A somewhat offbeat contribution on this Moon landing anniversary day. The month of July is witness to several different space history milestones. Over at The Once and Future Moon, I discuss how I was inspired by the Apollo 15 mission, July 1971. Comment here, if inclined.
Also, Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle has the third of his pieces on the state of the American civil space program up today. He spoke to me about the value of the Moon and that topic is discussed in the story.
“Every space-faring country in the world, except for the United States, is interested in going to the moon,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology rocket scientist Jeffrey Hoffman, a five-time astronaut.
Astronaut Clayton Anderson said the same thing:
“I found this interesting. The majority of the astronaut corps, the people that actually do the space flying, agreed with me –that the moon should be our next destination.”
Clayton Anderson
U.S. Astronaut (Ret.); ISS and Space Shuttle spacewalker
Where Do We Go From Here?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clayton-anderson/where-do-we-go-from-here_3_b_4495029.html
Marcel
I like this passage too:
It is unfortunate but it is clear the choice to do an asteroid retrieval mission rather than a return to the Moon is purely based on politics. It is based on the hate the current administration had for the prior one, and also the viewpoint, shared by the current administration, that the huge expenditures of the 60’s of the Apollo missions during a period of political unrest were unjustified.
Bob Clark
For that reason, the word needs to be put out that going back to the moon can be done without a huge expenditure. That is, we can do it with what we spend already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15
Some trivia from wiki:
Lunar ascent stage at lift-off from Moon weighed 10,916 pounds (about the same weight as a Vietnam era Huey helicopter) of which 5180 pounds was propellent and 633 pounds was fuel for maneuvering thrusters.
The Command Module weighed about 6.5 tons and the Service Module 27 tons, with the complete lander at 18 tons for a trans-lunar stack of over 50 tons.
The third stage burned over a hundred tons of propellents to send that 50 ton stack on it’s way and the 10 tons of empty stage were discarded into solar orbit.
In my view the empty stage is the key to future programs. An empty heavy lift core stage can be inserted into lunar orbit and a self-fueling lander used to prospect for, process, and transport lunar water to these lunar orbit wet workshops.
Concerning Eric Berger’s certainty over fuel depots I am not so certain.
I admit it sounds wonderful; solar energy + water = rocket fuel. I attempted to take this wonderful sounding idea to it’s end and conjure up the ghost of the space shuttle with a do-everything vehicle that would be a lunar lander as mobile fuel depot and cislunar tug.
A robot that can find ice on the Moon, land on top of it, extract it, process it into pure water and rocket fuel, take-off into lunar orbit, and transfer water to a lunar space station is a tall order. Especially if it has to do this repeatedly for years. But in my view it is an easier project than building a Moon base. We can crash robots but we cannot kill any more astronauts.
http://sciencefocus.com/blog/how-apollo-astronauts-avoided-deadly-solar-flare
We avoided the next deadly solar flare by never leaving the safety of Low Earth Orbit again. Anybody remember July 11 as a space anniversary? That is when Skylab re-entered.
77 tons of dry workshop falling uncontrollably back to Earth in 1979. Why? Just like right now, the U.S. had no spacecraft. The troublesome hot-rod engines of the space shuttle prevented a rescue mission from ever being ready in time.
Eventually going cheap proved deadly, the shuttle losses equivalent to losing all the Moon landing astronauts. The supposedly cheap shuttle taking small pieces up one at a time resulted in a fantastic sum expended for what went up in one afternoon as Skylab.
In my view the essential lesson of Apollo is the Heavy Lift Vehicle. The giant F-1 kerosene engines of the first stage and the exquisitely engineered hydrogen second stage; the space shuttle was a less powerful design due first to the small size of the segmented solid rocket boosters. In this sense the newest design continues to make the same mistake and in my view a follow-on vehicle to the SLS using four of the 5 segment or larger solid rocket boosters should already be in some stage of development.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQLWIuaNg68
If we could just find a pit the right size near an ice deposit it will be a remarkable opportunity!
Such a site would make a Moon base a much easier proposition. Even within a few hundred miles of an ice deposit it might be possible to economically transport the water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xxsj2YSPgU
Ran across this and thought Dr. Spudis and the regulars would be interested concerning lunar lander technology.
While carrier pilots get all the glory the second most challenging arena may be trying to land a small rescue helicopter on the deck of a small military vessel in heavy seas. The state of the art several decades ago were reverse hoists that winched the helicopter down onto a capture device on the deck. This recent video seems to showcase some very advanced autopilot programs to assist in landing without any of that older technology.
Comparing the different operating environments of a maritime helicopter drone and a lunar robot lander we can see some interesting parallels. Almost all helicopter designs have some serious instability problems- just like a vertical thrust lander in a vacuum- that require constant inputs. Helo drones and robot landers are both far simpler and cheaper than any human-rated system.
Just the images from Apollo 15 show this was a different sort of exploration.
A mountain almost as tall as Pike’s Peak, a canyon, and of course the rover.
To think we can have missions like that take place on a regular basis, all over the Moon.
On a different matter, there’s something I thought of.
Robert Zubrin published his book “The Case For Mars”, outlining in detail about what is involved in going to Mars. It has been updated since then to include the MERs.
What I wonder is if a similar book can be made for the Cislunar Next concept.
Perhaps “The Case For The Moon”?
I think this can bring the idea of development of the moon more into the public mindset.
I tried to do this to a degree in my The Once and Future Moon, but that was published almost 20 years ago. I am in the process of writing a new book about lunar development and I’ll keep readers of this blog posted on its progress.
Please do!
I hope readers can spread the word, especially to those that write about popular science.
In one blog post, it seemed Dr Phil Plait had written his hope for something similar to what you propose.
A new Congress will be in Washington in 2015, during a two year period when President Obama will, fortunately, be the lamest of lame ducks. So it would be nice if you could have your lunar book out in 2015 or 2016 in order to help promote new lunar legislation through Congress.
I also hope that your book will emphasize just how– extremely important–it is for NASA to be able to identify and to accurately quantify the types of volatiles contained at the lunar poles.
Marcel
“The task of rocket building gobbles up so much of NASA’s meager exploration budget there’s no money left to develop payloads; the spacecraft, the living quarters, rovers or all of the stuff NASA needs if it wants to send humans to the moon, the surface of an asteroid or Mars.
For this reason critics, and there are many, have dubbed the SLS a “rocket to nowhere.”
The joy expressed by the private space mob when they refer to the SLS in this way is exactly the same emotional gratification I experience when referring to the SpaceX entry as “the hobby rocket.”
An HLV like the SLS in the Saturn V range is a rocket to one place- the Moon. This is more an environmental issue than a engineering one. Nuclear energy schemes can carry human beings from the surface of the Earth to the other planets but the contamination is unacceptable. A “rocket to everywhere” will have to lift-off from someplace outside Earth’s magnetosphere.
Nuclear contamination of the Moon is acceptable.
Nobody likes the asteroid retrieval mission:
NASA’s asteroid mission takes a beating
Posted on July 31, 2014 | By Eric Berger
NASA can’t afford to send humans to Mars. With its current plans to build a large rocket, the Space Launch System, NASA can’t even afford to go back to the moon.
What NASA can afford to do, in about a decade, is bring a small asteroid to a location near the moon, and then send astronauts to fly in formation with the rock.
This is known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM.
There is little love for the ARM in Congress.
“I don’t think there’s a clear consensus on a lot of things in Congress, but we all agree that pushing a rock around in space is a waste of taxpayer dollars that we don’t have to spare,” John Culberson, a Houston Republican, told me.
On Wednesday, at two separate space policy meetings, the mission was also savaged.
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/07/nasas-asteroid-mission-takes-a-beating/
Bob Clark