

NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon - geuis
http://www.space.com/18380-nasa-moon-missions-obama-election.html

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schiffern
With SpaceX and their heavy-lift plans in the back of my mind, watching the
video made me cringe. When they constantly name-drop the manufacturer of
various components it becomes all too obvious who the real audience is. And
the message? 'Don't call your Senators, you're still on the gravy train.'

>Work is underway on the flight-qualified booster, getting ready for its big
test next year _at ATK in Utah_. [Formerly Morton Thiokol, the company that
Orrin Hatch axed the single-segment SRB design to protect. This design
decision, and the famed management decision at MT to ignore engineer Roger
Boisjoly's warnings on launch day, doomed the crew of STS-51-L.]

>The venerable RS-25 engine, _built by Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne_ … will power
the SLS core stage.

>In order to fuel these engines, NASA called on the expertise _at the Boeing
Company_ to build the SLS core stage…

…and on and on.

In this arena cost inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.

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cryptoz
A base at L2 is interesting. However, I have a fundamental problem with these
plans: timeframe. JFK's moon speech was so memorable, and the policy it
implemented so successful _because it was aimed to be done while JFK was still
in office_ (well, pretty close). Obama and NASA targeting a Mars landing by
the time Obama is nearly dying of old age...well, it's not inspiring. It's
also not likely to stay on track for so many decades. "By the decade is out"
-> "When I'm 78 and elderly"

I am also nervous about the continued approach of establishing bases to "learn
more about supporting humans in deep space". The ISS did this for not-deep
space, and it trapped us in. It was so expensive that it prevented further
exploration.

I would suggest that we should not establish small expensive bases to learn
more. Unless the bases are intended to become permanent _colonies_ , which I
think would be an excellent move. I realize this starts to sound expensive,
but start with a small but expandable design. Like scaling a web start up.

~~~
debacle
Could you do a moonrace in today's America? Would it work? Would we win?

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cryptoz
Sure. SpaceX or China would win. NASA or ESA would follow about a decade
later.

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sehugg
Kennedy: Let's go to the Moon. We go to the Moon.

Nixon: Apollo canceled. Shuttle born.

Reagan: Space Station Freedom. The Ride Report proposes a lunar base by 2010.

Bush Sr: Space Exploration Initiative, or $500 billion for a lunar base by
2010 or 2020. Rejected.

Clinton: Space Station Freedom morphs into ISS.

Bush Jr: Constellation program and humans on the Moon by 2020.

Obama: Constellation canceled, SLS born. Moon by 2020. Or maybe an asteroid by
2025. Or maybe Mars (with friends). Or maybe somewhere else entirely...

It seems much easier to get agreement on who does the studies and who builds
the hardware than where to go and when.

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stcredzero

        Kennedy: Let's go to the Moon. We go to the Moon.
    
        Nixon: Apollo canceled. Shuttle born.
    
        Reagan: Space Station Freedom. The Ride Report proposes a lunar base by 2010.
    
        Bush Sr: Space Exploration Initiative, or $500 billion for a lunar base by 2010 or 2020. Rejected.
    
        Clinton: Space Station Freedom morphs into ISS.
    
        Bush Jr: Constellation program and humans on the Moon by 2020.
    
        Obama: Constellation canceled, SLS born. Moon by 2020. Or maybe an asteroid by 2025. Or maybe Mars (with friends). Or maybe somewhere else entirely...*
    
    

Elon Musk: Going to Mars!

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DanielBMarkham
As another commenter pointed out, it's become rather cliche for NASA to make
grandiose plans for 15-30 years out, only to change direction a few years
later.

Solve cost-to-orbit, guys. Get it to $100/kilo and we can build a dozen manned
stations for the amount of money the country spends on potato chips each year
(around $10 Billion)

But enough with the grandiose long-range plans that only serve to allow
contractors to bill for a few years until the next grandiose long-range plan.

~~~
qq66
This is because space programs are a great tool of presidential politics,
which operates on 4-year cycles that are completely useless for long-term
space policy.

Perhaps a solution is to have NASA administered by a board that's appointed
for life similar to the Supreme Court -- its total budget will still be
subject to the vagaries of political squabbling but at least its ability to
allocate budget to programs will be unencumbered.

~~~
rsynnott
To an extent, this is an oddity of the US system, where a lot of the civil
service is run by appointees. In most modern parliamentary democracies, the
civil service is largely static and non-appointed, and while the government
can in principle get rid of, say, a permanent secretary, it's highly visible
and would rarely be done. This tends to give long-term projects more inertia;
if the government wants to kill one without considerable controversy, it
really has to make a case for doing so.

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greedo
Jerry Pournelle has done a lot of writing on the value of offering prizes
instead of having the government foot the bill. We've seen some of that with
the funding SpaceX gets, but the scale needs to be increased.

Offer $1 billion to orbit an unmanned (man rated) capsule around the Moon.
Then another billion to land same capsule. $5 billion to land a crew of two,
and return them to Earth. Since each is incremental, the risk for the
companies trying to compete will be lower.

EDIT: Yes I know the costs are far higher than the prizes I'm mentioning. It's
the general concept I'm aiming at.

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cpeterso
Google is sponsoring an X Prize to visit the moon before 2016. The first team
to land a robot and drive 500 meters will win $20M. The second team wins $5M.

There is also a controversial "Apollo Heritage Bonus Prize" of $1M if a team's
robot visits one of the Apollo landing sites.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize>

~~~
greedo
I think the prize needs to be larger to mitigate the risks involved. $20m
doesn't seem like enough for the costs involved in launching a droid to the
moon.

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alecdibble
This is great news. I'm hoping SpaceX's recent success has put a fire under
NASA.

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stcredzero
Okay, WTF is up with Space.com's website? Takes forever to load on a new iPad,
which is usually quite zippy, all the while the entire page appears as a
columnar thumbnail sized in the left 1/4 of the screen and hangs out there,
frozen, then the entire thing re-refreshes at least 3 times? What kind of
amateur crap is this?

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jhspaybar
This article kept going back to this being some secret agreement between Obama
and NASA, kept a secret in case Romney won?! Uh, what, why? I understand
administrations have different goals, but this felt almost like a campaign
piece of "Obama good, Romney bad!" and I for the life of me can't figure out
why it matters.

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anonymouz
I think the point was simply that they didn't want to announce it just before
the election, in case Romney would become president and pull the plug on the
whole thing. NASA would look rather bad if they had to call it off again in a
month or so (despite the fact that it technically wouldn't be their fault).

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tocomment
But the existing space station in LEO took 10 years to build and cost 150
billion. Wouldn't a similar station in deep space be an order of magnitude
more expensive?

Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?

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cryptoz
> Hmm, has anyone considered moving the ISS to earth-moon L2?

This idea comes up all the time on r/space. It can't be done. The ISS is not
safe out there. It does not have enough radiation shielding nor is it sturdy
enough, nor would you be able to accelerate it out there, etc. Making the
modifications necessary to do so would cost much more than just building a new
ship.

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stcredzero
L2 sounds like a big boondoggle to me. It's like the ISS part two. A base on
the lunar surface would be able to use lunar soil for radiation shielding. Put
a linear accelerator out there to launch things into orbit, and you
dramatically reduce the travel costs to get there and back. (Since you won't
have to haul as much fuel for return up there.) In addition, O2 can be
extracted from lunar soil, which would reduce the return fuel payload to
almost nothing.

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debacle
The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space can't
be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated,
especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the
ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have
to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?)
to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the
broad side of a barn.

Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much, and once there
is a permanent mobile presence in near space, the fuel cost will really just
be relegated to getting from the surface into orbit (which is most of the fuel
cost anyway).

The reality (sad, unfortunate, or otherwise) is that getting into space is
expensive, but it's ridiculously cheap compared to some of the other things
the US wastes money on.

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stcredzero
_Fuel costs would obviously be greater, but not all that much_

Fuel is just a small fraction of the cost anyhow. Also, you could build
"cycler" craft using ion or plasma thrusters that could ferry crew modules
from LEO to the moon and back.

 _The convenience of being on a giant rock versus a sitting duck in space
can't be understated, either. It makes a lot of things a lot less complicated,
especially supplying the base. The deceleration and coupling that ships to the
ISS have to go through would be completely negated on the moon - all you have
to do is land something relatively close (within a few hundred yards, maybe?)
to the base and you're set. It's like threading a needle versus hitting the
broad side of a barn._

There's a lot of valuable payloads you wouldn't have to actually land. You
could ship frozen water up there in a projectile designed to keep it in a
super-cold, super-hard state using liquid nitrogen as a boil-off coolant, and
also clad it in armor and partially shield it from impact. Then a rover could
go and retrieve the frozen water capsules. Even better, have a few shipments
consist of frozen, dampened potting soil, which can be supplemented with lunar
soil (made into a slurry with water and sloshed around to wear down the super-
jagged edges) and start growing your own food up there with redirected
sunlight. (There are a number of plants that are workably tolerant of 2 week
sunlight cycles, like peas, provided you keep them cold between sunny
periods.)

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martin1b
Please help me understand why a nation with a fledgling economy that is
trillions of dollars in debt spend billions of dollars on something that was
done 50 years ago?

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shabble
There are many reasons:

* Inspiration - the space program was a huge morale booster and directly responsible for a lot of people going into the science/engineering professions.

* Dual-use technologies - most of the problems you end up solving have other uses, from little things like velcro up to ICBM and other weapons tech. Or, you could think of it as giving an alternative to those who want to work on big explody things, but aren't comfortable with them being used to kill people.

* Economic stimulus - those billions of dollars aren't just disappearing. A large amount of the space industry is US based, and that money goes to them and their employees and creates/maintains both skilled and unskilled jobs.

* Scientific research - There are plenty of things we don't know that would benefit from modern sensing or analysis capabilities that weren't available in '72.

* Human progress - At the rate humanity is expanding, eventually we're probably need to gather resources off-planet, whether it's orbiting solar power satellites or asteroid mining, that tech needs to be developed. The longer term goal of actually colonising some place else is also pretty important if we consider progress & survival on a long enough scale.

All of these are I think good reasons why it should be done (again). That's
not to say it should necessarily be done by the government, but it's certainly
not money wasted in the way people often claim.

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lispm
Most of that are more like myths or are mostly irrelevant for current
problems.

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waterlesscloud
I guess I'm missing the Manned Moon Missions part. Something about an L2 base,
the only thing about actual moon missions is something about "teleoperating
rovers".

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oh_sigh
Why put multiple cameras in it? Why not just make the center of gravity
opposite the camera, so that the lens is always on the top?

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brudgers
L2 point is:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L2_point#L2>

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antidoh
Actually the image at that link shows the sun-earth L2.

The article and mission is concerned with the earth-moon L2.

Here's a nice diagram of all earth-moon lagranges:
[http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures/Lagrange%20S...](http://www.orbitalvector.com/Space%20Structures/Lagrange%20Structures/LAGRANGE%20POINT%20STRUCTURES.htm)

Here's a pdf describing missions related to earth-moon lagrangians:
[http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604657main_4-%20GER%20Stakeholders%2...](http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604657main_4-%20GER%20Stakeholders%20Workshop%20Earth-
Moon%20L1_L2%20Bobskill.pdf)

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Luyt
You could operate a remote vehicle on the back of the Moon from Earth via
relay stations in L2 and L4.

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gavinlynch
Honest question: Why do we want to pay for this?

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grayrest
Why would we not want to? It's cheap entertainment if nothing else. As a
taxpayer, if you're making $100k gross, your annual contribution for NASA's
entire budget is about $100/year. I have no issues with spending $10-15 a year
(it's not going to be NASA's entire budget) to see a mars mission in my
lifetime.

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gavinlynch
That's a pretty terrible reason, especially when it is mandatory.

Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for
"entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city
children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go
towards cancer research?

Sorry, but the idea of "well, wouldn't it be cool??" I know fascinates many
geeks, but I think it's a horrible waste of our money.

If you guys want to see another moon mission, I say pass the tip jar around.
You can all contribute. I don't want my money going to this project, at this
point in time for our country. I'm not always opposed to this type of
endeavor, but this one, at this time? What a waste.

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grayrest
> Let me put it another way: Would you rather have that $100 going to Mars for
> "entertainment value" or, oh say, perhaps school supplies to inner city
> children? Maybe it could be used to pay off the deficit? Perhaps it could go
> towards cancer research?

My answer would be the same. You might value those other things more highly
but I do not.

I believe that nationally challenging engineering projects pay dividends for
years to come in ways that are not immediately apparent when the projects are
being funded.

I believe that our future as a country will depend on the number of scientists
and engineers we ultimately produce. Manned space exploration is very capital
inefficient in terms of science produced BUT it's deeply engaging. It's an
entry point that many current STEM workers can cite even if they're not
Aerospace Engineers or working in the field.

I believe we should spend money on things that might not work simply because I
think it's valuable to have a concrete national dream for the future. It
shouldn't be the main thing we spend money on, it shouldn't be a top priority
but the money is not a waste unless it goes entirely to contractors and
produces no entertainment value.

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anotherevan
The world is running out of Helium-3!

