http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/12/..._repo.html#more

Do they actually think they can SELL this? Even to this Congress? (Actually, I don't think they really do.)

(sigh)....No, but wouldn't it be nice....

I don't really know that NASA can sell this -- but then again, that's not what they were tasked to do. They were tasked to come up with an architecture that would give America a manned interplanetary capability. This does just that, and it's not as expensive as many other options.

Please don't start the argument that there's no good reason for humans to travel back to the Moon or to other solar system bodies, because I will never agree with that argument. I don't care what the fianancial factors might be. I think it's very bad for the human spirit to stay holed up here, when we have the ability to explore beyond -- in person.

-the other Doug

Someone seems to have successfully sold Congrss on the idea that massive tax cuts and spending increases are the means to a balanced budget. So NASA's probably thinking "what the heck -- who knows WHAT these suckers will buy."

It's also bad for the human spirit to reduce people's prosperity, against their will, for things they don't as a whole want to do. We've already seen the polls: Gallup reports that the American people would favor a return to the Moon ONLY if the total cost of the program was less than a billion dollars -- which is to say they don't want it at all. If there's no actual concrete benefit from it, how does this give Congress and the White house the right to cram it down their throats with their own money? Particularly, I may add, when we can "explore" without the gigantic added expense of lugging out own bodies along -- and the people as a whole seem quite content with THAT kind of space exploration.

Let's just keep in mind that we are talking about a manned return to the Moon, which -- however interesting it may be to geologists -- is an utterly barren, monotonous desert that most people find boring as hell, which is why interest in the Apollo program vanished the moment Apollo 11 was over. If you're going to explore something like that, the way to do it is as cheaply as possible, with machines.

Certainly a point well taken, Bruce, but I would argue that we would not only betray the spirit of the United States but also the long evolutionary struggle of life on Earth if we fail to expand permanent human presence throughout the solar system and, eventually, to the stars...and that won't ever happen unless we try.

Appalling as the price tag for manned exploration is, one (sort of) good thing about it is that it provides one hell of a lot of incentive to develop cheaper and more effective propulsion technologies. That and an enduring mandate to do these missions at all are desperately needed to make such development possible, and history shows that technology usually rises to meet the challenge but only if a challenge is perceived.

Remember Alexander's steam engine. If ancient Greece had had an urge to explore the ocean beyond the Mediterranean Sea, then its full potential as a propulsion method might have been realized and the spin-off (besides the probable early discovery and colonization of the Americas) would have been the Industrial Revolution several centuries early...

But we don't do this kind of exploration. Where's our Lunar Exploration Rover?



There's a heckuva lotta Moon we haven't seen close up -- some of which is a good deal more visually interesting than the parts we have seen. Well, okay, it's still gray.

Maybe our visual artists could tint lunar images to a more exciting hue. I bet that a popular survey could easily determine which color Americans would most like images from the Moon to be. Probably pink.

The "boring as hell" aspect of the Moon to some is indeed undeniable, but I have the feeling that the sight of people exploring it in person again might capture the imagination of the public in a way that Apollo failed to do. Plus, I'm sure that there are some unique places yet to be seen...Oppy proved that point for Mars beyond a doubt!

Remember, the present generation grew up with Star Wars, Star Trek, and therefore science fiction (well...space opera, anyhow; real SF is still beyond the limited imagination of Hollywood) as a mainstream phenomenon. Apollo was framed primarily as a one-shot strategic national goal and/or propaganda stunt instead of as a sustained exploration initiative, and that's why everyone lost interest after July 1969..."mission accomplished".

The Moon/Mars Initiative has a chance to become something much more than that, and this is the point that has to be made to achieve enduring public support.

I think it's quite obvious that NASA isnt going to get a 400% budget hike, so this report will probably just highlight the fact that yes, we could go back to the moon etc, but if you want to do it it's going to cost a LOT of money.

Doug

I think that's not so much of the problem as that the Soviets failed and then gave up on their moon program -- which apparently came a bit closer to success that we knew at the time. Learning the psychology behind the Soviets' figuring that 0th place was better than 2nd place would doubtless be fascinating, but that's all water under the bridge by now.

Looking back on the events, the best thing for NASA, in terms of the budget, advancing lunar exploration, and so on, would have been to deliberately stall the program to allow the Soviets time to catch up. (Of course, we'd have needed much better intelligence about the Soviet program than maybe the Americans had -- I don't really know what information the CIA had and how widely they shared it, if at all, with NASA.) If Apollo had actually had the character of a race, with both the Soviets and the Americans coming closer and closer toward a lunar landing goal, then the Americans would have been terribly excited about it all, and if both Americans and Soviets had landed on the moon at about the same time, there would have been great pressure to follow up and create more "firsts" on the moon. We'd probably have a 20-year old lunar settlement up there by now. (Which would also probably have depressurized, caught on fire, and undergone all other sorts of scary adventures.)

As it was, it looked like the Americans were going to the Moon with no Soviet opposition at all, and that made the Apollo program just a series of technical accomplishments -- which would have been very boring even if the moon were a blooming garden.

In terms of a human landing, yes, but recall that a Soviet sample return mission that would have beaten Apollo 11 by hours failed in a dramatic bid to upstage the American mission (although asymmetrically: without a crew).

One thing about the space race is that the "finish line"s were always arbitrary. A human landing on the Moon was dramatic enough to seem like an objective win, but the whole thing was entirely subjective. The Soviets might have attempted to trump it, within Tass/Pravda's ability to spin things, by sending a cosmonaut on a no-landing flyby of Venus or Mars while NASA was still trifling with the mere Moon...

The Soviets actually directed their efforts towards marathon Earth orbit flights, and not long after Apollo attempted the first robot landers on Venus *and* Mars (finishing half -- and a bit more -- successful). Even with the first-crew-to-Moon race in the bag, the US didn't have much of a lead to squander all around.

Now there's a question: Why did they launch Luna 15 so late in the game? Why not send a sample return mission earlier so that if it failed they had several more chances to try and beat the US before Apollo 11?

Did they really do it out of a sense of drama?

BTW, anyone ever see the 1968 film Countdown? An often forgotten "realistic" space film in the tradition of Marooned. That one had the Soviets coming way closer to beating the US to the Moon.

Note the obvious that the growth is little-now, much-later. Well, relatively "little" now.

This is about as evil as a plan could be if it is begun because it would mean many billions spent now, then a fateful decision to be made way off (when many/most of the guilty parties OKing it now will have moved on) to cancel it and make all of the money spent up to that point a no-return waste.

Spirit of exploration my shoe. Just like any purchase, you have to consider the return relative to the cost. Only two people have ever been to the deepest part of the ocean floor. Let's inspire people by sending a new crew to the Marianas Trench and spend the savings from the Moon/Mars plan on fancy dinner for the world. If that's not inspiring enough, take 1/1,000 of the budget to hire a really good Hollywood director to MAKE it inspiring.

The meaningless of this cashcow of a program is that we are supposed to quantify inspirational value vs. billions of dollars, or provide some sort of a "I'll know it when I see it" definition of what worthwhileness is in the realm of megaexploration programs. If the reason why the ocean-bottom program doesn't edge out the Moon-Mars program is that someone's gut feeling is that it's not inspiring enough, that gut feeling isn't worth $100 billion.

I'd like to see Tradesports begin a betting line on a human Mars landing taking place by the timeline in this plan. It'd give the pragmatists a good chance to take the optimists' money.

I'll have to review the details; but Luna 15 was apparently NOT their first attempt to launch a sample-return mission -- they had had one or two launch failures before then.

It should also be noted that -- while they may have come within a few months of beating us in sending men around the Moon on a nonstop circumlunar flight -- they never came even remotely close to beating us in putting men into lunar orbit, let alone landing them.

A few comments...

Bruce and JRehling, most of the "little now" money will be spent on the CEV and its launch vehicle, which are needed to maintain an American manned space presence of *any* kind after the Shuttle fleet is retired. And I'm thinking that the CEV, even with its development costs, will end up costing less in the long run than a re-certification of the Shuttle fleet. Also, it's my impression that the CEV will be overall cheaper to fly than the Shuttle is, which will provide a long-term cost savings. It's actually a move to *lessen* the percentage of the space budget dedicated to maintaining an American manned presence in space.

One good thing about the way the CEV is being designed is that it's a multi-purpose vehicle. Once you have a CEV fleet in operation, you can develop habitat and propulsion modules at your leisure and use the CEV as a taxi to get to and from the "real" mission modules. So, spending the money to develop a CEV *now* won't end up being wasted money -- we'll be able to use the CEV for LEO and ISS operations, even if the LSAM development is delayed or canceled.

As for a majority of Americans not supporting a return to the Moon -- a majority of Americans didn't support the U.S. entry into WWII, either. Until we were attacked. A majority of Americans *do* believe that the Air Force captured a UFO in 1947 and autopsied a bunch of dead gray aliens.

I *guarantee* you that if America were to give up manned spaceflight, it wouldn't be long before a majority of Americans would *insist* that America not be left behind by expanding Chinese and Japanese manned space programs.

And if you think that by killing Shuttle and ISS flights you'll get three planetary flagship missions a year, think again. Funding for unmanned spaceflight would remain the same, if not be cut back a bit, if America got out of the manned space flight business. Cutting funding to one does not mean all that money would get spent on the other.

The main competitor for unmanned spaceflight's funding is NOT manned spaceflight. It's Iraq war spending, Katrina recovery spending, servicing-a-multi-trillion-dollar-national-debt spending, on and on ad nauseum. Killing American manned space flight will *not* significantly increase unmanned spaceflight funding, period. And, with all due respect, you're a fool if you think it will.

Walking away from manned spaceflight is the first step down the path of abandoning *all* significant space exploration. Mark my words.

Oh, and a comment to ljk -- yes, I remember the film Countdown quite well. It was one of the very first films directed by Robert Altman, who went on to direct such classics as M*A*S*H and Nashville. Altman's signature style is already well developed in Countdown, especially his penchant for having his characters talk over each other, like people do in real life.

Countdown was based on a much more well-told version of the story, the novel "The Pilgrim Project' by Hank Searles. That book is based on an actual LSR (Lunar Surface Rendezvous) proposal made in the early 1960s, while NASA was struggling with the "mode decision," how to send men to the Moon. It's a much more plausible scenario, using a Saturn 1B to orbit an Agena/Mercury combination. Actually, the TLI stage consisted of the S-IVB (for stage 1 TLI propulsion), the Agena (for stage 2 TLI propulsion and MCCs), a modified Polaris solid-fuel rocket (to act as a landing brake during the landing phase), a truss with landing legs and small vernier final-phase landing engines, and attached to the truss, a 3-day-duration Mercury capsule.

The flight plan was nearly identical to a Surveyor's -- the stack was aimed directly at a spot on the near side of the Moon, the braking rocket fired at several hundred km altitude, slowed the craft to only a few hundred kph, and the verniers slowed it to a relatively soft landing. If, for any reason, you wanted to abort, there are several opportunities during translunar coast to fire the Agena and/or Polaris perpendicular to the line of flight and place yourself on a free-return trajectory.

The nice character-building catch in Searles' version was that the Mercury/truss combo was *just* too heavy to land. To bring the weight down, they had to slingshot the heat shield away from the spacecraft. So, once you committed to landing, you *had* to land -- you had no way to return to Earth.

Searles' book is also able to get away with basing its main characters on real-life astronauts without specifically naming them. The "old veteran" astronaut, played in the film by Robert Duvall, is never named in the book, but always referred to as "the Colonel." A Marine colonel, in fact. Mercury pioneer. Born in Ohio. The Colonel's original backup was "the Commander." Another Mercury pioneer. Naval aviator. Craggy grin, known for flashing from smiling to icy in milliseconds.

And while offhand mentions were made, here and there, of Glenn and Shepard as if they were other people (just to keep lawsuits at bay, I'm sure), it was a skillful job of using Glenn and Shepard as characters without requiring their permissions...

-the other Doug

Gentlemen, your excellent responses still support one of my major points: Apollo was indeed conceived, executed and publicly perceived as a race between the West and Communism to land--not stay--on the Moon, and therefore the program completely lost public support after Apollo 11.

While it may be true that had the Soviets accepted a second-place finish and done their own landings Apollo may have lingered on a bit longer, I still doubt that Apollo would have led to a permanent lunar presence because of the reasons and perceptions I have previously described. Additionally, the Cold War had already thawed considerably, the 1967 UN Treaty on Outer Space was already signed, and the US was preoccupied with Vietnam and the other tumultuous social and political events of the 60s.

In this light, I have stopped thinking of Apollo as a lost opportunity and see it instead as a serendipitous burst of pioneering--the right thing done at a sociologically inopportune time for arguably the wrong reasons.

The challenge now is to ensure that MMI is perceived as an effort to establish permanent human presence on the Moon (not just as Apollo Recycled!) and, eventually, Mars so that developmental money is spent wisely on true infrastructure development and sustainable, affordable technology via economies of scale. There is no reason that MMI cannot become just as valid a long-term engine for American technological development as Defense spending; in fact, MMI can provide an even better direct return-on-investment while simultaneously preserving the Defense-critical aerospace technology base during the lean DoD times to come after the current conflicts finally end.

Bottom line: "Framing" issues properly is a critical skill that NASA needs to learn how to do a lot better!

Yes, framing the issues is important. That's one reason why NASA *hired* James Cameron (director of such films as Titanic and The Terminator) to help them frame such issues.

Can anyone honestly say that has helped?

This links back to another discussion -- people are motivated by greed and fear, and invariably try and do things the easiest way possible, with the least effort on their parts. If you *really* feel you need a popular upswell of opinion to achieve space flight goals, you need to appeal to the people's fear, greed and/or laziness.

Now, just *how* do you plan to accomplish anything *lasting* if that's how you must frame it, eh?

...*sigh*...

-the other Doug

"Greed is good".... ...specifically, the vast new market for the aerospace industry that MMI would implicitly provide. MMI would provide lots of well-paying long-term domestic jobs (which is patently in the best interests of the country in these dark days of outsourcing & layoffs), and the technological innovations spun off from all this developmental work would, as always, help to create new industries and economic growth.

In realpolitik terms, the present level of defense spending is unsustainable, and eventually there will be massive pressure to cut it. Naturally, defense-related industries will strongly support any way to preserve their workloads, and MMI is one big potential cash cow for a lot of them once DoD dollars begin to dry up; therefore, it is probable that they will lobby Congress quite vigorously for this program.

Happlily, this umpteenth iteration of the Old Washington Game really can be a win-win for all stakeholders. In addition to all the back-home economic benefits just described, we would actually, finally begin the no-kidding human exploration and colonization of the solar system (shh...it's a secret!)

Very well said Bruce.

My questions are: Who are the people they polled and do they have any concept of how much it takes to run an actual space program - plus the fact that NASA takes so little of the federal budget or their taxes.

What's one of the few things people remember from the 1960s: The Moon landings. Not all the whining against it or the things that were problems then but are dusty memories in history books now.

One of the problems in using the argument "people don't want it" is that we are, by and large, talking about people who are massively uninformed on the subject.

For example, when polled, a majority of people state that they believe the NASA budget is larger than the HHS (Health and Human Services) budget, when NASA's budget is something like 1/100th of HHS's.

Also, the line I hear repeatedly from people who criticize NASA funding is that "we should be spending that money right here, on Earth!"

Ummm... the *entire* NASA budget is spent paying workers, running facilities and procuring materiel -- almost all of that within the U.S. That money IS spent here on Earth.

If people were simply informed of the actual facts, I'd have an urge to trust their judgment. But as it stands, I do not accede to the opinions of an uninformed majority...

-the other Doug

As Harlan Ellison once said, everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.

As much as I think that by the time we currently plan on sending humans to Mars (the 2030s, right?), robotics and computers will have advanced to where human astronauts would be incidental and perhaps even a hundrance to the mission's scientific success, I have to agree with The Other Doug that for now the public is mainly going to support manned space exploration, not machines. Especially the part of the general public that is footing the bills for space.

What we can hope for is that enough of a space infrastructure will be created that we cannot abandon continued space exploration.

Scientists griped about Apollo taking away resources and science, but we got over 800 pounds of Moon samples. Had we relied only on robots back then, we'd be lucky to have maybe 800 grams. Look at how little the Soviet Luna probes returned to Earth.

But if NASA ever wants to get the focus and support on cheaper robot missions, they should try harder to aim at what the public wants, at least on surface matters. As just one example of what I mean, the Mars Rovers should have been named Wilbur and Orville. It would have "personalized" them more for people. We space supporters know that robot probes have their own personalities, to say nothing of all the actual humans behind their successes, but the public just thinks of them as machines (though children tend to anthropomorphize them).

First, of course uninformed opinion should be ignored on matters of CONCRETE benefit to a nation -- that's what we pay our legislators to analyze, after all. But if you're going to advocate manned space exploration solely on vague "spiritual" or "aesthetic" grounds, then you obviously have an obligation to obey the will of the people directly on how much of their tax money they want to spend on it.

Second, people know perfectly well that the money on the space program is spent "on Earth" -- they mean that it should be spent on material things existing on Earth to benefit people on Earth.

LJK 4-1: "As much as I think that by the time we currently plan on sending humans to Mars (the 2030s, right?), robotics and computers will have advanced to where human astronauts would be incidental and perhaps even a hindrance to the mission's scientific success, I have to agree with The Other Doug that for now the public is mainly going to support manned space exploration, not machines. Especially the part of the general public that is footing the bills for space."

Don't count on it. Notice that the things in space exploration that have really riveted the public's interest -- Voyager, Hubble, the MERs -- have been UNMANNED programs? They've riveted the public's interest because they involve exploration, and the revelation of entirely new sights and facts about the universe -- despite the fact that those revelations have come from our sending our eyes and minds to new places without lugging our bodies along for the ride. That technology is one which this generation is privileged to be the first to be able to use -- Jefferson would have given his eyeteeth to mount the Lewis and Clark expedition by cheaper robot, and Isabella would have been even happier if she could have tested Columbus' theory that way.

By contrast, the public has been bored cross-eyed about manned space travel ever since Apollo 11; the only things that have waked them up have been thefirst flight of the Shuttle (simply because it was such a spectacular new technology), the first American woman in space (although not the first black, for some reason) -- and of course, the disasters. From the viewpoint of cost-effectriveness, the public finds unmanned space exploration far more interesting per dollar spent on it than manned exploration -- and even the first man on Mars isn't going to change that fact very much. You can only do that for the first time once, too. (How many people remember the second team to climb Mt. Everest? Not I.)

"Scientists griped about Apollo taking away resources and science, but we got over 800 pounds of Moon samples. Had we relied only on robots back then, we'd be lucky to have maybe 800 grams. Look at how little the Soviet Luna probes returned to Earth."

Yep -- but, thanks to modern technology, geological samples are like Bryllcream: a very little dab'll do ya, and the marginal scientific benefit of returning big amounts (especially from a single site) drops off very rapidly. Had we spent 5% of the money we spent on Apollo, we could probably have returned a pound or so of lunar samples from each of 20 or more places on the Moon, and the total science return would have been far greater. (As far back as 1961, by the way, the US had designed a Surveyor mission that could have returned 1 pound of lunar material to Earth. The clumbering inefficiency of Soviet technology has clouded this issue -- and even they finished up quite nicely with a 2-meter core sample.)

I absolutely understand and agree with the premise that unmanned missions do better science faster, cheaper, and safer, Bruce, but I think that we are comparing apples and oranges when we compare manned interplanetary exploration to UMSF. The goals are completely different; the challenge right now is to make sure that manned flight goals are also relevant.

I and probably some of the other posters here am of the opinion that extraterrestrial colonization should be a primary goal of space exploration. Aside from the philosophical and spiritual arguments for this that we're all quite familiar with, I frankly admit that I see a survivalist aspect to the issue that is even more important.

We can't count on the Earth being habitable for mankind over the long term, and the greatest danger of technological and/or political accidents causing this to happen will probably peak over the next few hundred years. The "best-case" bad scenario would be a really long, really deep new Dark Age, and the worst of course would be extinction.

Obviously, one or preferably more self-sufficient off-planet colonies would at least preserve technological civilization in the latter scenario, and of course the species itself would be capable of surviving a terrestrial catastrophe thereby; therefore, colonizing space seems quite prudent. However, the clock may be ticking. Aside from the possibility of near-term catastrophic events, it's also quite possible that we may not be able to afford to start concerted manned space exploration twenty or thirty years from now and maybe never again after that if it turns out that all of the Earth's resources and economic power must be used exclusively to support an increasingly large and energy-hungry population...which again would imply an eventual collapse of technological civilization very much like the Moties in Niven & Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye.

In this light, MMI and its hoped-for follow-on of actual colonization may well be our only chance to provide a true insurance policy for the future of the species; I sincerely hope that's never true, but it sure would be comforting to have it in place. We've spent the better part of two million years getting to where we are today; it would be monumentally foolish to throw it all away out of a lack of foresight.

Perhaps a good compromise would be a obscenely expensive robotic development program, where adaptive robotics would be used to demonstate some of the manned attributes - specifically a toolbox equipped, wrench swinging robotic that could fix a high gain antenna boom, or make an agile adaptation to the unexpectedly rough terrain of Itokowa.

Using bullets and mousetraps to capture samples, fixed camera platforms, and near-sighted probes have badly weakened the science returns from robotic missions, while the bloated cost of the ISS, and shuttle failures have stained the manned program.

We need a good planetary science program, not handicapped toys and space tourists growing seeds in microgravity.

Exactly! I hear so much talk about how the ISS is totally useless, scientifically -- and yet, I hear the same people say that there's no reason for people to go back to the Moon because it only interests "a few geologists."

You can't have it both ways! If you want manned spaceflight to do science, don't denigrate real scientific missions because they don't interest anyone except scientists!

Particle accelerators don't excite the public imagination, either, and it's a sure thing that the Katrina victims could use Fermilab's budget right now -- anyone think we ought to shut down Fermilab and go with computer modeling for all future subatomic research?

I didn't think so.

-the other Doug

You completely miss the point about the ISS -- which is that the very same experiments it conducts could be carried out, tremendously more cheaply, using unmanned satellites. My God, most of the experiments being "done" by the crew right now are remote-controlled from Earth -- and a great many will be so controlled even if the thing ever gets a full crew. There are NONE of them that require on-the-spot human supervision, or that can't on balance be done far more cheaply on unmanned sats. (The cost of keeping humans on site to repair malfunctioning experiments is enormously greater -- by about two orders of magnitude -- than that of simply reflying automated experiments that break down in orbit.)

The same thing is true of all lunar surface experiments, since remote-controlled teleoperation is quite feasible given a radio signal time lag of only 2 seconds total. It's only when you go on to worlds farther away that remote-controlled experimentation becomes difficult -- but it's also at that point that the cost of putting humans on the spot skyrockets by at least another order of magnitude, which means that in those cases you had damned well better have an adequate scientific justification for such gigantic expenditures.

Bruce:

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

Bob Shaw

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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