NASA plans manned Mars flyby

[Metryq]

So, you understand that doing a flyby first increases the chances of success of a landing mission, right?

How does a flyby increase the success of a landing? Perhaps you'd advocate a manned "flyby" to another star, just to shake the bugs out, with no provision for a landing?

The "bugs" for long duration interplanetary flight can be worked out just fine with LEO missions, or in conjunction with practical missions between here and the Moon—including lots of landings. That way if any "bugs" are significant, there is an abort option. A manned flyby of Mars would be 95 percent bench warming. That doesn't add up to practice in my book.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

So, you understand that doing a flyby first increases the chances of success of a landing mission, right?

How does a flyby increase the success of a landing?

Well, since a landing mission has to do everything a flyby mission does, plus more, the answer is pretty self-evident.

 

[gturner]

Not really. A landing mission has to aerobrake in the Martian atmosphere or otherwise perform a Mars orbital insertion. A flyby is just a gravitational slingshot maneuver that doesn't tell you anything that you couldn't find out looping around in high Earth orbit.

The only thing a flyby mission does is give basic life support and radiation shielding a long-duration test, but that could be done anywhere outside the Van Allen belt. Since the mission is just a test, and the test could better be performed closer to Earth, it makes sense to do so. Testing closer to Earth provides vastly better options to cope with parts of the test that fail (and failure is always an option in a test), such as flying up replacement parts, upgrading systems that prove to be trouble-prone, or doing a quick abort if things really go south.

And what's not being tested on a Mars flyby? That the intended lander can survive the long trip to Mars. That the all-up vehicle can successfully perform a Mars orbital insertion and then perform a burn for Earth departure, etc. By stripping the landing mission of all the critical, large components, a flyby mission isn't really testing anything other than a life-support system and a com link.

 

[bbjeg]

Yeah, there is no logical reason for sending two people to swing by Mars.

So, do you think there is no logical reason to send people to Mars at all?

What's to gain from spending millions (if not billions) to send two people to view Mars. I'd rather see Nasa use that money on more practical ideas like thermosphere or exosphere commercial flights.

That didn't answer my question. My question was, should we be trying to land people on Mars, yes or no?

If my question was somehow not originally clear, please accept that as my clarification of it.

My original statement was in regards to this mission, not we should never go to Mars. With several rovers collecting all that data and skills that landed us on the moon, wasting billions on a flyby seems pointless. I'd rather them use that money on a landing or at least with an ending result of Mars soil being brought back to Earth.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Not really. A landing mission has to aerobrake in the Martian atmosphere or otherwise perform a Mars orbital insertion. A flyby is just a gravitational slingshot maneuver that doesn't tell you anything that you couldn't find out looping around in high Earth orbit.

The only thing a flyby mission does is give basic life support and radiation shielding a long-duration test, but that could be done anywhere outside the Van Allen belt. Since the mission is just a test, and the test could better be performed closer to Earth, it makes sense to do so. Testing closer to Earth provides vastly better options to cope with parts of the test that fail (and failure is always an option in a test), such as flying up replacement parts, upgrading systems that prove to be trouble-prone, or doing a quick abort if things really go south.

I concede that from an engineering perspective this is more logical as a first mission. As you suggested, they'd need to do more than simply park at L-4 or L-5 for two years. They'd need to run the Orion engine comparably.

However, besides radiation exposure, they'd need to have micrometeoroid exposure that's comparable, or perhaps even in excess of what to expect, to test any shielding which I really hope is there and able to withstand at least some level of debris. I'm assuming a full-blown meteor strike would be catastrophic, and I have no idea whether meteor detection and avoidance is to be part of the mission (I'd be pleasantly surprised if it is).

Granted your idea is safer for the astronauts, but here's the problem with it. Your near-Earth test is at least as expensive as a flyby mission, otherwise it proves less. If there's no political will for a flyby mission, then is there more or less political will for "just" a near-Earth test?

 

[publiusr]

Landings are risky--and flybys atop HLLVs were pushed for as far back as the 1960s, so it isn't a "funding excuse."

A couple of nice quotes from the web:

A positive message about growing space capabilities through the addition of commercial crew in conjunction with our national human spaceflight program will I hope be something that a future Administration will pursue. To do that means a change in language for everyone. Gone should be all of the unsubstantiated talk about how Orion and SLS are too expensive ($3.7B annually, or 1/2 of 1% of our Defense budget, spent on those programs is too expensive for the US?), will never fly, aren’t needed, etc.. Gone should be the constant rhetoric that the commercial space companies are a bunch of parasites, amateurs who don’t know what they are doing and have no future. Both sides should be praising the heck out of each other in particular and the space program in general. Do that for awhile and I’ll bet Congress will be willing to spend more money to grow the nascent space market into something that will get us to the Moon and beyond and build a business that can profitably support that.

In the Great Depression, America could have withdrawn into itself and hoarded its diminishing federal budget. Instead, it began huge projects like the Hoover Dam and the freeway system, providing both jobs for the unemployed masses and leaving the country with a legacy that still serves it today. While presenting the VSE in Kennedy terms is something that should be done, it also needs to be sold to the public as something that will create American jobs and give the USA a dominance of space that will serve it in the long run.

SLS Updates--Engines

http://www.space.com/24954-nasa-hot-fires-mini-engines-in-sls-test-video.html
CZ-9 vs SLS
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34164.0

 

[gturner]

Um, Obama canceled the VSE not long after your big quote was typed.

 

[publiusr]

And the Senate at least saved something--which is a good thing.

Let me leave you with another quote:

Geoffrey Landis, a NASA Lewis Research Center (now NASA Glenn) engineer, said that:

"...the answer was a new piloted Mars program that would take into account lessons taught by Apollo (“If you accomplish your goal, your budget will be cut”) and the Space Shuttle (“if you do the same thing over and over, the public will focus on your failures and forget your successes”). Landis’s program was a 14-year series of incremental 'footsteps' that provide a series of interesting milestones that would maintain public enthusiasm for the program at least until a piloted Mars landing took place."

"The Mars temperate landing, the sixth footstep, would mark the culmination of Landis’s program. Successfully accomplishing a landing in the martian mid-latitudes would, Landis estimated, result in budget cuts and Mars program cancellation within two years. His seventh footstep was, thus, designed to postpone the inevitable. He argued that a landing in Valles Marineris, Mars’s equatorial “Grand Canyon,” would provide a spectacular coda exciting enough to forestall program cancellation."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/footsteps-mars-1993/

That sounds pretty reasonable to me--in that the Fly-by is just the starting line.

 

[gturner]

The Mars temperate landing, the sixth footstep, would mark the culmination of Landis’s program. Successfully accomplishing a landing in the martian mid-latitudes would, Landis estimated, result in budget cuts and Mars program cancellation within two years.

Like many, Landis must realize that Mars is a dead end as a government run program. Thus his push to have us colonize the cloud-tops of Venus.

 

[MacLeod]

Can't see a manned mission to Mars happening within the next decade. 2025 is a much more realestic date, with perhaps 2030 before the first actual landing on Mars.

Before I send a single person on a Mars Orbial flight, I would want to send at least one unmanned mission to test the onboard systems without risk to a crew, of course to do it correctly we would have to wait until the unmanned flight returned to Earth Orbit.

You then have a follow up manned mission assuming the systems worked for the Mars Orbital Flight. Now what I might do is to park the lander in Orbit so you potentially have a back-up module should anything go wrong on the landing mission.


A Third flight would be the actual MArs Landing flight.

 

[Gil T.Azell]

Wouldn't it be funny if one of there names was Shaun Geoffrey Christopher? (If this ever happened.)

(sorry about that one )

 

[Squiggy]

That's not a mission, it's just a funding excuse.

And how do you think we got to the moon?

 

[gturner]

By setting a goal (putting a man on the moon), rapidly deciding how we would do it, then deciding which hardware to develop, and then building and testing all the hardware.

What we didn't do is decide to build a Saturn V, work on it for a decade, then decide to build a payload, then decide to build the hardware required for a lunar flyby mission, then decide to build the hardware for a lunar orbit mission, then decide to build the hardware for a landing.

There is no Mars lander design being finalized somewhere, nor have they started bending metal on a long-duration habitat module for the flyby, nor anything else.

 

[scotthm]

My question was, should we be trying to land people on Mars, yes or no?

No, if by "we" you mean taxpayers.

---------------

 

[2takesfrakes]

The proof is in the pudding, the "value" in these Feel Good, prestige missions. Billions of dollars later, what did we end up with from the Moon Missions? A few bags of rocks and a couple pages in history books. Now, they're talking about roping a small, near-Earth asteroid into Lunar orbit so we can screw around on it. I find this whole idea absolutely horrifying! Not so much because I fear it will backfire, some way, but just look at the precident it's setting!

What if Russia or China wants the Earth to have a second moon, and hauls in something bigger? Let's not even play with this and opening the door to some even crazier shit! And again, what's it getting us? What's it really about? Flipping the bill for National Pride.

And for having direct control over their own publicity, NASA has always made Outer Space seem really boring! Once in a while, they get a cute female astronaut who seems sweet, and that's great for visiting schools, or whatever. But it's still the same when she gets up there. Oh! Her hair is floating wildly ... and she's doing what? I'm watching her pedal on an exercise bike or listening to her talk about growing large crystals. No ... It's not enough to fire my imagination, going to Mars, even. I'm sorry.

 

[Shatnertage]

Just out of curiosity, what's the failure rate for unmanned missions to Mars? I know that the Soviets lost a few, and so did the Americans. How many spacecraft that we've sent to Mars actually completed their missions?

 

[Trekker4747]

Can't see a manned mission to Mars happening within the next decade. 2025 is a much more realestic date, with perhaps 2030 before the first actual landing on Mars. .

Yea, a manned mission to Mars isn't going to happen in the next decade just maybe in the next decade plus one year.

Honestly, I don't think a manned mission to Mars will happen in my life time. It's way to expensive for the government to want to spend on it. There's still a number of hurdles I still don't think they've quite worked out yet.

 

[publiusr]

Like many, Landis must realize that Mars is a dead end as a government run program. Thus his push to have us colonize the cloud-tops of Venus.

Self-fulfilling prophecy in that a gov't program is only a dead end when folks want to kill off gov't run programs, as opposed to supporting them.

Is DoE and Fusion a dead end? Yes, if big oil and anti-gov't Republicans want to kill off DoE as Perry did.

Then too--that comes from the party that thinks "something called volcano monitoring" a waste:
http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/something-called-volcano-monitoring/

Case in point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties_Act_of_2005
"...its effect would be to eliminate public dissemination of National Weather Service data and forecasts ."

This was just one example of how privatization can make things more--not less--expensive.

But that doesn't stop the anti-infrastructure morons from proposing the same bad ideas:
http://spacecoastdaily.com/2014/02/senator-rubio-statement-on-unused-ksc-property/

Not everyone agrees:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/341/1

If I had my druthers, I'd take Rubio and his ilk to the top of the Washington Monument--and have them make a giant leap for all mankind.

Private run exploits can be slaves to the owner's peccadilloes
http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/mlb/...rank-mccourt-jamie-mccourt-reach-divorce-deal

Space X got by with a close shave:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...vorce-Talulah-Riley-gets-4-2M-settlement.html

This is why we need to bolster Gov't run programs--not backbite or undermine them.

One percent for space!

 

[Noname Given]

The proof is in the pudding, the "value" in these Feel Good, prestige missions. Billions of dollars later, what did we end up with from the Moon Missions?

And the microcomputer CPUs (in desktops/laptops/smartphones) that we're using today. That level of computer miniaturization started BECAUSE of the space program.

 

[Spider]

There is no point in sending men to Mars when we haven't even set up a working moon base yet. There is nothing helpful on Mars that we can't do on the moon, other than finding proof of ancient life or current life. The only way to live permanently on Mars is underground, just like on the moon. And the moon is a heck of a lot closer and cheaper to get to and build on.