Boeing Unveils Deep Space Concepts for Moon and Mars Exploration
Boeing Deep Space Gateway (Credit: Boeing)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Apr. 3, 2017 – Boeing [NYSE: BA] today unveiled concepts for the deep space gateway and transport systems that could help achieve NASA’s goal of having robust human space exploration from the Moon to Mars.
NASA’s Space Launch System, which Boeing is helping develop, would deliver the habitat to cislunar space near the Moon. Known as the Deep Space Gateway, the habitat could support critical research and help open opportunities for global government or commercial partnerships in deep space, including lunar missions. It would be powered by a Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system.
“The ability to simultaneously launch humans and cargo on SLS would allow us to assemble the gateway in four launches in the early 2020s,” said Pete McGrath, director of global sales and marketing for Boeing’s space exploration division.
Boeing Deep Space Transit Vehicle on approach. (Credit: Boeing)
The Deep Space Gateway could be the waypoint for Mars missions. Utilizing a docking system akin to what the International Space Station uses for commercial operations, it could host the Deep Space Transport vehicle, which would take humans to Mars. Once near Mars, crews could deploy a lander for surface missions or conduct other scientific and robotic missions in orbit.
The transport vehicle would be equipped with a habitat specifically designed to protect passengers from deep space’s harsh environment and its own robust SEP bus.
In fact, both of Boeing’s concepts leverage proven solar electric propulsion technology and hardware design from the 702 satellite family.
The gateway and transport systems are partially being developed as part of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Technologies (Next Step) program and an ongoing High Power SEP technology development effort within the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).
For more information on Defense, Space & Security, visit www.boeing.com. Follow us on Twitter: @BoeingDefense.
75 responses to “Boeing Unveils Deep Space Concepts for Moon and Mars Exploration”
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From rocket to nowhere to space station to nowhere…
Yep, less deep space gateway than deep space roadblock.
Ouch
The truth hurts.
You are really stuck on repeating the mistakes of Project Apollo with Mars. Mars direct means no infrastructure, which means it will be easy for a future administration to pull the funding once the first flag and footsteps flight is over.
I want to see missions to Mars, and the rest of the Solar System be sustainable and the start of the human exploration of the Solar System, not a one trick pony like Project Apollo turned out to be.
Mars isn’t even on the table.
If the Gateway is put in a sensible orbit it will be a good place to change to the lunar lander. Even Apollo found expendable landers too expensive.
This station is clearly an evolution of ISS hardware so its development costs will be relatively low. There is no money to develop a lunar lander. A lunar lander, on the other hand, would be quite expensive to develop.
Don’t be fooled by the name. This is a “gateway to nowhere” without a lander.
NASA has been helping multiple companies develop lunar landers.
Trump/congress could offer up contracts to put us on the moon in a base.
Those are tiny little unmanned landers. I’m talking about manned landers.
Same difference.
Let companies develop their own landers and you get them at a fraction of the cost of old style NASA programs.
Not arguing on the pro/contra of such a “gateway” station, just saying that the cost of developing lunar landers is not the thing that prevents them from being useful.
Big difference between a GLXP lander and a manned lander, or even a MSL/Curiosity scale lander. Hundreds of millions of dollars difference.
NASA does not have the money to engage in lunar landings no matter how cheap the hardware is to develop.
NASA has the money to use a lander designed in a rational way for a rational price by someone else. What it doesn’t have is the money to develop a lander itself using its usual expensive procedures and legacy contractor base.
Why do you assume that? There is no new technology required to move from a GLXP style lander to a manned lander. Of course it is more expensive to build something bigger that has more functionality (ECLSS, Airlock, etc). But it is not like the cost rises exponentially.
Of course the cost rises exponentially! For starters, you have to scale everything up in size because manned landers are *heavy* in order to carry all the equipment for all of the functionality that keeps the meat-bags alive (ECLSS, kitchen, sleeping, toilet…) and productive (control panels, computers, airlocks, surface EVA suits, and etc.). All of that equipment is complex and cost scales with complexity. Also, all of that equipment has mass with drives up the size of the lander exponentially which ripples all the way back to the vehicle which launches the lander from earth in the first place.
Of course manned missions can also be exponentially more productive. The manned lunar rover traversed large distances in minutes. The same distance traveled takes the unmanned Mars landers months to traverse. Having people driving rovers and operating equipment is a lot more efficient than doing the same thing remotely.
NASA has all the money that CONgress tells them that they can have.
And the majority of CONgress is likely to push for the moon.
Right now it looks like they are pushing for almost the Moon…
Without landers, you have a “gateway to nowhere”. It’s a chicken and egg problem for sure. But developing the *easy* part first seems silly, IMHO. When I’m working on a project at work, you typically want to tackle the *hard* problem first. Without solving the hard problem, there is really no point to solving the easy parts.
We know how to make rockets and guidance systems, so they are the easy part. It is the long term ECLSS that is the hard part. NextSTEP-2, NextSTEP-3 and Commercial Crew are working on various types of ECLSS. Hopefully the life support for a capsule and/or spacestation will work in landers and Moon/Mars bases.
That is why we all have to hope that ULA will be able to turn its new ACES upper stage into a XEUS lander with help from Masten.
A cabin with full life support will be needed. I hope one of the NextSTEP-2 ECLSS is low mass.
That would be dandy. So would a permanently-attached crew-capable new top-knot for New Shepard. As Aerospike says, there’s definitely more than one way to skin the lunar lander cat.
This is not a new idea at all. ULA engineers proposed this long ago for their Centaur upper stage. The engineers have also proposed Centaur as the technological basis for LEO refueling depots. Any of these past proposals involving Centaur ought to be possible with ACES as well.
ULA engineers are top notch and I have a high amount of respect for them. But, IMHO, the problem with ULA is that its parent companies have, in the past at least, been very reluctant to fund any of these innovative ideas to fruition.
SpaceX is currently eating ULA’s lunch. To survive ULA will have to build a new restaurant.
ULA has more high energy LOX/LH2 upper stage experience in the US than anyone else. SpaceX doesn’t even have a high energy upper stage. This is a huge advantage for ULA (e.g. their upcoming in space reusable ACES upper stage).
No, they do NOT have the LOX/LH2 experience.
Rocketdyne does.
and with SX moving to Methane/LOX, it will handle very similar, other than being colder and more corrosive.
ULA has experience with building LOX/LH2 upper stages with fairly low boil-off of the LOX/LH2. This includes tankage, plumbing, and etc.
Aerojet Rockedyne does NOT have experience building LOX/LH2 upper stages. They have experience building RL-10 engine(s) used in upper stages.
Once avionics and general approach is figured out, the rest is just scaling up.
LOL, if only it were that easy to keep astronauts alive and productive.
Let’s see.
Boeing, spacex, iss, and a company in great lakes area all do eclss.
In fact, one that makes sense is a Bigelow sundancer loaded on top of a landing/launching truck.
It might allow for transport of say 12 ppl to/from lunar surface.
Blue Origin is reportedly working on a cargo lander capable of delivering 10,000 pounds to the lunar surface. That’s a start. As for the lunar outpost, it would be more useful at a LaGrange point than in lunar orbit.
http://www.popularmechanics…
Blue has proposed a lander. But there is no one to pay for it. I don’t think even Bezos is going to throw a billion dollars of his own money into the hat to build a Lunar destination and transportation system hoping that…. you know, “they will come”.
Since it isn’t the government building it, I doubt it would cost them a billion dollars just to make the lander. Several years ago, NASA analyzed what SpaceX spent to develop the first version of the Falcon 9. IIRC, that included one or two launches. The cost was about $300 million. NASA had to admit that if they had done it using their usual processes, it would’ve cost at least 10 times as much. That’s why “government efficiency” is a major oxymoron. If Bezos can make a business case for it, he’ll use his own money in addition to whatever he can get from NASA.
A lander isn’t much use unless you have a destination (or are just making flags and footprints again). Its hard to imagine even a lean mean commercial US company being able to that for less that a $B. The Indians or Chinese? Maybe. But not “us” because of all our cost inflators (lawyers and the bloated aerospace industry).
Bezos has already stated his intended destination – the lunar poles. I don’t really see the relevance of lawyers as an impediment here – especially the ambulance-chasing slip-and-fall types of the tort bar. As I understand the proposal, Blue isn’t even intending to put people on its lander initially; it’s going to be, in essence, a big, space-rated, rocket-powered version of those delivery drones Amazon has been working on. It’ll be, basically, a robotic package carrier. Slipping a detachable, toroidal freight module, with slots for the landing legs to pass through, onto a slightly modified New Shepard would accomplish that goal nicely and for peanuts
And Blue is not “bloated aerospace,” its a clean-sheet-of-paper scratch build. I yield to no one in my disapprobation of both the legal profession and legacy aerospace but neither has any relevance to what Blue’s minimum cost will be in designing and building a reusable lunar lander. Given what Blue has done to-date, I can see it costing up to maybe $100 mil, though even that seems quite a stretch. A billion? I don’t think so. $100 mil is pretty much couch change to Bezos. Money is not an impediment here.
See my reply to Larry J.
BO is based in Seattle, home of Boeing. About as bloated as they come. The cost of every AN fastener and fitting up thru the six-figure salary expected by every AE has absorbed every cost-plus contract and lawsuit since the 1930s. Those costs impact even outsiders like SX and BO.
AN hardware is built to higher standards than the cheap nuts and bolts you buy at a local hardware store. They’re stronger and built to tighter tolerances. It would be incredibly foolish to risk an aircraft or rocket worth tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars by saving a few dollars on cheap (likely Chinese made) nuts and bolts.
See what I mean? lol
I used to own a private plane. You don’t have to explain to me about the cost of airplane parts. However, in many cases, the high costs of those parts are justified. I’ve read too many crash reports where someone substituted an unapproved part (sometimes a homebuilder trying to save money or who made an oversight, and other times someone using a counterfeit part) that led to tragic results.
You think the Chinese don’t use AN-equivelent parts in their air/space craft? Do you think they pay anywhere near what a US company does?
Much of what you pay for with an AN fastener is the slightly higher QC, the paper-trail, and the incentive for a company to stick its legal neck out because if anything ever happens, a lawyer is going to try to sue if the blame gets stuck on them.
I’m sure the Chinese use their highest quality hardware for their aircraft and space systems. I’m saying that the level of quality between AN hardware and the cheap stuff you see in typical hardware stores is significant. Producing stuff in relative low numbers to stricter standards and tolerances is always going to cost more than lower quality stuff build in vast numbers.
True. But my point is that anything labeled “aerospace” gets an instant price hike, just because the industry is accustomed to it for historical reasons (gubment). That is one of the reasons SpaceX does as much in-house as it can.
SpaceX does as much inhouse as they can because it allows them to have complete control over quality and costs. When you buy from someone else, you have to factor in their overhead costs and profit margin. Those companies were used to gouging their customers. SpaceX eliminated as many of those suppliers as possible.
I recall on one of the early Dragon flights (2nd or 3rd) where they had trouble activating the Dragon propulsion system shortly after separation. It turned out that the outside supplier for the propellant valves had changed the design without notifying SpaceX. That almost resulted in a loss of mission incident.
There’s another reason why SpaceX likes to keep things inhouse. I recall talking to a SpaceX employee at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs back around 2011. I congratulated him on their recent (2nd) successful Falcon 9 flight and noted how they solved the uncommanded roll immediately after liftoff issue that happened on their first flight. He replied that everyone knew it was a SpaceX problem that had to be fixed so there was no finger-pointing or blame shifting. They then quickly worked together to identify and fix the cause of the problem. It has never happened again. When something bad happens on an aerospace system built the normal way, everyone tries to deflect blame away from their company. SpaceX takes ownership of the problem and fixes it. That’s why they seldom have the same problem twice.
No, I don’t really see what you mean. Aerospace-quality fasteners are hardly a monopoly franchise. I have no idea where SpaceX buys its nuts and bolts, but I do know for a fact that there are a lot of manufacturers of same located in Southern California so choice would hardly be a problem, even locally. If Boeing pays too much for nuts and bolts, that would seem to be Boeing’s problem and no one else’s.
You’re really attacking the engineers? BTW, salary on the west coast is faaaaaaaar different than it is in Wichita. And on the whole, aero is pretty much on par with mechanical – whose salary doesn’t seem to hold back the myriad of other industries in which they’re employed.
No not attacking. Just stating a fact of life. If it makes you feel better, management and executives are even worse. 😉
Your reply to Larry J was a set of pointless deflections that have nothing to do with SpaceX’s or Blue Origin’s viability and prospects. I’ll be happy to concede that Democratic progressive land use regulation has made housing costs astronomical in San Francisco. That ain’t hardly news. It’s also irrelevant as neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin has operations in San Francisco. Manhattan, I hear, has a lot of very pricey real estate too. SpaceX and Blue Origin don’t do any business there either.
I share your skepticism about the long-term viability of a lot of Internet businesses. But, again, what has the trading of nasty pictures got to do with SpaceX or Blue Origin? Neither Musk nor Bezos made, or make, their money in the nasty picture trading business. Musk made his name in software and on-line financial services before moving on to hi-tech hard goods manufacturing. Bezos started out with an on-line bookstore that quickly segued into being an on-line general store. Both have real businesses that are not subject to sudden failures even in hard economic times.
SpaceX, Tesla and Amazon were all around in 2008. SpaceX and Tesla squeaked through that particular annus horribilus and Amazon was in no particular trouble. Since then we’ve had eight consecutive years of Great Depression 2.0 courtesy of the now mercifully departed Obama administration. Musk’s and Bezos’s net worths have climbed in every one of those eight years.
Your notion that what goes on at Boeing also affects SpaceX and Blue Origin is equally daft. Boeing is, among other dysfunctional things, a union shop and labor relations have been traditionally lousy. Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin is a union shop. Second, neither has to pay engineers six-figure salaries because they have stock options to offer.
Who is doing pointless deflection?
I wasn’t speaking directly of SX’s or BO’s, or Boeing’s costs, but the general state of aerospace in the US. Boeing is the 800 lb. gorilla of the aerospace world. What it does DOES effect everyone else.
Much of the financing that have allowed SX and BO to achieve what they have is because of the ah… liberal fiscal policy of the US government and Fed res. Inflated equities have swollen the values of companies and swamped Wall St. with money. NASA was handing out money as part of various stimulus projects of which CC Dev was one of them. Both SX and BO benefited greatly from them. Its probably not a safe bet to assume that this will continue forever.
A cargo lander is basically a one stage platform. It’d need one or more small engines, attitude control electronics and thrusters, landing gear, guidance system, basic electrical system, TT&C, and not much else. It really wouldn’t be any more complicated than the rocket they use for New Sheppard except perhaps for the computer incorporating obstacle avoidance software which NASA is already developing and testing. It’s very likely that it didn’t cost Blue Origin anywhere near $1 billion to develop New Shepard, so I doubt it’d cost them that much to develop a lander. The biggest expense would likely be the engine development and that makes me wonder if they plan on using one of their early engine developments. Looking at the BE-3 page on Wikipedia, it states the BE-1 was a simple, single-propellant engine that used peroxide to generate 2,000 pounds of thrust. You’d need a few of those engines to power a lunar lander, keeping in mind that lunar gravity is only 1/6th of Earth’s. Peroxide is a storable propellant so it would work. Their BE-2 engine used kerosene and peroxide to produce 31,000 pounds of thrust. That’s way more than needed for landing on the moon but it may be throttleable enough to do the job. If either of those engines are suitable, they could probably develop the lander for a small fraction of a billion dollars.
To reiterate, A lander doesn’t matter if you can’t afford to get there or do anything once you’ve landed. NASA does not have any money for a “Lunar Base/Village/Outpost/etc.” A private one, will cost at least a $B, even if cut-throat cheap. So while its fun to what-if a BO lander and other hardware, it an’t gonna happen unless a bunch of bigger pieces fall into place first.
Blue is proposing to build one of those pieces. Given the right incentives and opportunity, other companies will build the other pieces. If we manage it in typical NASA style of “waste anything but time” like they did in the Apollo years (modified to “waste anything” for the ISS and Orion), then of course it will never happen. Instead of treating this as a typical NASA-ran acquisition, let NASA announce they’ll pay X dollars for services such as delivery to and stays in a lunar habitat. Hypothetically, NASA would say that “We will pay X dollars per person for transport to and from the moon and Y dollars per day while they’re on the lunar surface”. If X and Y are large enough, companies like Bigelow, Blue Origin, and others could make business cases for developing the pieces needed to make it happen and do so at a far lower cost than having NASA buy all of those pieces.
Edited to add, I propose NASA follow the use case they already do for employee travel. They book seats on commercial airlines and rooms in hotels. They don’t buy their own airliners and hotels. It’s a lot cheaper that way.
yeah…. um… good luck with that.
I think I would put a bet on some rich Arab or a global corporate consortium putting together their own “herd of kittens” than NASA/Congress being able to do so.
Perhaps it won’t be a government project after all. I read yesterday that Jeff Bezos is about to become the 2nd wealthiest man on Earth. Elon Musk isn’t that rich but he is a multi-billionaire, as is Bigelow. We live in interesting times where some very wealthy men have developed their own space companies.
Net-worth isn’t worth as much as it used to be. By my stock portfolio, I’m a “millionaire”. But that doesn’t mean I’ve got a mansion and a limo.
We DO live in interesting times where there are lots of financial shenanigans afoot that do wierd things like make a 1 BR flop in San Francisco cost a million dollars and where companies that don’t do anything or make any money but let users trade nasty pictures with each other are “worth” billions of dollars. All this “wealth” is not based on anything but greed and speculation and it can evaporate just as fast as it came.
NASA does not have any money for a “Lunar Base/Village/Outpost/etc.”
It would have the money, if it weren’t spending it on SLS and Orion.
Or for that mater, see even Charles Miller’s study for NASA from July 2015. Of course, his proposal makes heavy use of commercial partners (and light use of SLS), which means fewer jobs in key congressional districts, so….
and you think that CONgress will not spend 1B to put a base on the moon ?
Nope. That’s not enough. Has to be at least $10B over 20 or 30 yrs. or some other unimangiablely large number to get their juices going.
Bezos already has most of a lunar lander in New Shepard. Just take off the aerodynamic controls and build a Moon-centric replacement for the current crew capsule that would stay attached. That’s a long way from a billion dollar project.
Uh… no. New Shepard is about as ready to go to the Moon as my car is.
Damn, dude! What’s your ride?
ok, what would have to change on NS/NG for doing lunar landings?
The whole thing.
I think that Blue WILL build a lunar lander for the simple reason that others will not. And it will cheap enough for him to convert NG to one.
For all of the new space coming up, they need more business to develop.
Realy, the moon is the first and easiest one to get going.
For a short time, private space stations would help, but there are already too many LV chasing sats, ISS, so, space stations would not add that much.
OTOH, having a LV, along with a lunar LV, they can provide the ability for Bigelow and others to put bases on the moon.
And a number of nations want to go.
I put little faith in Popular Mechanics. They’re like the National Enquirer of science and technology publications.
Then go to other sources and you’ll find the same information. I linked to them because their article isn’t behind a paywall. Try doing some of your own searching instead of expecting others to do it for you. Just in case, here are some links:
http://spacenews.com/bezos-…
http://www.geekwire.com/201…
https://www.washingtonpost….
http://aviationweek.com/spa…
I’m not at all averse to doing my own searching.
What I’ve read so far about this topic (e.g. the Space News article) is that it’s currently only a proposal. In other words it sounds like Blue Origin is suggesting something like “commercial lunar cargo” which would be similar to the current ISS “commercial cargo” program. I do not get the impression that Blue Origin is currently working on this. The way it’s presented, the US Government would need to initiate, and pay for, this.
Without US Government paying, I would expect Blue Origin to take a very long time to make this a reality. They would certainly need to get New Glenn working first. Ideally, they’d get New Armstrong working before they’d need a lunar lander.
All it is is a gateway to more funding for the SLS contractors…
All it is is a gateway to more funding for the CONgress critter’s districts
FTFY
This is some weak sauce. Let’s use SLS to build a space station out near the moon because we don’t have enough money to build a lander because SLS/Orion costs too much and its flight rate is far too low.
This reeks of a “make work” project that’s going to be hideously expensive for very little added benefit over a LEO station like, oh I don’t know, ISS the station we have right now.
Yeah, but at least with a lunar orbital station astronauts can get a view of the Moon from their cupola instead of Earth. /s
LOL. Sarcasm noted.
These are the types of projects NASA should be funding instead of the SLS launch system.
Don’t you see? This is exactly the same as SLS. Busy work that accomplishes nothing but keeps the wheels of government space turning and the cash flowing to contractors in key congressional districts.
Phantomware!
What is the deep space transport vehicle?
A future draft pick to be named later.