Lunar program

[Phil1111 910]

NASA should have had some sort of engineering epiphany subsequent SpaceX. Obviously that never occurred, just look at their $1 billion spacesuit program.

There are currently many stories about why NASA should cancel the SLS program. As both budgets and launch dates slip and slip again. Obviously Mr. Musk doesn't need any blank cheques. But his solutions to servicing the current manned space program have shamed NASA engineers and management. Not that the ESA has been a shining star in space flight.

[wmw999 2,121]

3 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

NASA should have had some sort of engineering epiphany subsequent SpaceX. Obviously that never occurred, just look at their $1 billion spacesuit program.

There are currently many stories about why NASA should cancel the SLS program. As both budgets and launch dates slip and slip again. Obviously Mr. Musk doesn't need any blank cheques. But his solutions to servicing the current manned space program have shamed NASA engineers and management. Not that the ESA has been a shining star in space flight.

Investing federal dollars in an approach that doesn't work is still an investment -- remember that not all "good" ideas work, and they have to be tested. The problem is that taxpayers are even worse than managers about not wanting to let all that "investment go to waste."

And conventional wisdom about why to send people instead of only robots (which really can get a huge amount done) is two-fold:

• You can get the public far more excited about manned missions, particularly if they get to know the people, than you can about robots
• People can come up with more ideas and solutions on the fly still. That may (and probably will) within the forseeable future, but still within the limits of what we can see until we really, really, trust self-modifying AI to expand itself beyond where we tell it to. Maybe in far space we'll do that, but if there really are inhabited planets out there, that's kind of a scary thought, too. Maybe Asimov's laws of robotics are a good thing, but with "what's there" replacing "humans."

 

Wendy P.

[JoeWeber 2,299]

2 hours ago, wmw999 said:

Investing federal dollars in an approach that doesn't work is still an investment -- remember that not all "good" ideas work, and they have to be tested. The problem is that taxpayers are even worse than managers about not wanting to let all that "investment go to waste."

And conventional wisdom about why to send people instead of only robots (which really can get a huge amount done) is two-fold:

• You can get the public far more excited about manned missions, particularly if they get to know the people, than you can about robots
• People can come up with more ideas and solutions on the fly still. That may (and probably will) within the forseeable future, but still within the limits of what we can see until we really, really, trust self-modifying AI to expand itself beyond where we tell it to. Maybe in far space we'll do that, but if there really are inhabited planets out there, that's kind of a scary thought, too. Maybe Asimov's laws of robotics are a good thing, but with "what's there" replacing "humans."

 

Wendy P.

That's been the conventional wisdom for too long, I'm thinking. These day's I don't buy it that people need to send people to support the space program. In fact, if we didn't send people, the few people who need us to send people would become as blissfully unaware that we even have a space program as the rest of the people. We should just give it to the marketing department for rebranding and then stop talking about it.

Sure people are better at problem solving than rocks. But I'm thinking that if all of the problems that are due to life support are eliminated things become all that much easier and vastly cheaper. For example, those pesky people problems like the Space Station crapper going on the fritz and the heroes needing to come home wearing diapers. Now that's some high tech problem solving, right? 

[billvon 2,396]

3 hours ago, olofscience said:

Although radiation on the moon is about half of what you get in interplanetary space, the dose is still high enough to limit stays on the surface to a few days. Not much point in going back if stays are that short.

After the first few missions, land an HLS, tip it over onto its side and cover it with about a foot of dirt.    Instant radiation shielding.

For longer term living, live in a lava tube (the moon is apparently full of them.)   One lava tube found near the equator is a mile long and 1000 feet wide.  Another nice feature of them is that a few meters below the surface, the temperature is a constant -4F or so - very compatible with an insulated habitat.

[ryoder 1,383]

26 minutes ago, billvon said:

After the first few missions, land an HLS, tip it over onto its side and cover it with about a foot of dirt.    Instant radiation shielding.

For longer term living, live in a lava tube (the moon is apparently full of them.)   One lava tube found near the equator is a mile long and 1000 feet wide.  Another nice feature of them is that a few meters below the surface, the temperature is a constant -4F or so - very compatible with an insulated habitat.

But aren't you worried about sandworms living in those tubes???

[JoeWeber 2,299]

1 hour ago, billvon said:

After the first few missions, land an HLS, tip it over onto its side and cover it with about a foot of dirt.    Instant radiation shielding.

For longer term living, live in a lava tube (the moon is apparently full of them.)   One lava tube found near the equator is a mile long and 1000 feet wide.  Another nice feature of them is that a few meters below the surface, the temperature is a constant -4F or so - very compatible with an insulated habitat.

Fantastic. We take a quarter million years learning how to come down from the trees, dodge Saber Tooth Tigers, figure out how to curse and build things (which are inseparable), develop rocket fuel and fly off to the moon so, viola, we can move back into caves. No wonder that crazy spelunker guy was willing to go with only a one way ticket.

[wolfriverjoe 1,340]

17 hours ago, gowlerk said:

... the limitations that sending humans places on what can be done mostly rule them out as cargo. We are far too fragile to waste all that launch capacity on...

It's not the fragility, it's our aversion to loss.

Both for sentimental reasons and for the cost (training up an astronaut is not a cheap prospect).

After the Apollo 1 fire, after the Challenger explosion, after the Columbia breakup, after each of those, there was a long 'stand-down' to figure out what happened and how to not let it happen again.
The ironic part of that is that all three had the same basic root cause. Overconfidence and 'normalization of deviance'.
The other ironic part of this is that during the big push to faster & higher airplanes (40s, 50s, & 60s) there were a LOT of test pilots killed. Even more if you factor in the 'normal' military pilots who died flying the 'newest & fastest' planes.
While they would do thorough investigations, and would sometimes ground a particular type of plane, they would keep on flying and testing.
The pilots took it as a matter of course that some of them would die.
The book "The Right Stuff" covers the mentality rather well.

Most of that stuff never made it big in the press.
The astronauts (and their deaths) were front page news for weeks. 
Ironically (again), the early astronauts were the same test pilots who put their lives on the line, at much higher risk.

I saw an interview with an astronaut (Storey Musgrave IIRC) in the aftermath of the Columbia breakup. He basically said we could make a rocket 90% reliable for fairly cheap. Use that for unmanned (cargo) launches. 
Manned launches would be in rockets that were as close to 100% reliable as we could make them. Those would be much more expensive. 
The cost of the loss of the occasional cargo ship would be offset by the cost savings of their lesser reliability. 
The higher cost/extremely reliable ships would only be used for irreplaceable/extremely expensive/human cargo.

[Phil1111 910]

5 hours ago, billvon said:

After the first few missions, land an HLS, tip it over onto its side and cover it with about a foot of dirt.    Instant radiation shielding.

For longer term living, live in a lava tube (the moon is apparently full of them.)   One lava tube found near the equator is a mile long and 1000 feet wide.  Another nice feature of them is that a few meters below the surface, the temperature is a constant -4F or so - very compatible with an insulated habitat.

Living in a lava tube would need too much A/C. IMO

[billvon 2,396]

57 minutes ago, wolfriverjoe said:

I saw an interview with an astronaut (Storey Musgrave IIRC) in the aftermath of the Columbia breakup. He basically said we could make a rocket 90% reliable for fairly cheap. Use that for unmanned (cargo) launches. 
Manned launches would be in rockets that were as close to 100% reliable as we could make them. Those would be much more expensive. 

That was true in aviation as well for decades - until the DC-3 came along.  It was not the fastest, or most economical, or highest load aircraft.  But it was very reliable, fairly simple, and it did most transport jobs OK.  To many people who have researched aviation, the DC-3 was the aircraft that made air travel accessible to more than just daredevils and the rich, and ushered in the age of air travel.

There was a lot of speculation that the Shuttle was going to be the DC-3 of space.  Needless to say it wasn't.  But the Starship might be.  Even its smaller sibling, the Falcon, has been making a lot of waves in terms of reliability and reusability.

[Phil1111 910]

3 hours ago, wolfriverjoe said:

It's not the fragility, it's our aversion to loss....
The higher cost/extremely reliable ships would only be used for irreplaceable/extremely expensive/human cargo.

Well currently there is nothing in new spending bills for the HLS. NASA asked for $5.4 billion for a second HLS provider. Mr. Nelson the NASA administrator believes that in a midterm(election) year there will be money for more HLS spending.He proposed $15.7 billion in the infrastructure bills.

Proposed is

• $750 million to repair or modernize NASA facilities
• $140 million for climate change research and development
  • $85 million for R&D-related activities
  • $30 million for associated data management and processing
  • $25 million for R&D to support wildfire fighting operations
• $225 million for R&D on sustainable aviation

Perhaps they should take up Bezos on his offer: Just one week after riding to the edge of space, Jeff Bezos wants to build a lunar lander—and he’s willing to bankroll NASA $2 billion for the rights. 

Just kidding.

"The offer comes nearly four months after SpaceX received a $2.89 billion contract to build a crewed lunar lander." From above quotation.

[JoeWeber 2,299]

12 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

$25 million for R&D to support wildfire fighting operations

Insanity. How about a billion dollars to buy existing fire fighting aircraft designs, another billion to research better designs and, just to placate the tin foil hat crowd, another billion for mirrors to reflect Jewish Space Lasers..