Outbound

Leaving something permanent.

One of the saddest things about the Apollo missions is that they didn’t leave anything permanent that made future missions any easier. When Apollo was canceled, all that was left were museum pieces, pictures and a few hundred kilograms of rocks. But the nice thing about ARM is that once the asteroid sample has returned to lunar DRO, it’s there. It doesn’t require continued expenditures from NASA for it to stay there. Until we’ve mined every last bit of it, it’s going to be there orbiting the moon, close enough that almost any spacefaring country or business in the world can reach it if they want to. It doesn’t need an ongoing “standing army” that can be defunded. It doesn’t need a mission control to watch over it 24/7. It doesn’t need a sustaining engineering contract that’s going to suck up significant portions of NASA’s limited human spaceflight budget on an ongoing basis. It’s just there. Having something that accessible and permanent out there is worth something, at least to me.

This may be one of the best rationales in the whole ARM mission plan. If we want to have a permanent presence in space, we have to do permanent things. I am an absolute fan of the Apollo program, for a number of reasons, be it political, entertainment, inspiration, or technological and scientific. It was a great period in our nation’s history, and has importance beyond itself as a political tool. But Goff is right: it didn’t last. With significant funding, it could have been built to last, but it was primarily a political program, and when the holders of the purse strings had wrung what they wanted out of it, they moved on. All big programs face such a peril.

But ARM? It has the real potential to develop an infrastructure that can endure, and has practical reasons for why it should endure. We would be building a space exploitation milieu that is focused on resource development, as a product and a way to expand human activity to the solar system in an understandable way. If you want to create something that really lasts, you have to make it of practical value to as many people as possible. You have to show that practicality in a clear, unspun way. We can do that with a strong ARM.

Providing more experience with on-asteroid operations.

If the Rosetta/Philae mission should tell us anything, it’s that there’s still a lot to learn, from an engineering standpoint, about how to operate successfully on the surface of large, low-gravity objects like asteroids or comets. While we’ll continue to get some small-scale experience using other robotic missions, and while a manned mission to a “free-range” asteroid will also provide a good way to get more data, ARM will likely extend our knowledge about how to do operations like these safely with large objects, increasing the likelihood of success of future manned missions to free-range asteroids.

This topic ties back to something that I think some other commentators are missing, and that is there is nothing wrong with practicing at the Moon first for operations that take place in much more remote locations. It is eases the program into risk, while actually stretching boundaries that we haven’t expanded before. There are those that advocate living on the Moon before reaching for Mars, simply because there are a number of unknowns about how to even merely logistically address a Martian mission. I would generally be one of those advocates. The same applies for a post-ARM crewed rendezvous with the delivered asteroidal object – let the robots go far to the regions where higher risks lie, and bring a part of that environment back to us for study at the relatively nearby Moon. We still get the experience of getting to the Asteroids, we still get to stretch ourselves with a Lunar mission with high mission durations, and likely develop a permanent presence in cis-lunar space, all as bonuses to the basic goal of providing a proving ground for asteroid exploration and development. There are enough gremlins in the Earth-Moon system as it is to keep us quite busy, and as Goff points out, there are enough unknows with asteroid rendezvous punctuated by the experience of the Rosetta team. Heading directly to the asteroids isn’t necessary from the point of view of solar system expansion. Setting up an R&D location in the Lunar location is a very valuable idea.*

We have the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo model to fall back on to understand why this is a winning strategy, so why shouldn’t we use it? I see little overtly wrong with heading back to the Moon to stay, or even a dash to Mars, though the latter may be a flag-and-footprints effort as Apollo became, if there isn’t an infrastructure behind it. Pursuing ARM can be implemented to provide that infrastructure.

*I have no problem at all with a direct-to-the-Moon colony, or a sprint to Mars, or sending crews to the asteroids. I think those are ALSO very valuable ideas. Any of those missions are better than the handwringing of politicians in what passes for the so-called “leadership” demonstrated at the current time.

Demonstrating planetary defense techniques.

If something similar to ARM Option B is selected, NASA is interested in using it to demonstrate the “gravity tractor” method for deflecting the parent asteroid. Learning how to deflect potentially hazardous asteroids is probably one of the more worthwhile things NASA could be spending money on right now, and providing a way of getting real hands-on experience applying those techniques would be very useful.

This is a big one to me, as it is aligns with one of the major rationale for the existence of the Outbound project. Even as a kid, I generally understood that an asteroid or comet impacting the Earth could ruin your whole day. Or your civilization. Or species. Given that seems that having the whole of humanity living on just Earth was never a good long-term plan. I’ve read my share of science-fiction, and books like Rendezvous with Rama and Lucifer’s Hammer drove the point home in good literary fashion, but real-life events in 1994 made it very clear to me that we are living on borrowed time. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter that July, with some spectacular results.

That comet, fragmented as it was, left multiple impact marks in the atmosphere of Jupiter, including one that was twice the diameter of the Earth. That is impressive, and frankly intimidating, to contemplate. We are fortunate in the extreme that we have Jupiter and Saturn acting as cosmic shop-vacs, clearing much of the debris of the solar system before it reaches the inner orbits such as ours. However, from impact evidence on Earth, not every object is pulled in by our gas giants. If there are rocks out there lurking around that can blot out the Earth so effectively, I can’t imagine why we’d hesitate in getting off of our home rock and leaving more than one target for the cosmos to aim at.

As noted a few days ago here and elsewhere, ARM Option B is now the mission in play, and if it does anything at all to further our ability to get off-planet or divert inbound species-killer object, that’s outstanding.