineering analysis has been done to
establish whether and to what extent individual Shuttle flights to
ISS are more or less risky than individual Hubble missions, there is
good reason to believe that it is Hubble flights that offer greater
safety.
However, if we include the consideration that only two Shuttle
flights would be needed to make Hubble operational through 2015,
while at least 20 missions will be needed to complete the ISS, it
becomes apparent that the risk associated with the latter program is
at least an order of magnitude greater.
A comparison of mission risk associated with Shuttle flights to ISS
and Hubble is presented in the table below.
Table: Comparison of Shuttle Hubble and ISS Mission Risk
Feature--------------------ISS---------------Hubble---Safer Option
Haven on Orbit? -----------Yes----------------No----------ISS
Micrometeor Danger
(MMOD)---------1/250 (STS-113)----1/414 (STS-109)---Hubble
Ocean Abort Site----North Atlantic---Equatorial Waters---Hubble
No Return
(RTLS) time --------232 s(STS-113)---231 s (STS-103)---Equal
Abort to Orbit time--282 s (STS-113)--188 s (STS-103)--Hubble
Press to MECO
(1 engine out)------391 s(STS-113)------265 s (STS-103)---Hubble
Press to MECO
(2 engine out)------425 s(STS-113)----380 s (STS-103)---Hubble
# of Program Flights Needed-->20---------------2------Hubble
* Press to MECO means time required at full three-engine power before
the planned orbit can be achieved.
Furthermore, consider this: Under the new space policy, the President
intends to ask Congress to spend billions of dollars to develop
technology to enable human Moon and Mars missions. Yet Congress has
just spent $167 million to develop the instruments for SM4, only to
be told by the NASA Administrator that he is now afraid to fly the
Shuttle to deliver them. If such behavior is accepted, what guarantee
can lawmakers have that after they spend billions to develop manned
Moon or Mars exploration hardware, a future NASA administrator might
not also get cold feet? It is difficult to understand how an agency
which is too risk-adverse to undertake a Shuttle mission to Hubble
could possibly be serious in considering a piloted mission to the
Moon or Mars.
The decision to cancel the Hubble mission thus completely undermines
the President's call for human planetary exploration. Unless we
are willing to accept risks equal to, and in fact significantly
greater, than those required to upgrade the space telescope, human
explorers are not going to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else. And if
we are not going to engage in human interplanetary travel, then the
primary rationale for the Space Station program – learning about
the effects of long-duration spaceflight on human physiology – must be
brought into question as well.
The point is not that we should be blasé about risk. The point is
that there are certain things that require accepting risk to achieve,
and are worth the price that such a course will entail. The search
for truth, carried forward by necessarily perilous human activities
in space – whether at Hubble, or on Mars – is one of them.
Nothing great has ever been accomplished without courage. If we
abandon courage, we turn our back on all that has made our
civilization one worth celebrating.
In the face of massive public outrage about his decision,
Administrator O'Keefe has agreed to allow it to be reviewed by
Columbia Accident Investigation Board Chairman Admiral Hal Gehman.
Hopefully Gehman will rectify the situation. But if he does not, then
Congress will have to act. They will have to take action, because
ultimately the question of whether we do what it takes to keep our
eyes open upon the heavens is not one of the technicalities of
Shuttle flight safety, but of societal values.
The desertion of Hubble is an offense against science and
civilization. It represents a departure from the pioneer spirit, and
its ratification as policy would preclude any possibility of a human
future in space. It is an inexcusable decision, and it needs to be
reversed.
**** **** ****
Note added; March 21, 2005. Admiral Gehman did in fact answer the Senators' inquiry by stating that Hubble missions were no more dangerous than ISS missions. Mr. O'Keefe chose to ignore his answer.
So congress must act. To get congress to act, you must act. Call your representative and Senators today. 202-224-3121
A Letter from an Astronomer
Feb. 3, 2004
Since the start of the Mars Society's mobilization to defend Hubble,
we have been deluged with letters thanking us for our stand. With the
permission of the author, I decided to publish the one below, as it
contains important technical information that provides valuable
ammunition for those making the scientific case to save the space
telescope.
A special expert panel laying out the scientific and programmatic
necessity for saving Hubble will be included in the agenda of the 7th
International Mars Society Convention, to be held Aug 19-22 2004 at
the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago IL. Registration is now open at the
Mars Society website.
The letter follows.
Dear Dr. Zubrin;
I would first like to applaud the Mars Society's stance on HST. I am
one of many astronomers who first became interested in the science
through the exploration of the solar system and dreams of a human
future in space. Many of my colleagues are rabid supporters of human
spaceflight and the push to go to Mars. I myself traveled to
Hanksville , Utah with Jon Wiley and identified the area as a
candidate site for MDRS. You have many supporters in the astronomical
community who would agree with the statements in this newsletter.
I would like to emphasize one point which does not seem to find its
way into any of the arguments in support of HST, even from
astronomers well versed in the relevant technical issues. Much has
been made of the gap of five or six years between he projected demise
of HST and the planned launch of JWST, and the science lost in that
period of time. The loss is actually much greater.
The label "Next Generation Space Telescope" for JWST is misleading.
JWST is not a successor to HST. If anything, it is a succesor to the
recently launched Spitzer Space Telescope. It is entirely an infrared
instrument, and its capabilities overlap only slightly with those of
HST. Except for specialized, program-driven missions, the loss of HST
will mean the end of optical and UV astronomy in space for much of
the astronomical community. JWST will not be able to observe in these
regions of the spectrum.
Optical astronomy is still the largest segment of the community, and
provides the majority of our information about the local universe. I
do not wish to denigrate JWST. I work closely with one of the co-
investigators on its near-IR camera and do a great deal of public
outreach in connection with it. JWST will do exciting science, but it
is not the same science that HST is capable of doing. Abandoning HST
is not a temporary inconvenience, but rather a permanent and
crippling loss to astronomy. I hope that this point enters public
debate over the fate of the servicing mission.
Again, thank you for all of your efforts,
Patrick Young
Steward Observatory
Tucson, AZ
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all. To teach superstitions as truth is a most
terrible thing."
-Hypatia, Librarian of Alexandria (circa 400 AD)
_
Note by RZ; Young's citation of Hypatia in conjunction with the
threat to Hubble is interesting. Hypatia was the last of the great
classical neoplatonic philosopher mathematicians. She was murdered by
a mob of religious fanatics in 415 AD, an act which closed the career
of ancient science. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria
followed.
For further information about the Mars Society, visit our website at
http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org.
I'm willing to bet real money that the official position of the Mars Society is that anyone posting here is completely free to express anything that's contrary to the stated goals of the Mars Society.
To be taken seriously though, you will need to satisfy everyone else that your reasons are better than the reasons of the writers who say things contrary to you in Society publications. Simply stating a possition, restating it, and getting angry and abusive when anyone tries to call you on it doesn't cut it.
pardon me if this has been seen before in the ten pages of this topic. I briefly scanned through it, but didn't see any of the publications I'm going to reprint here.
Why We Must Defend Hubble
Robert Zubrin
President, Mars Society
February 1, 2004Last week, the Steering Committee of the Mars Society released a statement supporting the new Bush space initiative, but taking strong exception to the decision by NASA Administrator O'Keefe to cancel all future Space Shuttle missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, including SM4, the nearly-ready-to-go flight that would have installed the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Widefield Camera 3 instruments.
Since the release of that statement, I have received many communications congratulating the Mars Society for this stand, which several in the non-Mars science community characterized with words such as "unexpected but very welcome." A few space advocates, however, have written me, questioning why those whose primary concern is to further the human exploration and settlement of space should fight to save an astronomy project.
The answer to this is straightforward. We must defend Hubble because the abortion of the Hubble program is a crime against science.
Furthermore, the grounds given for deserting Hubble are irrational, and constitute a form of moral cowardice that if accepted as the basis of space policy, would absolutely prevent any human missions to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else.These points are explained in greater detail below.
1. A CRIME AGAINST SCIENCE: The Hubble Space Telescope is, as explained in more detail in the appended talking points, the most productive scientific program in human history. It has revolutionized astronomy, and made discoveries that have caused us to radically revise our concept of the nature of the universe. It is emblematic of our society's commitment to the search for truth. If you support that commitment - and we do - then you must defend Hubble.
2. DESERTING HUBBLE IS IRRATIONAL: Giving up on Hubble makes no sense. Given the commitment to continue flying the Shuttle program through 2010, adding the two Shuttle flights required to upgrade Hubble and then reboost it to make it operational through 2015 would only add about 1% to the Shuttle program's cost, while increasing its science return by several orders of magnitude. The safety argument given by Mr. O'Keefe for canceling Shuttle flights to Hubble while allowing them to ISS is also without rational basis. It is true that when flying to the ISS, the crew has a safe-haven on orbit, which is not available to Hubble flights. However Hubble missions leave the Cape flying east-southeast, while launches to ISS go northeast. Thus in the event of a launch abort, Hubble missions can ditch in warm tropical waters while ISS flights must come down in the frigid North Atlantic, where the crew's chances for survival would be much less.
Furthermore, because ISS flights take off with much heavier payloads than Hubble flights, they require full functionality of all three engines for nearly 100 seconds longer than Hubble missions if they are to perform an abort-to-orbit. This makes landing in the drink on ISS missions considerably more likely. Finally, NASA calculations show that the danger of fatal impacts by micrometeors and orbital debris to be over 60% greater on ISS missions than Hubble missions.
If we put this information together with the fact that only two Shuttle missions are needed to make Hubble operational for another decade, while over 20 are needed to complete the ISS, it is apparent that Mr. O'Keefe's assessment that the Hubble program poses greater risk than the ISS program is irrational.3. HUBBLE DESERTION PREVENTS HUMAN EXPLORATION: Desertion of Hubble discredits the human spaceflight program because Hubble is the one example to-date wherein the human spaceflight program can show more science return per dollar than robotic spacecraft. For example, Hubble, including its four Shuttle support missions to date, has cost about twice as much as the Galileo probe to Jupiter, but it has produced at least a hundred times the science return. Fleeing from Hubble is fleeing from the human spaceflight's program primary scientific accomplishment. The cost of retreat is much worse than that, because the space agency is now proposing to begin a program of human exploration to the Moon and Mars. Yet it is patently obvious that a human mission to the Moon or Mars cannot be done at a lower level of risk than the Shuttle mission to the Hubble. So, if we don't have the guts to go to Hubble, we are not going to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else. And if we are not going to engage in human interplanetary travel, then the primary rationale for the Space Station program -- learning about the effects of long-duration spaceflight on human physiology -- loses its foundation as well.
In the face of massive public outrage about his decision, Administrator O'Keefe has agreed to allow it to be reviewed by Columbia Accident Investigation Board Chairman Admiral Hal Gehman. Hopefully Gehman will rectify the situation. But if he does not, then Congress will have to act. They will have to take action, because ultimately the question of whether we rise to the challenge of the Hubble upgrade mission is not one of the technicalities of Shuttle flight safety, but of societal values.
If humans are to explore space, cowardice is not an option. It is not a matter of ignoring risks, but of facing them, and knowing the odds, bravely putting it on the line to do what has to be done. That attitude is the human quality known as courage. It has been the primary requirement for every significant achievement of humanity to date, and it will be the spirit necessary if we are to go to Mars.
So in every meeting with Congressmen from now on, our message must be to support the pioneer spirit through three key points:
* Fund the new space exploration initiative
* Set the program's sights on Mars
* Show that it is serious. No desertion of Hubble!The following talking points explaining the value of Hubble were sent to me by Mars Society members with extensive knowledge of astronomy.
Those wishing to gain a deeper knowledge of the Hubble program may wish to consult such excellent books as "Hubble: Mirror of the Universe" by Robin Kerrod (2003), or "Hubble Vision" by Carolyn Collins Petersen and John Brandt (1998).Hubble Space Telescope TALKING POINTS
Jason Held1. There are 1.36 million web pages that talk about Hubble. A telescope which sees to the very beginning of space and time is a popular American topic.
2. Hubble's current accomplishments
* Proved the existence of Black Holes.
* Clarified the reason for quasars (active galactic nuclei powered by black holes).
* Proved that gamma ray bursts come from distant galaxies in the early universe.
* Hubble was used in what may be one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time -that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, driven by an unknown force.
* Hubble has been used to watch the process of the death of stars and imaged solar systems in the process of formation. In this sense, Hubble is Humanity's only Time Machine
* Provided spectacular views of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet's collision with Jupiter.
* Gave new understanding of the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus, as well as the first detailed images of Pluto and its moon, Charon.
* Discovered "Northern Lights" on Saturn, Jupiter, and Ganymede.3. Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) are both COMPLETED products, ready for installation and designed specifically on Hubble. They are designed specifically to plug into Hubble, not the ISS. Configuring the ISS to accept these instruments will require money to configure ISS to accept them. How much will this cost?
4. With WFC3 and COS, Hubble can conduct valid, useful, and relevant science until 2010. WFC3 will:
* Study the formation of galaxies in IR and UV from 500Myr.
* WFC3 is unique in that it looks at a large patch of the sky in good detail
* Specifically missioned to study the birth and death of stars
* Detection of redshift galaxies, offering insights to galaxy evolution
* 4-12x gain over current instrumentation (WFC2)5. ¡K.and COS will:
* Fine point UV resolution for faint UV targets (not available on next generations of space telescopes), perfect for distant quasars
* Spectroscopy to study ages of deep space objects, dynamics, chemical enrichment of gasses, as well as stellar and planetary origins
* 20 times more sensitive in UV than previous Hubble instruments6. If Hubble is retired early we also risk losing a large amount of information because there will be no comparison between Hubble and the James Web Space Telescope. This loss in continuity will make comparisons between the platforms far more difficult and thus lots of information will never be found.
Accomplishments (from http:hubble.nasa.gov/overview): Every day, Hubble archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world.
As of March 2000, Hubble has:
* Taken more than 330,000 separate observations.
* Observed more than 25,000 astronomical targets.
* Created a data archive of over 7.3 terabytes. (That is like completely filling a PC every day for 10 years.)
* Provided data for more than 2,663 scientific papers."The observations from a single day would fill an encyclopedia."
-Hubble.Nasa.Gov"Not since Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens in 1610 has any event so changed our understanding of the universe as the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope"
-NASA WebsiteHUBBLE'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS SO FAR
Peter Detterline* It is the most scientifically productive craft in the history of space exploration.
* Taken more than 330,000 separate observations.
* Observed more than 25,000 astronomical targets.
* Created a data archive of over 7.3 terabytes. (That is like completely filling a PC every day for 10 years).
* Provided data for more than 2,663 scientific papers.
* Every day, Hubble archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world.
* Using images from the craft, scientists have determined the age of the universe, about 13.7 billion years.
* Hubble discovered that a mysterious energy, called the dark force, is causing all of the objects in the universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force is still poorly understood.
* Hubble has provided information crucial to understanding the structure of our universe.
* Hubble continually tests physical theories and reveals new phenomena throughout the universe, especially through the investigation of extreme environments.
* Hubble helps scientists understand how both dark and luminous matter determine the geometry and fate of the universe.
* Hubble instruments have helped us understand the dynamic and chemical evolution of galaxies and stars and the exchange of matter and energy among stars and the interstellar medium.
* Hubble has expanded our knowledge of how stars and planetary systems form together.
* Hubble has provided detailed images that assist us in understanding the nature and history of our solar system, and what makes Earth similar to and different from, its planetary neighbors.ADVANCEMENTS WITH CONTINUED OPERATIONS
* There are observations that can only be done with the Hubble. For example: Hubble's ACS instrument is the only facility that can be used to search for such faint objects as asteroid binaries.
* ACS doubled Hubble¡¦s field of view and collects data ten times faster than the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, the telescope's earlier surveying instrument. The new Wide Field Camera 3 is three times better than the ACS.
* The two new cameras (WFC3 and COS) are already built at a cost of $167 million dollars, and probably could not be adapted for use with any other telescope. They would make Hubble 10 times more capable of examining the early universe.Wide Field Camera 3 specifics
* As revealed by recent HST and other studies, the spectral characteristics of galactic populations pushes the discovery space into the red and blue extremes of HST capability. These are the regions that WFC3 is designed to explore.
* Designed to study the controlling mechanisms of star formation in galaxies and to learn how to interpret the flood of tantalizing data on very distant galaxies. This provides important clues for galaxy evolution.
* WFC3 is particularly well suited to the detection and study of several important classes of high redshift galaxies.
* It is optimized to study the astrophysics of the interstellar medium, including star forming regions, stellar winds, supernovae remnants, planetary nebulae, and other interstellar material.
* This will be a prime instrument for studying weather patterns and climatic variations on the outer planets of our solar system.
* WFC3 offers the prospect of measuring water and ices on Mars and the outer planetary satellites. Observations by HST complement measurements made by spacecraft since the latter can only carry out local measurements and are less well suited to follow seasonal variations.Cosmic Origins Spectrograph specifics
* The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will bring the diagnostic power of ultraviolet spectroscopy to bear on such fundamental issues as the ionization and baryon content of the intergalactic medium and the origin of large-scale structure in the Universe; the ages, dynamics, and chemical enrichment of galaxies; and stellar and planetary origins.
* It has the ability to make quantitative measurements of physical parameters such as the total mass, distribution, motions, temperatures, and composition of matter in the Universe. Such data are essential to draw a complete picture of the Universe.
* COS gives HST the greatest possible grasp of faint UV targets, a capability perhaps not available from future space-based observatories for decades.
* COS can determine the abundances and kinematics of hot gas in galaxy halos, the impact of violent starbursts and supernovae on interstellar and intergalactic environments.
* COS can determine the ages of globular clusters, which can be used to reconcile the ages of the oldest stars in galaxies with the age of the Universe.
* The origins of stellar and planetary systems will be investigated by studying the physical processes and chemical abundances in the cold interstellar medium.For further information on the Mars Society, visit our website at
http://www.marssociety.org]www.marssociety.org.
> So John... are you trying to be intentionally deceptive?
:angry: Damn! foiled again... I hate it when my nefarious schemes get derailed like that.
Lunar polar ice in a near-term scenario:
I'm going by many various NASA and scholarly sponsored symposia, the AIAA, and a lot of other qualified observers and writers.
So, what are your qualifications, besides being a cock-sure opinionated internet poster (poser?) who doesn't even put their real name in a profile? Where have you seen things published in these peer-reviewed aerospace journals that sucessfully completeely overturns all this?
How do you get to/from the poles? With cargo? What's the delta-V penalty for plane change? On top of the Delta-V just to get to/from the Moon's surface?
> The short flight times to the Moon permit you to radically reduce the size of vehicles required since you need not develop the vehicles big enough, robust enough, and stocked enough for three years... a month would do for the Moon.
Sorry, but by expert opinions I've seen for decades, the benefit of the vastly lower delta-V to get to them far outweighs the "benefit" of being closer. The only doubt is in communications delay, and possibly emegency medical evac back to Earth, but most qualified engineers and flight planners don't place too much stock in that.
And like Mars Direct, you don't go fully stocked for 3&1/2 years, except for provision for direct-to-Earth interplanetary abort. "Live off the land" is how it's been put, and at Mars' moons, you've got 24/7 sunlight, H2O, CO, CO2, CH4, NH3, and cosmic ray shielding.
(funny, I could have sworn that the Atlas, Delta, and Titan were ICBMs... But I shouldn't poo-poo them. Even the SS-18 has been used to put up comsats, and the Delta heavies have a pretty good record.)
BWhite
> The ONLY reason for doing the Moon (beyond Bush said so) is to exploit lunar resources. Primarily PGM IMHO with lunar LOX exported to L1 and LEO as a minor fringe benefit.
Lunar resources are too far off to be of any consideration. Useless or worse for going to Mars, and inconsequential in its own right.
NEAs are where you want to go for space resources, or better yet for us. Mars' moons. No prospecting, just dig down, expose it in a solar furnace, and everything you want in a far far more advantageous position to use it for Martian exploration or anything else in space.
http://neofuel.com/]http://neofuel.com/
The Diemos Water Company
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/the_ … pany.shtml
RobertDyck
> I think you'll find almost everyone here on this board supports going directly to Mars, not the Moon first. However, George W. said go to the Moon so NASA must go to the Moon.
The important thing is that George W's administration won't be doing anything, except the political grandstanding they did with their nonsensical "space plan".
They got their political benefit from the announcements, and ignored it from then on, and put off doing anything real until the 2009 administration. Even if Rummy or Condoleeza Rice gets into office, bets are that whatever we do in space won't bear much resemblence to W's supposed plan.
SpaceNut:
I agree with the clippngs you posted. The 2-SSME (or eq) version doesn't seem to hold much over the existing crop.
It's the bigger loads I'm thinking of. Using the throw-weight of that launch stack, not to throw 80 tons of reusable manned spaceplane plus a bit of cargo, but all cargo.
The version of Shuttle-Z they presented was unknown to me. I'd always associated the "Z" with top mounted cargo, and in-line engines underneath.
That loses the advantage of using the esisting design ET, and they both lose the adantage of the Shuttle-C:
GCNR wrote
> I am beginning to think that there is a real irrational pathology going around that demands to find worth in the Shuttle program, perhaps as redemption for its failure in the face of being trumpeted as a national treasure, and willfully ignoring bad things about it.
and
> There is a big difference between SDV and EELV+ other than the economies of scale: the difference is that the whole construction, integration, and launching of SDV is inherintly inefficent because it relies on outdated technology and methods.
Philosophically I agree, but the Shuttle-C eliminates the Golden Goose orbiter, but here's the important bit it uses all the same vehicle handling and launch infrastructure we've got in place. No modifications to the launch pad or ET for the underneath in-line engines.
Yes, it smacks of feeding a horse which hasn't pulled its weight, to maintain the infrastructure just because it's politically expedient to use the congressional districts we've been using, and the personnel.
But it works. How long to develop a new SHLV and all the new infrastructure it needs and get it into use? twenty years or whenever they decide they're ready to return to the Moon or on to Mars?
Commodore
> Were going to spend a lot of money on the fancy aerodynamic shell and rockets of whatever we launch on a SDV.
Dream a nightmare for me, and try to find a way this could possibly cost as much as the orbiter. Go ahead. Just try. Especially since we're tossing aside the big dead-weight of the orbiter (making the cargo load between 4 and 5 times what it is now), along with the enormous cost of readying it for flight.
> Also, going that route would preclude top-mounting the payload. This will doom SDV from ever carrying people (no MarsDirect. Period.), reduce the payload by 5-10MT (off-axis thrust), and precludes using a heavy upper stage (again, no Direct anything).
The reason the Ares booster used off-axis thrust was to use the existing launch pads flame trenches, instead of having to spend more to build/rebuild new launch facilities.
I never liked launching the crew of a Mars Direct mission in their tuna can. That's even worse than the Shuttle: no possibility whatsoever, of any sort of bailout/escape (what, 4 encapsulated ejection seats?
Better to kludge the clean mission plan up by adding a flight of a CEV or equivalent and EOR. By flying a Mars Direct, we're asking enough of a crew, without demanding they do this. I don't know though... you might still get volunteers to ride it up.