This is a really great bunch of film history of the original astronauts from Mercury through Apollo. The restoration of these candid shots is wonderful, and for those of us who like to see space nostalgia walking and talking, it’s quite a sight. And yes, the background audio is not linked to the video, it’s a media presentation of what I understand was the third group of astronaut selectees. Enjoy!
The Lost Archives: NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Missions
One of the dual-purpose areas of interest for us is the blending of space development with terrestrial benefits. Not ancillary spinoffs, but really conscious efforts to make space technology directly applicable to earthly needs and desires.
NASA has offered a prize challenge here
for coming up with ways to use Martian materials for either textile production or for building structures. Outbound is particularly interested in building efficient and technologically advanced living and working buildings, so this is a pretty good fit. I think we’ll take a closer look at this challenge and work to submit a proposal.
Well. That’s some big news.
Mars has liquid water.
It’s been long suspected, watching the changing striations over the years, and sensing what seems to be material of the proper density just under much of the service. But real chemstry showing the action of liquid water… that is truly the operational door that any future crewed Martian missions would need to walk through to do just about anything of real value.
You need plastic, water has the hydrogen.
You need working fluid for machining operations. Water works pretty well as a base.
Fuel’s the thing? Hydrogen and Oxygen split pretty simply.
Food? Water feeds plants and animals both. Mars already has carbon for proteins and carbohydrates.
Something to drink? Water, right?
You’re fond of breathing? Oxygen again.
This announcement today has been on the tip of our scientific tongues for decades, and now it can be spoken of confidently. It will take a bit for this to filter through current events, and for it to sink in with mission planners and policy makers. But it will.
I am not the only person in the space commentary community to have missed this flight test, but kudos to Blue Origin. They got half of what they wanted (capsule recovery yes, fly-back booster lost) and that’s very encouraging. Getting those fly-back boosters to work is proving more difficult than expected, I think, but now there is a second company joining SpaceX in developing the technique.
I am a very long-time supporter and member of the Moon Society, from way back in the 1990’s, and feel pretty strongly about the need to establish a beachhead on the Moon. There are a number of reasons for this.
It’s stable.
From an orbital consideration, it is an extremely well-known commodity. Many nations have now landed something on the moon, orbited it, or used it as a means of sling-shotting to some other place in the Solar system. We know how to get there, and how to maneuver around it. There is something to be said for consistency. Geologically, it is nearly silent, and between industry and science, the nearly lab-like conditions and vast tableaus have a great deal of value.
It isn’t new.
I know, this doesn’t sound like a great selling point, but hear me out. With the Apollo missions, the Moon has been characterized enough in a few surface locations to build upon, if one takes a more cautious exploration strategy. For all of those detractors of the “flag-n-footprints” nature of the Apollo program, what better way to make lemonade than to actually derive a better and longer-lasting program of habitation based on what we’ve already learned?
It’s geopolitically valuable.
Humans will be humans, and sometimes they will fight. Maybe an economic war, or maybe a hot war, but nations are going to be at opposition of some level at all times in human history. Get used to it. As such, what value can be made of the Moon will initially belong to who lives there first. And I mean lives there, not explore or take a vacation there. Some nation, someday, will claim the place. Functionally, it provides a low-g jumping off point for other places. Militarily, it is the ultimate high ground in the Earth-Moon system. Woe is it to those who lose that race to a belligerent foe.
Of course, in the logic of zero-sum mathematics, there are a lot of people who think that in a finite field of funds, going to the Moon is stale and wasteful compared to Mars. If that is the logic in play, then Mars is also a bad place to go, because Asteroids have a very good chance of repaying the development costs and then eclipsing them in short order. Much shorter than Mars.
But really, the division between the two is a matter of apples-and-oranges, and does nothing but cause feuds between the proponents of the two destinations. As far as I am concerned, if the Triad is the road to the rest of the Solar system, colonizing the Moon is the maturing of the Terrestrial system. Certain circles are taking umbridge that NASA is doing quiet study on going back there, but personally, I think it’s great. I think it’s appropriate. However, Mars missions push us towards technology that we need to go anywhere else nearby, say the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or even farther afield. Why throw such activity out in a fit of Lunachauvinism, either?
NASA is supposed to look to the future, and it is kind of unrealistic to think that planning for Moon missions would be ignored. Lunar activity doesn’t become any more or less impractical because political winds blow in another direction. Going to Mars is something else we need, too, so we can spread ourselves out and protect the species, and to foster freedom.
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.
Providing the beginnings of a lunar gateway.It turns out that getting to and from lunar DRO, and to the lunar surface from a lunar DRO, isn’t massively different from getting to and from Earth-moon L1 or L2. The orbital dynamics are a bit more complex but the propellant and travel times are relatively similar. And some lunar DROs can be long-term stable without active station-keeping. If we were ready to go straight to the moon, L1 or L2 might be slightly preferable to a lunar DRO as a location for a lunar gateway, but if we did something like ARM, with the habitat module, you’d already have a de facto start to a lunar gateway — one that likely would be set up (by NASA or follow-on efforts) with ISRU hardware and include at least rudimentary rocket fuel storage and handling capabilities.
VASIMR Plasma Propulsion
Small Fusion Systems
Asteroid Retrieval
In the past few months the three items of my extreme interest have hit the news, and it has me pondering if NASA may be putting together (finally) a real set of architectures for a larger solar system mission. The most recent news about Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz’s Ad Astra VASIMR getting the go-ahead for a mission seemed like a final puzzle piece falling into place. See:
Could we get to Mars in 39 DAYS? Nasa selects companies to develop super fast deep-space engine
If a mission to places farther than Earth orbit or Mars are to become anything other than naked, skin-of-the-teeth exploration forays, we will have to have propulsion sources like VASIMR. You need something that can cross these larger distances quickly, be reusable and re-directable to multiple destinations, and be able to perform an abort is something goes wrong. VASIMR is capable of doing all of those things.
There was also the news late last year about Lockheed Martin’s small, but high-power-density fusion power plants now in development, discussed here:
Fusion Power May Be On Its Way (Finally)
In short, these are the power systems VASIMR is looking for. They make the mission work.
And now we have OSIRIS-REx going forward with spacecraft assembly for its 2016 launch, announced right on the heels of Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) option B being given the green light for development.
The combination of these three things, the Triad, are the road for development of the solar system. Resource exploitation and permanent human exploration and settlement ride that road.
For more background on this mission:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/osiris-rex/index.html
The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security — Regolith Explorer spacecraft will travel to a near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36), and bring at least a 2.1-ounce sample back to Earth for study. The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.
OSIRIS-REx is scheduled for launch in late 2016. As planned, the spacecraft will reach its asteroid target in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023.
It seems that NASA has turned on the part of this project that allows for the construction of the actual spacecraft, so that’s a great bit of news. It is only bringing back a small part of an asteroid, but a lot of what OSIRIS-Rex will do is an analog for ARM Option B.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission Passes Critical Milestone
Artist concept of OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard
NASA’s groundbreaking science mission to retrieve a sample from an ancient space rock has moved closer to fruition. The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has passed a critical milestone in its path towards launch and is officially authorized to transition into its next phase.
Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D) occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover the technical health, schedule and cost of the project. The milestone represents the official transition from the mission’s development stage to delivery of systems, testing and integration leading to launch. During this part of the mission’s life cycle, known as Phase D, the spacecraft bus, or the structure that will carry the science instruments, is completed, the instruments are integrated into the spacecraft and tested, and the spacecraft is shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for integration with the rocket.
For More…
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/march/nasa-s-osiris-rex-mission-passes-critical-milestone/
