George Abbey: Let's Go Back To The Moon
Former NASA Flight Director Says A Return To The Moon Is Necessary Before Heading To Mars
“But what about plans for a return to the moon? “”First, you go to the moon before you go to Mars,” George W.S. Abbey, a former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said in an interview with the International Business Times. Abbey, is currently the Baker Botts Senior Fellow in Space Policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Abbey was named director of flight operations in 1976 and helped develop strategies for future moon and Mars missions. Speaking to International Business Times, Abbey said international cooperation is a key to future missions and a return to the moon is necessary before NASA can get to Mars.”
Any reason you’re posting an article from 2014?
“Heading to Mars”…Does that mean a Mars flyby or to the surface of Mars. It makes a difference. The DV for a Mars flyby is less than for the Moon. A Mars flyby requires no lander like going to the surface of the Moon. But then there is the whole radiation-microgravity-equipment reliability thing…unless “go to the Moon” means to lunar orbit like Lori Garver described as “going to the Moon”.
Shouldn’t be a condition to go to Mars. Testing hardware? Obviously. Since we’re testing, establish an outpost? Right, since it tests some useful ISRU for Mars, but even better is if anything bolder in moon is commercial and international to not divest resources from Mars.
What hardware intended for Mars can be tested on the moon, but can’t be tested on Earth or in orbit?
What kind of ISRU works on both the moon and Mars?
Some types of landers, rapid ptototyping using regolith, low gravity strucures, lava tubes construction, but is less about the technology and more about gainning confidence to invest and risking on a farther destination. Also it’s a cheaper trip, can help to mont interest on the costier Mars mission. I personally don’t think this is the rational approach, but considering polictics, budget and public opinion, possibly is the way it’ll go.
Yes, NASA has been focusing on Mars Direct for decades with no progress. Maybe it time to admit and journey to Mars requires going to the Moon first.
Apollo, Manhattan projects had a lot of financial support because were a manageable less than 10 years to reach the goal initiatives and had huge polictical and existential motivations. Any Mars project, is about 20 years away after we stop laughing. It’s logical to go direct thinking about time and cost, but probably the incremental steps is the way to realize it. But it’s more probably we will reach mars on a BFR or Surak, invited by the Vulcans.
I am all for any space flight. But, as has been the case for the past 45 years, no one seems to understand the need to put forth a succinct, sustainable and long-term plan for any destination by answering the question “Why” in a provable manner. This is why thing will not change and it will be years or decades before we return or go someplace new. So sad.
Bingo. It’s a question I’ve posted here many times, usually by asking where are the customers for commercial spaceflight.But the larger issue remains. And it is THE reason we haven’t gone anywhere.
Me? Don’t look at me. I don’t know either. Oh, sure, I think we should go: destiny, excitement, what’s-over-the-hill, research, all of those meaningful reasons. All the reasons that will improve us as a species.
But we live in the Age of Commercialism. If it don’t sell, it don’t go.
Actually, what you are looking for is commercial in a literal sense. You are asking for the commercial. Or the advertising slogan. For proposed space missions, the phrase, “elevator speech” has entered the vernacular. According to a story, someone got a mission funded by ending up in an elevator with a senior NASA official, and being able to clearly and convincingly explain what his proposal was about in the time it took for the elevator to go up half a dozen floors. I guess you’re asking about the elevator speech for a human presence on the Moon. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer. I’d just say that, if you can make it cheap enough, you wouldn’t need such a motivation. I’d say ten or possibly a hundred times the cost of a trip to Antarctica is about the point where it wouldn’t take an inspirational justification.
I’d say you’ve started me thinking in a new direction, for which I thank you.
I’ve been thinking all along that the cost wouldn’t come down very much— by ‘very much’, I mean several orders of magnitude. SX is around $2500/KG to LEO (correct me if I’m wrong on these numbers, they are straight from simple calculations on the SX website).
Could the cost ever be, say, $250, or $25? Don’t know, but I’m thinking not very likely. And if that’s true, then ‘customers’ who go to space are a very rarified and very small group.
But say the cost goes to somewhere around $250/KG. At that price you’d not need much motivation.
[It’s worth noting that Keith didn’t post about the latest SX venture, which included a previously owned booster and Dragon. This isn’t criticism- far from it. It’s a recognition of reality. I still watched it, though, especially the landing].
The price SX charges is about $1,100/lb, down from the often given rate of $10,000 for traditional launch systems/Shuttle. That alone is a drop. Even if ULA prices are actually lower than the often used figure (I recall reading somewhere an Atlas heavy was around $3,000/lb.) it still a drop from earlier prices for launch.
But that doesn’t mean that it costs SX $1100/lb to launch a pound of mass into orbit. The cost would be less than that and is probably a lot less. But as a private firm SX is not operating on cost plus contracts, but fixed prices for NASA and negotiated ones (with prices confidential) for private payloads. So SX costs could and probably are much lower. But they would be fools to leave money on the table if $1100/lb is enough to undercut their current competition in launch service.
What will be interesting is to see how far the prices fall when New Glenn is in service.
That would be in line with the numbers I’ve seen. As to the SX markup— now that’s a piece of data lots of us would curiously consume.
I wonder though how space transportation will shake out, and how the various companies will compete. As a far more prosaic example, I don’t compete on price in my business. This isn’t to say I’m not price sensitive, nor are my clients. But I don’t tell folks I’ll beat the lowest quote.
Service? Reading through the publicly available material that SX provides to potential customers there is an awful lot that the launch company does to facilitate smooth campaigns. Cost? Surely yes, but what’s the delta that matters? 10% of $50M, say, is an awful lot. So is 1%. Reliability? I predict this won’t be an issue within my own lifetime- sooner, probably. Five years down the road and rocket explosions will be a thing of the past. It is inevitable.
What else?
Actually, it really is worth noting that we didn’t hear much about the latest SpaceX launch. That’s the point. The line (real or not) about the pre-accident Apollo 13 mission was that NASA had made going to the Moon about as exciting as a trip to Pittsburgh. That shouldn’t be a criticism; it’s what we want. Going to the Moon needs to be more like a business trip than an adventure.
Many have said there is no business model for going to space except for communications satellites in the GEO belt. Everything else has only one customer: the government.
Wrong – look at the constellations of “Earth Resources” photographic satellites in sun synchronous (etc) orbits. WorldView, Planet Labs, etc etc etc.
Ok. Two.
What else?
Global Positioning System. And, to save time, “Ok. Three. What else?” Let’s make it a comprehensive list and say “robotic spacecraft which observe from space and/or transmit data to and from the surface.” I haven’t seen much of a business plan for any other space-based activities (well, possibly also for things which facilitate those activities.)
You don’t know much about space, do you? How about Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite, Landsat, etc. Those are also NOT comm satellites in the geo belt. Want more? Do some reading, this is not intended as an educational forum.
The space ‘industry’ these days lives on the Big Hope: that given sufficient research, and sufficiently low prices, space will bloom like the American West.
It’s a precious analog, to be sure, as several here have pointed out. The industry is more like a race horse, penned up and ready to roar, with no real course ahead. Or something.
Demonstrably the governments of many nations have done their part. They’ve designed and blown up hundreds of rockets, and engines, pumps and engine designs, trial and error that couldn’t have been done privately. It’s not exactly an Interstate Highway System, but it is an enormous body of research and experience. Two great American companies have taken the pieces, creating Falcon and New Horizons.
But the point remains the same, which is this: the ‘market’ is very, very constrained. Military? Check. GPS/Communications? Check. Trips to the ISS? Check. Big Bird in space? Check. Yes, a few non-government entities use launch services.
But to deny the fact that it’s limited hardly moves the ball forward. We need a killer app. We need Lotus 1-2-3. Something really new. Perhaps sufficiently low lift prices will drive a really great idea. This will happen but so far it’s not clear where.
Folks like me standing in the bleachers yelling “we should go! we should go!” just ain’t enough. And for sure the current buyers of launch services are insufficient.
At least the settlers going to Virginia knew why they were going, it was to get rich mining gold and silver in the new world 🙂
Seriously, this is why frontiers are conquered by individuals and not governments. Governments need justifications while individuals just do it. The good thing is SpaceX and Blue Origin are bringing cost down individuals, or a least groups of them, will be able to finally access the high frontier.
I think you’re on to something here, Herr Professor. If the gubment finds the possibility of something that could make me money, I’m going.
The folks who got rich in 49 in California were the outfitters, don’t forget. (Also don’t forget the miners raped California).
What government? North America wasn’t settled by the English government, it was settled by for-profit private firms, The Virginia Company, the Masscheutts Bay Company, the Hudson Bay Company. Almost all the English explorers of that period were working for for-profit corporations or groups of investors. John Cabot wasn’t funded by the English government but by a group of Adventure Merchants out of Bristol led by Sir Richard Amerika.
Yes, thank goodness the EPA didn’t exist then. If they had we would be still stuck on the East Coast. Sadly the Planetary Protection folks are likely to be a similar barrier to the economic development of Mars.
Yes of course I was thinking in more modern terms, particularly transportation infrastructure. Certainly profit-seeking companies like East India, and the examples you cite, paved the way.
How far does the analogy go, though? In all of these cases there was knowledge about potential profit- the existence of beavers, as a single example.
Beavers are a very good example. No one would have built a business model on beavers in the early 1600’s. There was no real demand for beavers until the fur reached Europe and even then little interest until it became high fashion to wear things made of beaver fur as a status symbol. When the fad ended in the late 1800’s so did a lot of the demand for beavers.
We won’t know what a similar product is from the Moon until we start the economic exploration of it. But also keep in mind that high costs to climb out of the Earth’s gravity does not mean high costs shipping to Earth at the bottom of the gravity well. The US Navy’s new rail gun has the ability to fire 40 lb rounds at speeds greater than lunar escape velocity.
I can’t find the reference, but I believe the westward expansion of Canada is a counter-example. Unlike the United States, the government built the railways and the settlers followed. But, if I’m correct about that, it was an unusual example.
We should go to the Moon because the amount of space funding is already mostly locked-in by politics, so we should spend it on the most useful thing we can.
That’s for crewed space exploration. For robotic space exploration, we should go for the possible scientific discoveries.
How is sending a few humans back to the moon “the most useful thing we can”?
If we’re going to have a funded crewed program for political reasons, and that funding is not going to be increasing much any time soon, then the Moon is the best destination for that program.
My question was, why is the moon “the best destination”?
There’s opportunities for research, opportunities for testing resource extraction and processing, and most importantly it’s something we could do with the budget that wouldn’t just be ISS 2.0. Mars is not going to happen with the budget we have now, not without a radical shift in the political forces underpinning NASA’s crewed program (i.e. a massive reallocation of resources away from the traditional set of contractors and space centers) – and maybe not even then.
Moreover, there’s some international interest in doing the Moon-approach. ESA wants their lunar village, the Chinese are interested in the Moon (although it’s uncertain whether they’d want to go along with an international effort), and the Russians could probably be talked into it. Some of the other countries with nascent space programs might be willing to at least pay for their astronauts and research to piggy-back on the back of the effort.
Don’t think this is what I really want. If it were up to me, most of the funding would go into robotic exploration while what’s left is used to pay for flights to test getting costs down. But that’s not going to happen.
This could be Door Number Two for sure. If it is true that the thesis- popular in these parts- that the whole SLS thing is entirely driven by the greedy desire to keep folks working, then it stands to reason (a funny word in this context) that the money would keep flowing somewhere.
I don’t think it’s entirely done by that, but “keeping the money flowing to politically connected contractors and space centers” is definitely the biggest political force underpinning the crewed space program right now. The smarter thing would be to try and give them something better to build than SLS and a Deep Space Gateway with no funding for reusable landers.
You should go to the Moon because it’s a good destination. Mostly for scientific reasons, but possibly for commercial ones as well. It doesn’t help much as a stepping stone on the way to Mars, though – a Mars-bound spacecraft would probably launch from Earth or Earth-orbit, lunar surface conditions don’t tell you much about Martian ones, etc.
Why, because we are driven to learn new things. We do that by exploring, and solving problems, and in the process discover things we didn’t expect or anticipate, and we grow. Our place is not meant to be with the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
The only reason for going to the Moon is if you are restricted to using the SLS architecture hardware. Since that architecture’s current components can only get to cis-lunar area. Not the surface of the Moon, which required a more robust lander than the LEM from the Apollo program.
Well said.
For me, I have always been concerned with our Astronauts having to dealing with the “unknown-unknowns”–those things we didn’t know that we didn’t know before we headed off to Mars and would probably get them killed. If you are three days from home, you can be a lot bolder with your goals and plans, because you don’t need the caution, margins, and redundancies required when you have no hope of rescue or resupply. Some have argued that the Moon’s harsher environment makes Mars more inviting, to which I say let’s swing the three proverbial bats before we step up to the plate when it really counts.
I think it is well past time for us to have set up a permanent research station on the Moon (I’m keen on Shackleton crater, myself). There, much like McMurdo in Antarctica, we first spend a good deal of time figuring out how to build and maintain an offworld outpost, while building and maintaining an offworld outpost. As exciting a Moon base would be to provide an opportunity to learn and possibly answer questions we didn’t even know to ask, the most important bit of research would be provided by its very existence: How do you live off the Earth, efficiently and sustainably, for long periods of time? What will you need? How will you do it? What works best? You can try to simulate that on Earth or on Orbit as much as you like, but in the end, nature makes no assumptions; the only way to truly know how is to do it, find out what _doesn’t_ work, learn, fix it, and keep going.
Once built, we will have a premiere research facility for doing research and developing technology you really can’t do anywhere else. What astronomer _wouldn’t_ want a radio telescope array on the dark side of the moon? (I mean the side tidally locked away from the Earth…sorry to bring up a pet-peeve of yours, Keith.) How about crystal growth in 1/6 g? Fuel depots in a very shallow gravity well? Helium-3 extraction? (How’s that micro-fusion reactor going, Lockheed?)
If Humanity is going to persist, we must become an interplanetary species. This is inarguable. The dark view being: the longer we wait, the greater the chance that we won’t have the chance. The brighter view: the longer we wait, the more opportunities we miss where we could have advanced further, faster, if we only had the courage to do so. We are on the verge of having the technology. We should get started, now.