Is Bush's manned lunar plan already coming unravelled? Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4430

Looks like this bunch has the goods on NASA, in the form of its new internal documents on the major new problems. One proposed solution is to have the CEV hover at the L-2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point 66,000 km above the Moon's farside, while the LSAM lunar lander does all the work of descending into lunar orbit, then landing, and later blasting off all the way back to the L-2 point for its rendezvous with the CEV. "This unconventional technique leads to significant mass savings on the CEV, and surprisingly leads to the same mass on the LSAM. In this case, the CEV fits on the Crew Launch Vehicle [which isn't the case any more for the currently existing plan]; however, the LSAM is still too large for the CaLV [Heavy Lifter] -- though the L2 architecture is closer to meeting the performance limit than the baseline cases examined."

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?

[Stephen]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4430

Looks like this bunch has the goods on NASA, in the form of its new internal documents on the major new problems. One proposed solution is to have the CEV hover at the L-2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point 66,000 km above the Moon's farside, while the LSAM lunar lander does all the work of descending into lunar orbit, then landing, and later blasting off all the way back to the L-2 point for its rendezvous with the CEV. "This unconventional technique leads to significant mass savings on the CEV, and surprisingly leads to the same mass on the LSAM. In this case, the CEV fits on the Crew Launch Vehicle [which isn't the case any more for the currently existing plan]; however, the LSAM is still too large for the CaLV [Heavy Lifter] -- though the L2 architecture is closer to meeting the performance limit than the baseline cases examined."

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?

From itty-bitty changes do mighty screwups grow!

Sounds like NASA folks have been making all those changes of theirs (eg the removal of methane/oxygen propellants) without fully thinking them or their ramifications through. Now their totality is threatening to snowball into something rather larger and more serious (judging from the article).

Unless they ungrade the CaLV or reverse some of the earlier changes, then I guess you're right, Bruce: the next step will have to be to "down-scope" the LSAM and/or the CEV. But then isn't that the way of many a space mission, unmanned and manned? We start out with the grand vision, it gets used to sell the thing to places like Congress, after which the next few years are spent scaling back the vision to fit the budget and rocket available.

Voyager, Viking, the Shuttle, the ISS. They all started out bigger and grander than what actually ended up getting off the ground. Why should the VSE be any different.

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Stephen

[disownedsky]

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?

Uh, no it's not. It has me depressed, actually. Time to go back to the drawing board, and with a new team, I think. We have to get much more innovative and less easily jerked around by industry B.S.

[PhilHorzempa]

[size=2]

Another option out of this mess may lie with re-fueling of the EDS in
Earth orbit. I do not recall the setting, but Griffin has suggested that one
big contribution from private launch companies would be to deliver fuel
to Earth orbit. He described a scheme in which there would be an orbital
fuel depot, with the fuel delivered cheaply by private industry. In addition,
he indicated that it would be a man-tended depot, with rudimentary living
quarters nearby. This hab module could be an inflatable, much like the
modules that Bigelow is working on.

Perhaps, this has been Griffin's plan all along. First, sell the ESAS
architecture, then when it becomes clear that the CEV and LSAM are too
heavy for the CLV and CaLV, bring in private industry to help develop
the fuel depot concept. This makes sense if one considers that the VSE
is also aiming at Mars. If NASA develops an orbital re-fueling capability
while returning to the Moon, then that makes manned Mars missions all
the more likely to be within our technological grasp in the near term.

[Stephen]

Another option out of this mess may lie with re-fueling of the EDS in
Earth orbit. I do not recall the setting, but Griffin has suggested that one
big contribution from private launch companies would be to deliver fuel
to Earth orbit. He described a scheme in which there would be an orbital
fuel depot, with the fuel delivered cheaply by private industry. In addition,
he indicated that it would be a man-tended depot, with rudimentary living
quarters nearby. This hab module could be an inflatable, much like the
modules that Bigelow is working on.

Perhaps, this has been Griffin's plan all along. First, sell the ESAS
architecture, then when it becomes clear that the CEV and LSAM are too
heavy for the CLV and CaLV, bring in private industry to help develop
the fuel depot concept. This makes sense if one considers that the VSE
is also aiming at Mars. If NASA develops an orbital re-fueling capability
while returning to the Moon, then that makes manned Mars missions all
the more likely to be within our technological grasp in the near term.

A "man-tended" "orbital fuel depot" sounds like a euphemism for "space station". Does NASA & the US really need a ***second*** space station, especially when it is not fully utilising the one already up there?

Since private enterprise is not going to be putting anything in orbit unless somebody else pays for it (and can guarantee them a profit) if this "orbital fuel depot" is for NASA's exclusive use--and for the foreseeable future who else is likely to need such a thing?--that surely suggests NASA (and hence the United States) is probably going to wind up effectively footing the ***entire*** bill for the construction and running of the thing.

I would therefore take claims about fuel being "delivered cheaply by private industry" with a grain of salt. Private enterprise may well be able to deliver fuel to the ***depot*** more cheaply than NASA could, but that cheapness may or may not be reflected in prices at the orbital pump for NASA, because even when its CEVs are not flying (and so it has no need to visit the the depot) it will probably still find itself footing the bill to keep the depot up there and ticking over.

======
Stephen

[mcaplinger]

Sounds like NASA folks have been making all those changes of theirs (eg the removal of methane/oxygen propellants)...

Methane/O2 only has a small advantage over MMH/NTO in specific impulse, and storing cryo propellants is a huge pain, so I don't see how that alone is really harming system performance. The supposed advantage of the methane was always for ISPP at Mars, but if we're not going to Mars than why deal with the complexity?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

It's been made clear for some months now that the manned Mars part of the Bush Initiative -- which was always relatively low priority -- has now been completely cancelled for the time being. It would take me a while to dig up the references to this in Aviation Week and/or NASA Watch; but there are also two solid technical indicators.

The first, as Mike Caplinger says, is the cancellation of the methane/oxygen lander engine -- which was useful only for ISRU refueling on Mars. The second is the indefinite delay of the series of "Mars Unmanned Precursor" missions that Bush intended to start flying to Mars in 2013, whose purpose would be to test ISRU techniques and gauge Martian environmental hazards for human expeditions. The fact is that NASA and the White House concluded some time ago that we simply do not have money for even the beginnings of a manned Mars program simultaneously with trying to fly manned lunar expeditions. Indeed, as is becoming increasingly clear, we probably don't have the money for the latter by itself. The whole thing is simply another hastily jury-rigged effect to keep the huge Manned Space Pork Machine fed at a constant rate while the Shuttle/Station project, which served that purpose for over three decades, finally collapses into its own absurdity.

[djellison]

Carefull where this topic goes.....you are being watched - carefully.

Doug

[MaxSt]

I see they removed the article...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, what they say is that the information leaked to them was biased by being selectively leaked to support the views of the leaker, and that they found out about it. (Sound familiar? This is the central danger with leaks, no matter WHO "has the rightful authority to authorize them".) But we are now back to Square 1 in trying to guess just how the manned lunar program actually will turn out.

[Bob Shaw]

Well, while they try to make their figures add up, at least we'll get some unmanned Lunar missions at last!

Bob Shaw