MarsBlog.net

Just in case, you know, any of you were worried about it: Mars Will Not Kill You.

Posted on August 24th, 2003 under Space Science. Comments: 1

In honor of next week’s Great Opposition, Phil at The Speculist will be focusing on Mars all week. To this end, he is inviting submissions on topics relating to Mars exploration:

Here’s what we we’re looking for:

• Links to interesting Mars-related websites, news stories, products, pictures.

• One-liner tips about how to make the best of Red Planet Madness, etc.
• Write a mini-essay (50 words or less) on Mars, space, rockets, that kind of thing.
• Any and everything else you’d like to do. Surprise me!

Send your submissions to me before noon, Mountain time on Tuesday.

Hop to it!

Posted on August 23rd, 2003 under Mars Society. Comments: 3

I still haven’t gotten to my copy of A Traveler’s Guide to Mars, but as noted previously it looks like a great book from what I have seen flipping through it.

Space.com has an interview with the author here.

Posted on August 23rd, 2003 under Space Science. Comments Off

…their science journalism is compared to the National Enquirer.

Posted on August 23rd, 2003 under Space Policy. Comments Off

Rand Simberg has another interesting post on the “humans to Mars” debate. And again, I have to agree with his arguments about the proper role for NASA:

It is useful for the agency to be working on enhancing technologies, but it’s essential for them to be working on the enabling ones. That’s how the resources should be allocated, if they’re limited (as they are, of course).

NASA has been spending (and sadly, squandering) entirely too much money on launch technologies, and altogether too little on deep-space and planet-settling technologies, though the former aren’t needed as badly and can be funded by the private sector, whereas the latter are vital, with no apparent near-term payoff.

I would like nothing better than to see NASA transition to a cutting-edge research agency along the lines of NACA — I came to that realization a long time ago, when it dawned on me just how much useful basic research in aeronautics was done by NACA in the 1920′s and 1930′s. In space, that means developing and demonstrating such technologies as surface suits, landers, long-duration spacecraft and associated systems, rovers, space power systems, in-situ propellant production and resource utilization, interplanetary propulsion, etc. As has been argued in various posts on his blog this week, we already have the know-how needed for private sector launch services and even manned on-orbit operations to take over from NASA…if NASA (and Congress) would take the private sector seriously and stop standing in its way.

In calling for NASA to take on humans-to-Mars as its focus, what I am asking for is precisely those things: for NASA to become an R&D agency again, and for it to stop engaging in those activities which should long since have been handed over to the private sector. As I described in the previous post, I’m not really after an Apollo redux. I don’t want a huge additional chunk of money to be shoveled into the project. I don’t want a single “flag-and-footprints” mission to become the short-sighted success criterion. And I don’t want the infrastructure and hardware and technology and teams developed in the process to be simply thrown away afterwards. I’m asking for a sensible, affordable approach: target NASA’s existing resources towards something, instead of allowing the agency to continue to fritter away its budget — our money — on the pet project or white elephant of the moment.

There seems to be a false premise involved in the opposition to the call for a new focus for NASA, namely that any new assignment for NASA is equal to an Apollo redux (or worse, an ISS redux). That need not be the case.

Posted on August 22nd, 2003 under Space Policy. Comments: 6

Pluto Mission May Be Early Victim Of Growing Budget Crisis

Prometheus seems to be falling prey to a Congress that doesn’t know squat about the physics involved, and thinks that it can raid the line item for district pork without serious effects.

Of course, the whole plan to send JIMO and/or a Pluto probe using electric propulsion doesn’t help. By all means, develop a nuclear power source for space applications, but send it via chemical rocket so that it arrives in a reasonable amount of time.

It’s news like this that makes me worry about the marriage of space nuclear power development and electric propulsion. If electric propulsion for such applications ends up being killed off (when it should not have been proposed for this use in the first place), it could very well take down with it the much more important nuclear power portion of Prometheus.

(Interestingly, NASA seems to be realizing that a Prometheus-powered mission will require a launch vehicle bigger than any currently available, in order to loft the heavy payload to the desired long-term “safe” orbit. Hmm…I wonder where they might be able to find such a vehicle…)

Posted on August 22nd, 2003 under Space Technology. Comments: 1

Rand Simberg questions the wisdom of making humans-to-Mars a goal for NASA. In a nutshell, he gives his reasons as libertarian-based opposition to big-government programs, an unwillingness to repeat Apollo and its lingering aftereffects, and the lack of depth of public support for such things.

And of course, he is right.

I too would like to see the free-market development of space access and space exploration, and I’m just as excited as anyone else about the X-Prize competition — and the non-participant startups, such as SpaceX. I too would like to see NASA make it possible for National Geographic to send the first manned mission to Mars. Unfortunately, I just don’t see manned missions to Mars, and the initiation of settlement there, as happening within my lifetime without some sort of government-directed push to get there sooner rather than later. And I certainly don’t want to see a new round of flags-and-footprints-and-forget-it missions.

But…

There are certain strategic benefits to getting NASA to take on manned missions to Mars, particularly if those missions are required to be carried out within the agency’s current funding levels.

First off (and most obvious), NASA would be forced to prioritize its spending, and to extricate itself from projects which do not support the primary goal in some way. This would place higher importance on R&D which would yield results beneficial to that end, dramatically reducing the amount of money wasted on dead-end pet projects and should-have-known-better white elephants. (On the other hand, as Stephen Baxter argued in his alternate-history Voyage, it may have its own deleterious effects, such as decreased quantity and variety of unmanned missions to other bodies not involved in the agency’s core mission).

Second, the hardware developed for sending humans to Mars could be adapted by private concerns for use in LEO and on the Moon. If the fedgov pays to develop that hardware for its own purposes, and then licenses the designs to private industry for reuse (a la Humvee and Hummer), it could help jumpstart private space development. In reaching for Mars, NASA could end up dragging private efforts along behind it into LEO and onto the Moon.

Third, if NASA is assigned a comparatively narrow focus (or a few of them), and has to justify much of what it does based on that focus, it will make it that much more difficult for the agency to “compete with” startups by undertaking its own in-house efforts or subsidizing others to do their bidding (as Andrew Beal complained). What NASA can no longer provide becomes a niche for startups to exploit. This is really just a variation on the “ban NASA from LEO” argument — if NASA is preoccupied with matters beyond LEO, it will be less tempted to meddle in LEO.

I’m not at all recommending a budget-busting program which would require a deep and sustained committment of public opinion to carry out. NASA’s budgets have been flat in recent years, but it still ends up with a lot of money — $15.469 billion in its FY2004 budget proposal . Freeing up a chunk of that money to pay for human missions to Mars (by, say, completing ISS construction or phasing out the Orbiter fleet in favor of — don’t laugh — OSP) would not be as controversial as asking for another fifteen billion dollars on top of the existing budget. NASA could even make the plausible case that it is getting more value for the same expenditures. Would this hypothetical small chunk of NASA’s budget — say, $2B per year — actually do any good? Quite possibly. Consider the cost estimates for developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle from Shuttle hardware and facilities. Back in 1991, Shuttle-C was projected to have a development cost of around $1.8B over five years, which translates to $2.38B in 2002 dollars, and still leaves plenty of money in each of those five years to develop other essential pieces of hardware. This approach might take longer to reach the goal than a lavishly-funded project, and that possibility carries with it an increased risk that the program will be cancelled before it reaches fruition, but it would be easier to obtain public support for this level of funding — because NASA already has it.

Well, that’s my quick stab at a response. The comments are on — tell me if I’m wrong or right.

Posted on August 21st, 2003 under Space Policy. Comments: 11

Here are some ideas for what to write about in your letters (note that I used the plural form there) to newspapers, Congressional representatives, and the President.

(more…)

Posted on August 21st, 2003 under Mars Society. Comments Off

Throughout the Conference last week, Bob Zubrin and others repeatedly made the following argument:

• The United States needs a manned space exploration program;

• NASA, the present custodian of that program, needs a focus for its efforts; and
• Mars should be that focus.

We are currently in a unique historical moment with regards to encouraging more vigorous space exploration. The upcoming Mars opposition (August 27) has focused a great deal of attention on the planet, and this attention will grow over the next week. One can quite accurately see the opposition as a “sign in the heavens”, as it will be the kickoff of six very important months of very public space-related (and Mars-focused) events. The centennial of the Wright Brothers’ first flight will be marked in December, and the five spacecraft en-route to Mars will begin arriving shortly thereafter. If the public response to Pathfinder was any indication of the attention a Mars lander can generate, three landers in rapid succession should (if successful) cause quite a stir. And overlapping the arrival of the Mars flotilla will be the New Hampshire primary, the formal kickoff of the 2004 Presidential campaign season (whose significance I will touch on in a moment).

But the most important upcoming development is the release of the CAIB report. There has been a lot of speculation that the report will go beyond merely addressing the proximate cause of the Columbia disaster, to detail fundamental flaws with the agency itself. NASA is in for a great deal of bad publicity and Congressional scrutiny over the next few months, and while many people will be clucking about what went wrong and how to fix it, few will realize that the problems with NASA stem from a single cause: it doesn’t have a goal.

Without a destination, all roads look equally good. Without a goal, NASA has drifted down blind alleys and passed by many promising avenues, only to end up circling endlessly around the block.

So, how do we go about changing this state of affairs?

The Mars Society’s plan is to use the upcoming attention on space exploration generally and Mars specifically as a foot in the door to get people thinking about humans-to-Mars as the proper goal for the national space program. The idea is to write letters to local newspapers, one’s federal representatives, and the White House, using these space-related events (and significantly, the public attention and enthusiasm for space exploration which they will generate) to push for making Mars NASA’s organizing goal. Beyond writing letters, members were urged to meet with representatives in person, to bring this message directly to them. It is hoped that by doing so, we can use this unique opportunity to steer the debate on what NASA should be doing away from “space science” and “space medicine” and “space station” back to space exploration, where it should have been all the time.

All of this effort over the next few months will culminate in a push to get the issue on the radar of the Presidential and Congressional candidates as they head into the primary season. Taking up Mars as its goal is a political decision which is out of NASA’s hands (and in some cases, against its narrow, sandbox interests) — that decision lies with Congress and the President, and that is where our efforts should focus.

Note that nothing in this plan precludes getting NASA out of the way of LEO privatization. Indeed, Zubrin’s (and my) call for turning the Shuttle stack into a heavy lift launch vehicle — before it is too late — presumes that NASA will be getting out of the space taxi business sooner rather than later…OSP may or may not happen, but the Shuttle’s days are clearly numbered.

Tomorrow, I will outline some letters you can send to your newspapers and elected officials.

Posted on August 20th, 2003 under Mars Society. Comments: 4