Better Paths to a New Frontier

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Photo by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel

Whats Next?

Space is limitless in the number of destinations we can pursue. From moons, and planets, to solar systems, and galaxies, we are only at the beginning of what space can offer us. Although we can agree that certain destinations are much more favorable than others, we cannot always agree on the path we will take to get to these destinations, and in what order we wish to pursue them. As we enter this post-shuttle era, many intelligent engineers/scientists/space-enthusiasts have offered plans for how we should pursue our future in space, many of which which are both practical and affordable. Unfortunately, our Congress (in their finite wisdom) has decided to ignore them and pursue their own plan for NASA, which involves a rocket known as the Space Launch System (SLS), and spacecraft known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. Sadly, when you take a look at this plan and it's details, it becomes apparent that this plan is not about pushing NASA forward. The current NASA plan has much more to do with party politics, preserving a lavish NASA workforce, and maintaining old contracts with out of touch aerospace firms. At the same time, certain members of Congress have also used this plan as an excuse to try and gut NASA funding for commercial rocket companies which, if given the chance, could provide much greater capabilities in space at a fraction of the SLS and MPCV cost. 

In this post, I will introduce (or re-introduce in some cases) you to some of the better plans we should pursue on our path towards greater space exploration. I will also address the current plan being developed regarding the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Space Launch System in some detail.

Let us start with the current plan

On October 11, 2010, congress passed an authorization act for fiscal years 2011-2013, that lays out NASA's budget, appropriations (how much of the budget goes to certain NASA programs), and requirements NASA must fulfill by certain deadlines. By December 31, 2016, NASA is required to build a heavy lift launch vehicle which they are calling the "Space Launch System." It will be designed to carry payloads at a minimum capability of 70 metric tons (70,000 kg or 154,000 lbs) to low earth orbit. To give you some perspective of size, at the minimum 70 metric tons, the SLS will be able to carry almost triple what the Space Shuttle was capable of doing to low earth orbit.

They want the vehicle to eventually visit locations beyond low earth orbit (Moon, Mars, an asteroid etc.) so the rocket must be "flexible" enough to also support up to 130 metric tons (130,000 kg or 286,600 lbs) for those missions. Just in case commercial providers are not available to service the International Space Station, the SLS will also be capable of providing that service. By the same date, Congress would also like a 4 passenger space capsule which can fly aboard the space launch system known as the "Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle." The MPCV was originally called the Orion under the Constellation program (which was cancelled in 2010), and is being designed to be NASA's primary means of conducting both low earth orbit and beyond earth operations with Astronauts. As the Shuttle program winds down, Congress has made a great effort to preserve the workforce and contracts related to technologies used on the Shuttle. They have mandated that NASA preserve contracts related to "...solid and liquid engines, large diameter fuel tanks, rocket propulsion, and other ground test capabilities for an effective transition to the follow-on Space Launch System."

Sounds good right? A rocket which will lift over 3 times the amount of the Space Shuttle, and can lift 4 Astronauts to low earth orbit and to destinations beyond, potentially even the Moon and Mars? At the same time, we minimize the loss of jobs after the Space Shuttle, and the loss of technologies developed during that period. It sounds promising, it sounds smart, and it sounds responsible. Does it also sound extremely expensive and too good to be true? If you said yes, than you are dead right!

The reality

On July 12th, 2011, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was asked to make a statement to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives. This meeting was originally planned by this committee to hear NASA tell them the final design on the SLS, and ask questions related to "cost, schedule, capabilities, and justification for the selected design." In fact, this committee had been waiting on the decision of the SLS design for the past 6 months, and now they considered the design decision late. However, on July 7th, a senior NASA official stated that the committee will have to wait even longer, potentially until the end of the summer for the final SLS design. So, the purpose of the July 12th meeting turned into a discussion of why NASA failed to reach a decision on the design. During the live hearing, the head of the committee Senator Ralph Hall also took a good portion of time scolding Administrator Bolden, stating it "represents an insult to Congress" because of NASA's inability to make a timely decision. 

Has NASA been making up a series of excuses as to why they have not reached an SLS design decision? Or, perhaps, some of the "excuses" are legitimate concerns over the design they would like to address first?

Here are some of the things the Administrator Bolden pointed out in his written statement to the committee:

- One of the main reasons they have not locked down a design, is because they are not sure how much it will cost. During the live broadcast of the meeting, Bolden stated quite intelligently, "We cannot rush a critical decision that will drive NASA's activities for several decades….Our new systems must be affordable, sustainable, and realistic…". NASA has contracted with Booz Allen Hamilton to do the work of crunching the numbers, and NASA expects to hear from them in late July/early August (unfortunately this report by Booz Allen Hamilton was due back in May as well).

- According to the presidents budget request for fiscal year 2012, NASA's best guess is the SLS will not be ready by 2016 as mandated by the Authorization act (ouch). It is more realistic to expect an uncrewed test flight of the SLS and MPCV by late 2017 (uncrewed? 2017? double ouch...).

- The first flight with crew is not expected to take place until 2020 (my head falls and bangs on a table). 

- The first real mission they have thought about planning with this rocket is to visit an asteroid, and that would not happen until 2025 (I pour coffee into my lap...intentionally).

- Regarding using the SLS and MPCV as a "backup" system to bring astronauts to the ISS, Bolden says in the written statement, "It should be well understood that utilizing the MPCV for routine ISS transportation would be very inefficient and costly use of the MPCV deep-space capability."

Gutting Commercial

While congress over the next couple of years will pour billions of dollars in the SLS and MPCV project, they are removing money from successful projects like Commercial Crew Development (CCDEV), and the Commercial Orbital Transportation (COTS) program. The COTS program was integral in helping SpaceX become the first commercial company ever to re-enter a spacecraft from earth orbit. SpaceX required only a fraction of what the SLS and MPCV costs, and yet they have done something only six national space agencies have accomplished. CCDEV has given funding to other commercial companies like Blue Origin, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada, who are also developing their own sub-orbital/orbital vehicles which would give the U.S a variety of capabilities and options to space, instead of relying on one single rocket to do every job.

In Summary

The Congress (again...in their finite wisdom) has very little respect, and an even smaller amount of patience for NASA, and fails to realize the magnitude of the mission they are tasked with over the next couple of decades. They are given barely any money for manned space exploration, and even when they are, the rocket, its payload capacity, and capabilities are designed by congress, not engineers! Administrator Bolden did his best to explain to the committee why it's difficult making a decision on designs that they did not have much say in, which ultimately affects NASA's future for decades. Nevertheless, even if these decisions can make or break NASA's manned space program, Bolden's problems are only heard by frustrated, and disappointed congressman.

The Better Paths...

Can we do better than an asteroid mission in 2025, and then maybe, hopefully, someday go somewhere else? Of course there is! Here are a couple of other plans I am very fond of...

Jeff Greason: A Settlement Strategy for NASA

The video above features Jeff Greason, a founder of XCOR Aerospace, and member of the Augustine Comittee. During the 2011 International Space Development Conferece, he gave a talk entitled "A Settlement Strategy for NASA," in which he proposes a strategy for NASA to achieve what could be the ultimate goal of our NASA's manned program, which is settlement. I would highly recommend watching the video (much more entertaining, and there is a nice "underpants gnomes" South Park reference thrown in which he uses quite well), however, here is a break down of the key points:

The importance of a strategy

As Greason puts it, the strategy is the "big picture approach" to achieving a goal. For example, during the Space Race our goal was to prove our dominance over Russia, and our strategy was to achieve an objective so advanced of what Russia was doing, that the space race would be won by achieving this objective. The objective eventually became landing a man on the moon.

By providing a solid goal, we can build strategies, objectives, tactics etc. that can help NASA move in the right direction. Right now NASA lacks any clear strategy, but that is due to policy makers not making the ultimate goal of the NASA manned spaceflight program clear. So, is there an ultimate goal we can all rally around?

The ultimate goal for NASA

Greason believes there already exists a national consensus amongst policy makers regarding the ultimate goal of NASA's manned spaceflight program. This goal has been stated many times, in many different ways. If we boil it down to one word, it is settlement: the ablity to establish a community of individuals on a planet or moon outside the Earth and have the capability to live there indefinitely. However, policy makers do not readily support this goal entirely, due to the fact that many believe settlement cannot be achieved. Greason makes a great parallel to the American goal of winning World War II and setting a serious goal:

"Now here's the bad news, which is why nobody quite wants to talk about it. OK so fine, the goal is human settlement of space. But, what would you have done in World War II if your honest assessment had been we can't win? Would you have still set the national policy objective as the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan? There is an uncomfortable feeling out there that that (settlement) is the only worthwhile goal of a national human spaceflight activity, but we don't think we can do it. So, maybe we shouldn't talk about it too much. I think that is a mistake, I think we can do it, I think we should do it, I think we better do it."

The strategy to achieve that goal

If we can agree that settlement is NASA's ultimate goal, and we believe it can be accomplished, we have to face an uncomfortable truth. The truth is NASA's budget is not on it's way up any time soon, it is only going down. However, in order to settle space, you must have a population living outside the earth that slowly rises in numbers, otherwise it can't be deemed the settlement of space. Therefore, each year as the NASA budget declines, and we send more individuals out to settle space, the cost to send one human to space must come down each year.

NASA has the capability to spend money in the short term to send someone to Mars, build a moon base, or send astroanuts to a near Earth object like an asteroid. However, settlement will not magically happen by going to these places. A strategy must be implemented that will allow costs to come down over the long term, otherwise it will not be sustainable. In order to do this, Greason suggests a way to make this happen.

It is called Planet Hopping: Start with the moon, and mine the moons resources for propellant to create a market for propellant in low earth orbit. NASA would purchase the fuel and fill a fuel depot (not developed yet) in low earth orbit, and by doing so, would make getting to more distant locations a lot easier. The reason it becomes easier is because if you have a fuel depot, you can fill up on your way to a distant destination, as opposed to trying to carry all the propellant from the ground, all the way to your destination (imagine a round trip from L.A. to New York carrying all the gas you needed and never refueling...not fun...not easy...).

Greason believes that by propellant mining, along with focused exploration missions, you can triple the current american demand for launch, and also lower the cost of launches. We can slowly build refueling stations farther and farther out of our solar system, from low-earth orbit, to the moon, to lagrange point 1, then as far as Mars. We make it more affordable for NASA to explore deep space, while the commercial sector follows in tow, since commercial companies will find it easier to close business cases on more innovative rockets. 

Robert Zubrin, and Mars Direct

Mars - Shot by Hubble Telescope (NASA 2007)

This plan has been around since 1990, when it was created by Robert Zubrin (aerospace engineer and founder  of Mars Society), and David Baker. It has since been revised and updated by Robert Zubrin over the years, this plan, as implied in the name, involves no stepping stones to get to Mars, it is a mission directly to Mars, using the technologies we have today. 

Misconceptions of traveling to Mars, and Why Mars is Important

Zubrin believes that everything we need to travel to Mars safely there and back is already available to us today. We can travel to Mars with roughly the same type of boosters we use on current rocket systems, and live off the resources provided on Mars. In an article written to the National Space Society, Robert Zubrin describes some of the key reasons why Mars is so important:

"...Mars is endowed with all the resources needed to support not only life but the development of a technological civilization. In contrast to the comparative desert of the Earth's Moon, Mars possesses oceans of water frozen into its soil as permafrost, as well as vast quantities of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, all in forms readily accessible to those clever enough to use them.

Additionally, Mars has experienced the same sorts of volcanic and hydrologic processes that produced a multitude of mineral ores on Earth. Virtually every element of significant interest to industry is known to exist on the Red Planet. With its 24-hour day/night cycle and an atmosphere thick enough to shield its surface against solar flares, Mars is the only extraterrestrial planet that will readily allow large-scale greenhouses lit by natural sunlight.

Mars can be settled. For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World."

How Mars Direct Works

The first mission to Mars would involve launching what Zubrin calls an Earth Return Vehicle. This vehicles mission is to deploy a rover on the surface of Mars, which has the ability to generate rocket fuel for the Earth Return Vehicle. Within about 13 months, the Earth Return Vehicle will be completely refueled. Within 26 months of the first launch, a second Earth Return Vehicle is launched, along with a habitat module, and Astronuats. With the Habitat module in place, Astronauts would be able to live out their lives for the next year and a half on the Martian surface, and then return home. While on there way home, there would be another habitat module and Earth Return Vehicle on it's way to Mars. This cycle of returning from, and going to Mars allows a group of habitats to be eventually linked together, allowing us to form a permanent base on Mars. For much more detailed info on the plan, I highly recommend reading his book The Case For Mars (which has just been recently updated), and checking out the Mars Society Website. The video below depicts the Mars Direct plan in action, if the first Earth Return Vehicle was launched by 2016:

Gerard K. O'Neill: The High Frontier

 Painting of an O'Neill Colony by Don Davis

"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" This was a question posed by Gerard K. Oneill back in 1969 to a small group of students he taught at Princeton University. Surprisingly, the answer he got back from the students was no. In fact, maybe the best way to settle space could come in the form of a large space station. This space station would be miles in diameter, and would have the ability to create the same living environment and conditions here on Earth, with some interesting advantages. In an interview O'Neill gave in 1975, he explains some of the problems with planetary settlement (or colonization as O'Neill puts it):

"...the classical science fiction idea of colonization is always you go off and you find another planetary surface, like the moon or Mars. . . That misadventure we sidetracked very quickly because first of all there just isn'tthat much area involved, and second, most of those other planetary surfaces are fairly unpleasant in terms of where they're located. They're the wrong distance from the sun, and they've got the wrong rotation times, and the wrong gravities usually. Besides all that, there was the fact that it didn't make sense once you could get out into the space beyond a planet to give up the fulltime solar energy that you could get if you just stayed there."

O'neill proposed a type of space station design known as the O'Neill Cylinder, or what could be termed an "inside-out planet." This space station would consist of 2 cylinders side by side, and each would be 4 miles in diameter, and 20 miles long. Large windows and mirrors could be arranged on the station to provide a day/night cycle, and gravity is artificially created by rotating the cylinders. Here is a 3d animation of what the inside of an O'Neill Cylinder would look like.

My thoughts on the plans.

If I wanted to go with a plan to settle the solar system (settlement being the ultimate goal), I would choose one which involves a step-by-step plan for settlement which builds upon a solid foundation. The one plan that I think achieves this the best is the one offered by Jeff Greason. The plan also involves taking a more realistic approach to NASA's dwindling budget, by making space flight for individuals cheaper each year, as the budget goes down each year. Every other plan seems to require a much larger NASA budget for development of a heavy lift rocket or large space station. I wish I could be more optimistic about NASA's manned exploration budget going up, but it has been, and continues to be, on a downward spiral. Although Greason does not publicly display how much it would actually cost per year, I can only take his word that his plan would work within NASA's current budget.

Robert Zubrins plan is a bold move towards Mars utilizing current technology. I can say that I am fond of this plan to some degree, however, there are things which leave me uneasy. For instance, Mr. Zubrin is the only person I have heard in the space community say that the radiation on Mars which astronauts will be subjected to is not as lethal as most people believe. Zubrin makes the claim that although there is no Mars magnetosphere, a magnetosphere does nothing to protect a planet from cosmic rays. Zubrin says what protects us from cosmic rays is an atmosphere, which Mars does have (however, the atmosphere is minimal). Unfortunately, most radiation experts, such as Irene Schneider of Ihrene Space Enterprises, believe Zubrin is quite wrong in his assumptions of radiation. Irene says we don't understand enough about radiation to claim one way or the other if it is going to be a large problem, and the claim that the magnetosphere does not shield a planet from cosmic rays is completely wrong. I would encourage you to check out Irene's interview on The Space Show for more info. In my opinion, if our ultimate goal is settlement of space, we should know if our Astronauts will be subjected to lethal amounts of radiation before sending them on a year and half trip to Mars. Lastly, as we have found during the Apollo era, a large well funded space program dedicated to traveling directly to a place beyond Earth is hard to sustain, and maintaining funding is subject to a lot of public/political scrutiny. 

The O'Neill plan to me is very intriguing. I like the fundamental question that it raises regarding whether we should populate space by way of planet, or station. The fact that a manned space station can be designed, and placed in any chosen orbit around the sun, is highly advantageous over populating planets with differing degrees of distance, temperature, atmosphere, composition etc. However, given recent conferences I have been to in the NewSpace community (NewSpace 2011, Space Access, SpaceUp) I have not heard a lot of discussion in pursuing this plan over missions to Mars or other planets. The support that a plan like the O'Neill cylinder would require from our government, and even space enthusiasts, I believe is just not there yet. However, there are some space advocates, such as Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation, and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation are huge proponents of O'Neills work. So, who knows? Maybe as time progresses this will become more of a reality to be envisioned by a commercial company, or through a competition.

What do you think? Please let me know by leaving a comment. Thank you for reading!

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