MarsBlog.net

A STRAIGHTFORWARD IDEA: The sudden apparent upsurge in interest in manned missions to Mars has me wondering just what the space advocacy community would do if they suddenly had the government’s ear — and purse.

Do we have a unified plan? Or would we fall to squabbling amongst ourselves over what should and shouldn’t be done, where we should start and where we should go, how it should be done and who should do it?

Maybe this is something the various advocacy groups should work out in advance — a common set of principles that all can agree on when pushing for support for manned Mars missions. A party platform, of sorts. By no means will all groups be able to agree on everything, nor would such a platform be all-encompassing and minutely detailed. Instead, it would be a guideline for what the various groups would expect to see in any government-funded missions, and what it would take for these organizations to support such missions.

One important principle of this sort would formalize the opposition to “flags-and-footprints” events, through a “platform” requirement that any new manned missions (be they to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else) be structured on an “open-ended” basis — such that missions could continue indefinitely, with continuous human presence and an eye on transition to the private sector at the earliest possible date.

I’m sure there is a better way to structure such a requirement to achieve the desired result, just as I am sure that a number of other shared principles could be hammered out among the space advocacy groups which all could comfortably sign up to as a “united front”. That may be hopelessly optimistic — expecting groups with often competing interests to work together — but there it is.

ALDRIN’S TROLLEY: Buzz Aldrin’s “Mars cycler” idea is making the news again. Here is the latest news item. While it’s a recap, there are a few points of note here in what is said and how they say it:

• The article focuses on the grassroots and non-governmental work going on, while pointing out specifically that NASA is not even considering a manned Mars mission;
• Aldrin specifically addresses the “flags and footprints” problem: “If we’re going to go to Mars with human beings, we need to do it in an evolutionary way, so that we can continue doing it”;
• Aldrin sees humans-to-Mars as “inevitable”, and believes that the budding space tourism industry could help to pay the way.

I like this idea, but I hope that it turns out to be more than a viewgraph-and-press-release project. It certainly addresses some of the problems with Mars Direct, specifically that MD is a disposable vehicle, and that it is limited in crew size by the size of the launcher. If a crew of four or six could do a lot of exploration, think of how much a crew of fifty at a time could do, particularly if they were coming to stay long-term. Indeed, it’s tempting to think of these cyclers less as round-trip transports and more as one-way emigration ships.

On the other hand, one hundred people every two years won’t build up a sizeable population on Mars in the near term, one large enough to be capable of resource independence from Earth. While it’s an open question how many people would be required for a self-sustaining presence on Mars, I’d hazard a wild guess it would be in the low thousands. This would suggest that more than two cycler ships would be required (if the orbital mechanics could support more than two), and/or some form of modular design is required to allow the ships to be expanded over time to accommodate larger crews.

MARS POXER REDUX II: Yet again, a “Study Urges Caution on Mars Trip”.

Yawn. Look, folks, there may be life on Mars, but it likely isn’t going to be anywhere near the surface, thanks to billions of years of intense, barely-filtered UV radiation — you know, that same UV radiation that was going to wipe out all life on Earth if we kept using CFC spray cans and refrigerators? Remember that? And whatever life may be on (or, rather, in) Mars will not have a taste for Earthlife anyhow. How can Mars life be any more dangerous to humans than the extremophiles brought up from the sea-bottom trenches right here on Earth?

That hoary bugaboo put to rest, the article does describe some valid recommendations the NRC has made to NASA with regards to Mars exploration, most of which concern the use of probes to characterize the physical and chemical environments at potential landing sites prior to sending human missions. Picture Mars-surface Pegasuses(Pegasi?), Surveyors, and LDEFs — all environments and materials characterization missions in support of follow-on manned activities.

QUESTIONING SLI: Rand Simberg also tackles a topic a few of us were discussing at work last week: the automation aspects of SLI.

Our conversation took a different tack, however, focusing not on the damage a government-sponsored unmanned reusable launch vehicle would do to the possible market for private space launch startups, but rather on why we need a man in the loop on the manned flights at all.

The gist of the conversation was that the pilot and copilot on a Shuttle (or its successor) do little but monitor the launch and landing phases of a mission — activities which are either partly or wholly automated. So why not eliminate those positions altogether, and acknowledge that there is very little the crew (any member of the crew) could do in the event of a catastrophic failure. Acknowledge that, and accept that it is part of the risk of space travel, just as we today accept that there is very little a flight crew or the passengers can do in the event of a catastrophic failure on a jumbo jet.

This led into a discussion of one of the crown jewels of the SLI/2GRLV/3GRLV/etc. approach, that of reducing “risk” by a factor of ten with each vehicle generation. It’s understandable that an agency which lives under the threat of Congressional budgeteers using any excuse they can to cut its funding would focus on eliminating any conceivable source of risk so as to avoid providing them with another well-publicized catastrophic failure as a reason to do so. However, how safe is safe? What is an acceptable level of risk? When will we get past the point of expecting spaceflight to be as safe as a milk run — or safer, since it’s already less risky to fly in space than to drive to the corner market?

Can anyone imagine the U.S. military being dominated by such risk aversion?

No, I’m not suggesting that NASA should look at astronauts as though they were Doritos — “Burn them up, we’ll train more!” — but rather that, if space is ever to be opened up to development and settlement, we will need to define an acceptable tradeoff between risk and return…one which does not hobble our efforts from the very beginning with unattainable safety goals for what is (like any other activity) a business with its inherent risks. Yes, the dangers of spaceflight can be managed, but we should not allow our inability to completely eliminate them now, today, deter or delay us from the larger goals of space exploration.

But Simberg hits the right nail with his essay — why should NASA be pursuing this line of development at all? If there is one thing the EELV project proved, it was that heavy government involvement in and subsidization of “commercial” space development activities puts the left-out startups at a financial disadvantage, thus destroying the ability of an organic, self-supporting market to take root and grow.

MORE ON REVOLUTIONARY PATIENCE: Focusing on the public support is not to say that the technical end of things is not important to success and long-term sustainability of human activity in space. On the contrary, a long-term view is vital in this area as well, for the reasons I described earlier with regards to Hoffer’s ideas on the importance of play.

If the base of support for space exploration was built up enough that a exploration done the “right way” suddenly became possible and desirable enough to take on, and the technology didn’t exist to support it, it’s entirely possible that the required technology could be developed in a short period of time. However, what one would end up with is not necessarily the best technical solution, rather the one that could most economically and quickly be applied. On the other hand, if technology development has proceeded hand-in-hand with the outreach efforts over a number of years, always with the same goal of open-ended human expansion into space, the very fact that such expansion is not yet a reality gives the engineers and scientists involved a great deal of room for creativity — for playing with their ideas, trying new approaches, free from the risk of project-destroying failure or the stifling pressure to perform ASAP.