Aviation Week & Space Technology, 09/25/2006, page 21
Edited by Frank Morring, Jr.
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are potential objectives for NASA's planned new generation of human space exploration vehicles, along with the Moon and Mars. Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program overseeing development of the exploration fleet, says a comet or asteroid in Earth's neighborhood could be a worthy objective for the Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV) and its Ares I launcher, even though the Ares/Orion stack is being developed for a lunar return. "We're getting a study going on looking at using the Constellation architecture to send a CEV possibly to a near-Earth object, rendezvous with one and stay in proximity and gather readings, possibly gather samples, investigate those bodies and then return," Hanley says. "The performance requirements are very much within reach of this architecture we're building." He stresses that a NEO visit is only one potential application for the new human spacecraft that NASA has turned up as it polls the scientific community, and not a "design reference mission" like lunar return. "We're saying 'look, we're building these big rockets. What can we do with them?'"
This should be the baseline reference mission -the first priority.
Survey one, see how to move around it, and bring along test rigs of various sorting/separation and extraction/refining techniques for ices and bring a lot of it back.
We also need to send out a fleet of sample returners and probes to as many NEAs as we can. Find a nice juicy target -just a bite-sized nugget for starters.
This would be much more useful to bootstrapping our capabilities, and that's got to be the backbone of any large presence in space.
I agree that the Lunar program they're (still) talking about isn't just "Apollo on steroids", but rather a start of something, but going to an NEA specifically to look at mining it is such a vastly smarter plan than going to the parched Moon. This would enable going to the Moon in a bigger way, and on to Mars and ad astra.
For every payload we lift into LEO, which is going to GEO or higher, fully 45% of the mass we've placed into LEO is the oxidiser in the upper stage for kicking it out of LEO.
We also carry a lot of water and fuels up to the ISS, and the need for volatiles in near space will have to get worse with tourism and private business interest in orbital territory starting out.
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"A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to be wrong he must confess it at all costs and atone for it."
Monhandas K. Gandhi
Many of them seem to be very similar to extinct comet cores; they've outgassed so much, that there's a carpet of regolith covering the surface, that's left over. This means that the inner cores of them -under between half meter and a few meters of dust- is foamy dirty ices. They don't have to be far from the Sun to shelter ices under regolith. Several of these have been linked to periodic meteor storms on Earth, and seem to be at various stags of their lives, after having been dropped down into the inner solar system by Jupiter.
Yes, they've outgassed a long time, but they're still the size of a mountain, so even if they're low density (like Mars moons and many C-type asteroids and comet cores), there's lots of ices. Even with the low density and regolith carpet, these things can be up to 40% ices by mass.
They don't even have to be low density CCs to have ices. Generic stony asteroids have lots of ices under sublimation locked in clays. Crush, heat, and vapors come off.
And as for comparing them to permanantly shaded ices on the Moon, these are vastly easier to reach -even than the Lunar equator, let alone the poles. That possible Lunar ice is the remnant of what's hit the Moon for the last few hundred million years (a few traces, on the entire Lunar surface?) and managed to find its way there and stick. Where did all of it come from? Why not go to the source, especially since it's easier to get there (especially since, if the purpose of all this is resources use, there are much better resources there).
__________________
"A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to be wrong he must confess it at all costs and atone for it."
Monhandas K. Gandhi
Has anyone come up with a list ? .....just a handful of attractive & feasible NEA mission targets ? ....what sort of mission duration are we talking about ? ....as I understand it, the initial lunar polar missions, before a base is constructed using unmanned LSAMs, will be on the order of a couple of weeks, at most.
Selection of Lockheed Martin Starts Shuttle Replacement Clock
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 09/04/2006, page 22
Frank Morring, Jr., Washington
<SNIP>
Caris A. (Skip) Hatfield, the Orion program manager at Johnson Space Center, says the circular arrays should handle maneuvering loads better as the capsule approaches its first destination -- the International Space Station (ISS) -- and later goes through the complex choreography it will follow en route to lunar orbits. NASA also requires that it be able to fly unattended while its four-person crew descends in a lander to the Moon's poles, where scientists believe water ice may lie hidden just below the surface.
Space Studies Board Encourages Lunar Exploration
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 09/25/2006, page 21
Edited by Frank Morring, Jr.
A special panel of U.S. scientists who convened to set priorities for lunar exploration says NASA's new program can answer some basic questions on the origins of the Solar System if it is properly organized. "The Moon today presents a record of geologic processes of early planetary evolution in the purest form," states an interim report of the Space Studies Board (SSB) of the National Research Council. Drawing on such earlier studies as the 2003 planetary science decadal study "New Frontiers in the Solar System," the SSB report strongly endorses a return to the Moon by robots and humans. It lists the Aitken basin at the Moon's South Pole -- "the oldest and largest basis in the Solar System" -- as the top priority for scientific exploration because of the relatively accessible record it may offer explorers plumbing its depths. The panel calls for creation of two "enabling programs" at NASA to collect and synthesize incoming lunar data. A Lunar Fundamental Research Program and a Lunar Data Analysis Program would organize the scientific community to handle the "deluge of spectacular new data" expected when Japanese, Chinese and U.S. lunar probes begin operating next year. Otherwise, the panel warns, NASA and lunar scientists will be "underequipped to harvest this data and produce meaningful information."
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 10/09/2006, page 68
Frank Morring, Jr., Johnson Space Center
Choices that NASA's Constellation Program makes now will have implications for Mars
Seemingly minor exploration procedures and processes NASA's Constellation Program is selecting today will gain significance in the decades ahead, rippling across the Solar System to Mars and beyond.
Engineers at the Constellation program office here and at other agency field centers are gearing up for a "season of reviews" beginning in November that will try to set requirements for the architecture NASA hopes will take humans to the red planet before 2030. A decision at the Constellation level can shape all of the vehicles the program is responsible for developing -- two Ares launchers, the Orion crew exploration vehicle, a lunar lander, surface habitats, rovers and even the spacesuits future explorers will wear.
For example, Constellation Program Manager Jeff Hanley signed a document Sept. 15 that designates the descent engine on the planned Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) as the one that will brake the four-person Orion crew into lunar orbit. That decision frees the service module engine on Orion -- docked nose-to-nose with the LSAM -- from the lunar-orbit-insertion task.
With that bit of knowledge, designers can begin to size the tanks that will carry the hypergolic propellant for the modified space shuttle Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engine that will drive Orion. It also will determine how they can fit the tanks and the other hardware they must pack around them in the limited space inside the service module.
Hanley says the Constellation Operational Concepts and Design Reference Missions document that he signed "specifies what requirements we put on Orion to be able to do. So, how much propellant does it need to carry? Right now Orion is scoped to carry about a little under 2 km./sec. delta v, which ends up being about 20,000 lb. of propellant."
At the same time, engineers have a better understanding of just what will be demanded of the throttleable RL-10 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engine that will lower the LSAM to the Moon's surface. Ultimately, some of their work may find its way into the Orion and LSAM descendants that take humans to Mars. The program is beginning a process that will take the broad-brush exploration concepts advanced by the Exploration Systems Architecture Study started after President Bush ordered the new exploration program, plus the refinements to them that Administrator Michael Griffin ordered last year, and whittle them into the spacecraft needed to carry it out.
"[We're] actually doing a top-down, methodical systems-engineer decomposition from the very highest needs, goals and objectives of the agency down into the Constellation architecture and what it must do for supporting [the International Space Station (ISS)], sending humans to the Moon, including establishing an outpost capability, and looking toward Mars," Hanley says. "The Constellation program encompasses all that."
While the first human spaceflights with the new Ares I and Orion vehicles will go to the ISS with as many as six crewmembers, the operational concepts and design reference missions document is focused on seven-day sorties to the lunar surface by teams of four astronauts. Although everything under the "go as you can pay" approach NASA has adopted will depend on budget and technology maturation, NASA has tentatively baselined a rover to give the first humans back on the Moon since 1972 at least as much mobility as their predecessors.
"The document is primarily focused on what we refer to as the lunar sortie mission, and it is kind of Apollo 17 on steroids," says Hanley. "We want to begin here with being able to . . . exceed what Apollo 17 was able to do with our first landing."
The program-level systems requirements review for the entire Constellation Program this fall will feed into project-level reviews early next year, starting with the Ares I and moving on to the Orion vehicle. One big question to be answered in development of the crew capsule is how many times it can be reused, and that turns out to be a function of where it lands. NASA wants to establish a single landing site for returning exploration vehicles in the Western U.S., which the capsule would reach by using a "skip-entry" return technique that takes it into the Earth's atmosphere for aerobraking that would set it up for final reentry and approach after it skips back into space (AW&ST Mar. 13, p. 30).
But the vehicle must also be able to land in water in case of a launch abort, and it remains to be seen how reusable a capsule would be after being immersed in sal****er. Cleon Lacefield, Orion program manager for newly selected prime contractor Lockheed Martin, says that to hold down life-cycle costs the goal is to reuse as much high-value hardware as possible. That includes avionics and environment control and life-support systems inside the crew pressure vessel, and perhaps some of the reaction control system lines on the outside as well.
"In the proposal we said that the first couple of orbital flights landed in the water," Lacefield says. "We would evaluate the reusability of those systems in a sal****er environment and then make a determination on how much we really had to replace. But we assumed in the proposal's worst case we had to replace all of those, and even with that it was still more cost effective to reuse the pressure vessel and the interior modules."
TO PROTECT THE CREW from the impact of landing, the capsule will carry four parachutes, a retro-rocket system in the chute shrouds, crushable structure behind the throw-away heat shield and shock absorbers in the crew seats, similar to those used in Russian Soyuz vehicles. For water landings it will also carry flotation devices to right the capsule and keep it afloat until rescue arrives.
Rescue prospects for a launch abort also shaped the modifications planned for the Orion service module engine. While it isn't a constraint for lunar missions, boosting the engine thrust for missions to the space station to 7,500-lb. thrust from 6,000 lb. reduces the chances that a launch abort could leave an Orion capsule in the middle of the North Atlantic by providing enough power to push on toward Ireland after a launch-vehicle failure. The engine nozzle will also be changed to give it a higher specific impulse for the Moon mission, when the engine must bring the crew back to Earth from lunar orbit.
Although the OMS engine uses toxic storable propellant, the crew capsule reaction control system will employ a "green" liquid-oxygen/methane mixture for safety. NASA wants Orion to be at least 10-times safer than the space shuttle, and Lacefield says his company's proposal also incorporates deep redundancy to that end.
"It is a two-fault-tolerant vehicle," he says. "The way we looked at the avionics, the way we looked at the propulsion, or all of the subsystems, was from this ability to take multiple failures and still have the crew safely land the vehicle. So if you lost all of your primary RCS, we still had a string of RCS, and a battery, and a visual control so the crew can still do an emergency deorbit reentry."
Ultimately Lacefield and his team must demonstrate that their design will mesh perfectly with the overall Constellation architecture. The Orion contractor must develop and update "functional and physical" interface simulators for use by other Constellation vehicle-development programs, and support Constellation-level integration reviews as the effort moves ahead, according to a heavily redacted draft of Lockheed Martin's contract with NASA posted on the agency web site. The contract carries similar requirements for ISS interfaces.
Just as the Orion design will be shaped by the Constellation-level systems requirements review set for November, Ares I launch performance will also be driven by the program-level review. And the launch vehicle project will gain some key data on the performance of its first stage -- a single five-segment version of the four-segment solid-fuel boosters that lift the space shuttle off the pad -- from an instrumented static test of a four-segment booster at ATK's Promontory, Utah, facility scheduled for Nov. 16 (AW&ST Aug. 14, p. 28).
But under the overarching strategy of using the Moon as a stepping-stone to Mars, all of that work is ultimately aimed at the red planet. Once Ares I is flying, for example, work will begin on the 100-metric-ton Ares V lifter needed for both lunar and Mars missions. To keep cost and schedule under control, both of the Ares vehicles carry heritage hardware from the Apollo era as well as the shuttle (AW&ST Sept. 25, p. 36). And NASA is already in talks with the Air Force on using the RS-68 engine from the Delta IV to power the big Ares V core stage.
"We're working on all of the pieces for getting back to the Moon, and realizing those elements are going to give us a big lever into a bunch of possible different missions, not just humans on the Moon," Hanley says. "The big rocket is what you need to go to Mars. Probably the single biggest lever for getting to Mars is getting the big rocket flying."
A Constellation study team is also at work on the LSAM lander, developing conceptual designs and defining requirements. Hanley says the program is aiming for a preliminary design review for the lander in 2011, although that date hasn't been formally set. That work, too, probably will shape the way humans ultimately go to Mars.
"We are very much trying to keep the team focused on the exploration component of this system, and set it up as right as we can from the get-go so when I'm out of the picture and somebody else comes in and takes this job, they have a good foundation to build on," Hanley says, stressing that "obviously we're only at the very beginning of thinking about Mars."
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NASA's ISS Partners Turn Attention To Exploration
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 10/09/2006, page 38
Frank Morring, Jr. and Michael A. Taverna, Valencia, Spain
With ISS assembly restarted, spacefaring nations get serious about setting lunar roles
A broad-brush framework for future international exploration of the Moon should be ready by the end of the year, now that NASA has satisfied its partners that it doesn't intend to leave their space station hardware on the ground.
In interviews at the 57th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here last week, space agency heads and other top space officials described an emerging approach to lunar exploration that one European Space Agency (ESA) official termed "global open architecture." Nations will supply modular habitats, power stations, resource-extractors and other elements as the Earth-Moon infrastructure grows, using standard interfaces while protecting sensitive technologies.
Planners also want critical elements of the infrastructure to be redundant, including human access to space. While the U.S. pushes its Ares/Orion replacement for the space shuttle, Europe has just initiated a joint study with Russia on a possible role for its industry in building an advanced version of the Soyuz capsule and proposed follow-ons to that upgrade.
"I hate single-point failure," says Jean-Jacques Dordain, the ESA director general. "This is one of the lessons learned of the space station, and embarking on such a huge program [as lunar exploration] with significant single-point failure, yes, it's a problem."
The hope is that, just as the Soyuz kept the International Space Station going while the shuttle was grounded after the Columbia accident, its successors could play the same role if the U.S. systems falter, and vice versa. Japan also may join the Soyuz-upgrade effort, known as the Advanced Crew Transportation System. It is being funded by the Russian Federal Space Agency, and ESA will kick in €10 million from a €20-million pool funded by France, Germany and Italy for initial studies of the vehicle, its Soyuz 2.3 launcher and a new launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana.
NASA HAS BEEN ENCOURAGING international participation since President Bush announced his exploration plans in February 2004 because, as Administrator Michael Griffin told the IAC Oct. 3, "much as we would wish otherwise, we cannot do everything we would like to do." A year ago, at the IAC in Fukuoka, Japan, ISS partners were openly skeptical about U.S. exploration plans as NASA struggled to overcome the Columbia accident's aftermath (AW&ST Oct. 24, 2005, p. 24).
Now, with the space shuttle flying station-assembly missions again, the mood has shifted to hopeful. Canada is interested in continuing the robotic contributions it pioneered on the shuttle and ISS, while Italy and Germany see opportunity in building pressurized habitats for lunar-surface astronauts. With scientists poring over data from ESA's Smart-1 lunar orbiter mission that ended last month, and orbiters from China, India, Japan and the U.S. bound for the Moon in the next three years, Griffin says he got a good response to his opening-session call for international lunar data standards.
Given its durability in the face of multiple redesigns and the Columbia disaster, Griffin, Dordain and other agency heads see the ISS partnership as a model for moving on to sustained exploration of the Moon and eventually Mars and beyond. Beginning with an international exploration workshop NASA organized in Washington in November 2004 (AW&ST Nov. 22, 2004, p. 35), some of the ISS partners have been meeting periodically to explore future cooperation.
Those efforts are likely to culminate early in December, when NASA hosts an exploration conference in Houston. Based on input received in April at another Washington workshop, and public responses to a call for ideas, Doug Cooke, deputy associate NASA administrator for exploration systems, has been overseeing the assembly of a sort of master plan for international lunar surface operations.
At the same time, a quasi-formal group of officials representing the ISS partners, plus Australia, China, India, Korea and Ukraine, has been drafting a "global strategy" document. Both are expected to be made public in Houston, and refined at a subsequent meeting in Kyoto next spring.
With space-spending a low priority in most governments' budgets, drafters of the strategy document hope its broad international flavor will help national space agencies convince their publics and politicians to buy into the new exploration efforts early.
Cooke's team has culled some 800 ideas into 23 categories of exploration objectives, grouped in six "themes." Those are preparing for human Mars exploration; pursuing space science to answer fundamental questions about the Solar System and the Universe; extending and sustaining human presence in space; boosting global partnerships; contributing to "public inspiration, education and welfare"; and building and sustaining economic development in space.
"That will frame the approach for international cooperation and this exploration effort," Cooke says. "So it is at this point an international effort to develop the strategy [and] the context of participation so that we can move forward together."
Presentations at IAC plenary and technical sessions indicate the economic exploitation of space will play a growing role as humans move beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). Martin Sweeting, CEO of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., suggests that government incentives could have the same effect on space development as they did in developing the U.S. West. Nicolai Sevastiyanov, president and general designer of RSC Energia, compared government and private investment in spacecraft to the Soviet Union's Siberian aviation development in the 1930s.
"Some people were saying 'why do we need to do this? It makes absolutely no sense because nobody can live in the polar regions,'" Sevastiyanov said through an interpreter. "But later on, very huge deposits of gas and oil were discovered [in Siberia], and some other mineral resources, and aviation became the major technology for exploration and development of these resources."
THE ENERGIA CHIEF SPOKE ON OCT. 4, 49 years to the day after his company's Soviet precursor launched Sputnik 1. Building on that long heritage, Sevastiyanov said Energia is investing its own funds in follow-ons to the advanced Soyuz -- a reusable cargo vehicle called Parom, and the long-discussed Clipper reusable crew vehicle. Both would benefit from international investments of capital and technology, he said.
Parom would consist of a space tug that could remain docked at the ISS or another orbiting facility for as long as 15 years, dipping down to a lower altitude to rendezvous and dock with low-cost expendable cargo canisters able to carry 7.5 metric tons, according to Energia's Nicolai Bryukhanov. The Parom tug would dock a new canister at the station and remove it when the next canister arrives in space. A solid-fueled deorbit motor would send the old canister, filled with station trash, back into the atmosphere to burn up.
For Clipper, Energia has selected a mid-wing monoplane shape designed to reduce wing-leading-edge heat loads as much as 500C on reentry, according to Bryukhanov. Ultimately, Sevastiyanov says, Energia envisions building a lunar-orbiting space station, and setting up a reusable ferry route to carry humans from LEO to lunar orbit.
Sevastiyanov says the Soyuz upgrade already under study could benefit from European technology developed--with Russian input--for the Automated Transfer Vehicle set for its first flight next year. "It looks like Europe will build the orbital module; Energia will be building the descent vehicle and together we're going to build the transportation propulsion module," he says.
While Japan is pondering a role in the Russian crew-transport upgrades, as well as in lunar-surface power systems, no decisions have been made in Tokyo, where the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is enjoying a small resurgence in its budget fortunes after seven years of decline. "We are studying which part would be the most beneficial to contribute to the international cooperation," says Kiyoshi Higuchi, JAXA executive director. "We have a lot of candidates."
For a lunar power source, JAXA engineers are considering both 50-meter solar power towers on the surface, and lunar-orbiting collectors to convert solar energy into microwaves or lasers and beam it to receivers on the surface. Beginning next year, the agency's Advanced Mission Research Center will be ground-testing both approaches as part of a long-term plan to develop a Space Solar Power Satellite for lunar orbit.
For the microwave test, plans call for a transmission over a 50-meter gap, with a 5-kw. transmitter delivering 1-kw. at the receiver. The laser test objective is the generation of 100 watts in a silicon-cell receiver bombarded by an 800-watt laser from a range of 500 meters, according to a paper presented by JAXA's Tatsuhito Fujita at a session on space solar power.
In addition to applying the robotic "Canadarm" technology on the ISS and space shuttle to the next phase of exploration, Canada is also interested in adapting its mining, drilling and laser-ranging technology to the Moon. A surface-mobility rover for human explorers is on the list of possibilities, too.
As envisioned by space leaders like Griffin and Dordain, the various national contributions to Moon exploration, and eventually beyond, would be discrete modules that plug into the overall exploration architecture, much as Europe's Columbus and Japan's Kibo laboratory modules are scheduled to plug into the ISS in the next two years. That way, technology transfer issues that bedevil so much international space activity today might be avoided.
Unfortunately copyright law forbids direct pasting of articles without the permission of the publisher and/or authors.
I've been really active over at Chris Bergen's NASASpaceFlight.com website--which is an almost unbelievable wealth of Ares I/V and Orion (the new Project Orion and not the old one!) information. It is a watering hole for many NASA engineers, contractors, enthusiasts and space buffs. It also has a subscription area they call L2 which has a lot of completely proprietary information that is availble only to NASA contractors (or subscribers to L2.) Just about the most detailed collection of NonClassified info there is...
Anyways, I've learned a lot about Ares I and V vehicles such as the first flight demonstration flight for Ares I will use a live 4 Segment SRM with a dummy ballasted 5th segment, boilerplate second stage, boilerplate service module, and boilerplate command module (CEV) with live parachute and live Crew Escape System. It is projected for 1st flight to be about 2011!
