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CONTENTION II. US SPACE PROGRAM’S MINDSET PREVENTS A REALISTIC MARS PROJECT FROM COMING TO FRUITION



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CONTENTION II. US SPACE PROGRAM’S MINDSET PREVENTS A REALISTIC MARS PROJECT FROM COMING TO FRUITION.
A. LONG TERM PLANNERS AT NASA BELIEVE IN THE INCREMENTAL APPROACH FOR FAR-AWAY DESTINATIONS LIKE MARS-Morring '02

[Frank, Jr.; Mars Is The Destination; Aviation Week & Space Technology; 16 December 2002; page 59]


Space exploration is not really O'Keefe's gig. He was hired to get spending on the International Space Station under control, and he readily admits that his main goal is getting to Feb. 19, 2004, without a major catastrophe. “That's the day that Node 2 is going to be launched and deployed to the International Space Station,” he says. “If we don't reach Node 2, core configuration, you can forget about any excursion after that.”

BUT THE MEN AND WOMEN who put together the NEXT strategy are in the space business for the long haul. They'll be around long after Sean O'Keefe has gone on to the reward he has no doubt been promised if he succeeds with the station. They want to go to Mars, and they seem to have hit on a practical way to get there. The details of their approach are certainly open to debate, but the overall strategy looks like it could work.


B. NASA PLANS HAVE NO DIRECT MARS COMPONENT AND SEE MARS AS A GOAL AFTER SEVERAL INCREMENTAL STEPS-Morring '02

[Frank, Jr.; Mars Is The Destination; Aviation Week & Space Technology; 16 December 2002; page 59]


Space buffs and Mars-direct boosters have been understandably dismayed at the latest exploration scheme to emanate from the ninth floor of NASA headquarters—understandably but unnecessarily.

The NASA Exploration Team (NEXT, in the inevitable acronym) has come up with a plan to buy exploration “by the yard,” starting at the libration point between the Earth and the Moon and gradually moving outward. No bold excursions to Mars or a return to the moon for the NEXT bunch. NASA management wants a step-by-step approach that will allow humankind to expand its reach incrementally, unlimited by a single destination.


C. CURRENT NASA-DEVELOPED SOLUTIONS TO MARS ARE HEAVY AND REQUIRE SUBSTANTIAL THRUST THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGIES-Pendick '09

[Daniel; Next step MARS?; Astronomy; August 2009; page 30]


Apollo-style landings entirely on thrusters are problematic, too. Decelerating from Mars orbit and landing using rockets would require a huge amount of propellent. Also, firing rockets in the martian atmosphere at hypersonic speed can create aerodynamic drag and instability that are hard to predict.

EDL experts at NASA and in the aerospace research community have brainstormed new options for the descent stage of a human landing on Mars. A leading contender is called the supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator, or SIAD. Imagine a giant airbag in the shape of a badminton shuttlecock, and you get the general idea.

Aerospace engineer Robert Braun and his students at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have worked out scenarios for landing heavy payloads with SIAD technology. They have developed detailed plans for how to land 20 metric tons of cargo mass -- about 8.3 tons of weight in martian gravity -- with an inflatable decelerator and thrusters.

The decelerators are still pretty big -- up to 160 feet (50m) across -- but the basic engineering is plausible. The inflatable slows the craft to about 450 mph (720 km/h), a speed at which it's possible to use rocket thrusters to maneuver the payload to the final landing site and decelerate to a soft landing.

The landed payload masses cited in the original NASA DRM were as much as 65 metric tons. Braun remains skeptical that such a landing is possible with any method he can currently imagine. "To land 65 metric tons -- 100 times what we have accomplished with robotic landers -- is a very large stretch," he says.

Braun would reduce each payload. "You'd be better off landing payloads of 15 metric tons," he says. That would reduce the size of the SIAD and make other EDL options more feasible.



D. CURRENT NASA PLANS FOR MARS WOULD REQUIRE DECADES OF PREP AND FUNDING-Petit '03

[Charles; DREAMING OF MARS; US News and World Report; 1 September 2003; page 40]


Right now, NASA is focused on getting its remaining three shuttles back flying and finishing the international space station, originally intended to be a steppingstone to interplanetary exploration. Even before the shuttle crisis, budget overruns limited the station to a crew of three, half the planned number; now the half-finished station hosts a skeleton crew of two. The crunch, says Sandra Graham of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board, "is ominous for the utility of the station for science," including space medicine studies needed to plan trips to Mars.

"We have a lot of work to do," says John Mankins, NASA's assistant associate administrator for advanced systems. He estimates that it will take until 2020 to do the basic medical and engineering studies. Another decade to design and build the ships for a Mars trip pushes launch dates toward 2030--assuming the political will materializes, along with tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in funding.


CONTENTION III. DUE TO THE PERVASIVE MINDSET AT NASA, A MARS MISSION HAS NO CHANCE IN THE CURRENT FRAMEWORK
A. NASA'S STOCK MARS PLANS ARE EXPENSIVE AND HUGE-Wilson '98

[Jim; Bringing Life To Mars; Popular Mechanics; November 1998; page 30]


NASA, of course, has its own plans for a manned mission to the red planet. Developed nearly 10 years ago, it is detailed in a document known as the "90-Day Report." It estimates the Earth-to-Mars round-trip ticket will cost $450 billion. Building the necessary foot ball-field-long, nuclear-powered spacecraft will take 30 years. Zubrin drew a round of laughter and applause from his audience when he derided NASA's Mars ship as the "Death Star."
B. TRADITIONAL MARS PROGRAMS ARE EXPENSIVE AND TIME CONSUMING FOR LITTLE REWARD-Pendick '09

[Daniel; Next step MARS?; Astronomy; August 2009; page 30]


Travel to Mars will include three steps. First, lift yourself and your ship from the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Second, accelerate on a trajectory to Mars. Third, descend into Mars' gravity well and land safely on the surface. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Rocket propellant is the problem. You must have enough to get you off Earth, to Mars, and back. The propellant always significantly outweighs the payload. In fact, it's best to visualize any interplanetary spacecraft as a massive gas tank with a tiny payload stuck to the front of it. A journey to Mars traversing hundreds of millions of miles requires a tremendous fuel supply.

One way around this dilemma is adopting a "split-mission strategy." It divides the plan into multiple stages to make the whole enterprise more manageable. The strategy has its roots in a speech President George H. W. Bush delivered in 1989 on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

On July 20 of that year, the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative. It called for construction of the space station, returning to the Moon, and, someday, going to Mars.

NASA launched the "90-Day Study" to flesh out Bush's vision. The Mars portion emerged as an elaborate "all-up" mission architecture. Astronauts would assemble a single massive ship at the space station. Upon arrival at Mars, the ship would split into a return vehicle to eventually take the crew home and an "excursion vehicle" to land the crew on the surface and return to orbit at the end of the expedition. This first mission would entail only 30 days on the surface.

C. COMPARATIVE SPENDING ARGUMENTS FOR MISSIONS TO MARS ARE FLAWED AS SPACE WILL NEVER MEET THE “LITTLE-GIRL-IN-A-WHEELCHAIR” TEST-Scoblic '04

[Peter J.; Earth Diarist: Rational Exuberance; The New Republic; 2 February 2004; page 34]


It's impossible to know just how much a manned mission to Mars would cost, but it is certain to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. And, since ours is a world of competing priorities, we must ask, even of a concept as lofty as transcendence, is it worth it? The biggest obstacle here is less finding the money--in just the last few years, such sums have been "found" for two wars, prescription drugs for seniors, and repeated upper-bracket tax cuts--than it is combating the idea that such sums would be better spent on Earth. Powerful as it is, that argument is flawed. There will always be domestic priorities that could take precedence. A recent Tom Toles cartoon in the Post, for instance, showed a little girl in a wheelchair asking, "They're spending how much so a man can walk on Mars?" But, even though few government programs can truly stand up to the little-girl-in-a- wheelchair test, that hardly means they're irresponsible. We spend $137 million per year for the National Endowment for the Humanities, $604 million on the Smithsonian Institution, and $1.6 billion for National Park operations. We spend this money on things other than health care, anti-poverty efforts, and education not because those are unimportant, but because the extension of life cannot be all that life is, the eradication of economic poverty must not impoverish us intellectually, and education must extend well outside the classroom. Why go to Mars now? Is there really a pressing need? That all depends on whether you think the purpose of government--indeed, of civilization--is simply to make sure we get through the day for as many days as possible, or whether it is time to reach for something a bit more ambitious.
THUS, THE PLAN: The United States Federal Government will substantially increase its exploration of space beyond the Earth’s mesosphere by adopting the “Mars Direct” exploration framework for a mission to Mars.

CONTENTION IV. MARS DIRECT IS A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR A REALISTIC MARS MISSION THAT DRAMATICALLY CHANGES THE WEIGHT AND TECHNOLOGY REQUIREMENTS. IT IS BEST DESCRIBED BY ITS CREATOR, DR. ROBERT ZUBRIN, AN AEROSPACE ENGINEER AND PRESIDENT OF THE MARS SOCIETY IN ‘09

[Robert; President of the Mars Society; The moon–mars initiative: Making the vision real; Futures; October 2009; page 541]


At an early launch opportunity, for example 2014, a single heavy lift booster with a capability equal to that of the Saturn V used during the Apollo program is launched off Cape Canaveral and uses its upper stage to throw a 40-tonne unmanned payload onto a trajectory to Mars. (Such a booster could be readily created by converting the Shuttle launch stack, deleting the Orbiter and replacing it with a payload fairing containing a hydrogen/oxygen rocket stage.) Arriving at Mars 8 months later, the spacecraft uses friction between its aeroshield and Mars’ atmosphere to brake itself into orbit around the planet, and then lands with the help of a parachute. This payload is the Earth Return Vehicle (ERV). It flies out to Mars with its two methane/oxygen driven rocket propulsion stages unfueled. It also carries six tonnes of liquid hydrogen cargo, a 100 kW nuclear reactor mounted in the back of a methane/oxygen driven light truck, a small set of compressors and automated chemical processing unit, and a few small scientific rovers.

As soon as the craft lands successfully, the truck is telerobotically driven a few hundred meters away from the site, and the reactor deployed to provide power to the compressors and chemical processing unit. The hydrogen brought from Earth can be quickly reacted with the Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide gas (CO2), to produce methane and water, thus eliminating the need for long-term storage of cryogenic hydrogen on the planet's surface. The methane so produced is liquefied and stored, while the water is electrolyzed to produce oxygen, which is stored, and hydrogen, which is recycled through the methanator. Ultimately, these two reactions (methanation and water electrolysis) produce 24 tonnes of methane and 48 tonnes of oxygen. Since this is not enough oxygen to burn the methane at its optimal mixture ratio, an additional 36 tonnes of oxygen is produced via direct dissociation of Martian CO2. The entire process takes 10 months, at the conclusion of which a total of 108 tonnes of methane/oxygen bipropellant will have been generated. This represents a leverage of 18:1 of Martian propellant produced compared to the hydrogen brought from Earth needed to create it. Ninety-six tonnes of the bipropellant will be used to fuel the ERV, while 12 tonnes are available to support the use of high powered, chemically fueled long range ground vehicles. Large additional stockpiles of oxygen can also be produced, both for breathing and for turning into water by combination with hydrogen brought from Earth. Since water is 89% oxygen (by weight), and since the larger part of most foodstuffs is water, this greatly reduces the amount of life support consumables that need to be hauled from Earth.

The propellant production having been successfully completed, in 2016 two more boosters lift off the Cape and throw their 40-tonne payloads towards Mars. One of the payloads is an unmanned fuel-factory/ERV just like the one launched in 2014, the other is a habitation module carrying a crew of four, a mixture of whole food and dehydrated provisions sufficient for 3 years, and a pressurized methane/oxygen powered ground rover. On the way out to Mars, artificial gravity can be provided to the crew by extending a tether between the habitat and the burnt out booster upper stage, and spinning the assembly.

Upon arrival, the manned craft drops the tether, aerobrakes, and lands at the 2014 landing site where a fully fueled ERV and fully characterized and beaconed landing site await it. With the help of such navigational aids, the crew should be able to land right on the spot; but if the landing is off course by tens or even hundreds of kilometers, the crew can still achieve the surface rendezvous by driving over in their rover. If they are off by thousands of kilometers, the second ERV provides a backup.

However, assuming the crew lands and rendezvous as planned at site number one, the second ERV will land several hundred kilometers away to start making propellant for the 2018 mission, which in turn will fly out with an additional ERV to open up Mars landing site number three. Thus, every other year two heavy lift boosters are launched, one to land a crew, and the other to prepare a site for the next mission, for an average launch rate of just one booster per year to pursue a continuing program of Mars exploration. Since in a normal year we can launch about six Shuttle stacks, this would only represent about 16% of the U.S. launch capability, and would clearly be affordable. In effect, this “live off the land” approach removes the manned Mars mission from the realm of mega-spacecraft fantasy and reduces it in practice as a task of comparable difficulty to that faced in launching the Apollo missions to the Moon (Fig. 1).

The crew will stay on the surface for 1.5 years, taking advantage of the mobility afforded by the high powered chemically driven ground vehicles to accomplish a great deal of surface exploration. With a 12 tonne surface fuel stockpile, they have the capability for over 24,000 km worth of traverse before they leave, giving them the kind of mobility necessary to conduct a serious search for evidence of past or present life on Mars—an investigation key to revealing whether life is a phenomenon unique to Earth or general throughout the universe. Since no-one has been left in orbit, the entire crew will have available to them the natural gravity and protection against cosmic rays and solar radiation afforded by the Martian environment, and thus there will not be the strong driver for a quick return to Earth that plagues alternative Mars mission plans based upon orbiting mother-ships with small landing parties. At the conclusion of their stay, the crew returns to Earth in a direct flight from the Martian surface in the ERV. As the series of missions progresses, a string of small bases is left behind on the Martian surface, opening up broad stretches of territory to human cognizance.
CONTENTION V. MARS DIRECT IS THE BEST CHANCE THE UNITED STATES HAS TO EXPAND EXPLORATION AND MAKE MARS A REALITY
A. MARS SHOULD BE THE GOAL OF THE UNITED STATES SPACE PROGRAM-San Francisco Chronicle '08

[Bull's-eye on Mars; San Francisco Chronicle; 30 May 2008; page B10]


A new set of cosmic goals is required for practical reasons, but also for the spirit of endeavour itself. Mr Bush is correct in saying ``the desire to explore and understand is part of our character.'' Mars should be the target, as the quest for life beyond Earth remains one of the great scientific grails. While other countries have had varying success with space missions, it is only the vibrant economic power of the US that will get us to another world. Without a Cold War race against the Russians, American presidents today face a greater challenge in winning public support for space than did Kennedy. George Bush Sr's $400 billion moon-Mars proposal died in Congress. Opinion polls show Americans ambivalent on the Bush proposal. One must hope that will change because sooner or later, as Mr Bush put it, ``human beings are headed into the cosmos''.
B. MARS DIRECT RADICALLY SIMPLIFIES THE PLANNED MISSION TO MARS BY USING RESOURCES ON THE RED PLANET-Zubrin '97

[Robert; President of the Mars Society; The Case for Mars The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must; 1997; Kindle Edition; Location 152]


This is the spirit of “Mars Direct,” a new approach to Mars exploration that I introduced in 1990 while a senior engineer for the Martin Marietta Astronautics company, working as one of its leaders in development of advanced concepts for interplanetary missions. This plan employs no immense interplanetary spaceships, and thus requires neither orbiting space bases nor storage facilities. Instead, a crew and their habitat are sent directly to Mars by the upper stage of the same booster rocket that lifts them to Earth orbit, in just the same way as the Apollo missions and all unmanned interplanetary probes launched to date have flown. Flying the mission this way radically simplifies and scales down the required hardware, and eliminates the need for decades of development and hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure on orbital assembly infrastructure. The key to this plan is the mission’s ability to use Mars-native resources to make its return propellant and much of its consumables on the surface of the planet itself.
C. MARS DIRECT BATTLES THE STICKER SHOCK THAT WOULD OTHERWISE DOOM MARS TRAVEL-Pendick '09

[Daniel; Next step MARS?; Astronomy; August 2009; page 30]


The price of Bush's initiative was estimated at $500 billion, and by 1990 his administration had all but abandoned it. But the episode did stimulate important progress. It spurred Zubrin, then working at Martin Marietta Astronautics, to develop the Mars Direct plan.

Zubrin was concerned that national "sticker shock" over Bush's proposed initiative would doom future human Mars exploration. He developed the Mars Direct concept with a colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker. "It was apparent we needed a much quicker, cheaper plan, or there would be no program at all," Zubrin recalls.


D. SIMPLIFIED MARS MISSIONS WOULD COST ONLY 40 BILLION DOLLARS-Salotti '11

[Jean Marc; Professor of Computer Science, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique, Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux; Simplified scenario for manned Mars missions; Acta Astronautica; September-October 2011; page 266]


We propose a simplified but efficient scenario for a manned Mars mission. The idea is to select a crew of only 2 astronauts and to bring in situ resource utilization systems in the same vehicle. For security reasons, we suggest duplicating the mission as it was proposed by Von Braun. At very moment of the journey, the two vehicles would stay close so that each crew could provide help to the other. We show that this scenario is much simpler than the last design reference architecture proposed by NASA. The initial mass in low Earth orbit is minimized and the risks are also reduced. The total cost could be in the order of 40 billion dollars.

ADVANTAGE: MARS EXPLORATION ALLOWS HUMANS TO UNLOCK THE SECRETS OF THE COSMOS
A. HUMAN EXPLORATION OF MARS WILL HAVE A PROFOUND IMPACT OF OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE COSMOS-Zubrin '96

[Robert; President of the Mars Society; Mars on a shoestring; November/December 1996; page 20]


When NASA announced its discovery of possible microbe fossils last August, the agency termed the evidence compelling but not conclusive. Further investigations by the first human explorers could have a profound impact on our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Conclusive evidence of Martian life, present or fossilized, would strongly suggest that life abounds in the universe. On the other hand, if we find that Mars, despite its once clement climate, never produced any life, we would have to accept the possibility that life on earth is a fluke. We could be virtually alone in the universe.

The search for life will be intensive, and there are many different places to look. The planet's dry riverbeds and lake beds may have been the last redoubts of a retreating Martian biosphere, and thus might contain fossils. Water ice sheets covering the planet's north pole could hold well-preserved remains of actual organisms. Geologically heated ground water beneath the surface--if it exists--may yet harbor life. By studying the differences from, and similarities to, species that evolved on our own planet, we could begin to discern what is incidental to earth life and what is fundamental to the very nature of life itself. The results could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, genetic engineering, and all the biological and biochemical sciences.


B. MARS IS THE BEST GOAL FOR THE SPACE PROGRAM BECAUSE IT OFFERS THE MOST PAYBACK FOR HUMANKIND-Zubrin '03

[Robert; President of the Mars Society; Mission to Mars: The Red Planet beckons, says The Mars Society's ROBERT ZUBRIN. Now is no time for Canada to drop out of a project that may be humanity's greatest challenge; Globe & Mail; 23 August 2003; Page A19]


Calling for a humans-to-Mars program may seem strange in the wake of February's space shuttle calamity, but there is strong justification. The most tragic aspect of the Columbia accident is that seven fine people died performing a mission of no particular importance. Human spaceflight will always be dangerous. If we are to dare such perils, we should do so for goals that are worth the risk. Opening a new planet to humanity qualifies.

Why Mars? Because of all the planetary destinations currently within reach, Mars offers the most payback in terms of what it portends for the future of humankind.

Mars is the Rosetta Stone for helping us understand the position of life in the universe. Images of Mars taken from orbit show that the planet had liquid water flowing on its surface for a billion years during its early history -- a duration five times as long as it took life to appear on Earth after there was liquid water here.

C. MARS MISSION IS CRITICAL TO UNITE HUMANITY AND PROVIDE RESOURCES THAT PREVENTS TYRANNY, WAR AND GENOCIDE- Zubrin ‘97

[Robert; President of the Mars Society; The Case for Mars The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must; 1997; Kindle Edition; Location 5031]


The frontier drove the development of democracy in America by creating a self-reliant population that insisted on the right to self-government. It is doubtful that democracy can persist without such people. True, the trappings of democracy exist in abundance in America today, but meaningful public participation in the process is deeply wanting. Consider that no representative of a new political party has been elected president of the United States since 1860. Likewise, neighborhood political clubs and ward structures that once allowed citizen participation in party deliberations have vanished. And with a reelection rate of 95 percent, the U.S. Congress is hardly a barometer of people’s will. Furthermore, regardless of the will of Congress, the real laws, covering ever broader areas of economic and social life, are increasingly being made by a plethora of regulatory agencies whose officials do not even pretend to have been elected by anyone. Democracy in America and elsewhere in Western civilization needs a shot in the arm. That boost can only come from the example of a frontier people whose civilization incorporates the ethos that breathed the spirit into democracy in America in the first place. As Americans showed Europe in the last century, so in the next the Martians can show us the path away from oligarchy and stagnation. There are greater threats that a humanist society faces in a closed world than the return of oligarchy, and if the frontier remains closed, we are certain to face them in the twenty-first century. These threats are the spread of various sorts of anti-human ideologies and the development of political institutions that incorporate the notions that spring from them as a basis of operation. At the top of the list of such destructive ideas that tend to spread naturally in a closed society is the Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth and living standards must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt—all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate. Nevertheless, in a closed society Malthusianism has the appearance of self-evident truth, and herein lies the danger. It is not enough to argue against Malthusianism in the abstract—such debates are not settled in academic journals. Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course. And if the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The extreme result is tyranny, war, and even genocide. Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.


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