NASA Prepping Plans For Flexible Path To Mars 175
FleaPlus writes "A group at NASA has been formulating a 'Flexible Path' to Mars architecture, which many expect will be part of the soon-to-be-announced reboot of NASA's future plans. NASA's prior architecture spends much of its budget on creating two in-house rockets, the Ares I and V, and would yield no beyond-LEO human activity until a lunar landing sometime in the 2030s. In contrast, the Flexible Path would produce results sooner, using NASA's limited budget to develop and gain experience with the technologies (human and robotic) needed to progressively explore and establish waypoints at Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moon Phobos, Mars, and other possible locations (e.g. the Moon, Venus flyby). Suggested interim goals include constructing giant telescopes in deep space, learning how to protect Earth from asteroids, establishing in-space propellant depots, and harvesting resources/fuel from asteroids and Phobos to supply Moon/Mars-bound vehicles."
Re:Going Nowhere (Score:2, Informative)
I'd agree with that. We need to stop outsourcing [american3p.org], virtually unlimited immigration [american3p.org], and starting pointless and expensive wars [american3p.org], and then we might be able to achieve a space program [american3p.org] that isn't chronically dysfunctional.
Support the American Third Position! [american3p.org]
Re:Going Nowhere (Score:5, Informative)
Eventually the Chinese are going to wise up and stop lending us money, and that'll be that for a whale of a lot of things, with things like NASA getting the axe first.
I do wish people would stop saying that.
Total US debt in 2009 $12,867.5 Billion [wikipedia.org]. Total debt owned by China 789.6 Billion [ustreas.gov]. China owns only about 6% of US debt and the odds are they will reduce that gradually to reduce their risks if the dollar depreciates or there is inflation in the US. The Iraq war is forecasted to cost $2 trillion by the CBO - Afghanistan is a bargain at a mere $500 Billion [wikipedia.org]. The US spends almost that much a year on defense. $8.3 trillion [wikipedia.org] evaporated in the financial crisis, way more than any of these numbers.
So even if the Chinese T bills were destroyed instantaneously it would still be a shock 10x less severe than the financial crisis, or less than half an Iraq war.
Of course the Chinese gradually diversifying away from US debt is likely to have much less effect than that.
They have no Idea (Score:3, Informative)
Where they should be going. The main purpose of manned spaceflight should be to develop the technologies to form permanent self sustaining colonies off of Earth.
With the abandonment of the Centrifuge Accommodations Module (CAM) we cannot determine if Humans or even most vertebrates can reproduce in reduced gravity and how much gravity is required.
All experiments with mice in microgravity have have indicated that cell division after fertilization does not occur, and that more advanced fetus that were launched do not undergo cell migration and/or cell differentiation properly.
If it is found out that Centripetal acceleration is an adequate substitute for gravity, then the asteroids may be our best bet.
Re:Orbiting Fuel Depots (Score:0, Informative)
Lagrange points, like Joseph Lagrange [wikipedia.org], not RuPaul Charles [wikipedia.org].
Try reading a few more of those books, and watching a bit less TV.
Re:nasa is not gonna get much done (Score:3, Informative)
I know you're being facetious, but we can design 'em faster than in 1969, largely because we still have the designs from the 1969 rockets as a starting point. They only starting point that they had back in the '60's when they started the plan to shoot for the moon were the V2 and the rockets used in the Mercury program. Nothing of the size/scale that could push a capsule to the moon had ever been built before.
We can't say that in 2010... people have been to the moon, and rockets of the scale needed to push people to the moon, if not further, have already been built and refined. There's decades of research that they don't need to repeat in order to start building rockets like that again. I'm not saying that putting an astronaut on the moon by 2014 is a likelihood, or even a possibility. But I am saying that it probably won't take as long as it did the first time. :)
Re:Why do people care so much about Mars? (Score:3, Informative)
Wouldn't the vast sum of money required be better spent preserving the rainforests here on earth?
Hell no. You don't need to spend money just to leave something alone.
Re:nasa is not gonna get much done (Score:5, Informative)
Another problem is NASA's "Not Invented Here" syndrome. ARES-I is a 20 tonne launcher. Billions have been spent developing it. However the US already has a perfectly fine rocket that can launch 20 tonnes into orbit; the Delta-IV Heavy. Oh, but that was designed by the Air Force. Can't have that at NASA.
Re:Reading Between the Lines (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget [wikipedia.org]
The money allocated to NASA from the 2009 Federal Budget was 0.55%. Saying that NASA is the source of our financial woes (or that its complete dismantling will do anything to correct them) is like arguing that the reason a person is going bankrupt is due to the 1$ they give to the Salvation Army bell ringer every Christmas. It's a retarded argument, and one that really needs to stop.
Re:Orbiting Fuel Depots (Score:3, Informative)
Orbiting Fuel Depots, 'bout time. Use of the LaGrange points, asteroids, yes! Scifi has known this for years, 'bout time that NASA caught up and went for long term development of space instead of quick one-shot missions.
This. Not everybody realizes that the vast majority of mass you need for space missions (particularly those beyond Earth orbit) is fuel. Fuel itself is cheap, and nobody cares if you lose it, so you can just launch it up to a fuel depot to whoever the lowest bidder is (making it a great catalyst for commercial space startups). Then you can launch the much-lighter unfueled spacecraft up by itself (or construct it in orbit), allowing you to launch much more elaborate spacecraft using smaller rockets. Fuel depots are a HUGE technology multiplier in spaceflight. It's really a shame that NASA's prior architecture for various political reasons was pretty much explicitly constructed to avoid any use of fuel depots or in-space refueling.
Aerospace engineer Jon Goff at "Selenian Boondocks" has some really great write-ups and conference papers about propellant depots and how they can benefit a human spaceflight architecture:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/09/space-2009-papers/ [selenianboondocks.com]
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/07/depot-centric-human-spaceflight/ [selenianboondocks.com]
One of the old arguments against propellant depots is that the technology is untested, although ULA just reported on the results of their in-space tests this month:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/01/additional-av-017-flight-experiment-information/ [selenianboondocks.com]