But Congress, reasonably, also wanted a back up option to LEO and to the ISS in case the commercial vehicles ran into some difficulties. Still, NASA could have easily funded the development of a reusable lunar lander/OTV with an additional $1.2 billion a year over the course of ten years ($12) (2011 to 2020).

But Dr. Spudis is correct. The Orion is a cis-lunar vehicle that cannot possibly be used for transporting crews to Mars orbit or back to Earth without some major modifications and a large radiation shielded habitat module add on.

The safest and easiest way to get humans to Mars orbit is to utilize lunar polar ice resources for air, water, propellant, and radiation shielding for reusable interplanetary vehicles operating between the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and Mars orbit. And such a reusable interplanetary vehicle could easily be derived from the SLS hydrogen fuel tank and upper stage technology.

Marcel

“I don’t think the media will report this honestly —”
“It’s always much easier to print NASA press releases than to do any actual research for facts.”

If there was such research done the questions they raise would be incredibly embarrassing. The first one being why hasn’t the Delta IV been man-rated after the years and continuing shame of having to pay the Russians for rides to the ISS. Of course those unbelievably expensive tin cans going in endless circles at very high altitude are a disgrace all by themselves. In my own view the debacle of paying essentially the same amount of money to launch a space shuttle into LEO that was paid to send a spacecraft to the Moon has made the U.S. a joke far beyond the fact that we are now a third rate space nation behind Russian and China. At least we finally retired the astronaut killer after losing a second crew.

The problem is not where to go, it is admitting that the Moon is the only place to go. The Moon is the gateway to the solar system. It would not be such a hard admission for the President to recant and point us back in the right direction. Unfortunately his advisers are……idiots. I hate branding a group of people like that and using such harsh terms on Dr. Spudis’ blog but this has gone far beyond polite commentary. The possibility that “new space” will finally and permanently kill any chance of a real space program in this century is real and very disturbing to me.

Another interesting feature of this mission has to do with the launch vehicle. The RS-68A’s are awesome engines yet there are more news articles wailing and gnashing teeth over the “critical need” for a new kerosene engine to replace the second hand Russian model on the Atlas. That’s all an obvious scam to myself and many who visit forums like this but the average citizen is clueless. As far as the man or woman on the street knows the only space program we have is Musk retiring on Mars using his hobby rocket.

The Crew Size was never 7.

The original requirements were:

– Crew of 6 to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for ISS Missions
– Crew of 4 for Lunar Missions

The crew of 6 to LEO requirement was dropped for a number of reasons the two major ones being:

-Mass as already stated
– Just as important was that to have two different crew sizes would complicate the design of the Crew Impact Attenuation System (CIAS) – the seat pallet. This would even affect structural design of the pressure vessel as the attach points and load paths would have had to be different.

This kind of change when detailed design is in process is not unusual. You might notice that for a long time the Commercial Crew vehicle crew size was spoken of as 7. When the most recent Commercial Crew contracts were let, that size was (without any acknowledgement) reduced to 5 Also a reduction of 2 for a vehicle designed for a much simpler mission.

I don’t think the media will report this honestly — I am already seeing stories such as this one:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2856585/Ready-lift-Nasa-gives-ahead-Orion-capsule-man-Mars-blast-flight-Thursday.html

It’s always much easier to print NASA press releases than to do any actual research for facts.

At some point, we will get an Earth departure stage for SLS — they need this even to do the asteroid retrieval mission. But no matter what form it takes, SLS can be used to return to the Moon, in a variety of different architectures. We can make use of both government and commercial launch assets — we just need to know what we are working with.

I would say that is a bit of an overstatement. The principal goals of this flight test are to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of the Orion vehicle, which includes its heat shield (thus, a high-apogee orbital path to create higher than LEO re-entry velocity). This is not a meaningless test — any spacecraft built for human use would require these data. I don’t agree that this flight is comparable to the Ares-X test of a few years ago.

I also don’t know where you got the idea that the “original Orion” had a nominal crew of seven. That number reflected the concept that in a possible role as an emergency Crew Return Vehicle from ISS, Orion would have to handle seven people during Earth return (i.e., in an emergency). The original ESAS architecture for lunar flights (i.e., what Constellation was designed for) called for a crew of four.

I agree that both the design and the mission of Orion have changed over time, with the latter being much more important.

Perhaps the situation could be redeemed somewhat by the SLS upper stage being designed to be a reusable cryogenic stage that could also serve as a lunar lander and could be sized (diameter) to be able to be launched on either the SLS or other launchers. Yet I feel like this would be grasping for anything of value when I would much prefer a complete rework of the vision, strategy, hardware, and procurement processes with an early focus on returning to the Moon in a sustainable way.

Those “few weeks” were probably a major factor in the end of Apollo.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo_astronauts.html
The solar storm of August 1972 is legendary at NASA because it occurred in between two Apollo missions: the crew of Apollo 16 had returned to Earth in April and the crew of Apollo 17 was preparing for a moon landing in December.

A massively shielded space station in lunar orbit (shielded with water brought up from the Moon) is the safest near future scenario for travel directly from the Earth to the Moon. Eventually the first leg of travel from the Earth’s surface into space will be a short radiation bath to a shielded habitat in GEO. Radiation is square one if people are going to be spending most of their professional lives in space.

The most important feature of Orion is the escape system. The Launch Abort System is quite powerful and if humans are ever to explore BELO, Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit, this is important due to unavoidable requirement for nuclear energy. The escape tower on the Orion is a critical prerequisite system for transporting fissionable material from Earth into space.

The Heavy Lift Vehicle with a powerful escape system, hydrogen upper stages to transport nuclear material to the Moon, and the water-as-shielding available from the Moon, is the only path to any manned deep space mission. The last piece of the puzzle is the wet workshop concept which allows for the actual construction of true Spaceships in lunar orbit.

Mars is a fantasy and not a very good one. Dozens of gas giant moons with subsurface oceans await exploration. Instead of the rather ridiculous scenario of settlers landing on a dim cold dead rock, hauling submarines to much better destinations is the future of space exploration.