UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions

UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
United Press International

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- American astronauts will return to the
moon early in the next decade in preparation for sending crews to
explore Mars and nearby asteroids, President Bush is expected to
propose next week as part of a sweeping reform of the U.S. space
program.

To pay for the new effort -- which would require a new generation of
spacecraft but use Europe's Ariane rockets and Russia's Soyuz capsules
in the interim -- NASA's space shuttle fleet would be retired as soon
as construction of the International Space Station is completed,
senior administration sources told United Press International.

The visionary new space plan would be the most ambitious project
entrusted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since
the Apollo moon landings of three decades ago. It commits the United
States to an aggressive and far-reaching mission that holds
interplanetary space as the human race's new frontier.

Sources said Bush's impending announcement climaxes an unprecedented
review of NASA and of America's civilian space goals -- manned and
robotic. The review has been proceeding for nearly a year, involving
closed-door meetings under the supervision of Vice President Dick
Cheney, sources said. The administration examined a wide range of
ideas, including new, reusable space shuttles and even exotic concepts
such as space elevators.

To begin the initiative, the president will ask Congress for a down
payment of $800 million for fiscal year 2005, most of which will go to
develop new robotic space vehicles and begin work on advanced human
exploration systems. Bush also plans to ask Congress to boost NASA's
budget by 5 percent annually over at least the next five years, with
all of the increase supporting space exploration. With the exception
of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, no other agency
is expected to receive a budget increase above inflation in FY 2005.

Along with retiring the shuttle fleet, the new plan calls for NASA to
convert a planned follow-on spacecraft -- called the orbital space
plane -- into versions of a new spaceship called the crew exploration
vehicle. NASA would end substantial involvement in the space station
project about the same time the moon landings would begin -- beginning
in 2013, according to an administration timetable shown to UPI.

The first test flights of unmanned prototypes of the CEV could occur
as soon as 2007. An orbital version would replace the shuttle to
transport astronauts to and from the space station. However, sources
said, the current timetable leaves a period several years when NASA
would lack manned space capability -- hence the need to use Soyuz
vehicles for flights to the station. Ariane rockets also might be used
to launch lunar missions.

During the remainder of its participation in space station activities,
NASA's research would be redirected to sustaining humans in space.
Other research programs not involving humans would be terminated or
curtailed.

The various models of the CEV would be 21st century versions of the
1960s Apollo spacecraft. When they become operational, they would be
able to conduct various missions in Earth orbit, travel to and land on
the moon, send astronauts to rendezvous with nearby asteroids, and
eventually serve as part of a series of manned missions to Mars.

Under the current plan, sources said, the first lunar landings would
carry only enough resources to test advanced equipment that would be
employed on voyages beyond the moon. Because the early moon missions
would use existing rockets, they could deliver only small equipment
packages. So the initial, return-to-the-moon missions essentially
would begin where the Apollo landings left off -- a few days at a
time, growing gradually longer. The human landings could be both
preceded and accompanied by robotic vehicles.

The first manned Mars expeditions would attempt to orbit the red
planet in advance of landings -- much as Apollo 8 and 10 orbited the
moon but did not land. The orbital flights would conduct photo
reconnaissance of the Martian surface before sending landing craft,
said sources familiar with the plan's details.

Along with new spacecraft, NASA would develop other equipment needed
to allow humans to explore other worlds, including advanced
spacesuits, roving vehicles and life support equipment.

As part of its new space package, sources said, the administration
will convene an unusual presidential commission to review NASA's plans
as they unfold. The group would consider such factors as the design of
the spacecraft; the procedure for assembly, either in Earth orbit or
lunar orbit; the individual elements the new craft should contain,
such as capsules, supply modules, landing vehicles and propellant
stages, and the duration and number of missions and size of crews.

Sources said Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all existing
programs that do not support the new effort. Further details about the
plan and the space agency's revised budget will be announced in NASA
briefings next week and when the president delivers his FY 2005 budget
to Congress.

--
Frank Sietzen Jr. covers aerospace issues for UPI Science News. Keith
L. Cowing is editor of NASAWatch.com and SpaceRef.com. E-mail


Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

January 8, 2004

wrote:

UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
United Press International

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- American astronauts will return to ...

congress.

Wow, more footprints. Real Cool.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net/nasa.htm

wrote in message
m...
UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
United Press International

The first manned Mars expeditions would attempt to orbit the red
planet in advance of landings -- much as Apollo 8 and 10 orbited the
moon but did not land. The orbital flights would conduct photo
reconnaissance of the Martian surface before sending landing craft,
said sources familiar with the plan's details.

What exactly would be the point of this? Anyone?



John Cody

"John Cody" wrote in news:J_nLb.879$ql3.729
@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net:


wrote in message
m...
UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
United Press International

The first manned Mars expeditions would attempt to orbit the red
planet in advance of landings -- much as Apollo 8 and 10 orbited the
moon but did not land. The orbital flights would conduct photo
reconnaissance of the Martian surface before sending landing craft,
said sources familiar with the plan's details.

What exactly would be the point of this? Anyone?


Learning how to operate long-duration/long-range manned missions, for one
thing. This will be a difficult enough job -- the ship & crew will have
to be essentially autonomous due to the comm lag alone, and we've never
operated like that in the past. We can also use the practice at
developing re-supply strategies for these missions -- developing
something like a Mars-capable Progress-equivalent might simplify mission
planning (you don't have to take everything with you at the start).

It makes a lot of sense to avoid adding a landing to the missions at
first. Performing the reconnaissance will be useful (particularly if
some small probes can be sent that allow essentially "ad-hoc" surface
exploration), but would really just be "what we do while we're waiting to
come back" -- the real mission will be getting there, staying there for a
while, and getting back in one piece.

As a side benefit, we might be able to take advantage of the opportunity
to take a close look at Diemos & Phobos. There's probably some
interesting science to be done there, particularly if we've also sampled
some asteroids and do some comparisons.

I'm not convinced that we have much of an idea how to build an manned
Mars lander that doesn't involve a lot of hand-waving. The Lunar module
was probably the trickiest part of the Apollo program -- in spite of the
benign environment that it was designed for (no sand & wind, much lower
gravity, much lower duration requirements).

--
Reed

"Reed Snellenberger" wrote in
message .119...
"John Cody" wrote in news:J_nLb.879$ql3.729
@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net:


wrote in message
m...
UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
United Press International

The first manned Mars expeditions would attempt to orbit the red
planet in advance of landings -- much as Apollo 8 and 10 orbited the
moon but did not land. The orbital flights would conduct photo
reconnaissance of the Martian surface before sending landing craft,
said sources familiar with the plan's details.

What exactly would be the point of this? Anyone?


Learning how to operate long-duration/long-range manned missions, for one
thing. This will be a difficult enough job -- the ship & crew will have
to be essentially autonomous due to the comm lag alone, and we've never
operated like that in the past. We can also use the practice at
developing re-supply strategies for these missions -- developing
something like a Mars-capable Progress-equivalent might simplify mission
planning (you don't have to take everything with you at the start).

It makes a lot of sense to avoid adding a landing to the missions at
first. Performing the reconnaissance will be useful (particularly if
some small probes can be sent that allow essentially "ad-hoc" surface
exploration), but would really just be "what we do while we're waiting to
come back" -- the real mission will be getting there, staying there for a
while, and getting back in one piece.


I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at one
of the LM windows?


Why not send the first long-duration mission to a NEA?


John Cody

"John Cody" writes:

I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at one
of the LM windows?

When you're flying back anyway you can avoid sending all data back via
the DSN bottleneck (and just take along a rack of harddisks). If you
look at the earth surface mapping missions (using STS) you will easily
see that the sheer amount of data gathered with some instruments are a
real showstopper otherwise.


Jochem

--
"A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no
longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take
away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In sci.space.shuttle Jochem Huhmann wrote:
"John Cody" writes:

I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at one
of the LM windows?

When you're flying back anyway you can avoid sending all data back via
the DSN bottleneck (and just take along a rack of harddisks). If you
look at the earth surface mapping missions (using STS) you will easily
see that the sheer amount of data gathered with some instruments are a
real showstopper otherwise.

There are other ways.
For example, a little bird stuck in earth orbit, talking to martian
orbiters over a fast laser link, with a big dish pointed down at some
earth stations.

Tens of megabytes/second is not hard to achieve, compared to a manned
flyby mission.

"Jochem Huhmann" wrote in message
...
"John Cody" writes:

I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as
a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian
surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at
one
of the LM windows?

When you're flying back anyway you can avoid sending all data back via
the DSN bottleneck (and just take along a rack of harddisks). If you
look at the earth surface mapping missions (using STS) you will easily
see that the sheer amount of data gathered with some instruments are a
real showstopper otherwise.


Yesterday in an IRC conversation with Doug Ellison I jokingly suggested
sending 'a car load of IDE hard-disks'* on a roundtrip as a solution to the
bandwidth issue. I'm astonished to learn that just such a mission is
actually being taken seriously! Yet it occurs to me that in order to
generate such a vast amount of data that transmission to Earth at MRO (or
even JIMO) style rates becomes unfeasible the idea of selective targeting
would probably go out the window- surely such a mission would consist of
continual observation. In which case, why have a crew at all? IIRC (I could
be wrong) the SRTM crew did not have much input into the data-collection
(other than the changing of recording tapes) during the flight of Endeavour.
SRTM made sense because the shuttle provided a pretty much OTS method of
getting an unwieldy 13 tonne radar deployed in Earth orbit without having to
develop things like an unmanned earth re-entry vehicle for the tapes or
spend years dribbling back the data from orbit.

Had such a system (inc. BDB with large payload fairing?) existed the radar
could have been in polar orbit and provided a far more comprehensive
dataset. When it comes to crewed Mars missions there is no 'OTS'- and an
uncrewed mission with some kind of physical data recovery (heritage from an
automated sample-return?)makes a lot more sense.


John Cody

*What's the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon fed on flash-RAM sticks?

"Jochem Huhmann" wrote in message
...
"John Cody" writes:

I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as
a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian
surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at
one
of the LM windows?

When you're flying back anyway you can avoid sending all data back via
the DSN bottleneck (and just take along a rack of harddisks). If you
look at the earth surface mapping missions (using STS) you will easily
see that the sheer amount of data gathered with some instruments are a
real showstopper otherwise.


That does not require a crew.

In article , John Cody wrote:

[Hey, John... how's life?]

I'm not wholly against the idea of a crewed Mars orbital mission
(particularly if it includes flybys/landings on Phobos and/or Deimos as a
bonus). It was the mention of 'photo reconnaissance of the Martian surface'
as the primary aim (as opposed to Phobos science or the real-time
teleoperation of Martian robots) that confused me. Is there *really*
anything useful we could learn about Mars that could be obtained by the
early 21st century equivalent of an astronaut pointing a Hasselblad at one
of the LM windows?

Dedicated high-res photograhpy has one major problem - data transfer -
that can be partially avoided by actually storing the data on the ship
rather than signalling it back. I'm not sure how useful this would be,
but being able to get MRO-level coverage of larger areas certainly
couldn't hurt.

--
-Andrew Gray