NASA has put out a call for novel ideas in space exploration, which I think is an excellent way to do science. More creativity!
But this feels like they’re just pandering to me (I know, they’re not): building robotic squid to explore the oceans of Europa? What’s not to love about that idea?
I would just like to know why the emphasis is now on a Mars landing when we never exploited our initial landings on the Moon. It is just the PR value? Permanent stations on the Moon seem much more realistic – and lucrative with recent developments re water on the Moon. Wouldn’t establishing something more permanent on the Moon be the logical next step even for a Mars expedition.
I am completely confused by NASA’s priorities.
lff
Robot squid always turn evil and try to destroy humanity.
See movies for numerous citations.
@fredfile I get the idea, from reading NASA’s strategic plans, that crewed space exploration is kind of a MacGuffin. It’s difficult, expensive, and dangerous — we can get far more useful science for far less investment of money and engineering by using robots. But, human exploration functions as kind of a visionary goal for its own sake, and it catalyzes the development of all sorts of technologies that might be useful in a wide range of typical space endeavors.
Why Mars and not the Moon? I’ll let Buzz explain:
http://www.slow-journalism.com/why-mars-beats-the-moon-and-everything-else-buzz-aldrin-told-us
In an ideal future, we no longer rape the Earth for mineral resources, but instead use lifeless asteroids.
Plus, Mars has a rudimentary atmosphere with CO2 and more water available in the soil. Those can be combined to create methane which can be used for rocket fuel. Mars also has less extreme temperature changes, possible lava tubes for habitation, more gravity, and bigger bragging rights.
Thanks Christopher. Appreciate the link and the insights.
lff
I’m thinking about the Europa Driller-Squid. Suppose you put a drill/melter on the front of it, give it the small nuclear reactor it’s going to need to do the melting, and then have it put the water it melts up behind it. The initial water near the surface would just freeze, but eventually you’d be below the ice to such a degree that it would just get above the driller-squid and exert a pressure on it downward. Could you design it so that it then uses that pressure to drill even faster downward, without breaking the drill or crushing the probe?
That could be something we could test in Antarctica, or Greenland. Otherwise, we’re basically hoping that the Europa Clipper mission measures the thickness of the ice, finds some areas where it’s unusually thin (and they might exist, considering the fissures and possible ice geysers), and then lands a heavily shielded lander drilling rig with a small nuclear reactor to drill straight down through the ice and send a probe through the hole. Or just drill down into the ice deep enough that Jupiter’s radiation wouldn’t have sterilized it, and you might find organics mixed in with it.
@ Christopher
I’ll represent for Venus here as a possible destination for a crewed mission. The surface is an inhospitable hell-world, but 55-60 kilometers above the surface and the temperature and pressure are actually pretty nice. At about 57 or 58 kilometers up, the pressure is about 50% that of Earth’s atmosphere (a little high, but you can make it more tolerable if you increase the oxygen fraction and take extra steps against fires), the temperature is between about 10-27 degrees Celsius outside, and you’re above the sulfuric acid cloud deck for the most part.
Meanwhile, you can literally live inside an acid-resistant balloon (nitrogen-oxygen is a lifting gas in a carbon dioxide atmosphere), the atmosphere provides you with a ton of radiation shielding plus basically all the volatiles you needs (and of course tons of CO2 for rocket fuel), gravity only 10% less than Earth’s, and a cloud deck that’s so reflective you can actually use double-sided solar panels with one side facing downward and get power from it. This seems rather weird, but think of it as like traveling in a ship across an ocean – if you sink to the bottom, you’re dead, but as long as you stay at “sea level” you’re okay.
Actually, I’ll add that you could use those same factors for a robotic mission as well. The Russians did a balloon mission to Venus, and you could land a balloon probe in the Venusian atmosphere, have it sample the air and dip down into the cloud deck, make fuel out of the CO2-rich air, and then launch the sample back to Earth.
@according2robyn
What?????
You obviously aren’t familiar with Squid Girl the cartoon, are you?
Who doesn’t watch Squid Girl? You are weird, sir.
You can, however, catch up.
I will stipulate for the record, however, that it’s not clear to me which abilities of Squid Girl are biologically based and which are cybernetic.
I also stipulate that she does attempt to invade the surface world, but the thing is she turns good – not evil – and even her initial ill-conceived invasion was an attempt to right the wrongs being done to ocean creatures by land-dwellers.
So there.
The Moon is certainly worth studying for itself and the light it sheds on the formation of the planets, but this “way station” stuff–climb out of Earth’s gravity well at enormous effort and expense and then deliberately fall into another one you’ve got to climb out of again? Please!
The International Space Station project needs Commercial Crew funding to support U.S. astronauts. (Commercial Crew funding was proposed by President Obama, but Congress does not want to invest the money.)
Congress, don’t make us hitch rides with Russia. Love, NASA
This is an issue that may be off-topic when it comes to innovation, unless you look at the fact that the Space Shuttle’s first orbital spaceflight was launched in 1981. The technology needed for that launch was innovative in its time, and the point is that the technology did not stay the same. It improved. The improvement trajectory needs to continue. But now we’re coming up on 1,500 days since the USA grounded the Shuttle.
Maybe innovative commercial carriers can fill the void?
That was the idea. But the commercial launch projects, other the the carry-over (Thor and Atlas) commercialized from the early space days, does not have a reliable safety record. For example, the most reliable system, the Dragon, blew up in mid-flight on the last launch. The booster was performing nominally, but the second stage LOX tank overpressured and self-destructed. The payload was cargo for the ISS.
*preview not working, sorry for any bad links*
A robotic squid is just common coleoid chauvinism, nothing more than sci-fi rubbish. The only model that can work is a robot orthocone.
@Lynna, OM
I will bet that it’s fucking Richard Shelby again (the Senator from Alabama). He does this every year, possibly with support from the SLS-associated companies worried that their rocket might end up as a white elephant if NASA never allocates any money for missions beyond Low Earth Orbit.
@ A Very Reverend Battle-Axe of Knowledge
A moon base might be useful as the next Big Space International Collaboration project for the US to do with a new set of international partners once ISS’ mission comes to an end. It’s something the US could do in collaboration with China, India, and other new countries with new space programs. I’m not convinced we could do a good international project collaboration project for a crewed mission to Mars, by comparison.
Of course, the downside is that the Moon is close. You don’t even really need people physically on-site at some point, because the communication lag is only a few seconds at most with the right relays. Remotely controlling robots on the Moon’s surface would be significantly cheaper.
Dragon is the capsule at the top. Falcon v1.1 is the rocket.
The CRS-7 Falcon blew up because a single strut end failed at a fifth of its rated strength due to a metallurgy problem. Said strut was purchased from a traditional aerospace company that supplies many government contractors. All struts are being replaced with new struts made of a better metal by a different manufacturer.
SpaceX pinpointed the strut by correlating a bunch of vibration sensors down to the microsecond, then triangulating the ping to a couple inch area. They then tested every strut and bolt in their inventory, finding one other strut (out of hundreds) that also failed at such a low force.
Rocket science is hard. Every gram counts and if any one piece fails, the whole thing tends to blow up.
The good news is that in this case, if humans were aboard, they would have survived: the Dragon capsule transmitted telemetry until it hit the ocean, and crew rated Dragons have a rocket propelled escape mechanism.
Much better than the Shuttle. Better than most rockets, past or present.
@fredfile:
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge has a good point that Christopher did not address. If we build a base on the moon, it is yet another gravity well we need to fight against. That is a big drawback to having a base there. However, as brett points out, it could be an international model that would be easier to put together than a Mars mission to use international cooperation. It could, possibly, but probably would not, give us some more technological insight to working on Mars. The reason I do not think it would is that the challenges for the moon and Mars bases are very different in terms of gravity, pressure, and other aspects.
There is also the fact that the moon orbits the Earth, and therefore it would only be a better launching point toward Mars for a small part of each month (or lunar cycle) and a worse choice the rest of the time. The launching site would only be useful for two to three days, at most, per lunar cycle, from the way I understand it. Earth’s launch sites pretty much reset each day, so if you have to scrap one launch you usually can reschedule for the next day or week with success.
@9 & @15
Yes the moon has its own gravity well, but it’s trivial compared to Earth’s. Consider: The Saturn V was 2200+ metric tons; the ascent stage of the LEM only needed to be 5.
Also, since there’s no atmosphere to speak of, there are lots more options for building up speed on the surface (e.g., solar-powered mass-drivers if you want to save on rocket fuel) — doesn’t actually matter what direction you’re going if you’re going fast enough.
On the lunar surface, you have direct access to building materials and (if recent observations are to be believed) water.
There’s also the small matter that if you’re going to live there for any length of time you ABSOLUTELY NEED shielded living spaces: gamma radiation is nasty, nasty shit, and the ONLY real way to block it when you don’t have hundreds of miles of atmosphere is to dig a (deep) hole to put your habitat in. This is easy to do on the Moon; not so much at the Lagrange points.
Yes, you want the fuel depots to be at L1 and L2 — it *would* be a waste to make folks passing through land on the surface — but the fuel depot is something that could be automated, and if you have a base on the lunar surface, that’s an easy distance to service it from.
@16
– The Apollo LEM ascent stage only had to get itself into orbit, not launch a whole lunar return mission into orbit. Fuel mass ratio for a lunar orbit launch is about 5x less than for earth launch. IOW, you could launch the same 120 metric tons into lunar orbit using something like 500 tons of fuel instead of more than 2500t. Yeah, it’s far easier than launch from the Earth’s surface, but only by one order of magnitude, not three.
– Launch direction has an effect on when and how efficiently you can drop out of lunar orbit back into Earth’s gravity well. (It’s true that it doesn’t matter for getting into lunar orbit, since the moon rotates so slowly.) The most efficient return trajectory involves burning backwards along the moon’s own orbit, basically using your own orbital speed as a head start. You can’t do this if you’re, say, in a polar orbit that is perpendicular to the moon’s orbit. (Though you just have to wait a week for the moon to orbit another 90°, and you’ll be fine again.)
– Space radiation is mainly protons, not gammas. Gammas occur as secondary radiation when protons strike and excite atoms in structural materials (like steel or aluminum.) You can shield protons with a thin layer of regolith. No need to go deep.
I’d also add that it’s probably going to be way more expensive to build anything on the Moon for use on outbound trips elsewhere than to frontload development back on Earth, even if doing so means you have to do stuff like multiple big launches, hardware sitting in orbit for months waiting for the next piece, and so forth. You’d only do it if you felt it was important to develop that capacity, even if it made doing missions much costlier and time consuming.