Stealthy NASA Deep Space Gateway Meeting Underway
Keith’s note: NASA is holding a Deep Space Gateway meeting in Denver right now. A hundred or so people are there. It is invitation-only. No webcast. No Webex. So U.S taxpayers and media cannot see what is going on but foreign nationals were invited – so they can. NASA and LPI never said media could attend, never provided any way to register, and never released any other information to that effect. They ignored an email I sent several months back inquiring. Now, half way through the event I find out they have hand-picked news media in attendance.
They claim that they cannot webcast this event since there are multiple sessions – yet it is so easy to do this with a cellphone and Facebook if need be. They also claim that since this is not a “decisional” meeting they do not see the need to webcast it yet they webcast things like this all the time.
Public and media concerns aside, no one at NASA who is working on the Deep Space Gateway or people working at companies and universities supporting this research can watch it either. All we get are short abstracts and a summary that someone at NASA PAO without a technical background will write in a few months about what they think is important from what other people said.
Scott Parazynski and I did live webcasts – daily – from 17,600 feet at Everest Base Camp 9 years ago using a small BGAN unit I carried on my back. NASA sent back live video of a Soyuz landing in Kazakhstan this morning and posting pictures shortly thereafter on Flickr yet they cannot webcast a simple meeting from a hotel in Denver about a project that will last several decades?
This workshop is by invitation only and is not being live streamed.
— LPItoday (@LPItoday) February 27, 2018
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I hope to see the report at least summarized here. 😉
Someday.
I’m guessing it might take a FOIA request to get it.
Well, “DSG” has had its first name change. Per the 2019 budget info sheet,
Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G)
That acronym just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Maybe they’re trying to get actual work done instead of putting on a show.
Or… maybe they think they know more about what to do and where things should be going than everyone else. Always two sides to the coin and I usually bet on the more egocentric version of human nature.
I concur with you on this. Although I can understand Keith’s frustration as a journalist, I don’t think every NASA meeting needs to be live streamed. Sometimes NASA folks just need to be doing their thing without worrying about every comment in a meeting being judged on Facebook…or whatever. It’s very early days on DSG. I’m sure that there will be plenty of opportunity to view and critique NASA’s forward plan on this as time goes on and before the metaphorical die is cast.
As far as Mr. Barker’s comment, it’s worth considering that – depending on who is actually invited to the meeting – that group actually may know more and better than everyone else. Everyone has an opinion on everything these days, but so what. Diverse views on a complex project in its initial stages is a good thing, but one can have too much of a good thing.
I don’t necessarily condone their working this in private, but I can understand it. There’s no obvious consensus yet on either where a cislunar station would be, or on what it would do. Beginning to sort that out halfway sensibly will be hard enough without everyone having to watch every word.
Mind, what it should do seems obvious to me. It’s either aimed long-term at being a transit hub, or not worth doing.
– As a point for pure human research, there’s a somewhat easier power environment with 24-hour sunlight (modulo occasional eclipses) but considerably tougher transportation and radiation environment. (Regular instrument passes through Earth’s magnetotail might be of some interest, but that can be done with sats far easier.) (Am I missing anything here?)
– As a transport hub, I recommend spending some time looking over
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
and it should be obvious. Low delta V to the nearest off-Earth source of propellant mass (also rad-shield mass)(plus by far the nearest off-Earth “there”), medium delta V to LEO, and extremely low delta V to and from Earth escape.
This last point, very low delta V to and from earth escape, gets a lot more important once you look into the implications of future usefully higher-energy and thus lower-thrust transport systems. (I tend to view nuclear thermal as at best an interim step – there’s just not enough delta V advantage over chemical rockets to seriously open up the inner system.)
With low-thrust high-energy systems, there’s a BIG loss involved in spiralling in and out of Earth’s gravity well. Run the numbers and a high-thrust auxiliary system to handle that part makes huge sense. Putting the deep-space transport transfer point cislunar, near both the top of Earth’s well (minimizing the amount of high-thrust delta V required) and Lunar propellant sources, makes huge sense.
IF, that is, we actually care about opening up the inner solar system to routine human operations. Me, I do. YMMV.
Mind, what it should do seems obvious to me. It’s either aimed long-term at being a transit hub, or not worth doing.
Seems obvious to quite a number of folks, but those folks aren’t necessarily in charge. That the meeting (see fcrary’s comment below about the abstracts) seems to be on its way to becoming a re-channeling of the ‘cast-a-wide-net’ solicitation efforts with Freedom/ISS and then the VSE’s lunar base is NOT encouraging.
What’s that definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result?
Sigh.
Well, it is a necessary part of the old NASA program-constituency building process. Get as many scientists as possible to sign up for a small piece, to add every morsel of support that can be gleaned. (Rather like the cubesats included on SLS…)
The overall process is manifestly faltering, but until something new replaces it, they’ll keep trying.
Put another way, the people in charge have to be aware that they cannot possibly plan for the large budget increases it’d take to do a useful transport hub under the traditional design-everything-in-house approach. They’re doing what’s usually done at that point – try to get their camel’s nose in the tent, and hope things change later.
It was a disaster with Constellation, one we’re still paying for. But it’s all they know.
So, is your argument with the ‘net casting’ approach, or do you take issue with how the acquired input is molded?
No, my point was not either the style or the arrangement of the deck chairs.
I guess I’m more concerned with the idea of deciding to do something and then holding meetings to figure out why you’re doing it. I realize there are both overt and ulterior motives involved. But it would be nice if there were actually some stated goal which determines what the hardware needs to do.
In architecture we call this ‘form follows function’.
That no one has any interest in a DSG except NASA, which sees it as a way to make sure the money keeps flowing for the SLS. It will, of course, be designed so only the SLS will be able to build it. It will also rope in the old gang from the ISS to ensure Congress HAS to pay for it.
But in terms of exploring the Solar System, or even the Moon, it will have zero value.
You’re forgetting the scientists who will get to fly experiments on DSG. The program needs some window dressing to make it look like science and exploration. (And, to be honest, if I were at all interested in lunar science, I might be tempted to provide some of that window dressing.)
True, they will find a number of experiments to use it for.
But I find it interesting that NASA is able operate rovers on Mars from Earth, but has to be in Lunar orbit to operate them on the Moon 🙂
“Science” alone and without some form of long term plan is completely tenuous and unsustainable for the costs and time involved in human space flight. People should stop trying to sell “science” as if it was packaged in a box. Ive worked years in the space program and never found one of these boxes of science.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that science should be more goal oriented, and not so much the science that lets researchers follow whatever interests them? (That’s what some call ‘pure’ science, I think).
No, there needs to be a goal that is sustainable and long term – our discussion on “settlements” above is the perfect example. Science is a process and our society sells it as a magical thing – a thing you can put in a box (my analogy). The process of doing scientific research will never support the permanent and sustainable expansion of humans off Earth. If you build a sustainable plan (i.e., if you build it they will come) then science will naturally be done as you go, and probably more of it as more people can be involved.
“The process of doing scientific research will never support the permanent and sustainable expansion of humans off Earth.”
Or on earth .. that is why we operate under the economic system of capitalism and not sciencism
I think you are baiting me, Vlad…!
Unfortunately, treating science as a process rather than a commodity doesn’t quite work. Unless you expect scientists to be independently wealthy (which would be highly discriminatory and non-inclusive), they do have to be paid. Baring rich patrons (who might just pay a famous scientist simply to have a famous scientist on staff) most employers want to make sure they are getting something for their money. The government certainly does.
That leads to all sorts of metrics and attempts to measure the “amount” of science a person or a research project is “producing.” They all tend to be pretty poor measures, and since most scientists tend to be reasonably smart, many of them figure out how to rig the statistics in their favor. But I’ve yet to see any viable suggestions for alternatives.
These are shifty terms, to be sure, but I think what you are describing is more like technology or engineering.
It’s more than simple semantics, though. As Dr. Crary has pointed out, “research” must be driven by curiosity of the scientists and nothing more.
The work in saturn’s realm, for instance, is curisott-driven for the most part; so too Juno. In both cases data on electron flux or whatever could become valuable in some distant future that’s not really foreseeable now.
But isn’t this true of pretty much all scientific research? Doesnt new knowledge become folded into our world view, and into our products and services eventually and often in unforeseen ways?
Who for instance would have seen the impact of the conductive characteristics of germanium and silicon? (From memory this happened in the late 40’s).
I keep saying the DSG is a “bridge to no where.”
And a very expensive one. Start with $6 billion for the 6 launches of the SLS needed to build it. Add in the cost of the modules and R&D. I am guessing it will be a $20 billion project at a minimum, with a couple billion in operating costs per year. This of course doesn’t include the $25-30 billion for the SLS.
Ya, and $20 billion would be a great focused start in getting the infrastructure of a Mars base set up, and in the same amount of time. And if done correctly would be sustainable and permanent.
I blame Mr. Musk for poisoning my view of everything in SpaceLand 🙂
Whenever a space-number is mentioned, especially in the billions, my brain wonders “I wonder what Elon could do with that much money”?
You forgot the billion dollar Orion capsules that will be used and discarded;
From everything I have seen to date.. there is nothing SLS specific.. A module would have to be so heavy as to need it or need a wide fairing .. neither is he case.. looks like ULA or SpaceX could launch the modules.
I’ve actually seen people organize invitation-only meetings for purely bureaucratic reasons. They wanted a one-off, scientific meeting, but if they called it a conference a significant number of people wouldn’t be allowed to attend. The process for getting approval for travel (at their NASA center; each one seems to have their own rules) would allow them to attend a “workshop” or a “program meeting” but not a “conference.” Open registration would have made the event a “conference.” So the organizers just told everyone (word of mouth) and everyone who emailed them got an invitation. That’s a fairly poor way to do things, but it seemed like the only way to get around a rule that made little real sense.
We have a very strong ‘Sunshine Law’ in Florida, as many know. The idea is sound: no substantive meetings without public access.
Recently I needed to show the Board of Directors of an HOA some of my previous work; this involved driving to several sites in Lee and Collier counties.
But the lawyers got wind of it, explaining that more than two Board members on a field trip constitutes a ‘meeting’ and must be open to the public. I am not sure what we will do at this point.
If it’s a site visit, isn’t it by definition already “open to the public”?
That depends on how many fit in my car…
Why do you have to provide transport?
I would think the board members would be legally covered if they just tabled the time/location(s) of your “meeting”, at any scheduled, minuted HOA meeting prior to the site visits.
(That said, IANAL, IAARIOTI.)
But Keith said ” no one at NASA who is working on the Deep Space Gateway or people working at companies and universities supporting this research can watch it either.”
So the question is .. who?
Well, I just ran across a interesting coincidence. On November 1, 2017, NASA commissioned some four-month studies on developing and building the power and propulsion module. Four months from November 1 would be now. Maybe Boeing, LMA, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada and SS/L are reporting their results.
“Maybe Boeing, LMA, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada and SS/L are reporting their results.” Or maybe not. We have no idea what is being said other than some abstracts.
Actually, your mention of abstracts made me look them up. It’s definitely not about reports on those studies. I recognize quite a few of the names and I’m a little disappointed. Going on the abstracts, this is basically a “if NASA was going to give you a platform to mount your favorite instrument on, would you want them to?” event. From the scientists point of view, that’s an automatic “yes” and it builds a case for the gateway being a scientific research station.
Some of the abstract aren’t even a good idea. Manned spacecraft tend to be a very poor platform for certain instruments. The only thing worse would be not having a platform to fly the instruments on at all.
I’m also not happy with the organizers. In the process of finding the abstracts, I also noticed where the meeting is. The Westin at Denver International Airport. They did manage to negotiate a group rate at the legal maximum of $180 per night (GSA per diem for Denver.) But that hotel normally charges $250 or more, the hotel restaurants are about as costly as you’d expect, and the few others at the airport and outside security aren’t much better. (And there isn’t much of anything else nearby.) If you deliberately tried to pick the most expensive venue in the metro Denver area, that wouldn’t be far off.
Why the hell hold a NASA meeting in Denver?
NASA has ten major centres in the US, but lets go to a random hotel.
NASA-organized (or Lunar and Planetary Institute organized, but there isn’t too much difference) meetings at NASA centers are relatively uncommon. If they want people from universities and industry to attend, getting through security is just too much of a pain. Ames does have conference facilities outside the fence, and headquarters has a lecture hall between the front door and the metal detector. JPL can configure Van Karmen auditorium to be either inside or outside, but not both.
As for why Denver? I’d guess it’s centrally located and a major airline hub. Other than that, Lockheed Martin and the University of Colorado are close. But I’ve given up on figuring out why they pick one city or another for some of these meetings. The Outer Planets Assessment Group tends to rotate around between home institutes of the steering committee, which makes some sense.
Denver doesn’t bother me so much, but as a local, I could name a couple of other airport hotels which would have been fine and probably half as expensive. I know it isn’t, for a multi-billion dollar project, all that much money. But it feels a little gratuitous and must have made it harder for younger scientists and those without much institutional overhead to attend.
Security?
Years ago JPL was pretty much an open campus.
Does anyone remember the Open Houses they once held? The last one I attended was, I think, 1999 or 2001. I flew to Pasadena to attend more than once…it was a rare (and valued) to actually meet and talk to PIs and other scientists. One could actually wander down corridors and knock on doors. For anybody interested in space it was just hard to describe: a day with far, far too few hours.
It was just plain terrific.
And, I was able to grow my collection of photos: pictures of me, that is, standing in front of a NASA center sign. How corny is that? 🙂
I’m afraid things have changed. JPL still does the Open House, but it now requires a ticket to get in (and the name has to match the one on the ticket; they really want a list of visitors well in advance.) I haven’t been to one in a long time, but these days, I think they have to block off the plaza right next to the front gate (the one between Van Karman and the administrative building.)
If you’re going there on business JPL wants names months in advance and anyone with a visitor badge still has to have an escort. That’s for US citizens. It’s even more awkward for foreign nationals. For JPL planetary missions, the project science team/group meetings are usually at a Pasadena area hotel, so they don’t have to deal with JPL security.
I actually didn’t know that – in fact, wasn’t there a period during which the events were stopped? A lot of things changed after 911 so maybe it was then.
The plaza – if I remember correctly there are some raised planters, with seat walls – was a quiet place where people could actually talk to the scientists and engineers.
So many things have changed. /wistful
Makes sense. Certain regulations and lack of funding or lack of approval authority forces employees to do work-arounds that either don’t make sense or good for that specific event but not good for the long run (insert “In Soviet Russia…” meme here). Or lets say funding is available for the workshop but job order cannot be used for costs of registration website, webex, streaming, whatever. And if funding is allowed, are there other issues that need to be dealt with (IT approval that will take 3 or 4 months to be resolved).
President and Space Council ask for a return to the Moon. “Not just for Flags and footprints but to live and explore”. NASA responds with a plan to build and out of the way rest stop over 12 years first. this LOP-G is like saying the best way to go from Boston to NYC is to go through a rest stop we first have to build in Montreal. just a sad excuse to justify SLS/Orion.
Flags, footprints and “explore” – not too encouraging or sustainable for any permanent expansion for humans off Earth. The use of the word “explore” should not be used anymore if people truly want to get humans off Earth permanently. The whole concept, intent and meaning of the word is transient, ephemeral, and unsustainable as a goal. 1966 Star Trek had the advantage of near infinite energy resources, speed and was not held back by a monetary system, and that is why they could endlessly explore – but of course that is science fiction.
Once the proper term is used – ‘settlement’ – we move from the realm of engineers to the realm of geographers and planners
And those mischievous folks are going to ask some uncomfortable questions, questions framed in the language of human settlement over the millennia. They will wonder where settlers will live, and recreate. Historically settlements occur around transportation to give one example, and they will ask how transportation will support Luna City. Where will people live? How do they get to work? Where do we grow crops? etc.
Personally I think that NASA would do well to include planners and architects, both of who could have done much to make ISS more hospitable.
(And lest I rile the engineers herein, let me explain: I’m certainly not disparaging the design skills of engineers. And while, for instance, engineers are always involved in the creation of new communities (or subdivisions), it is also true that developers go to planners for an entirely different level of design. We have a different, and, dare I say it – more inclusive – point of departure).
I actually like the idea of an orbiting lunar station.
I do to if you were manning it regularly not once a year and it wasn’t so far out of the way. there is a place for a orbiting shipyard when you start talking about building up your cargo and crew transit for Mars cause you can send up prop and such from the moon, but going 70k km past the Moon to then go down to the surface is a big detour.
I have been trying to think of any major science fiction stories about stations orbiting the Moon and come up blank. There are some about stations in the EM L1 location but none in orbit around the Moon. So NASA is really going into unknown territory here 🙂
Of course the reason there are none is because the authors just assumed if you are going so far it would be simpler and easier to just build a base on the surface. Its like driving from NY to Disney World and then never getting out of the car to go in…
Stephen Baxter’s classic 1996 novel ”Voyage” had a ‘Moonlab’ in high lunar orbit. It was based on the Skylab design and was portrayed as a precursor to sending something similar to Mars.
Thanks! I will have to read that.
Here are moon novels a few have stations but are not the focus
http://bestsciencefictionbo…
A fraction of humanity survived a nuclear war on a Moon-orbiting station in “A Specter is Haunting Texas”, of course the Texans also survived…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
What are they hiding?
[HUMOR]
The fact that there are NO plans to go ANYWHERE… except to dinner.
[/HUMOR]
Actually, I hope my humorous take is inaccurate, but, really, if there was a real future, they’d want it known, wouldn’t they.
Just a quess, but I suspect that what happened;
(1) there was the uproar in 2004, mainly led by the Gehman committee, that Shuttle would kill someone and so it was time to call it off and go someplace new.
(2) NASA managers did not like the idea they were supposed to figure out what to do in Earth orbit on the ISS because after all they are engineers and operators and not scientists, so why not give the jobs they did not want to do to someone else (they never figured out who else)
(3) NASA and especially the astronauts want to go someplace; boring holes in Earth orbit is boring
(4) the Administrator decided we would repeat Apollo, with Constellation, because Apollo was exciting (only in his mind-to everyone watching in 1969, the excitement was over on July 22)
(5) Constellation’s architecture did not work
(6) NASA could not afford Constellation, certainly not the way it manages its money; without any other plan, Congress kept Orion and SLS going
(7) NASA did not know what to do with Orion and SLS; they could not afford a moon lander; actually they could not afford Orion or SLS; Orion was only a lunar vehicle with about a 2 week lifetime and could not go to the asteroid belt or to Mars
(8) NASA invented the Lagranginan point Gateway to give Orion a place to go; it wasn’t the moon but hey, it was going someplace
(9) people began to wonder what the purpose of this newly invented Gateway was all about.
That brings us to step 10, which is where we are today, and now NASA is trying to figure out if there is anything useful to be done at a Gateway, out between the Moon and Earth, hundreds of thousands of miles from anything to see. That is the purpose of this meeting.
Apparently this is what NASA considers to be strategic planning.
And if you think flying around the Earth with so many wondrous sights to see out of the 3D cupola window is boring, wait until you are stuck in a 3 meter box with a couple tiny windows and nothing nearby to look at for 5 or 6 weeks.
I have the sense that there will be opportunity for public input. Bt I also feel that as others have said here a non-public event will illicit a wider range of ideas, both for policy, where it is sorely needed, and for technology.
It’s just too easy for the uninformed to dismiss early and sometimes wild ideas as somehow typical. This would include the press.
” no one at NASA who is working on the Deep Space Gateway or people working at companies and universities supporting this research can watch it either.”
Ideas from who?
Point taken Vlad; criticism of the membership remains valid.
But so too the point that we are absolutely merciless in criticizing leaders, fair or not; as a result, few will publicly float an oddball idea in public. We are addicted to gotcha public discourse.
On the larger issue, we are in early days of a design- so early that the decision to build or not hasn’t been made. Still, it’s a design process, with the emphasis on “process”.
Actually this is playing out pretty much like I said it would only it was predicated on H. Clinton would be the ending the ISS and not trump.
From the looks of the abstracts, there is some marketing involved as well. At this stage, the scientists involved want to show people they have an interesting idea, get enough of the details out that it may influence any future Announcement of Opportunity, but not be specific enough to let a potential competitor grab their idea and run with it.
There are foreign nationals registered at this event and making presentations. No ITAR limitations are mentioned on the website.