UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions

In article ,
Dick Morris wrote:

No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions
have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending
on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a moon colony, again,
would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface.

EDITOR'S NOTE - AP Science Writer Paul Recer has covered the U.S. space
program since 1964. "

I wonder if this guy has looked at any of the plans made since 1970..

I don't know, but he obviously hasn't looked at anything proposed since
1990. If there is anything behind that $1 trillion cost estimate, the
proposal will be as dead as SEI within a week.

There IS NO proposal for a Mars expedition. The rumored proposal is to
focus on a permanent lunar presence. This can be explained to Mars
fanatics as a precursor to an eventual Mars mission, if it makes them
feel better. But the real point is to start developing our closest
offworld resource base, and this is as it should be.

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| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
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Joe Strout wrote:

In article ,
Dick Morris wrote:

No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions
have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending
on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a moon colony, again,
would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface.

EDITOR'S NOTE - AP Science Writer Paul Recer has covered the U.S. space
program since 1964. "

I wonder if this guy has looked at any of the plans made since 1970..

I don't know, but he obviously hasn't looked at anything proposed since
1990. If there is anything behind that $1 trillion cost estimate, the
proposal will be as dead as SEI within a week.

There IS NO proposal for a Mars expedition. The rumored proposal is to
focus on a permanent lunar presence. This can be explained to Mars
fanatics as a precursor to an eventual Mars mission, if it makes them
feel better. But the real point is to start developing our closest
offworld resource base, and this is as it should be.

If there is anything at all to that $1 trillion figure it won't matter.
It'll be laughed to death before Bush utters a word.

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
| http://www.macwebdir.com |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'

Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
teaspoon. The only NASA option with a reasonable chance of success is to start
new organizations elsewhere and slap the NASA logo on their buildings, while
winding down and pensioning off the existing NASA manned space bureaucracies.

The danger in that is that the new organisations will be without any
experience and will make the same mistakes NASA has done.

Dosco Jones wrote:
Where else would you perform long term experience exercises in a low
gravity, low pressure environment?

A week long trip to the moon is no comparison to a year long trip to Mars.

So far, the ISS and Mir have provided NASA with far more experience in
building a ship to Mars than all the Apollo missiosn combined.

Consider ECLSS. Dealing with humidity and water is extremely different in 0g
compared to gravity. Look at all the maintenance needed to the Elektron oxygen
generator, look at the reliability of the CDRA.

While TVIS seems to have been extremely poorly designed right from the start
and has consumed a lot of maintenance hours since then, other exercise
equipment has also failed, albeit at a reasonable rate.

Look at the CMGs. Until they return the totally failed on to earth for a post
mortem, they won't know if the remaining 3 will have the same defect or if
they are OK.

The ISS is providing NASA (and the Russians) extremely valuable data on
hardware reliability, number of spare parts that would be needed for a year
long mission, exercise, entertainment and other items necessary to not only
keep a body alive, but keep it healty both physically and mentally.

On a mars ship, sending the ship to mars for an orbit isn't the way to test
it. Making it orbit the earth for one year without any resupply is the way to
test it. If things fail, you don't risk the lifes of the crew since they could
come back down to earth. During that year, you may want to make a few
escapades to moon orbit and then back to earth orbit to test engines and
orbiting software.

The real question will be the type of structure required. Would an ISS style
ship be able to widstand sufficient acceleration from engines, or would they
need to build a structurally much stronger ship ? (perhaps a strong "spine"
onto which are attached ISS style modules for living space as well as storage ?

NASA should be given a mandate to put a man on the moon and bring him/her back
safely. NASA should then decide what is the best way to accomplish this.

One metric that is important is how many trips to Mars are expected. This
would dicatate a lot of the parameters for such a large ship, whether they
expect to re-use it, or whether they would allow aerobraking to cripple the
ship, requiring totally new one to be built for each mission.


And to me, the first sign that the government would be serious would be to
allow NASA to continue development of Transhab. The way the article was
worded, the government seemed to want to get rid of the station and move on to
something totally different.

The thing is that a ship capable of supporting a crew for over a year is going
to be far more like the ISS than Apolllo. As a result, the ISS is the perfect
testbed for any technologies that will be used to send a man to Mars and the
ISS should therefore be an integral part of the project.

Someone mentioned the use of commodity computers. Hard disk drives have
already had "spectacular" failures on the ISS and have been replaced with
solid state ones. And I am not sure if there is any data on survival of
magnetic tapes in space. And the ISS is in rather benign conditions in LEO.
How much worse will it be once totally outside of the earth's magnetic field ?

They're only starting to learn now if they can solder stuff in 0g. This is the
type of experiments they need to prioritize on ISS isntead of watching
crystals grow.

And the USA needs to complete and test its versions of oxygen generators, as
well as the Sabatier device to "close the loop". The USA may think it has a
reliable version of an Elektron, but until it is in the ISS running 7/24, we
can't say if it will be reliable or not.

NASA needs to develop and test all technologies on the ISS before it can start
to design the real ship to Mars. Pointless to build that ship if you're going
to have to continually fix it until it works and has been debugged. That is
what the ISS is for.

John Doe wrote:
Henry Vanderbilt wrote:

teaspoon. The only NASA option with a reasonable chance of success is to start
new organizations elsewhere and slap the NASA logo on their buildings, while
winding down and pensioning off the existing NASA manned space bureaucracies.


The danger in that is that the new organisations will be without any
experience and will make the same mistakes NASA has done.


Just bear in mind that NASA wasn't NASA back in the 1960's. There
was no core of skilled space techs and engineers.

The basic *tech* skills are far beyond what they were in
the 1960's. The *managerial* skills are much degraded.

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 09:48:25 -0000, "Brian Gaff"
wrote:

Hmm, it ain't gonna happen I suspect when Bushykins is hopefully going to be
booted out of the Whitehouse soon. But that is just a personal observation.

If the Democrat competition is Howard Dean, which I think likely, Bush
will win re-election by a very wide margin.

Brian

On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 11:11:13 -0700, Charles Buckley
wrote:

EDITOR'S NOTE - AP Science Writer Paul Recer has covered the U.S. space
program since 1964. "



I wonder if this guy has looked at any of the plans made since 1970..

He didn't look at Apollo either. Elsewhere in his story, he claims
Apollo used nuclear *reactors* on the moon, and he repeats the
long-disproven legend that the Apollo and Saturn plans have been lost.

Brian

On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 12:36:13 +0100, Fafnir
wrote:

What exactly would be the point of this? Anyone?

Ego? Distraction from the Iraq mess?

The moon landing is proposed for 2013, so it won't be the "Iraq mess",
but it might be the "Syria mess" or the "Iran mess", or the "Saudi
Arabia mess" by then, and it will be some other President.

Anybody remember that Richard Nixon ordered two US aircraft
carriers to steam halfway around the world so that the carrier
that picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts would NOT be the John F.
Kennedy?

Apollo lunar missions returned to splashdown in the Pacific. The USS
Kennedy was a warship of the Atlantic Fleet. Shifting a Carrier Battle
Group from one fleet to the other would have been an enormously
complex and costly operation. Even a Democratic President would have
scrapped that plan. Remember, there was a war on.

And that he then cancelled the last (3?) moon landings, which
had already been paid for?

They hadn't been paid for. Launchers and spacecraft were available,
but mission ops and training had to come out of current budgets, which
were very tight.

Brian

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 09:22:55 +0100, "Dr. O" dr.o@xxxxx wrote:

A 'true' Mars mission would last up to three years and would therefore
create its own host of problems (logistics). A manned fly-by would already
take more than a year and would be doable within a decade (my guess is that
it WILL be done within a decade).

The Project Prometheus nuclear powered engine seems to have a key role
in the Bush deep space proposals. If we get nuclear engines, the time
scales drop radically.

Brian

On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 18:21:44 +1100, Brett O'Callaghan
wrote:


What exactly would be the point of this? Anyone?

I found this a little odd also. If you want long duration experience,
do you really have to go to Mars orbit to get it?

Where would you go instead?

Brian