The first human mars mission?

In article ,
Christopher wrote:
NASA has *no plans* for a manned Mars expedition. None. It's completely
beyond their planning horizon. So there are no "preliminary designs"...

Thanks for that-and the other posters-looks like it'll be 2050 at
least before we go, and I'll probably be dead by then.

The situation is both worse than that, and better than that.

The bad news is that if you assume business as usual at NASA, the answer
to when they will do a Mars expedition is: never. Not 2015, not 2020,
not 2050, not 2100, but *never*. NASA is not competent to do it at any
reasonable price, and Congress knows that, so it will not be funded. NASA
cannot be reformed drastically enough to change that. Campaigning to get
Congress to write a blank check for it is futile, a waste of effort.

(And the outlook is no better for ESA, NASDA, RKA, or whatever the Chinese
equivalent is.)

The good news is that radical change in the situation is not out of the
question. I didn't say that NASA people will never walk on Mars; it's
just that they'll be paying passengers on someone else's ship.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

Henry Spencer wrote:
The situation is both worse than that, and better than that.

The bad news is that if you assume business as usual at NASA, the
answer
to when they will do a Mars expedition is: never. Not 2015, not 2020,
not 2050, not 2100, but *never*. NASA is not competent to do it at any
reasonable price, and Congress knows that, so it will not be funded.
NASA
cannot be reformed drastically enough to change that. Campaigning to
get Congress to write a blank check for it is futile, a waste of
effort.

(And the outlook is no better for ESA, NASDA, RKA, or whatever the
Chinese equivalent is.)

The good news is that radical change in the situation is not out of the
question. I didn't say that NASA people will never walk on Mars; it's
just that they'll be paying passengers on someone else's ship.

I do disagree to this posting. (Politely and with all due respect.)
I do agree that NASA wont get anywhere doing things the way they are
going now, and ESA is not a bit better (just less funded...)
However, NASA *would* be able to do a manned Mars-mission given the
necessary funding (=lots and lots of cash), but the prospect of the
chinese starting a race seems at least possible. (Like Apollo)
On the other hand, any private effort without strong state backing
is prone to fail because of lack of funding, lots of government
regulation (rockets *are* dangerous) and other reasons. I do admire
the startups, but I do not put any faith into their success.

The only possible way a radical change in the situation may come is
by the efforts of space agencies, but only of third world countries
with scarce resources. If one of them decides to take a intelligent
risk by sidestepping the whole trodden path and doing something new
which works out to be lots better - this would be a change in the
situation.

I will agree (sadly) that none of my scenarios seems likely at the
moment - but even so, they are still more likely than the private
option.

Robert Kitzmueller

In article ,
Robert =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Kitzm=FCller?= wrote:
However, NASA *would* be able to do a manned Mars-mission given the
necessary funding (=lots and lots of cash)...

I'm not convinced even of that. They only barely managed to do a space
station at all, after a long series of redesigns and cutbacks and budget
overruns...

but the prospect of the
chinese starting a race seems at least possible. (Like Apollo)

To me, this is just not credible. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy rather
than a real prospect. Moreover, it's a very ominous fantasy: the last
thing we need is another Cold War, and that's what it would take.

Apollo was not done simply because the Soviets were outdoing the US in
space, but because the dynamics of the Cold War in the 1960s made that
*important*. When they outdid the US in space again in the 1980s -- by
establishing a permanent space station while NASA was still drawing
station viewgraphs -- nobody got excited.

On the other hand, any private effort without strong state backing
is prone to fail because of lack of funding, lots of government
regulation (rockets *are* dangerous) and other reasons.

These things are issues, but they needn't be disastrous ones. There has
already been one successful launcher startup without outright government
backing -- Pegasus development was privately funded, by OSC and Hercules --
and I think there is reasonable hope for more. Nobody is going to find
billions privately, but it shouldn't take billions.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

Robert =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Kitzm=FCller?= writes:

Henry Spencer wrote:
The situation is both worse than that, and better than that.

The bad news is that if you assume business as usual at NASA, the
answer to when they will do a Mars expedition is: never. Not 2015,
not 2020, not 2050, not 2100, but *never*. NASA is not competent to
do it at any reasonable price, and Congress knows that, so it will not
be funded. NASA cannot be reformed drastically enough to change that.
Campaigning to get Congress to write a blank check for it is futile,
a waste of effort.

I do disagree to this posting. (Politely and with all due respect.)
I do agree that NASA wont get anywhere doing things the way they are
going now, and ESA is not a bit better (just less funded...)
However, NASA *would* be able to do a manned Mars-mission given the
necessary funding (=lots and lots of cash),


No. This is a very common misconception, and NASA thanks you for it.

But, in fact, "necessary funding" !!!!!= "lots and lots of cash".


If you hand NASA a check for a *trillion* dollars, and tell them to
get their ass to Mars, you will wind up with junkyards filled with
half-built hardware, mansions filled with rich retired LockMart and
BoeDonnel bigwigs, and petabytes of Powerpoint slides explaining
why it will take at least two trillion dollars to put a man on Mars.

I am not making this up, and I am not exaggerating. Remember, last
time anyone at all serious about it asked NASA for an estimate for a
Mars program, they seriously said, "four hundred billion". Add in
your own best guess as to the overruns, and do the math.

NASA is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are absolutely incapable
of building spaceships. They do not have those skills. This is not to
say that they are unskilled. They are *very skilled at: making Powerpoint
viewgraphs, asking for money, excusing their past failures at spaceship
building, getting in bed with contractors with the same skillset, forging
new employees to the same temper, suppressing employees who insist on
embarassing them by building conspicuously successful spaceships, and
protecting their budgets, their empires, and most especially their jobs
with ruthless efficiency.

There is *no* sum of money that can be added to NASA's budget that will
result in Mars-bound spaceships. Only viewgraphs, excuses, and claims
that with twice as much money they'll get the job done. And that last
bit is recursive.


The one theoretical, and alas only theoretical, possibility for a real
NASA Mars mission would be to *reduce* the agency's budget by an order
of magnitude. That still leaves enough money for a skilled, efficient
spaceship-building enterprise to reach Mars in a decade or so. But by
Big-NASA standards, it's nothing. The big primes will abandon the
shriveled husk, as will the foresightful NASA managers. The rest will
fight over the corpse, their former skillset no longer optimal for the
environment, and it's remotely possible that what survives that internal
bloodletting is a cadre of talented and highly motivated people who can
over the next generation rebuild NASA (so long as it's budget is *not*
increased) into something that can begin to think about Mars.

But it's not going to happen. It doesn't need to. The same level of
funding applied to a new institution or, better, community of institutions,
can get the job done sooner by not having to spend a generation repairing
the damage beforehand. And if you keep the funding low, your new teams
may not attract the "Competition! Stomp, Crush, Kill!" reflex of the
dinosaurs until it is too late.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 15:19:57 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article ,
Christopher wrote:
NASA has *no plans* for a manned Mars expedition. None. It's completely
beyond their planning horizon. So there are no "preliminary designs"...

Thanks for that-and the other posters-looks like it'll be 2050 at
least before we go, and I'll probably be dead by then.

The situation is both worse than that, and better than that.

The bad news is that if you assume business as usual at NASA, the answer
to when they will do a Mars expedition is: never. Not 2015, not 2020,
not 2050, not 2100, but *never*. NASA is not competent to do it at any
reasonable price, and Congress knows that, so it will not be funded. NASA
cannot be reformed drastically enough to change that. Campaigning to get
Congress to write a blank check for it is futile, a waste of effort.

(And the outlook is no better for ESA, NASDA, RKA, or whatever the Chinese
equivalent is.)

What a depressing out look.

The good news is that radical change in the situation is not out of the
question. I didn't say that NASA people will never walk on Mars; it's
just that they'll be paying passengers on someone else's ship.

So long as it happens.



Christopher
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Kites rise highest against
the wind - not with it."
Winston Churchill

In article ,
Christopher wrote:
...NASA is not competent to do it at any
reasonable price, and Congress knows that, so it will not be funded. NASA
cannot be reformed drastically enough to change that...
(And the outlook is no better for ESA, NASDA, RKA, or whatever the Chinese
equivalent is.)

What a depressing out look.

Quite so. It *is* depressing what a hole we've gotten ourselves into by
relying on government bureaucracies to open the new frontier. Wishing
will not make it better, alas. Nor do we particularly want it to, because
one thing that is utterly certain is that if NASA is in charge, only NASA
people get to go.

The good news is that radical change in the situation is not out of the
question. I didn't say that NASA people will never walk on Mars; it's
just that they'll be paying passengers on someone else's ship.

So long as it happens.

Indeed so, especially since if NASA can buy such tickets, other people
can too.
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

Christopher wrote:

On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 17:14:47 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article ,
Christopher wrote:
...Has there
been any preliminary designs on the lander craft, or how it's going to
get to Mars yet...

Mars mission studies are a dime a dozen. The NASA Mars Reference
Mission is one of the most detailed studies, though the Mars Direct
concept is probably the closest to what will eventually happen. Links:

http://www.nw.net/mars/marsdirect.html
http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov/MarsNew...ion_Table.html

*Lots* of designs. Lots of paper and viewgraphs. None of which have any
likely relation to anything that might happen.

NASA has *no plans* for a manned Mars expedition. None. It's completely
beyond their planning horizon. So there are no "preliminary designs":
that would imply a commitment, with specific plans to turn those
preliminary designs into definitive designs. There is no such commitment.

What NASA has, is design studies. A large pile of them; some of the ones
on the bottom of the pile are from the early 1960s. They might, or might
not, influence any real design that might someday be done.

or has the total work done on a Mars mission been
restricted to the work done by the Mars Society...

The Mars Society's work has been at the same level: design studies.
(Yes, they have built and experimented with mockups of some of the studied
designs. NASA has been known to do that too.)

Thanks for that-and the other posters-looks like it'll be 2050 at
least before we go, and I'll probably be dead by then.

There are no technological show-stoppers, so we could start a program at
any time. The only thing that is stopping us is the estimated costs.
Published studies (AFAIK) universally assume the use of expendable
HLLV's for Earth-to-orbit transportation which drives the cost out of
reach.

Christopher
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Kites rise highest against
the wind - not with it."
Winston Churchill

Dick Morris writes:

Published studies (AFAIK) universally assume the use of expendable
HLLV's for Earth-to-orbit transportation which drives the cost out of
reach.

Actually, the Earth to LEO transportation is a surprisingly small fraction of
the estimated cost for NASA's Mars Reference Mission.

Will McLean

On 29 Sep 2003 18:23:46 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(McLean1382) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

Dick Morris writes:

Published studies (AFAIK) universally assume the use of expendable
HLLV's for Earth-to-orbit transportation which drives the cost out of
reach.

Actually, the Earth to LEO transportation is a surprisingly small fraction of
the estimated cost for NASA's Mars Reference Mission.

If that's the case, then I suspect that the mission as a whole is
highly non-optimal from a cost standpoint (i.e., they're spending too
much on payload, perhaps by attempting to overminimize launch costs).

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers:

McLean1382 wrote:

Dick Morris writes:

Published studies (AFAIK) universally assume the use of expendable
HLLV's for Earth-to-orbit transportation which drives the cost out of
reach.

Actually, the Earth to LEO transportation is a surprisingly small fraction of
the estimated cost for NASA's Mars Reference Mission.

I was reading a paper in "The Case for Mars VI" last week which put it
at about 1/3 of the total estimated program cost. That's a non-trivial
cost item, but there are additional indirect effects. The high cost of
Earth-to-orbit transportation with expendable launchers leads to the
traditional obsession for minimizing the mass placed into orbit, which
drives development costs up across the board. It also leads to the
"disintegrating totem pole" paradigm in which the mass at each stage of
the Mars mission is minimized, leading to the maximization of expended
hardware. Each manned Mars flight using that approach will expend at
least several billion dollars worth of hardware, including the
launchers. Add to that over two years of engineering and other support
costs for all those items of expended hardware and each manned Mars
flight will cost over $10 billion. That is not the stuff of which
long-term programs are made. Add development costs and the total
program will probably cost about $100 billion.

What is it they say about people who do the same thing over and over
again, each time expecting a result which is different from what they
have always gotten? Space enthusiasts have been proposing manned Mars
programs using expendable HLLV's for 30 years, and none has even come
close to getting off the ground. I suspect that space activists are
held in low regard in some quarters, at least in part, because we keep
trotting out the same tired proposals, with mostly minor variations,
expecting each time that this time we're going to get it right and the
super boosters will once again start thundering off the pads down at the
cape, never to be seen again, just like that other program long ago. It
isn't going to work - not now; not ever.

Apollo died a painful death because, once the original objective was
achieved and the point of diminishing returns had been reached, it
simply cost too much to keep it going with expendable hardware. Very
few people are interested in a repeat of that sort of performance. We
have to stop with "business as usual" approaches and try something
entirely different. Driving a stake through the heart of the expendable
launch vehicle paradigm is the essential first step, IMHO. I expect to
see no further progress with manned spaceflight until it happens.

Will McLean