Posey Introduces Measure Calling for Return to Moon by 2023
Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) has introduced a measure directing NASA to plan a return to the moon within eight years and the establishment of a permanent presences there.
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall plan to return to the Moon by 2023 and develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, in order to promote exploration, commerce, science, and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations,” the measure reads. “The budget requests and expenditures of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall be consistent with achieving this goal.”
The bill, which Posey introduced on April 27, is in direct opposition to NASA’s approach, which is focused on sending astronauts to investigate a boulder that has been retrieved from an asteroid and returned to cis-lunar space.
Co-sponsors of HR 2036 include Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT).
The measure mentions a number of benefits of returning to the moon, including allowing astronauts to test out technologies for living on Mars, re-engaging public interest in the space program, and giving the commercial sector the opportunity to develop technologies for settling on and surveying the moon.
Posey and his co-sponsors also see settling the moon in strategic terms.
“China and Russia, understanding the economic and strategic importance of human space flight, have declared their intentions of colonizing the Moon and are advancing their lunar exploration plans,” the bill reads. “It is strategically important that the United States possess and maintain the capabilities of unfettered operation in the cislunar space domain, and not cede this domain to other nations.”
115 responses to “Posey Introduces Measure Calling for Return to Moon by 2023”
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What is this? Just another go at trying to shovel more money at NASA to complete that silly SLS/Orion?
NASA gets money for either a rocket (A) or a mission (B). Here we need BOTH, wonder where Mr. Posey is going to miraculously make the money come from! My bet is that some reps from the SLS states will try to get this going to get more money for SLS and then scrub the whole thing when NASA wants to start on the actual lunar infrastructure!
Just eliminate the wasteful $3 billion a year ISS program and there would be plenty of money (at least $8 billion a year) to establish a permanent presence on the Moon in the 2020s and a permanent presence on Mars in the 2030s.
Marcel
The ISS is actually quite a useful laboratory, the way it is put together is just overly complicated and that is a shame.
Then again, simply trashing the ISS right now wouldn’t all of a sudden make its funding available for use elsewhere. How much funding NASA gets and where to spend it all goes through the Hill, in a best case scenario they would let NASA keep that $3B a year from the ISS… but in stead force them to feed it down some pork barrel like SLS/Orion.
But the more likely scenario would be that if/when NASA were to say “Lets stop with the ISS and use the money for a moonbase!”, than the folks on the Hill would say: “Ow cool, NASA is not using that $3B a year anymore… lets spend it elsewhere (that is not the moon)”
But yeah, I wholeheartedly believe that the ISS is in fact an awesome place and not just because they produce some of the most amazing views on the planet you ever did see 😛 NASA and its foreign partners should definitely keep it up while they can and proceed to rent out space on Bigelow units when the time is there.
That will serve as a base for that they should do on the Moon later on!
No, the Congress Critters for the NASA districts require a minimum level of pork flowing in. Just look at SLS. The money will still be spent byNASA, properly allocated between the Centers and major contractors as it is now.
Thats basically what I said as well 😛
Yes, but it needed to be emphasized that is how the system works. NASA is considered to be entitled to a certain level of funding, just as with welfare, and will receive it regardless so the Congress Critters are able to brag about how much federal money they bring to their districts for jobs.
COTS lander, COTS hab modules, COTS surface power…etc. Might be a good way to go. At least it could give the commercial sector a toehold on the moon.
Too complicated and it will take too long as firms will pace out their development to NASA annual funding as has been the case with COTS/CCP. The crewed version of Dragon SpaceX promised in 2012 probably won’t fly until 2017 because of it.
A far better strategy would be for NASA to simply offer a $2.5 billion annual contract for 10 years to the first firm,or group of firms, that demonstrate the ability to deliver 6 astronauts to the Moon for a 3 month stay and safely return them to Earth. The contract should not require all 6 astronauts be on the same mission, but could be dividend between 1, 2 or 3 missions a year as the vendor wishes.
Simple. Clear. And minimizes NASA delaying the process or micromanaging it.
Indeed! In these trillion dollar days there’s no lack of venture capital funding for such projects, NASA doesn’t even have to pay upfront, just give a clear and binding commitment to do so after the fact.
Sorry but I don’t see two firms,or two groups of firms, that can demonstrate this ability, I only see one and I don’t need to name it.
It seems to me that there is one company (SpaceX) and one group of companies (ULA and Blue Origine) that can do this, even if indepen eight or ten or fifteen years.
I wouldn’t rule out some combination of Lockheed-Martin, Boeing and Northrup-Grumman. They have the knowledge and financing.
They only move slow because they know there are more profits to be made in NASA cost plus and COTS/CCP than in a old fashion flyoff and have adapted to them. But if they see that a flyoff without any NASA funded R&D ( or micro-management) is their only opportunity I suspect they will likely surprise folks.
I suspect they will likely…. not bother without a gravy train and prefer instead to concentrate their efforts on other troughs.
SpaceX will soon have a lander, what do ULA and Blue Origine have?
SpaceX could send asronauts to the moon with two Falcon Heavy, what launcher will ULA and Blue Origin use?
A crewed version of the Dragon capsule was first proposed back in 2006 – keep in mind that’s 2 years before SpaceX even had a successful launch – but had NASA dumped a billion dollars on SpaceX to build a crewed version of the Dragon capsule back in 2006, I can believe it might have been flying by 2012.
You miss the point, its NASA dumping its money on COTS/CCP that encourages the firms to drag out development and slow development to NASA’s schedule.
It took only three years to develop the original Mercury capsule and another 2 to develop Gemini in the days of slide rules and without having a previous art in capsule design to use. Why is it taking 10 years in an age of computers and with the accumulated knowledge of designing Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules to build?
And its not because of money, as NASA didn’t really start getting flooded with money until 1963.
Folks want to return to the contracting model that existed before cost plus became standard in WW II, let’s do so. In the 1930’s the U.S. Army Air Corp and U.S. Navy just stated minimum performance goals and the firm that best demonstrated the ability to achieved them got the contract to build the aircraft. That is the model I am proposing should be used to return to the Moon.
No it doesn’t. It encourages them to get the work done on time. NASA is pushing them on a 2017 deadline, you know.
And it should be obvious that if you contract with someone to do work for you, they are going to work at the rate that you, their customer, wants them to work at… why would they work more if they aren’t getting paid to work more?
This seems blindingly obvious to me. If you are paying someone to, say, renovate a house or restore a classic car, but you only pay them 1,000 per month, you’re only going to get 1,000 of work done. If you can pay 30,000 per month, you’ll get 30,000 of work done.
You get exactly what you pay for. Nobody will work for free.
Ah, yes… development in the early space race, where the motto of NASA was “Waste anything but time” – if you put up the money to get things done quickly, then things get done quickly. That just proves my point.
And that’s a false comparison, besides. Mercury capsules were bare-bones, one man capsules. Making something that small is comparatively cheap and easy. If NASA wanted Mercury capsules, I’d be willing to bet that development of such a thing could be done in under a year. But that’s not what they want. They want larger, 4-7 man capsules that can also carry cargo, with an in-orbit endurance of 210 days. That’s worlds apart from what Mercury capsules were capable of.
Hug,
Wrong. It encourages them to match the pace of work to the budget as you show. Only a government contractor would view it as pushing them to a deadline, instead of the dragging the work out.
If it is their own money they are spending, and they have NO revenue coming in until they are carry passengers, they would have a huge incentive to do it cheaper and quicker, which is why the pressurize cargo Dragon that flew in 2010 would have quickly been configured to carry crew members by 2012, or earlier.
Also you need to brush up on NASA history. That motto only came into existence AFTER the Moon Race money started flowing in 1963. The was no luxury of money for Project Mercury and the start of Project Gemini. And although they may have been bare bones compared to today, they came into existence from nothing, with zero prior art to draw on.
Again, firms today are not starting from zero, they have the legacy knowledge of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, plus computers, plus advances in control systems and materials undreamed of when spacecraft were designed on drafting tables with slide rules.
Ok, so what idiot works for free??
NASA is their customer. They work as fast as NASA pays them to work.
You need a reality check.
So are you calling Elon Musk an idiot because he is spending money on making his first stage reusable. Shouldn’t he wait until the “great and wise” NASA puts out a RFP requesting a reusable first stage?
Is Robert Bigelow an idiot because he has spent tens of millions on designing an inflatable space station (the BA330). Should be wait until NASA puts out an RFP for an ISS replacement
You have been working as a government contractor too long, or for NASA, if you think firms only spend money when NASA tells them to spend it.
And no they don’t work as fast as NASA pays them to work, they work as SLOW as NASA pays them. If you want to see fast go to private industry developing products for REAL commercial markets, not NASA.
You seem to be missing the point, neither SpaceX nor Bigelow will be going anywhere without a paying customer!
Private industry doesn’t work for free, man. They make products that customers pay for. Business 101, read a book and come back to reality!!!
Hug,
Your need a product to have a customer and there are customers out there. That is why both were investing in such systems. If not for NASA doing its best to assimilate SpaceX as a contractor Bigelow Aerospace would have its station in orbit, with paying customers being flown to it by SpaceX. But NASA undermined that by COTS/CCP and delayed it.
Really, its like the government buying all the sugar, then claiming their is no private market for sugar because only they are buying it.
NASA is SpaceX’s customer. Without that paying customer, SpaceX probably would have failed years ago, or still be struggling with the Falcon 1.
I want you to back up your claim that NASA has slowed down SpaceX in any way. It’s absurd on the face of it.
I think SpaceX would have failed completely, or at best still be many years away from offering commercial manned flight services without NASA.
NASA should be renting space on a commercially operated moonbase, not running or maintaining it 🙂
Exactly! And all these brainy capitalists who are soooo much smarter than the folks at NASA need to get off their fat asses and mobilize all that private sector money to finance it.
NASA doesn’t have to show a profit, just get Congress to dole out tax payer dollars to it. And maybe if NASA showed an interest in contributing to the economy by developing space resources, instead of searching for ET, they would get more support and funding.
Sorry, but is exactly the wrong type of thinking that has stranded NASA in LEO for 40 years. Without a return first to the Moon NASA will NEVER send humans to Mars.
Exactly! The utilization of water resources in the Moon’s low gravity well is the key to getting to Mars within NASA’s limited annual budget. Plus much of the architecture utilized for a lunar outpost can also be used on Mars.
Marcel
The utilisation of water resources on the Moon is the key to a trillion dollar mining adventure. That’s assuming there is even collectable water there, which in itself is a $50 billion exploration exercise.
Spending $5 billion a year on a Moon base will keep NASA from Mars for an extra 50 years. There is no “testing” or cost saving purpose to going to the Moon first. That said, if you don’t give a shit about Mars and would rather go to the Moon, then going to the Moon is a good idea.
There’s probably more than a billion tonnes of water contained in the regolith at the lunar poles.
But even if there wasn’t a flake of water ice on the lunar surface, lunar regolith is still about 40% oxygen.
Oxygen is approximately 89% of the mass content of water and approximately 86% of the mass content of rocket fuel. So more than 86% of the mass needed for water and propellant for a journey to Mars could still come from the Moon’s low gravity well.
Marcel
There is considerably more oxygen and water on Earth and Mars and it is vastly cheaper from those sources. Earth and Mars are the main places that (significant numbers of) people and cargo carriers would want to go. Lunar extracted oxygen is simply another unnecessary expense and complication in these terms.
“Oxygen…approximately 86% of the mass content of rocket fuel.”
Very long lasting and highly efficient rocket engines use xenon or argon. Water and oxygen are highly recyclable.
The biggest part of the problem of getting to and from the Terrestrial and Martian surfaces is COST. The cheapest way to achieve this in terms both of fuel a launch vehicles is by using methalox. The idea of using lunar resource extraction to facilitate BEO travel, originates from a mindset and era of prohibitively expensive expendable launch systems. Reusable launch systems providing cheap surface-to-orbit services allow the use of oxygen and water from the planetary bodies is a far simpler, easier, more quickly accomplished and almost certainly cheaper solution.
I have yet to see any evidence of significant numbers of folks wanting to go to Mars. At best it’s a hand full of scientists looking to send astronauts to look for ET and a couple hundred adventurers who read too many science fiction novels and think Mars is like Utah, instead of the harsh world it actually is.
You have been hanging around the Mars advocates far too much.
He is not worth replying to….a broken record. He will just go on and on arguing like a robot. Reminds me of that guy Coastal Ron.
Where do you get your numbers? A robotic mission could verify the Moon’s water for less than it cost to send Curiosity to Mars. And it won’t cost a trillion to mine it, not with telebotics.
As for the Moon stopping folks from going to Mars, last I saw no one was going anyway because of the huge costs and lack of technology to reach it safely. That is why no one rushed there after Project Apollo, and no one will be going there this century if we don’t develop the technology needed on the Moon.
Yes, NASA could have done it in the 1970’s if it didn’t have Mars fever which drove them to attempt CATS with the Shuttle.
I would think that if NASA in the 1970’s had replaced Apollo with a human mission to Mars, that they would’ve experienced even more cost overruns, delays, health issues, maintenance challenges than the Shuttle and the ISS have. I think that they wouldn’t have gotten to Mars still today, given the same budget but with the human Mars mission as the dominating priority. Shuttle and ISS can operate to some degree, but a mission to Mars is more binary, either everything gets good enough or it won’t go. And then we really would’ve had a NASA in deep crisis today!
Yes, without the Soviet Union applying pressure the effort to reach Mars would have faded as the bill increased for it. By contrast the costs for a Moon base would have been supportable since the technology already existed in basic form.
The Moon and Mars are two very different destinations, one would like to optimize all equipment differently for the two. But I think it is natural to focus HSF to the Moon and robots to Mars. And then move outwards. Already humans in LEO has been quite problematic with the Shuttle and ISS. The Moon is doable today, Mars less so yet.
Which will give researchers plenty of time to determine if the is life on Mars, and what precautions would be needed for a human mission to protect it.
If there’s life on Mars then it is at least as tough as those microbes NASA fail to scrub off their rovers before launch. I’m not worried for them. And them coming to Earth would be like Panama invading the US. Some defensive capabilities have been evolved here.
The problem is not displacing the locals as much as being unable to tell if the bacteria you found is some very rare species for Earth that followed you to Mars, or a true Martian original. DNA analysis may help, but we don’t know how universal DNA combinations are and if there is only one “right” combination. Also there will always be questions, especially as some claim Martian life may have seeded Earth life via meteorites.
We do know how universal a gene is, namely: Not at all! We know that the same two will never happen independently anywhere twice. Never. Anywhere. No alien life will have any gene in common with you, however, ALL life on Earth, without exception, have genes in common with you.
20 amino acids in 100 to 30,000 long sequences for different proteins. Please do make the calculation to compare that number with for example the number of all molecules in the visible universe. And do trust your calculator, the number is indeed unfathomably unlikely!
I am not talking about genes, but about something more basic, namely the question if Mars life uses the same amino acids, and they are not enantiomers of Earth origin DNA. Just look at how the debate has raged over the last 50 years whenever someone claims to find Archaea or even just amino acids in meteorites about if it is from space or Earth.
I’ve read somewhere that lab experiments have shown that new amino acids have successfully been adopted by living organism, by manipulating their genes. I think there are about 200 amino acids possible, and the three base pair combination allows present life systems 64 different. I think it has landed on 20 just because there hasn’t been time and biomass enough to try out more combinations. Those who don’t conform to some kind of standard find it hard to recombine.
It is a bit scary that alien life certainly is compatible with our DNA/protein type, because building blocks of our system are so simple and it has been so extremely successful on Earth during extremely varying conditions. But that the aliens have other sets of combinations of sequences on these macromolecules. Combinations we have no hope of ever predicting. Inter-alien sex is not advisable on the first date.
Yes, and I expect one reason it took so long from the emergence of simple life to the Cambrian explosion is that some sort of competition might have been taking place between those different systems with none really gaining an advantage. But the “Snowball” Earth put an end to it with the current existing set being the only survivor.
At least half of the Moon is 🙂
As somebody not all that familiar with US politics, does this have any real chance of being passed?
Zero as written. O will nix it.
However, if done as a cots outside of NASA budget, then O will approve if the neo cons really stand by their words.
The Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed a lunar program during the Bush administration. The lunar program (Constellation) was canceled by Obama– not the Congress.
And President Obama won’t be in office anymore after 2016. So the Congress has to prepare for a ‘real’ space program again.
Marcel
Constellation was canceled because CONgress did not fund it.
“If the opposite of pro is con, then the opposite of progress is Congress.”
Always liked that joke.
Bob Clark
The huge majority of bills never become law. However, versions of a bill can gain momentum.
I’d say it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Congress essentially overrode the president to create SLS and lobbied hard for a continuation of Orion after Obama initially proposed canceling it. I think there is a genuine desire in both congress and among the American people to see America preeminent in space and specifically back on the moon — to at the very least get back to what we once had (Apollo) and even expand on from there somewhat (base, polar exploration, far side, cool new pressurized rovers). However, while the desire is real, no one wants to pay for it. Especially, no one wants to increase taxes to pay for it.
Also, I think there’s a growing realization that Mars is too hard — especially on this budget. The moon is seeming ever more like a reasonable, achievable stepping stone that is more viscerally exciting and engaging as a destination than an asteroid, and especially more so than a boulder brought back from an asteroid. The dissatisfaction with the asteroid redirect mission is real and widespread. Not that people actively hate it, but that it generates apathy where people want excitement. The vicinity of Mars in the mid 2030’s is far off, and that’s only in the unlikely event that things stay on schedule — it’s too long to maintain excitement and keep people and congresspeople engaged.
Depending on what the next president does, I could see congress and/or the president funding a moon lander and redirecting SLS towards the moon. Even if Clinton wins and she names Lori Garver as Administrator, I could see them doing a Lunar COTS type initiative (so, again the moon, but not with a traditional NASA designed, cost plus-contracted lander and base). Maybe Cislunar COTS instead.
So, regardless of the fate of this particular bill, I belive it is more likely than not the the U.S. redirects it’s immediate and medium-term efforts towards the moon within the next two to three years. People genuinely long for results and not being able to achieve what was achieved in the age of slide rules is a minor national embarrassment that, all politics aside, people genuinely wish was fixed (if they don’t have to pay more taxes).
Anyway, we shall see. Musk is supposed to announce his Mars architecture later this year — that plus a successful Dragon 2 test flight, launch abort test and Falcon Heavy debut could suddenly make Mars seem more achievable and swing the pendulum back in that direction. Otherwise, it seems like Congress and even NASA are just kind of waiting until Obama leaves office so that things can be redirected back towards the Moon.
“Also, I think there’s a growing realization that Mars is too hard — especially on this budget. The moon is seeming ever more like a reasonable, achievable stepping stone that is more viscerally exciting and engaging as a destination than an asteroid”
Absolutely correct.
We only get sick from microbes which are highly specialized on our DNA. Half of human DNA is actually identical to the DNA of virii, they injected it in us! You are half a virus. A life form which doesn’t speak our language would not relate to us chemically. Is there a clinic term for this contamination paranoia? Interplanetophobic hypocondria hypotheticum?
Yes, the novelty of television was probably one of the big reasons for the popular success of Apollo. In the 2030’s when a Mars mission is possible, there will be consumer gaming equipment on sale where you can simulate being on Mars pretty convincingly. When it actually happens, the reaction will be like: “Oh, I thought that was done decades ago! At least it cost only a tiny fraction of producing the latest movie/game/experience-whatever.”
We can’t base sustainable human space flight on public popularity. We have to do with the fraction of us who want to see it happen.
One can sometimes leverage silly posturing such as this to advantage; namely to implement some part of a “Lunar COTS” program. Not to mention a partial gravity test lab and other such essential research avoided for the past 50 years, but procured and operated through an SAA. Another option would be to set up a Lunar Base Prize, but you’d likely have to ditch SLS for that, which is a no-go for these Hill Kabuki dancers.
Given the failure of the Ansari X-Prize, and the struggles of the Google X-Prize, I think its time to see prizes for what they are, one off stunts and policy failures.
A solid guarantee of a long term contract to the first firm, or group of firms, to demonstrate performance will work much better and encourage firms to build sustainable, profitable systems that would be also available to serve commercial needs as well instead of some kluge to win the prize that only results in a dead end to future development.
By failure do you mean it has not yet led to private flights to suborbit? Blue Origin has just made a test flight capable of doing it. My opinion also is that if Virgin Galactic had not used hybrid engines but instead higher performance liquid engines they would already be making suborbital flights.
Bob Clark
Bob,
It was supposed to create a vehicle that would be able to jump start suborbital tourism by carrying passengers into space. It did not. Spaceshipone was too much of a kludge to win the prize it had no possibility to be put into commercial service, or even carry passengers into space. The decade they have spent on Spaceshiptwo demonstrates that easily enough.
It was suppose to bring a rain of venture funding on the teams involved. That never happened and all but Scaled Composites, who make most of its money on drones, is gone due to lack of capital.
The two firms likely to beat VG to suborbital tourism ignored the Ansari X-Prize as irrelevant, which is why they are in the lead now.
So by any measure it was a complete failure.
Bill Posey rights in principle, but in vain to worry about Russia. The current Russian regime is an absolute impotent (but able to begin a new world war). Perhaps is the only thing this mode is able to do.
Russia and China (soon to be the largest economy on Earth) just agreed to set up a lunar outpost together.
China intends to economically dominate both the heavens and the Earth.
Marcel
Didn’t Putin recently cut the space budget for the next 10 years with 35%? They are good at rocket engines and kosmonauts in LEO, but that’s all. They haven’t even launched any successful interplanetary probe in over 30 years. India sent a working orbiter to Mars before the Russians could. The Chinese might mean business, but the US still has a big space tech lead which should be held on to.
Alas, Plato is my friend, but truth is more expensive.
Perfect.
Now, have the dems modify this to turn it into a COTS/ccxdev style program of offering say 5 billion to 2 winners to put a base on the moon by 2022.
In addition, offer up to have a minimum of 2 astronauts per base for 5 years. It will need a max spending on that, but something reasonable.
Actually, the utilization of lunar water resources for the production of air, drinking, food preparation, washing, radiation mass shielding and propellant will be essential for getting humans to Mars in the 2030s.
Marcel
Yes, and you wouldn’t have the atmosphere of a Moon Race to drive interest up. Folks always love a good competition with arch rivals, just ask anyone who markets sports.
Plus we may always find a Mars Meteor with life in it, life we know didn’t contaminate it after landing since there is no evidence of any on the Moon. Of course that would undermine one of the justifications being used to go to Mars, which is another reason Mars advocates are so irrationally anti-Moon.
So, you’re okay with being ‘stuck’ on Mars, instead?
No, really. How many Mars missions must occur, before someone says that? Trust me, it’ll happen.
It astounds me that people look at any of these places (including LEO) that way. As if there weren’t any number of things yet to do at any of them, even if the other places didn’t exist..
The planetary science people have no qualms about going back to places they’ve ‘been before’ with new instruments and questions. HSF should be no different.
Expanding human presence into space isn’t hopscotching to the next gravity well, and leaving nothing behind.
Show me the money.
SLS/Orion is effectively the parts of Constellation that NASA can afford on its existing budget. There’s no funding for a lander/ascent-stage, nor funding for a base. A base is effectively a space-station in complexity and since ISS costs $3b/yr merely to operate, it’s hard to see a lunar base being more affordable than ISS. So even cancelling ISS still leaves you with no funding to develop the lander/ascent-stage hardware, nor any hardware necessary to actually do something on the moon; barely enough to fund base modules and a few EVAs per year.
If Posey was serious, he’d specify funding increases for NASA, or create a separate “challenge/prize” amount.
The latter is my preference. A flat $2-3b prize for the first US citizen to return to the moon within a decade (I suggested this years ago, with the deadline being the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Missed PR opportunity, IMO.) It gives you the drama of a “race”, while hopefully stimulating commercial development. Throw in a few “stepping stone” prizes to kick things off, and a few more to continue after the initial landing (for example, first far-side landing, first stay over a full lunar-day, etc).
In addition, a bounty for lunar ice from the poles being transported safely to the ISS. (Up to a certain limit per year, obviously.) Ideally there would be multiple bounties: For eg, core samples 10cm/4″ wide, paid per metre, chemically isolated and cryo-preserved. (For science.) Potable water made from the ice. LOx made from the ice. And LH/LOx made from the ice. (All for ISRU.) Later on, once the analysis of the contaminants in the ice is done by NASA, other chemicals might be added to the bounty-list, methane, ammonia, whatever is there.
I like your proposal. They could also make the deadline by December, 2022 to honor the Apollo program itself by making it by the 50th anniversary of the last manned lunar landing by Apollo 17.
You could also make it additional prize amounts for using reusable systems. If Falcon Heavy does come online it is possible to make lunar missions at flight costs of a few hundred million dollars:
SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for low cost trips to the Moon.
http://exoscientist.blogspo…
Then a $2-3 billion dollar prize would cover the development costs.
Bob Clark
Let’s be honest about this – NASA isn’t going to Mars. They don’t have, or are not allowed to have, the required technology. And even if they were allowed, they wouldn’t be able to develop the launchers and spacecraft at an affordable cost. SpaceX is going to Mars, because they will be trying to do it the best and most cost effective way. SpaceX are not going to the Moon, because going to the Moon accrues no benefit to going to Mars and simultaneously uses valuable and limited resources that would be required for a Mars effort. Going to the Moon as a prelude to going to Mars, makes no practical or economical sense.
As always, the caveat to the above is that if you don’t want to go to Mars and you do want to go to the Moon, then go to the Moon.
There is a lot debate about this issue but my opinion is the best way to go to Mars is to go to the Moon first and use lunar-derived hydrolox from propellant depots placed in cislunar space.
NASA’s head of human spaceflight William Gerstenmaier raised this possibility, but NASA higher-ups downplayed the idea because it is not official NASA policy:
Yes, NASA really is reconsidering the moon, and here’s why that’s important.
Posted on April 6, 2015 | By Eric Berger
http://blog.chron.com/scigu…
A key benefit of doing it this way is that you have virtually unlimited propellant to make a large vehicle that can shorten the flight time. The long travel times of 6 to 8 months and the muscle and bone loss and vision damage from being in space that long are a big problem with current proposals for Mars flights.
As a point of comparison most proposals for Mars flights assume you use a minimal energy flight at about a delta-v of 3.8 km/s to make the injection towards a Mars-bound trajectory. However, the Saturn V when you add up all the propulsive stages could do a delta-v of 18 km/s. Imagine how much shorter we could make the flight to Mars if we only needed to transport the empty stages of a Saturn V-sized vehicle to cislunar space with all the propellant being provided there.
Note also the importance of first setting up such propellant depots is that the entire inner solar system then becomes open to manned exploration, including Venus and near Earth asteroids.
Bob Clark
I understand the reasoning of the case you’re putting forward and I am certainly not unaffected by the sense of hope that such a scenario generates. However, I remain sceptical regarding lunar hydrolox in a number of ways. Firstly, I am not yet convinced from the in orbit surveys that collectable water exists in those permanently unlit polar craters. Even if said water is there, the task of recovering (i.e. mining) and processing it strikes me as a century long and hundreds of billions of dollars task.
Secondly, it seems to me that the single biggest problem of exploring, make use of and settling space, is that of reaching LEO economically. Even having a potential source of relatively cheap propellent waiting does little to improve the prospects of human deep space flight for exploration and settlement, if the cost of reaching LEO is economically unsustainable. To achieve this most critical capability we need fully reusable super heavy lift launch system: SpaceX’s BFR?.
Once full reusability high mass and high volume lift is available, then, and only then, can we entertain genuinely a large scale exploration and use of space as plausible. It will probably take this sort of lift economics breakthrough to enable lunar water mining. However, once you can lift 150+ tonnes of methalox to LEO for the price of launch fuel and some incremental fraction of booster amortisation, then the economics of large scale lunar hydrolox mining is brought further in question.
The need for spending tens or hundreds of billions prospecting for lunar water and then spend more hundreds of billions mining it, may well be further negated by improvements in electric propulsion. The quite considerable reduction in the volumes of propellent gases required for electric propulsion adds even more weight to the economical argument of lifting them from Earth (assuming the existence of a fully reusable SHLV on which all schemes rely for plausibility anyway).
A 200MW VASIMR (whether solar or nuclear electric) may be a ways off, but even the idea of putting a 200MW nuclear-electric plant in space pales into insignificance compared with mining and processing from permanently dark lunar craters. Clingy, abrasive lunar regolith, potentially steep and/or rocky terrain, a permanent temperature approaching -270 C, complete permanent darkness (unless you take a nuclear electric system to light and heat the way). And from this environment you hope to excavate and process hundreds of tonnes of hydrolox a month. That 200 vasimr could supposedly reach Mars in 39 days. Musk has talked of cutting the journey to 3 months, though we don’t yet know how (presumably using an Earth departure stage that returns indepently).
As I said before, if one wants, for whatever reason, to go the Moon, then go to the Moon. But don’t go to the Moon as a training ground or stepping stone to other destinations. I am unconvinced that lunar water is the likeliest, best, easiest or cheapest route to Mars or the rest of the solar system. I think Mars is probably a better gateway to the outer solar system.
If we spent a fraction of what has been spent on sending robots to Mars sending robots to the Moon we would know and not be guessing.
And the challenge is not reaching LEO, its learning how to venture into space beyond LEO, something we stopped doing after Apollo.
The big problem with the “Moon first, because we can make and launch huge hydrolox rockets to Mars from there” argument is that it will take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to establish and develop the mining capacity, smelting and refining facilities, and then manufacturing facilities, plus the infrastructure needed to cart these materials around, and then once you can make the parts needed, you have to build a rocket assembly and launch facility, etc., and the vast majority of the equipment needed to start doing all this will need to be launched from Earth to the Moon. So why not just launch stuff to Mars instead? You can be on Mars (which is your stated goal) decades earlier. Presumably you would want to send to Mars much of the same equipment you sent to the Moon, so just cut out the middle-man.
You missed my point. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY dislike Mars plans that involve 6 to 8 month in-space travel times. In that Eric Berger article I cited NASA’s chief of human spaceflight William Gerstenmaier believes the 500 and more likely 900 days total mission times for such missions is unfeasible.
However, if you have virtually unlimited propellant in space than you can use a huge rocket (think of the entire Saturn V in space) to achieve a high delta-V and shorten flight times. It would be unfeasible to launch the ca. 3 million kg of propellant from Earth’s deep gravity well. From the Moon it’s easy.
Bob Clark
No, it’s not easy. I literally just explained why in my comment. Learn to read.
Robert Clark said, “It would be unfeasible to launch the ca. 3 million kg of propellant from Earth’s deep gravity well. From the Moon it’s easy.”
It is most certainly not easy. It is a fantasy. The infrastructure needed on the moon to support a water mining industry would cost far, far more than simply launching it up from Earth. Especially now that launch companies are working so hard to get launch costs down.
No one even knows if we can make equipment that will survive in the environment of those permanently shadowed craters much less if the water can be extracted with any kind of reasonable effort and expenditure.
It is a fantasy, it is a lie, it is a red herring. It is something Moon First people say to detour the space program towards the Moon. It makes no sense economically or practically. It is the equivalent of claiming solar power beamed from space is the reason we need to develop better launchers.
This nonsense needs to die now.
Why do Mars advocates like you hate the Moon so much that you spread so many lies about it?
No one build such an infrastructure for the handful of “flag and footsteps” mission Mars advocates want. They will build it to give humanity the Solar System. Not just a sustainable way to keep sending flights not only to Mars, but to Venus, the Asteroids and beyond.
That is the basic difference between Moon advocates and Mars advocates. Moon advocates want the entire Solar System opened to humanity. Mars advocates just want to run away from Earth and hide in Mars deep gravity well.
I’m not a “Mars advocate” you insufferable jerk. I’m a realist.
“The infrastructure needed on the moon to support a water mining industry would cost far, far more than simply launching it up from Earth.”
You are making stuff up and that makes you a phibber- not a realist.
2000 pounds of water weighs 330 pounds on the Moon and can be shot into cislunar space with a fairly simple gas cannon- this reverse Jules Verne approach was suggested over half a century ago. You don’t know what you are talking about.
William Gerstenmaier is the head of NASA’s human spaceflight division. The National Academy of Sciences also came to the same conclusion that the best way to get to Mars is through the Moon.
Your nonsense needs to die now. You have no idea what you are talking about.
“It is the equivalent of claiming solar power beamed from space is the reason we need to develop better launchers.”
Actually we DO need much larger vehicles than the Saturn V to support a Moon return program to eventually power civilization on Earth with space solar power- using lunar resources.
You are calling the best path to space colonization nonsense.
You are right, NASA isn’t going to Mars because it is too stubborn to admit it has to return to the Moon first. That is why it has been stuck in LEO for decades, and will continue to be stuck in LEO.
Oh yeah, SpaceX will go to the Moon, rest assured! Not because it helps them go to Mars, it doesn’t, it is too different. You’re quite right and it is a point I think is often underestimated in the whole “stepping stone” debate. But they will do it because they can. It’s like a young student renting a dorm room because it is affordable, even though it is not the kind of housing aspired for, and in no way helps her get a bungalow.
A one week trip to the Moon and back could be done with feasible upgrades of the Falcon+Dragon architecture. Mars, on the other hand, requires lots of pre-deployed assets and the construction of the great Mars transfer vehicle/ISS2 in LEO. That’ll take ten years longer and cost ten times more than a visit to the Moon. Maybe Elon Musk decides to retire on the Moon instead? It is pretty awesome too, I’ve heard from guys who have been there.
But Soviet never was prominent in space beyond rocket engines and cosmonauts in LEO (where they are still in the lead!) Roscosmos going to the Moon won’t happen. Maybe they could piggyback together with ESA and China, but working together with NASA would be the obvious choice. Besides I think Putin is only interested in LEO and MEO because that is what is militarily useful.
“SpaceX is not going to Mars, because there is nobody, who will give his company the required many billions of dollar. He is not able to do the required R&D work for landing and surviving on Mars surface. Just developing a Methane/LOX-engine is not enough.”
You may turn out to be correct, but I am hopeful that you are wrong.
“I would be not surprised, if one times the “Musk imperium” of SpaceX, Tesla and all other stuff explodes (or better implodes) with a load bang.”
You obviously haven’t been following SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City in any detail.
“BTW is not healthy to rely on one company.”
I entirely agree. I really wish there were more than one such organisation with the potential to achieve anything meaningful in space sometime in the next 50 years, but at the time of writing there is simply no-one else.
” the “world” needs a well-developed incremental manned space program…”
Which is not happening, anywhere, by anybody, except for SpaceX. Progress everywhere else seems to be limited by either corruption or incompetence (probably mainly corruption).
Your NASA-hate is typically weird for a new space fan considering SpaceX was created with NASA dollars and depends on NASA for it’s survival. You are so dishonest.
The key point is that is not just a Moon base. It is a development program for producing propellant depots in cislunar space. This make Mars flights both shorter and easier.
Bob Clark
I’m going to take a guess that most of their ideas regarding a “stepping stone” Moon, are in line with what Robert has suggested. If so, then I’d also guess that they weren’t envisioning a fully reusable vertical landing SHLV that could deliver super cheap propellent to LEO. Nor advanced interplanetary electric propulsion that doesn’t need thousands of tonnes of supercryogenic LH2 and LOX. So, I submit that mining hydrolox from the Moon is not only the harder and more expensive route, but is also solving the in-space propellent problem with the wrong technology.
“-reusable vertical landing SHLV that could deliver super cheap propellent to LEO. Nor advanced interplanetary electric propulsion that doesn’t need thousands of tonnes of supercryogenic LH2 and LOX.”
Nothing like that exists or will except in advertising hyperbole.
However, there actually IS ice at the lunar poles. I submit you are the one with the wrong technology. We have been to the Moon.
“We have been to the Moon”…Really?.
As an example of open pit mining:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Now pick up this large!!! scale industrial operation and drop it into a permanently dark lunar crater at -240 C.
SpaceX are on the verge of succeeding at returning and reusing a first stage. Using the experience of F9, they are designing their next launch architecture – a fully reusable methalox system (for now we might assume to be BFR). However long it takes to get such a system working and however much it costs, it will occur way sooner and be orders of magnitude cheaper to develop than a lunar hydrolox (or even just a LOX) industry. In fact, success of this sort of launch system is a prerequisite for the development of a industrial scale lunar mining industry. If you can place 150 tonnes of propellent or water from Earth to LEO more cheaply than it can be scavenge from the Moon, why both undertaking a mega expensive, centuries long enterprise of developing a lunar LOX and/or LH2 industry?.
Take a look the Dawn spacecraft now at Ceres. It isn’t hydrolox propelled. What ever flavour of electric propulsion eventually wins out for high power applications, it is certain that it will arrive sooner and be orders of magnitude cheaper than developing an industrial scale mining operation on the Moon.
And you accuse me of hyperbole?. Another commenter quite accurately and more succinctly described the prospect of large scale lunar hydrolox/water/LOX as “fantasy”.
An example of a red herring. Ice on the surface is not mineral ore buried on Earth. You pick up your industrial operation and go somewhere else with it because it does not belong in this discussion.
That spudislunarresources report is a perfect example of absolutely the wrong direction to take. Spending trillions of dollars on 1980s space tech as a way to get clogged up with lunar regolith is truly a bad idea. Generally, this type of plan provides a very compelling argument for not going to the Moon.
I repeat: what is needed is affordable access to LEO. Without fully reusable launch systems, lunar development is economically impossible. Once we have affordable access to LEO, the Moon becomes a pointless money pit, of no immediate use beyond its own intrinsic scientific value. Perhaps, thousands of years into the future, the Moon will be an economically useful mining resource, but not for quite a while yet.
And of what “use” is Mars?
Bob Clark
If you’re asking the question, what use is human space flight?, or, what use is space beyond GEO?, then that is a different philosophical debate.
Assuming humans want to go beyond Earth, for scientific exploration, for an intelligence backup, for adventure, or for any other reason, then Mars is the most logical choice. It’s the second most hospitable environment in the solar system after Earth, which will be very useful to Martians. What use will Martians be to Terrans?, who knows?.
“Mars is the most logical choice. It’s the second most hospitable environment in the solar system-“
Total bullshit. Anybody born on Mars would dream of living on Earth. Mars sucks. The Moon is a place you can visit but Mars is hell. There are oceans under the ice of the gas giant moons. Maybe even Ceres- those are places to explore. Mars is an airless rock and is not “hospitable.” You are being ridiculous and exposing yourself for what you are- a new space moon hater.
What use is the moon? Other than as a money pit you want to build to go to Mars. If you want to go to Mars, then just go to Mars. Don’t waste time and money on another destination.
And mining Mars, with its deep gravity well and distance that make teleoperations nearly impossible for industrial use makes sense? The Moon will has the potential for profitable mining activities long before humans will ever reach Mars.
“-thousands of years into the future,-“
You are pathetic.
What info is that? google search produces nothing.
LOL okay, personal anecdotes – same evidence given for “chemtrails” and that vaccines cause autism.
Admittedly, I exaggerate to make the point. I will concede that there is the possibility that it would take only a few hundred billion to lay the foundations for a meaningfully useful lunar mining operation.
“You got not the big picture.”
It is you who have blinkered yourself to the biggest obstacle to a our expansion of our use of space; and also the biggest obstacle to mining the Moon. You have not analysed the problem correctly. That problem is the cost of access to LEO. Once access to LEO is affordable, access beyond LEO becomes a relatively trivial problem.
You are not exaggerating, you are lying through your teeth. Again, totally false information. LEO is a dead end. The Moon is where the gateway to the solar system is to be found.
The big lie is that a rocket that launches from Earth must somehow stop in LEO or it cannot go anywhere else. Absurd. What is stupid is stopping in LEO at all instead of continuing on to escape velocity.
Daylight period, temperature ranges, gravity, resources available, communication time delay, travel time, mission duration, atmosphere… Systems for energy and life support must be completely different, and any subsystem which is not directly dependent on the differences in environment, will have to be redesigned anyway because it interacts with systems which are destination specific. Just one example: you could save alot of mass by designing structures for the lower lunar gravity. And even if one could make a kind of Moon/Mars unisex design of some of the equipment (Dragon2+ could maybe be the crewed lander for both), optimization for the specific destination is certainly the way to go. You won’t find much of the polar gear very useful in Sahara.
But the general experience gained from going to the Moon would be very valuable for starting from scratch again to develop a new set of stuff needed to go to Mars.
You could then say, without going to the Moon which is a very different environment from Mars anyway, that the ISS provides such general experience today. It does hide from radiation, but we know how to handle that problem with enough mass launched. The ISS has unfortunately emphatically proven that microgravity is not an attractive way to go to Mars or live in space, although survivable for at least a few years.
But the only thing which has actually killed astronauts to date is mechanical failures. And the ISS is a triumph in miraculously avoiding that happening, in spite of all the launches and about 15 years of having 6 astronauts in space with all the EVA’s and stuff. (I don’t think, any of the shuttle disasters had the ISS as its destination). That is one of few encouraging lessons from the ISS! Quality control seems to have been developed successfully to manage the catastrophic system failure risk, even though it is a much more diffuse and complex problem than radiation and microgravity.
The launching-two-copies-at-once was practiced by NASA too in the 1970’s, with Pioneer, Voyager, Viking. The difference is that they all worked fine. I’m worried about the Roscosmos Exo-Mars rover 2018. I read unconfirmed news that it will be repurposed to Phobos! That should surprise the science teams which design the instruments and have spent years on preparing for the science results. Not to mention the engineers. I don’t think a lander is repurposed to a completely different kind of target object just three years before launch, not if it will actually happen. (It is just a rumour, or hopefully a misunderstanding)
Russian planetary scientists have been hooked on Phobos ever since their (otherwise) prominent astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky proposed that it is a hollow alien spaceship and wrote the book: “Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon” So don’t sit up waiting for anything good coming from that direction, except routinely launching humans to LEO.
https://iceonthemoon.wordpr…
You can lead a horse to water…..
From wiki: On October 9 (1977), the CBS program 60 Minutes ran a segment about space colonies. Later they aired responses from the viewers, which included one from Senator William Proxmire, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee responsible for NASA’s budget. His response was, “it’s the best argument yet for chopping NASA’s funding to the bone …. I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy”.[53] He successfully eliminated spending on space colonization research from the budget.[54]
http://www.nss.org/settleme…
O’Neill was the one true visionary that answered all the arguments against funding for space. Space Solar Energy is still the solution to poverty on planet Earth- and now the only possible solution to climate change.
But NewSpace wants nothing to do with it.
“Going to the Moon as a prelude to going to Mars, makes no practical or economical sense.”
NewSpace idiots are worse than Proxmire.
Not all NewSpace supporters are opposed to returning to the Moon. Elon Musk is because he is so fixated on going to Mars as the only goal.
I agree going to Mars is an important goal. However, returning to the Moon AND using its resources allows us to go to Mars and other destinations in the inner Solar System.
“Not all NewSpace supporters are opposed to returning to the Moon.:
What you are saying is like Nazis saying they don’t support genocide. If they support NewSpace they oppose Moon return. A hundred thousand blog comments say I am telling the truth.
Excellent points made in this lecture by Jeff Greason head of XCOR that commercial space can get us to the Moon orders of magnitude more cheaply than the NASA estimates.
This is important because supporters of a “Mars first” approach such as Robert Zubrin take that stance because of the idea a lunar return would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. But this is by following the usual governmental financing approach. By following commercial space and not requiring all new “giga”-rockets, it could be done for a fraction of those estimates.
NewSpace 2014 – Pathways to Human Exploration: Are there alternatives to NASA?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
The jerks that squat on this forum are going to turn any discussion you try to have into a troll baiting contest and you will eventually be banned- if you insult the Muskiiah. Just letting you know Sno- you will not last here very long.
Because people who ask questions like “Are there alternatives to NASA?” are living in a fantasy world and are part of the problem- not the solution. Only a government program can gather the tremendous resources necessary for space colonization. He is not supporting that and worse, he is working against it- thus I attack. It is the basic conflict of ideology that is in play between “new space” and “old space.”
New Space is dead in the water before it even starts. They are going nowhere except low earth orbit.
He’s talking about commercial space in general. For instance it could be funded by a Bezos, or a Bigelow, or a Paul Allen.
Also, if NASA were to set up a billion dollar prize as suggested by Paul451 to return to the Moon, then you could have the big players in the industry such as Boeing, Lockheed, ULA, and SpaceX getting involved.
Bob Clark