[meteorite-list] Space leaders work to replace lunar base with manned asteroid missions

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:35:59 -0500
Message-ID: <51n6p3pj1ccho756p9h22ocspbq2lvfc0s_at_4ax.com>

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0801/18avweek/

Moon Stuck
Space leaders work to replace lunar base with manned asteroid missions
PUBLISHED IN AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY
RE-PRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 18, 2008

BY CRAIG COVAULT

Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working
to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for
space exploration"--one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward
manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth
environmental spacecraft.

Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division
directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define
these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space
Exploration (VSE).

Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings
could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts
could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.

Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to
Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity
cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space
Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.

The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater
private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a reality.

There would also be some different "winners and losers" compared with the Bush
vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose
additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar
base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the
Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California,
would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.

Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear
a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space
program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars
operations--the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The
first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.

If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be
flown to an asteroid in about 2025.

Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there's little public enthusiasm
for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush
administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the
funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.

Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that
have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.

"It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for
manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar,
a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.

The prospect of challenging new manned missions to asteroids is drawing far more
excitement among young people than a "return" (as in going backward) to the
Moon, says Lou Friedman, who heads The Planetary Society, the country's largest
space interest group.

The society is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with
Stanford. A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so
yesterday," says Friedman.

"It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high cost, it
offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars operations."

Under the alternative VSE, even smaller, individual lunar sorties would be
reduced, or perhaps deleted entirely, says Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive
Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories before
heading all of NASA's science program development. He also led Lockheed Martin
Spaceflight System.

Hinners believes the group should examine dropping all the lunar sorties to
accelerate the human push to Mars in the revised VSE proposal to the new
administration.

The James Webb Space Telescope, with a 21.3-ft.-dia. mirror, will be launched in
2013 to one of these "L" points. With little fanfare, it was recently approved
to carry a lightweight Crew Exploration Vehicle docking system just in case a
manned CEV has to make a house call a million miles from Earth for emergency
servicing.

A growing corps of scientists, engineers and astronauts are emerging to argue
for this chance to accelerate manned spaceflight operations outward well beyond
the Moon--faster toward Mars than can be done by using the Moon as a
stepping-stone only 240,000 mi. away.

"The notion that the Moon could serve as a proving ground for Mars missions
strains credulity," says Farquhar, who holds the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair for
Aerospace at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He also was mission
director for the Applied Physics Laboratory's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
mission that was the first to land a spacecraft on an asteroid.

A return to manned Moon operations has become "a bridge too far" in the Bush
administration's VSE, says Wes Huntress, another former planetary mission
manager.

Huntress is director of the Washington-based Carnegie Institution's Geophysical
Laboratory and had a long career at JPL and NASA headquarters, where he led NASA
space science development and operations--including the highly successful
Discovery planetary mission series. He's also helping to organize the Stanford
workshop that will have about several dozen participants, including several top
NASA and contractor exploration managers.

"There is little left of the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration except the real
need to retire the space shuttle," he says. "Even this goal is being pursued
with great sacrifice from all other parts of the agency because the
administration has simply not put its money where its mouth is."

"Inadequate NASA budgets are leading to collapse of the VSE Moon focus and to
incredibly slow progress for the Moon," says Hinners.

"The nation's space enterprise is under great strain even to build Ares I and
Orion CEV," Huntress stresses. "There are alternate destinations for human
deep-space missions that do not require building a lot of new hardware to [come
and go between Earth and the Moon]. These are missions to near-Earth asteroids
or to scout the Sun-Earth Lagrangian points for future space telescope
construction and servicing," he notes.

The Earth-Sun Lagrangian points (also called libration points) are at the very
edge of the Earth's gravitational well, and a mission would represent a first
excursion to the limit of Earth's influence in the Solar System--a significant
step beyond Apollo, says Huntress.

Missions sent to "L" points can stop just there, orbiting only above and below
the ecliptic plane without any significant use of station-keeping fuel. Also, L
points offer a much cleaner option for advanced astronomy than the dusty lunar
surface, where you have to land everything in addition to launching it.

"As the nation seems to be turning to environmental threats to our own planet, a
mission to a near-Earth asteroid to assess their nature for good or ill would
also seem to be a real winner," says Huntress.

These stepping-stones would allow for the development of a broader vision of
human spaceflight than simply reinventing Apollo.

Major lunar-related contracts for the Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle
Orion command ship, a lunar lander design and Ares V launcher have yet to be
awarded, giving the next administration some breathing room in post-Bush
administration VSE contracting.

Some basic asteroid mission design work--part of it volunteer--using the CEV
hardware is already underway at the Johnson Space Center (AW&ST Sept. 25, 2006,
p. 21). Other, more in-depth and long-standing manned asteroid analysis is
underway under International Astronautical Assn. and Smithsonian National Air
and Space Museum sponsorship.

Scott Hubbard, consulting professor in the Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics
Dept., conceived the reassessment meeting. Hubbard was previously the director
of NASA Ames Research Center and, before that, NASA Mars program director. "We
have planned this invitation-only workshop to elicit frank and open discussion
about the future of the 'vision' as the administration changes," he says.

"The Stanford workshop will address a broad range of issues touching on many
elements of space exploration. The attendees will discuss the balance between
space science and human exploration, the need for continuing and enhancing Earth
science observations, the relative utility of humans and robotics, and progress
or impediments to human exploration of Mars, asteroids and the Moon," says
Hubbard. "In addition, the workshop will discuss the status of access to space
and the emerging entrepreneurial space industry.

"This is the kind of debate that will go on--beyond whether a lunar base really
makes sense. But manned asteroid missions first--ahead of a lunar base--are
drawing strong attention," he says. Hubbard and Friedman are co-hosting the
event, along with former astronaut Kathy Thornton, associate dean of the
University of Virginia's Science, Technology and Society Dept. Thornton flew on
four space shuttle missions, including the initial critical repair of the Hubble
Space Telescope in 1993.

The alternative vision would also include far greater private-sector incentives
for participation at all levels, an area public surveys cite as very important.
Missions to asteroids and Lagrangian points, for example, are likely to carry
along Bigelow-type commercial inflatable modules. A recent informal space
program survey by The New York Times found substantial public frustration about
NASA's doing what entrepreneurs could do better.

Under the alternative concepts, astronauts using an upgraded CEV would initially
be sent on long-duration missions, not to the Moon, but to land on asteroids
where they would sample terrain perhaps more ancient than the Moon's. These
visits would also help develop concepts for diverting such near-Earth objects,
should they threaten a potentially devastating impact on Earth.

Although it may be hundreds of years before used operationally, an emergency
asteroid diversion would be "the ultimate 'green mission'--one that could save a
large portion of the Earth from impact destruction," says Friedman.

To reinforce that point, he notes that on Jan. 30, a 150-ft.-long asteroid will
pass close to Mars. The asteroid visit and Lagrangian mission concepts would use
much of the same CEV Ares I and Ares V heavy-lift booster infrastructure, but in
ways that would be much faster stepping-stones to Mars than developing a manned
lunar base. Asteroid and Lagrangian point missions would each last several weeks
or months. Both the libration points and asteroids would be about 1 million mi.
from Earth, requiring operations more like much longer trips to Mars at least
40-100 million mi. away.

Robotic options for all mission elements also will be reviewed, and one working
group will be devoted to better defining manned versus robotic tradeoffs.

Another issue is international participation.

Aviation Week discussed an unrelated European International Space Station topic
with NASA Administrator Mike Griffin last week, who in comments aside also
addressed the basic Moon/Mars issues between the U.S. and Europe.

"A large portion of the scientific community in the U.S. also prefers Mars over
the Moon," he acknowledged. But "interest in the Moon is driven by goals in
addition to and beyond the requirements of the science community. It is driven
by the imperatives that ensue from a commitment to become a spacefaring society,
not primarily by scientific objectives, though such objectives do indeed
constitute a part of the overall rationale.

"We continue to experience intense international interest concerning our plans
for lunar exploration," Griffin told Aviation Week.

With Frank Morring, Jr., in Washington.

This story appears in the Jan. 21 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology, p.
24
Received on Sun 20 Jan 2008 09:35:59 AM PST