NASA's Moon Vision: Action Plan or High-Tech Hallucination?
- From: "DrEvil" <drevil@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:44:32 +0800
Gee Dubya will make a public pronouncement claiming this as a national goal,
so that he can get votes with his JFK impression. He'll give such a small
budget to it that the program will never start. He'll be out of office when
it fails. A Republican Congress may not even appropriate the little sums
that Dubya will ask for. In the end, NASA will have to fake a moon trip to
save face, just as they did three decades ago.
***
NASA's Moon Vision: Action Plan or High-Tech Hallucination?
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 20 September 2005
11:19 a.m. ET
NASA's rollout of a strategy to return people to the Moon and eventually
plant footprints on the distant sands of Mars is sparking both praise and
criticism.
Michael Griffin, NASA's administrator, publicly unveiled yesterday the space
agency's $104 billion mastermind of a mission that puts astronauts back on
the moon by 2018, setting the stage for future expeditionary trips to the
red planet.
New space travel hardware - a Crew Exploration Vehicle and the requisite
boosters for tossing people and cargo beyond low Earth orbit - is part of
the must-have agenda.
But analogous to one of Newton's laws of physics that drives rocketry -- but
in a 21st century context -- for every action plan there is always an equal
but opposite reaction.
Lacks pizzazz, budgetary timing
Editorial pundits, such as the New York Times, while saluting NASA's "Apollo
on steroids" approach, also noted: "Unfortunately, the new plan lacks the
pizzazz to inspire public support and will be operating under budget
constraints that make delays or overruns likely."
NASA's Moon, Mars and beyond roadmap also prompted House Science Committee
Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican from New York, to applaud the
exploration architecture, while underscoring budgetary concerns.
Boehlert congratulated NASA's chief, Michael Griffin and his team on the
"very thorough work" they have done. "While we are still reviewing the
details, it appears that NASA has come up with an effective way to move
forward, making the most of past U.S. investments in human space travel to
enable us to enter the next phase of exploration in the safest, least
expensive and most efficient way."
That being said, Boehlert added: "The question Congress and the
Administration will still have to grapple with most is not the nature or
desirability of the exploration architecture, but rather its timing."
The lawmaker cited funding shortfalls in the space shuttle program,
explaining that there is simply "no credible way" to accelerate the
development of the shuttle follow-on - the Crew Exploration Vehicle --
unless the NASA budget increases more than has been anticipated.
"Whether such an increase is a good idea in the context of overall federal
spending at this time is something neither Congress nor the Administration
has yet determined."
Positive and negative features
Mars Society President, Robert Zubrin, assessed the new NASA plan, spotting
significant positive and negative features.
"On the positive side, it recognizes the need for the development of a true
heavy-lift launch vehicle, and takes concrete steps the preserve the shuttle
industrial infrastructure necessary to produce such a vehicle," Zubrin told
SPACE.com. The importance of doing so "cannot be overemphasized," he added.
The heavy-lift booster is absolutely necessary to enable human exploration
of the Moon and Mars, Zubrin said, with Griffin reversing his predecessor's
"unworkable" space architecture concepts.
Zubrin also said there is negative aspect to the heavy-lift launch vehicle
decision.
While preserving the heavy-lifter infrastructure, the plan relegates its
development to a subsequent administration. "In consequence, for the next 13
years, NASA will continue to send crew after crew up and down to low Earth
orbit, at a cost of some $70 billion, for no justifiable purpose
whatsoever."
In the post-Columbia accident world, Griffin and others "have made the point
that if we are to accept the costs and risks of human spaceflight, we should
be undertaking missions that are worthy of those costs and risks," Zubrin
explained. "But for the next 13 years, we will continue not do so."
NASA is acting in accord with President George W. Bush's "Vision for Space
Exploration" as enunciated in January 2004, Zubrin said. "That policy,
however, was formulated by a White House which lacked a competent NASA
administrator to advise it. Now that we have a qualified NASA administrator,
this policy needs to be revisited and reformulated," he concluded.
Reasonable, pending detailed definition
NASA's ambition to hurl astronauts back to the Moon prompted thoughts from
one person that can already claim "been there, done that" bragging rights -
Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and former U.S. Senator
from New Mexico.
"I have great respect for President Bush's Moon-Mars initiative and for
Administrator Michael Griffin and his maturing management and engineering
team in NASA," Schmitt told SPACE.com. "The broad architecture would appear
to be reasonable, pending detailed definition of the major technical and
budgetary issues," he said.
In an alternative universe, Schmitt added, the country would have maintained
the Saturn V booster capability - the huge rocket used to propel crews to
the Moon -- rather than being forced to work with the space shuttle booster
technology. "That, however, does not appear to be a viable option for NASA
at this time."
Critical path caution
In taking a preliminary look at the NASA architecture, the geologist in
Schmitt provoked a worry.
"One caution at this point is to not put the presence of ice at the lunar
poles in the critical path to success for the architecture," Schmitt said.
"It is not a proven resource in spite of reports to the contrary. On the
other hand, elemental hydrogen implanted by the solar wind -- in contrast to
water-ice that has come from cometary impacts -- is clearly concentrated in
the polar regions over that present in lower latitudes," he said.
Schmitt said, however, that there is enough hydrogen everywhere on the Moon
to produce water and oxygen. "Thus, selection of a site for semi-permanent
lunar base should be approached with an open mind until we know for sure
that ice is present and economically accessible at the poles."
In his forthcoming book, Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and
Energy in the Human Settlement of Space, published by Praxis-Springer,
Schmitt spotlights the role of the Moon in supporting an energy-hungry
Earth. That prospect appears to be a missing-in-action aspect within NASA's
new architecture, Schmitt said.
"Another consideration for site selection not yet apparent in the
architecture is verification of regional concentrations of helium-3, a
potentially highly valuable, commercial energy resource for use in
terrestrial fusion power plants," Schmitt pointed out.
Schmitt also argued that the long-term architecture related to flights to
Mars "must eventually contain a full, scientifically credible understanding
of the long term effects of the space environment on human performance and
health."
No Apollo replay
Paul Spudis, a lunar and planetary scientist at the Applied Physics
Laboratory, a research and development arm of the Johns Hopkins University
in Laurel, Maryland, takes issue with those that see the NASA vision as an
Apollo replay.
There is significant difference in Apollo of yesteryear judged against the
NASA plan of today, Spudis said.
In the first place, the systems making up the vehicles are being designed
for maximum leverage: long-life, cryogenic-based propulsion, potential reuse
in space, Spudis explained.
Secondly, the mission is different.
"In Apollo, the mission was to prove we could land on the Moon and return
safely to Earth. In this case, the mission is to determine the best site to
collect and use the resources of the Moon and to emplace the necessary
infrastructure to do so," Spudis said. "Admittedly, the early missions will
be very much like a 'super-Apollo.' However, they have potential to grow
into something very different."
Use of off-planet resources
In point of fact, Spudis continued, "Apollo, for all its beauty, was
essentially a technical dead-end.one-use systems, storable propellants, a
paradigm of launching everything from Earth."
Spudis told SPACE.com that this system, as blueprinted by NASA, is designed
from the beginning to adapt to a different paradigm: The use of off-planet
resources -- lunar manufactured propellants - to create a permanent
transportation infrastructure in cislunar space, the territory between Earth
and the orbit of the Moon.
Should some things have been done differently?
"Possibly", Spudis suggested. "You can never satisfy everybody by making
architectural choices. However, it's a system that will get us back to the
Moon with the minimal possible extra investment."
"It's a start back on the road to real space capability," Spudis advised.
"And it's better than the alternative, which is extinction of human
exploration."
http://space.com/news/050920_nasa_moon_response.html
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