Deep Space Gateway – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Space News for May 2019: Are we on our way back to the Moon?

Hopefully it’s not just because the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar landing is coming up in a few months but I’m certain that you’ve noticed there’s been a lot of talk about humans returning to the Moon recently. With that in mind I think I’ll use this month’s installment of Space news to offer my two cents worth.

Back in March NASA was officially tasked by the Trump administration with developing a plan for returning American astronauts to the Lunar surface by the year 2024, hardly enough time to prepare a robotic mission let alone a manned one. That detailed plan has now been released and the new Lunar program has a name at least, Artemis the Greek Goddess of the Moon and the twin sister of Apollo.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announces the Artemis program to take America back to the Moon (Credit: Daily Mail)

Now to be honest, this time NASA doesn’t have to start from scratch as they did back in the 1960s. With the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew vehicle the space agency has two of the three major components of an updated Apollo program almost ready to fly. Almost ready, as in both programs have encountered significant delays already and are several years behind schedule.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is nearlt ready for its first test launch (Credit: NASA)

NASA’s Orion Crew vehicle is also nearly ready for its first test (Credit: Wikipedia)

Still, the SLS and Orion are expected to undertake their first missions in 2020 so really all NASA needs to put astronauts back on the Moon is a new version of the Lunar Module (LM). You would think that if they concentrate their efforts on producing a LM five years should be enough time to develop one. In fact Lockheed Martin has already prepared some initial designs for just such a Lunar lander so there would be no need to start from scratch.

Lockheed Martin’s concept for a Lunar Lander (Credit: Space News)

Problem is that NASA also wants to construct a space station in Lunar orbit called the Deep Space Gateway and building that could require several times the effort needed for just a new LM. The idea is for the Gateway to serve as a place to park a reusable LM module as well as conduct long-duration missions in deep space. See my post of 31Dec2018.

NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway, with an Orion Capsule docked on the left (Credit: Wikipedia)

The complete Artemis program proposed by NASA is both boldly ambitious in scope and detailed in its planning. In addition to meeting Trump’s goal of a manned landing by 2024 the plan continues beyond that with one manned landing each year and concludes in 2028 with the establishment of a semi-permanent Lunar base. The total plan requires 37 launches in all, a mixture of SLS and Commercial Launch Vehicles (CLVs) like the Space X Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy. Most of the missions will not in fact be manned but rather robotic spacecraft that will place equipment in either Lunar orbit or on the Moon’s surface.

The only thing missing now is of course the MONEY! While the full Artemis program should not cost as much as the Apollo program did, adjusting for inflation, it’s still going to require a major increase in NASA’s budget. All at a time when the Federal Government has virtually ground to a halt due to partisan bickering, a time when the yearly federal deficit is over a trillion dollars, and next year is an election year!

Recent and projected yearly Federal budget deficits (Credit: FactCheck.org)

In order to get the ball-rolling Trump has promised to add another $1.6 Billion to NASA’s 2020 budget. That could pay for perhaps one of the 37 missions but hold on, he needs congressional approval even for that small increase.

A better sign of progress was NASA’s awarding of a contract to begin construction of the first of the Gateway modules to Maxar corporation. The $375 million dollar contract is for the design and development of the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), obviously a critical section of the planned space station.

The first section of the Deep Space Gateway to be constructed will be the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) (Credit: Daily Mail)

Still I have to admit that I don’t hold much hope for Artemis. In terms of an outline for an engineering project it’s first rate but there simply isn’t the political will in this country to get it done. We’ve been down this road before; George H. W. Bush directed NASA to go to Mars but never funded it. George W. Bush wanted to go back to the Moon but never funded it. Bill Clinton just wanted to build a Space Station but at least that got built.

Large-scale scientific project like manned exploration beyond Earth orbit require a long-term commitment by the politicians holding the purse strings. With our present political mess I see little hope of the kind of commitment needed any time soon!

What I’m most afraid of is that a year or so from now, when the hoopla and nostalgia of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is past the current plans for a return to the Moon will all be forgotten and nothing will have been accomplished.

As NASA finalizes its plans for a return to the Moon is the Deep Space Gateway an unnecessary and costly complication?

This coming year, 2019 we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, humanity’s first ever landing on the Moon, the first ever trip to another celestial body. It makes sense therefore to consider NASA’s current plans for manned exploration of space and in particular the current plans, now being finalized for a manned return to the Moon expected to occur in or about the year 2028.

Now when President John F. Kennedy first proposed going to the Moon all of the engineers at NASA, Werner von Braun for example, thought that they’d have to build a rocket big enough to put a spacecraft into orbit that would go directly to the surface of the Moon, land there and later blast off from the Moon to head straight back to Earth. The most simple, uncomplicated approach in other words. The problem was that such a rocket would have been so huge and expensive that it would make the Saturn V look puny in comparison. There were many at NASA who doubted that developing such a rocket was possible in Kennedy’s time frame.

It was Dr. John Houbolt, see image below, of NASA’s planning directorate who advocated for a different plan called ‘Lunar Orbit Rendezvous’ (LOR). In this idea two smaller spacecraft would be sent into orbit around the Moon. One would be a Command and Service Module (CSM) that would sustain the astronauts during their voyage while also having the rocket engine that would send the astronauts back toward Earth. Only the second module, a Lunar Module (LM) would actually set down on Moon. With this approach the size of the actual spacecraft that landed would be much smaller, see image below, and this would make every other component of the mission, all the way back to the big rocket that took off from Earth, much smaller and therefore cheaper as well.

John C. Houbolt Explaining Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (Credit: Public Domain)

Comparison of the Sizes of Lunar Landing Vehicles (Credit: Public Domain)

The problem with Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was the rendezvous part because once the astronauts had blasted back off from the Moon they would have to find and connect up with the CSM in order to get back home to Earth. The idea of two spacecraft in orbit around the Moon finding each other was scary, in 1960-62 no one knew if such a rendezvous was possible in Earth orbit let alone 400,000 km away in Lunar orbit.

Still it looked as if LOR was the only way to meet Kennedy’s deadline and NASA made it work. To the people back on Earth who watched the Apollo landings the astronauts made rendezvousing in lunar orbit seemed like a routine operation.

The Lunar Module in Lunar Orbit Preparing to Rendezvous with the Command and Service Modules (Credit:NASA)

So now NASA is planning to take us back to the Moon, again in about ten years time. This time they already have two major components of the Apollo missions designed, built and nearly ready to begin flight-testing. The Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion crew module, see images below, are obviously updated versions of the Saturn V rocket and Apollo CMS modules. So all that we need is a new, improved Lunar Module, like the one in the image below. Once we’ve developed that we’ll be ready to go right?

NASA’s Space Launch System (Credit: NASA)

Lockheed Martin’s Proposed Lunar Lander (Credit: Space News)

Not so fast, because you see NASA wants to build a space station in lunar orbit before going back down to the surface. This station is know as the Deep Space Gateway and is intended to serve as the rendezvous point for the Orion capsule and a proposed landing module. The Gateway is expected to cost about $20 billion to build and at least another $5 billion to assemble in lunar orbit. The image below shows the planned Deep Space Gateway.

NASA’s Proposed Deep Space Gateway (Credit: NASA)

Now since the Apollo astronauts demonstrated that they could rendezvous in lunar orbit without a station being there you might wonder if the Deep Space Gateway, and the $25 billion it will cost is really necessary, and you won’t be alone in asking that. In fact the National Space Council’s User’s Advisory Group has recommended that the money for Gateway be instead spent on accelerating the development of the lander which could enable NASA to put a man back on the Moon 4-5 years earlier.

So why would NASA want to spend $25 billion or more and delay getting back to the Moon by five years anyway. Well now remember its called the Deep Space Gateway not the Lunar Orbiting Station and it was originally intended to go into an extremely elongated orbit around both the Earth and Moon, an orbit that would take it as far as 5 million kilometers from Earth on voyages lasting a month or more.

In other words the Deep Space Gateway is a stepping-stone to an interplanetary spaceship, a step on the road to Mars. NASA hoped to use the Gateway as a test bed for learning how to operate with astronauts far beyond the Earth orbit for months at a time, experience they will need to begin planning for a manned trip to Mars, and they still hope to do by occasionally putting the Gateway in extremely elongated lunar orbits. In a sense NASA is using the Gateway in order to connect going back to the Moon with going on to Mars!

Personally I want NASA to just concentrate on one mission and get it done. In the past twenty years the ‘next stage of manned spaceflight’ has flipped back and forth from Mars to back to the Moon to an asteroid to back to the Moon. I say let’s just develop a lander and get back to the Moon for real and then think about something like the Deep Space Gateway.

Anyway that’s my opinion, what’s yours?

Space News for September 2017

A lot happened this past month in outer space. Of course the biggest story in September was the end of the Cassini mission to Saturn as the spacecraft plunged into the planet’s atmosphere. I’ve already talked about that however (See post of 13Sept17), so in today’s post I’ll be talking about several other items of interest.

The first story I’m going to discuss also concerns one of NASA’s interplanetary space probes. The Osiris-Ex mission is an ambitious attempt to land on the asteroid Bennu, collect a sample and return that sample to Earth. The picture below shows an illustration of the Osiris-Ex probe hovering above Bennu taking a sample.

The Osiris-Ex spacecraft was launched last year and placed on a trajectory that initially took it closer to the Sun. That orbit was designed to bring the probe back around for a gravity-assisting flyby of Earth. On 22Sept17 the spacecraft flew 17,500 km over Antarctica not only boosting its velocity by 3.7 kilometers per second but altering the plane of its orbit around the Sun to match that of Bennu.

The Earth flyby was accomplished without a hitch and as it moved past our planet the spacecraft took several pictures of Earth, one of which is shown below. Osiris-Ex is now expected to reach Bennu in October of 2018. Once in orbit around Bennu the probe will spend two years mapped and examining the asteroid with a variety of instruments before reaching out with a robotic arm to try to grab a sample of as much as two kilos of material from Bennu. The spacecraft will then leave Bennu for a return to Earth carrying that material. The expected arrival date for the sample is September of 2023.

Earth as seen by Osiris-Ex (Credit: NASA)

Long range planning is key to the success of any space endeavor. With that in mind Lockheed-Martin Corporation (known in the aerospace industry as Lock-Mart) has published some details and illustrations of their ideas for a Mars Base Camp program. Lock-Mart’s plan calls for a space station to be built in orbit around Mars which can then be visited by astronauts from Earth. Four of the astronauts can then take two week long excursions down to the Martian surface using a single stage Mars Assent / Descent Vehicle (MADV). The illustration below shows what the Mars station could look like in orbit around the red planet.

Proposed Mars Base Camp (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

The MADV lander is intended to land on the Martian surface using the supersonic retropropulsion technique that Space-X Corporation has developed to land their Falcon-9 rockets for reuse. The illustration below shows the MADV sitting upright on the surface of Mars.

Proposed Mars Assent / Decent Vehicle (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

Perhaps the thing I like best about Lock-Mart’s scheme is how it looks and feels so similar to the hardware Andy Weir described in his novel “The Martian”

Another important news item this month concerns President Trump’s finally making his choice for a new director of NASA. This month Trump chose Oklahoma Congressmen James Bridenstine for the job. Now Trump’s choice is controversial for several reasons first and foremost of which is the fact that, unlike every NASA director since the agency’s founding, Bridenstine has no background in either science or engineering. The picture below is of Congressman Bridenstine.

James Bridenstine, official portrait from US House of Representatives

The congressman is also well known for several opinions that have put him at odds with the majority of the scientific community. The most notable of these is global warming with Bridenstine being a consistent climate change denier.

On the other hand Bridenstine is a strong supporter of human exploration of space. He also is on record as preferring a return to the Moon before going on to Mars, a position I have advocated in several posts (22Feb17 and 19July17). Bridenstine is also a strong supporter of the commercialization of space by companies such as Space X and Orbital Science.

Only time will tell whether Congressman Bridenstine turns out to be a good choice for NASA. More than anything else NASA needs a coherent long term goal, and then to stick to that goal. I’m actually more concerned about the incoherence of Bridenstine’s future boss than I am about Bridenstine.

My final item is also more political than anything else. After the successful cooperation between the US and Russia in the building and operation of the International Space Station the two nations have agreed this past week to cooperate on the construction of a space station in lunar orbit, the Deep Space Gateway project. The picture below shows what the Deep Space Gateway project could look like.

Proposed Deep Space Gateway (Credit: NASA)

If that concept sounds familiar well of course its really the same plan as the one from Lock-Mart we discussed above for Mars. I suppose the idea is to take human exploration one step at a time, using the knowledge and technology gained in the last step to ensure the success of the next step. That could all be for the best but we will still need definite goals and a firm commitment from those who hold the purse strings if we’re going to finally return to truly exploring outer space.