Nasa's New Budget Graph For The Bush Initiative..., ...or, This You Gotta See To Believe Options

[Bob Shaw]

Bruce:

A Surveyor-based Lunar sample return mission? Do tell!

Bob Shaw

[Betelgeuze]

Ive been watching this forum for a long time now and I never posted anything before but I just want to say some things.
Im really excited about what the MERs are doing and about new mission like New Horizons but in the end I only care about two things;
-Search for alien life-forms.
-Getting people in to space and colonise the universe.
Those two things are not going to happen if we dont send robots first, but ask yourself is there really any other reason why we send robots to other planets?
Why is every one excited about mars, titan and europa but not about mercury?

Thanks to all the unmanned missions to mars we know a lot about this strange world, but who cares if we never plan to go to mars? Why did we spend all the time and money on something that would be useless for us?

I totally agree with nprev, and sometimes I have the feeling its 'now or never' , because of all the unmanned space missions we know a lot about space and the planets/moons in or solarsystem, but please lets use our knowledge before it is to late.

[Bob Shaw]

One of the things which has been most frustrating about the ISS has been the almost absolute *lack* of what you might have expected in the way of 'bolt-on', low-cost science. The early Shuttle 'Getaway Specials' sort of led us to expect something similar aboard the ISS (or whatever) but to no avail. Even quite sophisticated projects (and almost funding-free) like the amateur space telescope which was proposed as a (literally) 'bolt-on' to the ISS just died.

On Apollo, however, we saw a different experience. From the Tommy Gold 3-D surface camera, and the solar wind experiments, through to the Apollo 16 astronomical telescope (let's not mention gravimeters) there were a range of man-tended and fairly cheap bits of science. Perhaps one of the things we should be pushing for on Apollo Mk II is the opportunity for a genuine range of small-scale, man-tended science payloads? It must be said in this connection that I'm quite sceptical of the plans for missions like the James Webb Telescope, largely because the simple burden of unfolding whatsits into the appropriate configuration strikes me as being exactly the reason why we need men to visit, if not reside at, major future science observatories. Men need to go there to hit the damn things with rubber hammers!

Bob Shaw

[David]

I don't expect this idea to be popular here (or even correct), but it seems to me that one of the things which has kept manned space travel dull, on both the American and Soviet/Russian sides (in addition to, as mentioned, the lack of new discoveries and the lack of a clear 'storyline' that people could follow) is that NASA has never really trusted its astronauts to make on-the-spot decisions with their extremely expensive equipment. As a result, from Mercury (and Vostok) on, the astronauts have not been much more than an expensive "spam in a can" on voyages that could just as well have been done by robots -- except, of course, that their original raison d'être was to demonstrate the feasibility of human spaceflight.
Well, we proved in Mercury that you could toss human beings up above the atmosphere, whirl them around several times, and bring them back home more-or-less safely. But finding something for them to do up there was much more difficult -- not least because there has been, I think, a feeling that astronauts (and cosmonauts) on their own screw things up -- Grissom's hatch problem, Carpenter's off-target splashdown, problems with the Agena docking, Schirra and the helmet affair, the Skylab mutiny -- and everything goes much more smoothly when left in the hands of mission control.
That might be the right thing to do from the point of view of astronaut safety. I don't know. But the failure to turn substantial flight control responsibility over to the astronauts*, once the program passed the purely experimental stage, does raise the legitimate question of what the astronauts are doing. In the Space Shuttles the pilots don't seem to do much of anything in the way of flying the craft except lowering the landing gear; something which could just as easily be automated (as the Soviets proved with Buran, back before the Fall). And even the other astronauts have their schedules meticulously constructed and directed for them by mission control.
Which makes me wonder, not so much why we have humans in space, but why we have a dedicated astronaut corps at all? It no longer seems true that astronauts have to be tip-top physical specimens and fighter jocks. So why not just have the mission controllers fly the darn ship, since they obviously know so much more about it than the astronauts?

*The one exception I can think of, which perhaps proves the rule, being controlling the descent of the LEM.

[nprev]

As far as astronauts screwing things up goes...one thing you should keep in mind is that practically all the early astronauts were fighter pilots. From personal experience with this subculture, I can assure you that fighter jocks often place pride, ego, and an overwhelming need to control their environment ahead of common sense, and very, very seldom admit error...

Clearly, this classical Type A mindset is permissable (even essential) for combat operations; you'd better feel invincible in that situation in order to remain aggressive and therefore effective. It is, however, poorly suited for the complex cooperation and comparatively passive data-acquisition/analysis cycle usually employed during exploration and research...but I think NASA knows this, and the new generations of astronauts have been scientists first and foremost.

[dvandorn]

David, the crews of American manned spacecraft *have* had more autonomous capacity to make decisions than you give credit for. As you pointed out, during lunar landing operations, there was a point that even Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft called "the place where control shifts from the ground to the spacecraft." This has also always been true during docking operations and EVA operations -- the crew on the scene has made the decisions, and informed Houston of them later.

Now, the Soviets (and later the Russians) have always had more of a control-freak mindset, starting with the lockout of manual controls on the early Vostoks and ending with the famous poster that hangs in Korolev Mission Control today, showing station crewmen as puppets being controlled by strings emanating from the flight control station.

-the other Doug

[David]

As far as astronauts screwing things up goes...

It wasn't my purpose to slam the astronauts, present or past! I'm just saying that it seems to me that some folks at NASA, particularly flight directors and controllers, view astronauts as the most unreliable part of a complex system, and that they are therefore shunted as much as possible out of the command structure. My comments on astronaut "screw-ups" were intended, not as a statement of historical fact, but as an attempt at representing, in an extreme fashion, one interpretation of some historical facts.

It seems to me, however, that the present situation is one which arises, not so much from physical and technical facts (though those are certainly involved) as from the peculiar history of space flight. Compare it, for instance, with other forms of "encapsulated" travel -- ships and aeroplanes. When the first boat-maker in prehistoric times pushed his fragile craft out onto a river or lake, he probably went along with it; he didn't have the luxury of standing on the shore and controlling his vessel from a distance. When the Wright Brothers flew the Flyer under power at Kitty Hawk, they didn't run it up on a string like a kite; they went up with it. After all, the whole point of their research was not to create just a flying machine, but a flying machine that would carry people.

But the rocket program has different roots. Modern rockets were first built in the radio age, when it was possible both to control the rocket machinery from the ground, and to monitor instruments on the rocket from a distance. Since rockets were complicated and dangerous, it made sense to operate things remotely instead of endangering the life of someone by putting him on the rocket -- which, in the case of rockets built to carry bombs, would have been a kamikaze mission anyway. As a result, we have a nexus of an outlook, and a technology built to support that outlook, which is based on the idea that control must stay on the ground, while the bird goes into the air.

The advent of astronauts doesn't change that. The infrastructure of ground control is already in place for missile launches, and astronauts are just seen as a new, if fragile, cargo, that gets in the way of the minimum technical requirements for successful launch -- as payload. To stroke the astronauts' egos, since they are pilots by training, they are given levers to pull and buttons to push, but none of that is necessary, as all the vital commands can be given from the ground anyway.

And that mindset continues, it seems to me, to the present day. An astronaut is at best an accessory, at worst a nuisance. Things could have been different, if at some point the decision had been made to turn primary flight control over to the astronauts themselves, with "Mission Control" becoming "Mission Support". Imagine, if you will, that spacecraft commanders were actually in command of their craft and not taking orders from the ground; that they could make their own decisions, based on ground and crew input, on whether to launch and when to launch; they they could make the decision on whether to abort a mission or extend a mission; that they, not the ground, directed crew schedules and duties; that crew health was monitored and decisions made about it among the crew, not on the ground -- well, things would be rather different.

I have no idea about whether turning substantial mission control authority over to astronauts is ultimately practicable or not. It doesn't seem to me that the current structure in Houston (or the equivalent set-up in Russia) is set up for that. But it seems to me that failure to turn over even small parts of this authority has caused friction in the past between astronauts (and cosmonauts) and the ground, resulting in small-scale crew rebellions, with the result that seasoned astronauts get the sack on their return.

Moreover, however well this type of ground control works for earth-orbiting spacecraft (though it doesn't seem especially suitable for long-term space stations) it seems altogether inappropriate for any manned mission beyond the Moon. If human beings are going to be going on space flights that take months or years, and will put them several light-minutes from Earth, then the strings that tie them to Mission Control will have to be loosened, and significant authority given to the commander on the spot. And I expect that would meet with institutional resistance. And for all I know, that's a factor (in addition to the immense technical difficulties) in preventing the extension of manned spaceflight; nobody trusts the astronauts to actually be in command of the operation, and nobody can figure out how to keep ground control in control.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

David's extremely interesting note is ultimately a corollary to the central problem of manned space travel: the ships must be so bloody COMPLEX to keep their human cargoes alive, as compared to unmanned craft. With contraptions as complex as manned ships, NASA naturally doesn't trust the important decisions to be made by just a few people (except in the case of the Apollo lunar landings, where they had to, given the impracticability of teleoperation for that particular task and the lousy state at the time of AI systems for picking safe landing sites).

And when we build manned deep-space ships -- where onboard management is largely a necessity -- the big problem will be making the damned things redundant enough to keep a crew alive in that hostile environment, where a fast emergency return to Earth is impossible. It's possible, but VERY expensive -- which means, yet again, that when we send humans into deep space we had better have a damned good reason for it.

[dvandorn]

The problem with giving the crew the *sole* call on aborts, etc., is that even during the pioneering days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, the spacecraft were so complex that you literally couldn't display status reports on all the systems onboard. There wasn't enough display console space (back in those pre-CRT-display days) to show everything that was happening.

So, the mission control concept evolved not from a distrust of the crew, but from the technical inability for the crew to continually monitor their own systems. It was just way safer to have the ground controllers monitoring systems.

The same is true for maneuvering -- even during Apollo, there was no way their onboard computers could maintain a moment-to-moment projection of the trajectory. (In fact, Apollo planners originally wanted to have a Return to Earth computer program that would allow the crew to plot their own return maneuvers from any point in the mission, but the onboard computer was simply too limited to be able to contain the RTE propgram along with the rest of the required programming.)

You have a very good point about deep space missions, though. When you get more than about a light-minute away, it's nearly impossible for Houston to run the flight real-time. That means that there will have to be complete monitoring of systems onboard (probably automated). It will also be *very* useful for base camp crew to act as "mission control" for EVA astronauts on Mars traverses. Apollo demonstrated the usefulness of having a mission control supoprt EVA astronauts -- I'll bet that the non-EVA crew will perform that function during Martian traverses.

-the other Doug

[Bob Shaw]

A couple of points:

Firstly, the ex-Soviet 'robot astronaut' philosophy *isn't* now the Russian way - much to the chagrin of NASA. The Russians now tend to tell their guys to simply 'go and fix the antenna', whereas NASA wants to have everything tested, retested and turned into a 'translate +X 10 feet, rotate to attachment point 36(F), decouple connection 2132a...'. There are problems associated with 'go and fix it', such as we saw recently with regard to potential RCS blasts during EVAs (as much of a difficulty in terms of toxic contamination as anything, though it must be said that post-Skylab the Russians were rather worried by Shuttle RCS plumes when the first visits to Mir took place) but in practice it's probably the way forward, with Mission Control adopting a collegial role rather than that of a defence lawyer.

And, regarding the Great New Vision - I've been slowly ploughing through the ESAS draft (thanks to NASA Watch and SpaceRef) and have thus far found a couple of gems.

Firstly, I'm really rather gratified to see the low-tech/high-tech blend - with things like Methanol/O2 RCS, and carbon-fibre outer structures. In other words, low-risk, high gain design policies (no chemical milling, no high-energy RCS propellants, and a *lot* of post-Shuttle lessons).

Secondly, it's nice to see some attention being paid to the past (Gemini-style EVA-capable launch and entry suits, and Mir toilets, for example). The feel of the CEV is, however, much more of a Shuttle mid-deck than that of Apollo (which had something like 240 ft3 space for three astronauts, compared to twice that (per crewman) for six (if I have my figures right). Much more comfortable than the (nominally) five-man Apollo CM (which actually made it to the pad for the Skylab rescue flight!).

Thirdly, the bad news: no cargo in the SM. I've yet to find any mention of a Lunar CEV SIM Bay option, which I have to confess has been one of the things I really wanted to see. Still, perhaps it is in there, hidden away in weight growth projections.

I'll continue reading the ESAS document and will post again either in this thread or in the 'Everything Old Is New...' thread.

Bob Shaw