MTO Cancelled Options

[djellison]

Just listening to the MRO conference. Highlights included...

1) 5.4 Mbits is the highest MRO data rate (not the 4 I thought)
2) An extra 50-ish KG of fuel puts it's low-altitude orbit life thru to the next decade.
3) MTO HAS BEEN CANCELLED

What the HELL!

They say that MSL can still do its mission with just MRO as it's relay capacity will suffice.

But that means less science data during an MRO extension

Seems a bit short sighted.

Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

In reply:

(1) I find that $55 billion price tag for Mars Direct about as plausible as the original $8 billion price tag for ISS, and for much the same reason. I take for granted that the cost on this thing will rapidly explode once it actually gets underway -- and the staggering size and complexity needed even for a 6-man ship according to the latest studies backs me up. See the documents from the first two Mars Strategic Roadmap meetings:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/apio/ppt/mar...man_studies.ppt

(2) Even assuming that you can get support for manned Mars landing expeditions that would ONLY look for fossils and restrain themselves from poking into any sort of environment that might conceivably contain extant Martian life -- which is extremely doubtful -- the dangers of their accidentally contaminating such an extant biosphere would be huge. And just how likely is it in any case that we can get support for such a hugely expensive manned fossil hunt UNLESS we already have strong evidence for Martian fossils from robot explorers?

Moreover, by an overwhelming margin, the most valuable fossil evidence we're likely to find on Mars is not of the shape of Martian microbes -- microbes, for elementary physical/chemical reasons, are likely to have the same shapes on any world -- but of their biochemistry. It's the variations in that, compared with Earth germs, that will make extraterrestrial life interesting -- and, given the great difficulties in interpreting whether apparent fossilized microbes even on Earth are really biological or are just copycat nonliving mineral formations, such preserved biochemical evidence may very well be necessary even to determine that any possible martian fossils really ARE fossils. But it is also precisely this kind of delicate, trace organic-chemical fossil evidence that will be disastrously contaminated at the landing site of any manned Mars lander.

(One point made clear in the testimony of NASA officials at the first Mars Roadmap meeting is that any manned Mars landing expeditions will be radically different in overall concept from our Apollo visions of spacesuited explorers tromping around the landscape. Given both the dangers of forward and back-contamination, and the greater difficulty in developing spacesuits and backpacks that are easy to wear in the greater Martian gravity, any landed Mars crew will do as much of their work as possible, even after landing, using robots remote-controlled from their home base or from the presurized cabins of their rovers. Actually suited-up EVAs will be limited to the minimum necessary. But you could run those robots just as well from Mars orbit.)

(3) As an Earth-orbital training ground for manned deep space ships, the ISS is absolutely ludicrous. It must be constantly resupplied; it will be very hard to build any closed-cycle, self-reliant (and leakproof) life-support system into it -- and in any case any such systems (absolutely crucial for manned deep space ships) can be tested on the ground, BETTTER, for literally about 0.1% of the cost of testing them on the ISS.

Indeed, the only aspect of manned deep-space flight for which any kind of Earth-orbital facility might be useful is to determine the effectiveness of various levels of artificial gravity in fending off the harmful effects of 0-G. But the ISS can never be equipped with artificial gravity -- unless you count the Centrifuge Module that Japan is building for it, which npw seems very likely to get kicked completely off the ISS due to NASA's funding oroblems, and whose usefulness in understanding the effects of low-G on humans themselves is extremely limited anyway. By far the best way to test that is simply to put a simulated manned-deep space ship cabin, spun up to provide some level of artificial gravity, into Earth orbit and simply put a crew on that.

(4) I didn't mean to say that NASA is actually officially saying that "science is unimportant in manned spaceflight" -- although I was at one meeting at NASA's 2004 Astrobiology Conference at Ames Research Center, at which a group of scientists hd been ordered to come up with (so help me God)strong "astrobiological" justifications for manned LUNAR exploration. Sean O'Keefe informed them threateningly in a message that the Great Leader was determined to fly a manned lunar program in any case -- and that, if the scientific community didn't get with the program and start coming up with official scientific justifications for it, the Great Leader would order it flown WITHOUT any science onboard. (Since, by now, the Bush Administration's ability to threaten people was already on a rapid downhill slide, the scientists literally jeered this announcement.)

But what I was really saying is simply that the "scientific" and "commercial" justifications being put forward by both the White House and Congress for NASA's manned program are at this point so ridiculously lame, pathetic and transparent that it's clear that not even they really expect anyone to believe them -- they're just going through the motions of a standard political Kabuki Play as the obligatory (if transparent) fig leaf for a pure pork program. Certainly this is entirely the case with Shuttle/Station,; the arguments for a return to the Moon are just as ridiculous when looked at, and not even Bush dares to push something as expensive as a manned Mars expedition on us at this point.

(5) Regarding a manned Moon program as an expensive blind alley when it comes to sending men to Mars: the Mars Roadmap group came close to a rebellion on the third day of its first meeting for precisely this reason. O'Keefe showed up in person at the start of the first day (I was there) and blew threateningly through his mustache that they were under no circumstances to actually question the advisibility of any part of the Great Leader's manned program; theirs was but to suggest the best way to carry it out. But since it was plain to everyone that a manned lunar program is probbly just a very expensive side distraction from a manned Mars program, the Committee (led, in the rebellion, by Tom Young and Sally Ride) nevertheless on the third day came close to issuing a statement to that effect -- and I wrote it up in my SpaceDaily piece on the meeting. Unfortunately, by the time the Committee actually isssued its preliminary Roadmap, enough additional arms had been twisted that they just ended up sticking in a brief, bland statement that the manned lunar program might provide useful experience for a manned Mars program, without going into any significant detail as to what such experience might be: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/apio/pdf/mars/mars_roadmap.pdf (pg. 29-30). Every one of the five listed areas in which manned lunar exploration might be useful in acquiring experience for manned Mars expeditions could probably be achieved much more cheaply in other ways.

And that is also the conclusion reached by the IAA's carefully thought-out, incremental 2004 plan for manned deep space flight ( http://www.iaanet.org/p_papers/exploringspace.pdf ) -- in which the movement is toward manned deep-space expeditions over longer and longer distances (first the Earth-Sun L-2 point, then near-Earth asteroids, and finally Mars), and it specified that a manned lunar base, while quite possible to incorporate into the program, is actually a side branch whose relevance to manned Mars mission planning is seriously doubtful. (Pg. 56, 63 and 69.) The Roadmap Committee was very interested in this report and indeed incorporated it into their background briefing material.