Mike

“We will need a considerable amount of technology development in closed loop life support, reliable power generation, radiation protection, and countless other little things that will impact crew safety and mission success.”

…Essentially need to be solved only once (though we could expect continuing incremental improvements thereafter). When you have those solutions, they’re going to be pretty much the same, whether you’re in LEO, on a Moon base, carrying out a Mars mission, or (given advanced propulsion allowing a complete mission of, say, >1 year ) halfway to Pluto…

But yes, almost anything you can do to shorten spacecraft flight times, clearly lightens all those burdens.

It is a worse PR-threat to NASA’s continued operation. NASA can keep dinking around in LEO if something goes wrong on the moon, but if their ascender explodes they have to shut down their whole operation.

A Falcon 1e can lift about 1 metric ton to LEO. Tarous II a 5 tonne tug and Falcon 9/Atlas V a 10 tonne tug.

Plenty of ways to avoid HLV. But rumour has it Bolden has decided to recommend commercial crew taxis + NASA HLV for the exploration program. It doesn’t look as if we’ll get the high launch volume needed for RLVs, which is outrageous, but at least it looks as if we’ll get to keep the ISS + commercial crew for a long time.

I agree with your rant.

If NASA had decided to “commercialize” the Saturn-I, Saturn-V , Apollo, and SkyLab rockets, spaceships, and manned space stations in the early 1970′s instead of taking 40 years and spending $200 Billion building new rockets, spaceships, and manned space stations (i.e. Space Shuttle and International Space Station) that have less capability today than Apollo/Saturn/SkyLab had in the early 1970′s, then we would all be much better off. If NASA had spent a fraction of that wasted $200 Billion on US aerospace technology leadership over the last 40 years, then the US would be much better off.

NASA is trying to make the same horrible mistakes that it made on the 40-year Space Shuttle and ISS debacle with the new Ares/Orion architecture.

Most people do not understand that NASA could have commericalized the Apollo/Saturn/SkyLab architecture in the early 1970′s or at least allowed the US Military to use the Saturn-I instead of developing the horrible Titan IV rocket. After the sunk costs of the Apollo program, NASA could have easily commercialized Apollo and SkyLab in the early 1970′s, and put the United States decades ahead of other nations in multiple key space technologies.

Imagine what the US Satellite TV industry could have been like if they had the opportunity to launch 6-ton GEO satellites in the 1970′s on commercial American Saturn-I rockets instead of 4-ton satellites on commercial Chinese, French, and Russian boosters in the 1990′s. The US commercial space industry designs satellites to fit on top of available rockets, and NASA’s decisions in the early 1970′s set even the commercial space industry back a decade or longer.

NASA has done a true dis-service to the US Military and Commercial space industry since the 1970′s by spending a lot of US money on the wrong things. Hopefully NASA will not have the opportunity to do this to the US space industry for another 40 years with the Ares/Orion architecture.

The US Government will eventually need to establish a new government agency to help DARPA with non-Military aerospace R&D if NASA is unable to do this job.

A Mars bound crew is likely to be power and mass limited. They must survive the entire mission with only the spacecraft they leave Earth in, the parts and supplies they are able to take with them, and maybe some pre-positioned caches of supplies at Mars. This situation is incredibly precarious, and with our current level of space-faring technology, extremely ill-advised. We will need a considerable amount of technology development in closed loop life support, reliable power generation, radiation protection, and countless other little things that will impact crew safety and mission success.

The research and development of these key space-faring technologies are all suffering from lack of funding at the moment. Many of them could be developed and tested on board the ISS if NASA wasn’t so preoccupied with developing its very own bright and shiny new rocket (TM). Imagine all of the advanced R&D that could have been accomplished over the last five years with $14 billion.

When we say that NASA should relinquish its stranglehold on crew launch so that it can focus on doing the more challenging things, this is what we are talking about. The private sector is perfectly capable of, and indeed is on the cusp of, developing reliable crew launch capability. The private sector does not currently have the capacity, or incentive, to perform research into the effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity and radiation, nor does it have the experience performing on orbit assembly of large structures or the logistics of keeping a crew of astronauts properly provisioned for long duration missions.

THESE are the real strengths that NASA should be playing to. These are the things which must be done, and only NASA and its international partners currently have the capability to do them. To insist that only NASA should be allowed to design and build the next generation of crew launch vehicle is selfish, short-sighted, and as Jon says, completely misses the point.

Sorry for the long-winded rant. I realize that I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but I’ve been wanting to get that off my chest for a while now.

Thank you.

I am interested in analyzing the chances of the crew of a Mars mission surviving a 2 to 3 year mission versus surviving a 6 to 12 month mission. I do not know how to analyze crew safety on a Mars mission, but I would guess that a crew would have less than a 50% chance of survival in the Mars mission scenarios that last 2 to 3 years, because there are too many things that can go wrong in that amount of time. There also are very few abort options using the low delta-V chemical propulsion systems that would allow the crew to come home early if something went wrong.

I think that I am really asking the question if NASA really has the political will to ever send a crew to Mars using their past DRM architectures that advocate 2 to 3 year missions, when the crew safety on these missions is likely to be unacceptable……Is NASA kidding itself when it thinks that it will ever be allowed to launch a crewed mission to Mars when crew survival probability might be under 50%?

Dr. Mike Griffin said that his Ares-I and Ares-V architecture was designed to later allow for missions to Mars, but if we really look at the crew survival probability of Mars missions using the Ares-I and Ares-V architecture, we might find that this architecture could never support a Mars mission that meets politically acceptable crew safety standards.

Ares-I and Ares-V might be poorly suited for Mars missions as well as lunar and LEO missions……especially if we look at crew safety.