Back To The Moon 3.0
America’s Return to the Moon: A Foothold, Not Just Footprints. Air & Space
“Our return to the Moon will not be like the Apollo-style sorties of the old Constellation project. This new approach calls for true lunar habitation – our first foothold on another world. The sooner we understand what is needed to get started, the better. The Trump administration’s national policy directive (via its Space Council) calls for the return of humans to the lunar surface to use its resources. Since NASA has previously been tasked with this near-term space goal – lunar return – understanding the significance of the goal will go a long way toward completing a vital mission that has faltered and failed twice before.”
‘We Choose to Go to the Moon’ Again–But When?, The Atlantic
“The lack of a bumper sticker-worthy target may be disappointing, particularly for lunar scientists and advocates who have been craving a renewed emphasis on the moon. Public deadlines for the space program can be beneficial in a number of ways; they can impose some sense of internal discipline, unite multiple corners of the scientific community, and rally excitement and inspiration from the public that’s paying for it. But deadlines in space exploration are also notoriously fickle. They stall, they shift, they get tossed out by one president and reinstalled by another. And in the meantime, little actually gets done to reach them.”
Boldly. Go.
I share your succinct view that it’s time to stop yakking about what we ‘should’ do and just to get down to it. This administration has set policy (the right one IMHO) – we are going back to the Moon, Paul Spudis article lays out a perfectly rational view on how we should go about it, and now it comes within the power of VP Pence to kick it up a notch, to show some real leadership and establish a tangible plan with calendar dates and a willingness to fight for a reliable long term budget to support the plan. As for the “slow 40” NASA engineers quoted by Mr. Spencer above – assuming they were real people and not fictional characters to make a point – I would say lead, follow, or get your lazy backsides out of the way. It’s Go time.
Looks like “Air & Space” ran out of room on this story, so I thought I’d finish it for them; I hope it is helpful:
Listen as the same NASA employee continued:
“No, the moon landings will not be like Apollo at all. I don’t mean that the types of landings will be different. They have to be! [Here he nods to this reporter, winking, and continues]. We need to show that we been doing something, after all. Those first landings were short and called “sorties;” they were all brief, after all. However, that’s not where the difference between the 1970s and the 2020s will be.”
The primary difference, now more than 50 years later? For one, notice that NASA has finally rid itself of that pesky “can do!” attitude!
Gone are the snappy salutes from engineers worried about their jobs- now that they are protected by Civil Service. Gone, toots the notion that the “impossible takes a little longer;” and none too soon, according to many of the engineers I spoke to: “Who the hell ever made that up, anyway? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!”
Many others agreed. One highly-placed engineer added “And weekends! We have them back!”, a comment widely held, as I saw nodding heads all around the room.
Another manager was a bit more philosophical: “I do not use the word “genius” lightly, but anyone works here [sic] would wonder ‘who is the genius who discovered that the right side of the schedule is made out of rubber?’ Someone shouted from the back: “Rubber? What kind of engineer are you, anyway? The schedule is made out of thin air!” The room burst into raucous laughter.
Later, as the same manager continued showing the facilities, he wondered: “Who discovered the linear relationship between payroll and project longevity? Everyone here puts in a “slow 40″- ask around if you don’t know the term!- and retires as soon as possible. Sweet!”
So many lessons, so aptly applied. While there is a lot to be thankful for, this reporter learned that this is not your daddy’s NASA.
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Added a few days later: I find that so often I must append my comments because the net is seen cast widely. Having followed NASA as an outsider as best I can for decades, I have learned one simple truth: you rank and file guys are excluded. The craziness that we see from our Agency results from the policy makers, the managerial types, not the dedicated engineers, scientists, and others, all of whom are simply trying to do their science. Or engineering. Or whatever else drives them.
This article makes me wonder about the utility of a lunar orbiting outpost. It suddenly seems a waste if time and resources as compared to just going straight to a lunar pole.
I suppose that, from a Mars prep standpoint, it will help us prepare for the three-month journey there and back again. It would also help us prepare for one of the “no touchy” Mars exploration plans that I’ve heard discussed. The other no-touchy plan involves a surface base on Phobos. I don’t support the “no-touchy” idea BTW. Maybe someone who does would have a different perspective on this.
The only real reason I could see for it would be if you didn’t want to have to rely on a heavy booster to get your astronauts to a Moon Base every time. That’s an expensive, difficult to develop rocket.
But then you’d have the expensive of maintaining the orbiting outpost, the expense of landers, and so forth, so maybe it’s all about the same.
The heavy booster is the only thing they are committed to building.
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Whatever the method, they need a lander (unless they go the BFR route). IMO, it would be better to make the lander the “lunar orbital station” between surface missions. It must be capable of docking, obviously, so it should also work fine with unmanned refuelling flights (via commercial players) since that’s a mature technology on ISS. It must be able to let the EVA astronauts out on the surface, so it has a proper EVA hatch as well as a IVA docking hatch, so it is capable of allowing in-orbit EVA repair/replacement missions.
And if you are serious about lunar development, not just flags’n’footprints-part-2, the lander will need to be fully reusable. As well as large, adaptable and capable. So while it’s in orbit, it’s already a small space-station.
So why LOP-G? The fact that NASA is building a single purpose, one-module orbital hab as their next thing seems to be a fear of committing to a lander. (Fair enough, given the hash they made of it with Altair.) After ISS, they think they can make another station module. They aren’t sure about anything else. LOP-G may not be the right answer, but it’s the only one they think they can do.
That’s getting way ahead of what we currently know or can do. If lunar ice is easily available for fuel, a specialized lander would make quite a bit more sense. Unless we can build a single, Earth-surface-to-Lunar-surface massive vehicle and operate it very cheaply (BFR might, but remember that BFR is the descoped version of ITS, and that descope happened in the first year after it was announced. So I’ll wait and see.) It all depends on what’s out there and what the best way to use it happens to be. I don’t think we know yet.
It seems like everyone whats to go directly to a base or station of some sort. I know there is a fear that short, small missions might turn into Apollo 2, with no lasting presence. But designing a base or a station in the absence of more information just guarantees a bad design. That includes more experience with what astronauts can do on the Moon and what sort of infrastructure is required to support it. I think a few short-term missions (say four people and a ten day surface stay) makes more sense at first. Then we’d know more about what sort of permanent infrastructure we need and want.
We shouldn’t rush into a base, obviously. We need robotic landers at the poles to try and measure the ice, and elsewhere. We’d also definitely want to do some crewed landing missions first as a test of the technology before building up to a base.
I think Paul has the right idea on simply making the landers the rendezvous ships in orbit instead of having a gateway. They could be refueled and re-supplied in orbit, and at a base on the ground. They’re already going to need some capability for reuse in landing and launching, and some ability to keep crew alive for a day or three on excursions away from the base (unless we wanted to have a separate class of suborbital landers to do that).
I do. At least until we’ve made a decent effort at ruling out Martian life. Such a discovery would be, IMO scientifically priceless, worth more than anything else we could do on Mars. Right now, in spite of the whole “follow the water” claim, we aren’t even looking. Not a single attempt to resolve the ambiguities of the Viking tests.
If Martian life is discovered, and it’s like Earth extremophiles (suggesting material swap), then after a few uncontaminated samples, there’s no value in a permanent quarantine.
If life is discovered on Mars, but also on comets, outer moons, etc — with similarities suggesting some common origin — then again, after a few uncontaminated samples, there’s not much point in quarantines, since you have a bajillion fresh samples out there in space.
If unique Martian life is discovered, and it uses different chemistry to Earth life, then a permanent quarantine would be my preference until we know a lot more about it. Losing such a unique scientific resource would be madness.
If a targeted, systematic search rules out signs of extant life in all the likely spots, then, again, a quarantine is unnecessary. (There might still be something. But if it doesn’t give indications of life, doesn’t metabolise, doesn’t change, doesn’t grow, who cares?)
“If a targeted, systematic search rules out signs of extant life in all the likely spots, then…”
Depending on how you define “rules out” and “all”, that statement could mean “never.” There are people out there who would like exactly that.
Meh. This is an issue you face with any scientific field work. Whether it’s archaeology in building projects, or just trying to extract enough from a dig before the weather turns or funding runs out.
Just because the answer to “how much is enough” is hard, doesn’t mean the answer is “none” (nor is it “never enough”.)
(Aside: “all” is easy, it’s “likely” that’s hard.)
I’ll just point out, since you mention building and archaeology, that I was at a meeting outside Rome a few years ago. The C line of the metro, which was supposed to connect the area, was still under construction. They started planning it in 1994 with a planned completion date of 2000. They actually didn’t start until 2007. It still didn’t connect to downtown in 2015, and didn’t until this May (2018.) The main reason for the delays was given as “archeological investigations.”
Of course a reasonable person wouldn’t say never or no delays at all. But there are some unreasonable people out there, who would like to push the issue as far as possible, in one direction or the other. There is also lots of room for reasonable people to disagree. For human landings on Mars, some people see little value in them and reasonable conclude that a fifty or hundred year delay wouldn’t be a big deal. Others see little real harm in near-term landings (e.g. because genetic analysis would let us tell if any identified was native or contamination.)
By the way, what about likely but inaccessible habitats for life? A kilometer down in bedrock isn’t implausible give that we’ve found such things on Earth.
Just because there are assholes, don’t mean the debate itself isn’t reasonable.
The harder to reach, the less likely to be contaminated by Earth-life. Likewise, the less Earth-life-like, such that we can’t even detect its activity at our current level of technology, the less likely it is to later be confused with Earth-life.
I’m not saying we have to rule out all possibilities. Just that the value of truly alien life is, IMO, greater than anything else we could do with Mars. Therefore making a reasonable effort to rule out the most likely candidates before manned landings seems a small price to pay to avoid losing the biggest scientific breakthrough in since… I don’t know what.
You didn’t mention the extreme existential importance to the human race of resolving the Fermi Paradox. For that reason, and the one you mentioned, I very much support doing everything we can to resolve the question of life on Mars during this gap before boots on the ground. What I do not support is further delaying boots on the ground while attempting to prove or disprove a negative.
Finding independently evolved life on Mars before humans arrive is critically important to our species IMNSHO…and we may now have considerably less than a decade to achieve that goal…so go out and get ‘er done!
Who are you replying to? (You replied to your own message.)
[“IMNSHO”: You should be aware that most people under 30 think that IMHO means “In My Honest Opinion”, making IMNSHO, “Not So Honest”, rather than “Not So Humble”.]
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Except that “boots on the ground” is what will virtually destroy our ability to find life on Mars. Eliminating the possibility of contamination will be hard enough with robotic rovers, but with actual filthy humans clomping around, you’ve made it close to impossible.
Exactly why we should hurry up and scan for those life forms.
‘IMNSHO”: You should be aware that most people under 30 think that IMHO means “In My Honest Opinion” ‘
I’m 54. 😉
I’m not far behind you. I got here from BBSes in the mid-’80s. I only heard about the honest/humble under-30/over-30 thing because it was mentioned in an XKCD comic. You can still get away with IMHO, but IMNSHO doesn’t work any more.
No, IMHO means ‘In My Humble Opinion’.
And the language continues to devolve…
Here’s the thing…waiting half a life time for humanity to stop going in circles in low earth orbit has convinced me of two things…
1> Government won’t go to Mars first…it’ll take industry going there to exploit.
2> It’ll require an aggressively pursued, hard and fast goal with an attached timeline.
Without these two things, humanity will never reach Mars. However, the top one is incompatible with the Mars “No-Touchy” approach and the bottom one is incompatible with any kind of “wait and see” priority.
But why is putting boots on Mars so important that you’d risk possibly the greatest discovery is history?
No risk necessary…just use the boots on the ground goal as an incentive to search for life more vigorously rather than the using the maybe discovery of maybe life as yet another reason to kick the can further down the road.
Developing interplanetary travel (with Mars as our most obvious incentive and first way point) is important to humanity too.
It’ll be circa mid-1920s to mid-1930s or 40s. There are a lot of smart folks working very, very hard to trim that down to the 20s. We are teaching children that they need algebra by the eighth grade if they want to be among the first. Various technologies are coalescing toward that date…3-D printing, electric rocket propulsion, space habitats, etc. We are very close to the point where sending more robots to the surface is sending a robot to do a human’s job and sending humans to only orbit the planet and look at it would be sending human’s to do a robot’s job.
The world doesn’t work like that. If you are committing to humans on Mars as early as possible, you are telling everyone that you don’t care about existing life on Mars. No such prior search will get funding, let alone get accelerated funding.
Accepting your point, as I do, means we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.
Neither do I have sufficient confidence in the existence of DNA as a fully reliable life marker, by which I mean that there is likely no reliable life marker beyond someone with three arms standing right in front of you.
Indeed move a little more into the land of ab absurdum: what about the possibility of life not DNA based? Or not even carbon based?
And lest anyone jump in with the arguments about the nature of carbon, for instance: I’ve heard them all. The point is that we just do not know. Every single new surface will have the possibility of exotic life on it.
Oh, hell! We might as well just stay at home!
“Life” implies activity and reproduction. You should be able detect the side-effects of metabolic activity, even if you can’t directly detect the lifeform causing it. (That’s what Viking was looking for, in a clumsy way.)
If there’s no activity, then it doesn’t rule out something that could be analogous to life, but it’s different enough from Earth life that contamination isn’t an issue.
As I said to FCrary, just because the problem isn’t 100% clear, doesn’t mean we have to go full retard. Neither “we can’t ever know, therefore we can never send humans!”, nor “you can’t ever know, therefore we will not wait one second before we send humans!”
Using activity, reproduction, metabolism or anything similar as a definition of life is always problematic. I’ve yet to hear a definition along those lines that doesn’t have a counter example.
For example, would you call a solar-powered robotic factory “alive”? It is clearly active. It converts solar energy and raw materials into things that looks very much like itself. Arguably, that is metabolism and reproduction. Unless you look carefully, you could easily miss the role of much smaller organic creatures, or mistake their role as symbiotic.
I don’t think we’ll find any solar powered robotic factories on Mars. Which was the topic.
But I’m not saying that activity/etc is sufficient for a confirmation of Martian life. As I said, any such claim will be controversial. Each potential false-positive will need to be put out to the scientific community for alternative abiological mechanisms, which new tests have to be developed to rule in or out. There’ll be cycles of testing. As with any scientific research.
None-the-less. You’ve proven my point. The definition for “life” is difficult and controversial. Making things harder by drastically increasing the contamination by having humans on the surface before we’ve done any serious testing is stupid. Particularly given the importance of a positive finding.
I don’t think anyone is talking about mass contamination (or even human landings) without _any_ serious testing. Well, perhaps Bob Zubrin, but that would be extreme even for him…
But this is like many other environmental and ethical issues. There are some merits to both sides, and probably no “right” answer everyone would agree on. Consider the Three Gorges dam in China. It has been widely criticized as an environmental and cultural/archeological disaster. But it’s hard to complain about 22.5 GW of clean, renewable electric power production to replace burning 31 million tonnes of coal per year (with all the environmental implications of that.) If we can’t agree about something like that, is there any chance we’ll agree about protecting a search for hypothetical microbes on Mars?
come on . without some furry little tribble life no one will care and at the microscopic level is not going to get much support..
Remember ALH84001? The President of the United States held a press conference to announce it.
Controversial, highly-disputed fossils of sub-micro-organisms. Presidential announcement, wall-to-wall press coverage.
and did they announce life protection protocols and nothing will every land on Mars now?
Is that what you think I’m arguing for?
No I am saying if it was important as you say.. they would already be establishing protocols .. I do not believe anything will be established until after humans land?
There are tons of protocols about planetary protection. But for human landings or sample returns, the official rule is “we’ll come up with the rules when they’re likely to be needed.” The planetary protection office doesn’t do much when it comes to the distant future. They don’t really have the funding to do so, and the possibilities are too vague for detailed work.
We even had problems with Cassini, Enceladus, and Titan. We started planning the end of mission about seven years in advance and knew planetary protection would be a requirement. When the project asked what those requirements were, the planetary protection office said they hadn’t decided yet. So I’m not surprised the don’t have set policies about a human landing on Mars, an even which seems to be perpetually 25 years in the future.
Is there a protocol in place preventing Musk to go?
Frank said: “The planetary protection office doesn’t do much when it comes to the distant future. […] I’m not surprised the don’t have set policies about a human landing on Mars, an even which seems to be perpetually 25 years in the future.” ..which seems to already answer your question.
But Musk needs US government permission under the OST before he can go to Mars. The OST requires control over contamination. And the US government has assigned that to the PPO at NASA.
So SpaceX won’t be given a launch licence until PPO has developed protocols. And IMO, if you’re accepting humans on Mars, you’ve pretty much given up on PP.
(But, as I’ve said elsewhere, IMO if the US government supports humans-to-Mars, which is the official space policy, then it will be politically impossible for NASA to get in the way. Given that, then it IMO it is incredibly irresponsible that NASA’s Mars program hasn’t prioritised life-search for the last three decades.)
I believe the rule is that Mr. Musk, or SpaceX, or whoever must get approval from planetary protection. To get that approval, they have to follow whatever practices the planetary protection office requires. But, to make it fun, I don’t think they’ve decided what practices will be required. So that’s a hard requirement to design to.
You are assuming one “you”. This debate involves many people with diverse opinions. One group could push for humans on Mars as soon as possible. Another could say, “not before we have done more serious life detection searches.” The compromise could be accelerated life detection work to enable human missions to Mars at an earlier date. That might not be what the humans to Mars people actually want, but it might also be a compromise they would accept.
No, I’m assuming that if you’re building a settlement on Mars, the “humans now!” faction has, by definition, won over any science faction.
I don’t know how long you’ve been watching this debate, but the Mars First/Mars Now! faction have already justified, in their own minds, the importance of humans-on-Mars over any other concern.
If you ask them about life-search, they’ll make an offhand remark about humans on Mars making it easier, and then dismiss the concern entirely.
(Have you seen how Zubrin, for example, reacts to anything that moves away from his preferred plan. He treats it like a personal insult. Musk is cut from similar cloth.)
We saw the same process with the ISS. The prior Shuttle science experience was disregarded entirely, and had to be rebuilt from scratch a decade later as an afterthought.
I’ve been following this for as long as the Mars Direct idea has been around. I was part of the old Mars Underground, back when it existed, although I didn’t get involved until the Case for Mars III conference. Zubrin and his fans are extreme, but sometimes entertaining.
Even when human missions to Mars happen, I don’t expect them to be controlling policy. Influencing it, perhaps, but not controlling it. Mr. Musk may ask himself if Mr. Nobel is more remembered for prizes or explosives, and how he’d like to be remembered. The country the rockets launch from will have some say in the matter. Hopefully, that will be a country democratic enough to not follow the whims of extremists.
The world does work like that and always has. Brinkmanship is definitely a motivational tool and is very much in charge of this issue.
The people currently in charge of the timeline fully intend to commit humans to Mars as early as possible, because they think it is an existential imperative for humanity. They don’t care (as much) about life on Mars, because research isn’t the reason why they are going. They don’t need as much funding, because they’ll do it a lot cheaper and their funding sources are of their same ilk.
Basically, the very discussion of the slow approach is academic, because the ones who would wait wouldn’t come to that decision point until a decade after someone else is already there and a decade and a half after someone else has already landed or crashed a greenhouse or something on Mars.
Except when the funding comes from the same body. If senior management has dismissed scientific concerns about life-on-Mars in order send humans, they will not divert funding from HSF to conduct a crash science program to look for life.
It’s much more likely that they’ll scarf up any science funding to divert it to HSF. As happened during Constellation.
(The President’s original justification for Constellation was polar bases allowing refuelling ships on the Moon, and permanently dark observatories. Yet there wasn’t a single unmanned mission to land at the poles and examine the polar ices. Instead, the entire science budget was cut by 25%, and instead the program dropped the polar base entirely.
The deadline provided absolutely zero motivation for the necessary science missions, even though the science missions would have been in direct support of the viability of the HSF mission.)
I think you’re missing his point. If human spaceflight and Mars missions are exclusively a NASA province, then you might have a point. There is at least one successful, aerospace company which is very interested in getting people to Mars. In 25 or 50 years, other nations may get interested as well. (I could imagine China moving in that direction after they have a lunar base up and running.) So the science and the human spaceflight budgets aren’t automatically under the same roof.
What if, hypothetically, five years from now SpaceX announces it’s first human landing will be in 2030, the announcement is credible, and the President and/or Congress order NASA’s planetary protection office to allow it? I strongly suspect NASA’s Mars program, and possible the whole Science Mission Directorate, would go into crisis mode and start doing lots and lots of Mars life detection work.
You know how long it takes to develop a mission from scratch. Even a half-decent life-search effort would require a number of landers/rovers for the different types of location, and then several rounds of landers/rover to allow for the early results to be digested and new tests done to eliminate specific ambiguities. All done in 7 years?
And, IMO, if the President and/or Congress order has ordered NASA to allow or support SpaceX’s humans-to-Mars, then politically NASA will not be permitted to do any such research because of the perception that it challenges the political support for humans on Mars.
Seven years is totally inadequate for NASA to do any meaningful life detection work on Mars _iff_ it follows its current policies and practices. (And iff isn’t a typo, it’s the mathematician’s shorthand for “if and only if”.)
I suggested that NASA would go into a crisis mode under those circumstances. I am aware of the short development cycles NASA achieve in the 1960s and the similarly short development cycles for modern small satellites. And NASA just released a RFI for instruments on lunar landers, which specified an assumption of class D hardware, making that comparable to CubeSats.
So, no, decent life detection on Mars couldn’t be done in seven years, if things are done the way NASA has done them in the past few decades. But I was talking about what NASA could do, if it we’re under pressure and faced with a hard deadline. In that case, I think a huge amount of good life detection work could be done in less than a decade.
However, IMO, there will be no urgency/panic/crisis within NASA if a major authority specifically tells to support SpaceX humans-to-Mars.
There’s too much political risk for senior management to be seen, in effect, criticising the decision.
No manager is therefore going to adopt more risky (or perceived risky) practices for a crash program that Congress/President could see as a criticism of them.
Hence my point that if the MarsNow! faction wins, in whatever forum they win, support from NASA management for a robotic life-search program will dry up.
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Re: IFF
I usually capitalise it to emphasise that it was intentional. Otherwise the explanation takes longer than just writing “if and only if” longhand.
What, exactly, is the risk? People have suggested (and Mr. Housley may agree) that genetic analysis goes a long way towards making contamination an non-issue. It should be able to both identify something as terrestrial in origin and (if so) when the species diverged from anything the astronauts brought with them (separating anthropomorphic contamination from meteoritic transport in the distant past.) If you combine that with a belief that field work is more efficiently done by a person than a robot (also debatable), then you could easily conclude than landing field astrobiologists is the best way to search for life on Mars.
Finding alien life will be an extraordinary and controversial claim. The greater the contamination, the harder it will be for the discoverers to rule out a false positive.
It’s hard enough to sterilise robotic rovers and landers, it is utterly impossible to sterilise a human base, let alone a permanent settlement. (You only need to look at the bio-contamination at the Antarctic bases.)
We don’t have a dictionary of all terrestrial extremophile genetics. We have only the species that have been sequenced. Any claim of life-on-Mars will be controversial.
Well, you can never rule out a false positive, so this is all about the odds of it being a false positive. Is 1% good enough? Probably not for something like this. Is 0.01%? Or one in a million?
No single thing is going to get you one in a million confidence in the result. But three 1% steps in combination could.
You seem to be dismissing the idea of special protected areas, by assuming the whole planet would be potentially contaminated as soon as any person steps on the ground. But keeping people 500 km from potentially interesting sites (and verifying, after the discovery, that signs of life go down between the human landing site and the discovery site) could be one of those 1% steps.
For the nature of the contamination, I don’t know if the microbes which survive on a sterilized spacecraft are actually extremophiles. They could very well be the most resilient or hardest to kill 0.1% from an original population of more ordinary microbes. If so, that could be another 1% step towards avoiding a false positive. (Either because they wouldn’t survive on the surface or because they could be identified.) If the experts in the field don’t know about which sorts of bugs make it though sterilization, they can certainly find out. The experiment is simple and straight-forward, and NASA funds work along these lines.
When I mentioned genetic analysis, I didn’t mean we’d be able to take a discovered species and exactly match it to a terrestrial, previously sequenced one. But, by sequencing a new species, I believe they can tell how closely it is related to a previously sequenced one. Not in years since the species diverged, but in the equivalent of steps along a family tree to the common ancestor. So, even an unsequenced extremophile from Earth would show up as genetically close to a sequenced terrestrial special. That would reduce the odds of a false positive. By how much? I don’t know, but that’s also an easy research project of the sort NASA funds.
But ultimately, we are talking about a subjective judgement. You (and I) are balancing the risks of a false positive and the difficulties of defending a real positive, against the benefits of having people on Mars. That’s how we draw the line and decide if an acceptable risk of a false positive is 0.1% or 0.0001%. But if your starting assumption is that humans on Mars has near-zero value, you will get one answer. If you think it’s critical to the future of humanity, you get a different one. So I doubt we’re going to come to any agreement on the subject of acceptable planetary protection rules.
And if the results suggest that it split off the nearest known family the equivalent of over 3 billion years ago, what does that tell you? It could be a family of Earthly bugs that we haven’t yet sequenced, or it could be a descendant of an common ancestor of Earth and Mars life. Either from shared early asteroid bombardment, or from true extra-solar panspermia.
No. Just that human presence on Mars requires access to water/etc. Which means the best sites for human habitation are the best sites for life. You are either harming the success of the settlement, or harming the potential finding of alien life. Moreso, if you are deciding to send humans to Mars, by definition the “it doesn’t matter, just go!” faction have won.
(Also, global dust storms show the interconnectedness of the Martian surface. There might be a few protected environs, such as deep aquifers, etc. But that’s not what we’re talking about.)
“…if the results suggest that it split off the nearest known family the equivalent of over 3 billion years ago, what does that tell you? It could be a family of Earthly bugs that we haven’t yet sequenced…”
Which is why I mentioned studies of the microbes which do survive current sterilization procedures. I should add those which astronauts would carry with them. If the unsequenced bugs are primarily things that live in 90 deg hot springs or subterranean lakes with a pH of 3, we don’t need to worry about accidentally taking them to Mars.
Knowing how many of the likely contaminants are sequenced or not would inform planetary protection decisions. That sort of work is both reasonably easy and quite relevant to a particular NASA-funded program.
Remember, I wasn’t talking about 100% certainty, since we’ve agreed that’s impossible. I was talking about one of several steps that would reduce the uncertainty to an acceptably low level. As I said, three, independent lines of argument, each with 1% uncertainty, collectively mean confidence at the one in a million level.
Regarding special protected areas and colonies/bases which want access to water, I think we’ve come back to what “all” means. Presumably there are multiple likely sites. Following the Antarctic example, it might make sense to protect most but not all, while allowing contamination of a few. But you seem to see things in an all or nothing way; it’s either the possibility of finding microbes or human landings. I’d rather find a middle ground that allows both.
planets under bombardment from space rocks have been kicking life into space since .. forever. From ISS studies it looks like some life can basically live forever in space until the rock it is on gets sucked in and lands somewhere.
I am under no illusions. life is everywhere and we are no fluke.
Again, the key will be the organization structure. You need to create a public-private partnership to provide the long term funding stability. If you keep it in NASA the next Administration will just hit the reset button.
Remember Project Apoll worked because it was basically accomplished within the Kennedy/Johnson Administration and was seen as a way to honor the memory of President Kennedy.
PPP….? Hmm. Don’t really like em. They are Catch 22 heavy. They don’t really work as they are currently promulgated… at least not for the public side. Why they come about is usually because of the risk benefit profile being too skewed to close the business case for the private entity. The public side is supposed to fund all the risky but potentially game changing stuff. Nothing wrong with that. We’ve being doing it for years. However If the private entity gets on-board early which is the current paradigm (that is seen as the most effective vision for the project life cycle costs) then they drive the entire mission risk profile. It is inexorably driven down the vanilla route to the be within the acceptable limits of the private entity. This totally destroys the whole point of the exercise and just turns it into a corporate welfare program. If there is to be a PPP it should be post implementation in the exploitation phase, once the public have bought down the risk. It should never be before the realization phase. However this is not really much of a cost saver in the project life cycle analysis. Ergo… back to square one and the PPP just can’t get over the risk hump.
It worked for Comsat. Just imagine if NASA was given the mission of creating a telecommunication satellite network how long it would have taken. And the cost of it.
Thomas, It hasn’t worked in COMSAT. COMSAT worked best on a purely commercial basis. Of the PPPs in COMSAT that I have worked on, all of them were supposed new product line harbingers that ended up as one-offs. The retrospective real purpose of each was to present a new generation of COMSAT prime engineers with a meaningful training opportunity away from the bread and butter customers. Nothing wrong with that per-se but it was not the stated and mandated objective of each PPP. Almost all of the risky ‘New deal’ technologies which were critical to the public element (they were mission enablers elsewhere), were disembarked. In defiance of the establishing MOUs. Tokenism and passengers were the final fig leaves. There was the exception with some payload technologies but these had been massively de-risksed prior to the PPP (just underlying my earlier point that the PPP is best at the exploitation phase). These curiously served, both as the reason for the PPP, and the excuse for disembarking the other risky elements that were probably more in need of the ‘flight time’: “We are already meeting our technology raising goal with this payload” (err no you are not, the actual risk has long since been retired and a hollow formalism remains). I see no way that a PPP can be made to work for lunar infra-structuring. I would dearly love to be proved wrong on this as I can see how institutionalism is dragging us. So if you have a particular vision here please do share it.
In the early days it helped get it started, then as with all good government participation the government needed to be eased out as the market emerged. This would be a feature of any new PPP on lunar development, applying lessons from earlier ventures.
Below is a link to a presentation on a LunarBase Development Authority from the 2010 LEAG Meeting.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/me…
Aldrin can be annoying at times, but he does have interesting ideas. That’s a nice contrast to other old, prestigious people. Instead of insisting on the conventional ways of doing things, which they got used to when they were younger, he takes a different approach. He acts as if he’s old enough and secure enough in his fame/place that he can toss out novel ideas without fear of reprocussions.
Yes, he was a very good addition to the UAG for that reason as he has spent his whole career seeking out ways to move America forward in space.
Are the two of you talking about the same thing? I think COMSAT was a reference the government-chartered corporation (dating from 1962), not the communications satellite industry in general.
indeed your are right it was crossed wires…. Still don’t think it shifts my point much: Many of the major telecommunications organizations started off in the public sector: Eutelsat, inmarsat( Notable exception: Echostar. Not sure about Intelsat as that was a COMSAT outgrowth but still largely public. Once matured they were then transferred to the public ownership.
When Intelsat was created in 1964 Comsat Inc. was the largest shareholder with other telecommunications companies, public and private, owning the rest. At one point telecommunication firms from 100 different nations had a stake in it. But as comsats became common they sold off their shares and many just bought their own satellites. Around 2005 it was bought out by a group of private equity firms and was privately held until 2013 when it started trading on the NYSE again. Located in Luxembourg it is a major contributor to the 2% of Luxembourg’s GDP that comes from space commerce activities.
Yes, created by Congress it was the first space firm to be traded on the NYSE. It was a key player, founder and shareholder in Intelsat.
I always like to remind folks two amazing things happened on July 20, 1969. The first was that humans sit foot on the Moon, something science fiction writers had written about for decades. The second, which no science fiction writer predicted because it was just too fantastic, was that an estimated 720 million people, 1/5 of the world’s population, were able to watch it LIVE thanks to Comsat and Intelsat. That is why the Apollo 11 crew are honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Just thinking about this a bit more and you may have hit on something that I didn’t consider: universality. Almost all the PPPs now, the ones that are not really working, are one on one: One private entity with the public entity. The leverage is lost by the public entity. COMSAT was not this. That was probably why it worked. If we could get all the stakeholders in CIS-Lunar to invest in an infrastructure program club it might work. Big if.
?
It was a peaceful way to win the Cold War.
Yes, but the goal was basically achieved by the time President Nixon entered office and had time to hit the reset button, scraping the Apollo 18, 19 and 20 flights.
If the real goal is a return to the Moon, and one which is for the long term,. extended, indefinite habitation (all as it should be), then the utility of a LOPG Gateway ‘station’ in a halo orbit in the middle of nowhere is really a waste of time and money. In fact the entire Orion design with its inadequate delta-V for reaching lunar orbit or lunar return from a moon mission is wrong. The question that ought to be asked is what nonsense went into the mission design and requirements for these systems? And who came up with these lame ideas? They should be put as far from the program as possible.
I think it’s horrible they could not manage a landing before the anniversary next year. When/if they do go, somebody has to get the communication and video experience right. I want “live” 4K VR continuous coverage of everything.
Back in 2010, when Constellation was obviously going to be cancelled, but Obama hadn’t proposed an alternative (to be hijacked by Congress), I suggested that the US should offer a $2.7b prize for any private company that could put a man on the moon before (or on) the anniversary of Apollo 11 first EVA.
The idea was to show that technology really has advanced, in spite of the apparent inability of NASA to achieve its goals. The cost of Gemini/Apollo was around $27b, in 1960 dollars, so the prize is 10% of that, ignoring the ~800% inflation. Putting the actual prize at nearly 1% of the Apollo program, in constant dollar terms.
The contest would provide the “back to the Moon” thrill that was the only thing that Constellation would achieve. The cost over the decade would be trivial, even if you offered secondary prizes for later teams (farside landing, polar landing, “overnight” stay, etc). Meanwhile, with the HSF sideshow out of the way, NASA could focus on Tech Dev and restoring the science budget (slashed by Constellation).
Now if they can just get there. I read Spudis’ book, and he had a pretty sharp, pragmatic view of the politics underpinning Apollo and any crewed spaceflight program.
Spudis also wrote something like humans on Mars is used as longterm goal to please the space advocates because it sets a goal but so far into future doesn’t require significant near term funding. This reinforces my belief is if the Moon is set as a HSF goal then real money needs to be spent now for a transfer vehicle, lander, spacesuits, communication equipment, launch preparation facilities (like they did for ISS components) and God knows what else. However, nobody wants to tackle those immediate hardware developments. So set Mars as the HSF goal and defer all that work to some other smucks 20 years into the future.
But wait looks like Moon Express has something in the works, at least what their flashy website shows. And Paul Spudis is one of their consultants.
What stands out when I read Spudis’ book was VSE planning meetings were working on lunar exit strategy before defining requirements for returning to the Moon.
Did I miss where they said the money was coming from? Or maybe we are getting a Lunar base – and a unicorn!
The plan is to make Mexico pay for it.
Does that mean – no unicorn??
If Mexico were actually going to pay, I hope they would insist on Quetzalcoatl rather than a unicorn.
Sadly, the Quetzal is as real as the Lunar base will be. 🙁
http://www.eartharchives.or…
Even though it’s completely infeasible, NASA projects should be budgeted and planned to allow implementation in four years or less.
For future human exploration, Mars is the place to go, not the Moon. There’s lunar science yet to be learned, but orbiters and robotic rovers with sample return capability could fetch what we need to know.
Mars however is a world, the most Earthlike place we know of that isn’t Earth. If we want to find out how life emerges on a terrestrial planet, we need to explore Mars thoroughly. And that means humans doing the exploration, coupled with robotic tools and sensors guided by humans on the planet using laboratories at hand.
The Moon’s a dead end, geologically and in exploratory terms. Mars is a frontier.
You could use the same excuse for Mars i.e. send orbiter and rovers.
Of course, and rovers, landers, and orbiters are at work there now reconnoitering the planet, with more on the way. There’s much more that needs to be done in that regard before sending humans makes sense.
But the Moon is dead biologically, and no one is proposing a search for life or its origins there.
Searching for life and its origins is the single purpose driving NASA exploration that isn’t related to terrestrial and solar matters. Even NASA’s outer planets program is focused largely on “ocean worlds” — moons (such as Europa and Enceladus) that contain global brine seas with potential biologies
Mars offers the closest and best place we know about to compare planets as biology incubators. And purely robotic reconnaissance can take that search only so far.
In the same spirit that the Saturn V was tested on Apollo 8, making a big leap physically and imaginatively, sending humans to Mars to look for evidence of a non-terrestrial biology is the kind of goal that powers an exploratory program.
Half-steps like returning to the Moon just fritter away exploration energy. I think Apollo was the best thing this country did in the Sixties . But it and the lunar missions since then show the Moon to be a dead world, both biologically and in exploratory terms.
Actually it is more likely that Europa and Enceladus have existing life than does Mars. As for the Moon being “dead” there is likely a large astrochemical record at the poles rich with comet ice containing a variety of organic compounds. Before you start – I am a biologist.
As a biologist then you’ll certainly understand that organic compounds are necessary but not sufficient in themselves as evidence for life.
Anyway, because early Mars is/was probably closer to early Earth in the respects that matter to the origin of life, the place to carry out a comparative study is — Mars. Even if Mars proves to be sterile, that can tell us something about life on Earth.
And of course, finding a biology at one of those ocean worlds would be a terrific discovery. But those places are far beyond the human exploration zone for the foreseeable future.
I’m not sure you and I are far apart here. I’m arguing that the search for life off-Earth is a worthy driving force for solar system exploration.
While I think the next best target for human exploration is Mars, I’m fully supportive of missions such as Europa Clipper and any follow-on ones that take the investigation further.
But if we’re narrowing it to places humans should go, I will always argue for Mars over the Moon.
We have unfinished business on the Moon. If we cannot figure out how to live there we will never live anywhere – including Mars.
Well, if we’re going back there, I sure hope we can get more out of it scientifically than just training for how-to-do-Mars.
Marius Hills-PKT-SPA — lots geologically worthy target areas. (And Lichtenberg also, which I think of as the B. Ray Memorial Landing Site. I’m sure his spirit is somewhere nearby.)
My worry is that the time, money, and effort will bleed away the urge to go to Mars, especially if there are fatal accidents in human lunar exploration, which are likely.
We’ll see.
And fatal accidents on Mars or anywhere else won’t have the same effect? Let’s just stay home.
Fatal accidents on the Moon will put a stop to exploration right there. Fatal accidents on Mars would probably do the same, but at a minimum, we’d be on Mars.
I’m OK with going to the Moon (again) if it’s that or nothing. But I’ll be real P.O.’d if people just call it quits with the Moon.
The first time someone is killed in one of those auto MOBILES that will be the end of cars.
The first time someone is killed on one of those new fangled aero planes that will be the end of airlines.
The first time someone dies going to space that will be end of space travel..
See how silly you sound ..
Category error.
People have ample personal experiences of horseless carriages and flying machines because these are conveniences. Both familiarity and personal utility means that people put up with some risk.
Space travel is in a different realm.
Hardly, death by transportation is … death .. gosh .. how will we ever be able to handle that …
Acceptance of automobiles and aircraft came before they provided much in the way of convince and when they were substantially more risky than they are today.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents, I guess, were better risk-takers than people living today. i wonder why?
Parents, in my case. But it is clear that modern Americans are less willing to risk their lives than those who lived fifty or a hundred years ago. Why? I’m not sure. Modern life is safer and more comfortable. That could be a factor. Cleaning dung out of a stable would also bias people towards the apparently more hygenic properties of automobiles, compared to animal forms of transportation. Modern medicine may also be a factor. Taking risks when you are 40 and would be lucky to live to 60 is a different proposition than taking the same risks, at the same age, when you can realistically expect to live until you are in your 90s.
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise. If the most important goal of exploration is searching for non-terrestrial biology, then putting humans on Mars is the worst way to do that.
(Also, the whole whole “Mars is the most Earth-like planet” thing is garbage.)
I’ll make you a dime bet — which neither of us will be able to collect on — that getting a definitive answer to the question Yes/No on a martian biosphere (any kind) will require human explorers to find it.
Second, if Mars isn’t the most-Earthlike place that isn’t Earth, what other place do you have better knowledge of and which comes closer to conditions here?
Once human explorers touch the surface of Mars we will never have a definitive answer to the question of a Martian biosphere. The sample (Mars) will have been contaminated. I suspect that even with our best efforts, the Martian environment has already been contaminated with our unmanned probes.
Having said that, I suspect further that panspermia is a real thing. That natural processes have exchanged organics among worlds from the beginnings of our solar system. Cross-contamination may well be a natural occurrence and thus all our efforts at planetary protection are moot.
It’s already happened. The various probes which have landed on Mars (softly or not) over the past several decades have not been sterilized to a degree that a laboratory would call sterile.
This is why NASa’s Planetary Protection rules have identifed certain “special areas” — basically places where liquid water could be at or close to the surface part of the time — are forbidden territory for lander and rover probes. Also, orbiters are required to keep a reserve fuel supply to boost them, at the end of their missions, into orbits high enough to last for centuries.
However, the surface of Mars, thanks to solar and galactic radiation is essentially sterile. So debris from crashes (ESA’s Schiaparelli was just the most recent) becomes sterile after some period of time.
To oversimplify, because we’ve not found obvious fossils where we’ve gone, the thinking is that any surviving martian biosphere is deeply buried, much like the chemolithoautrophs that dwell in Earth’s rock-o-sphere far below your feet.
Or the Mars bugs died out at some point. Or they never existed in the first place.
So actually, the barrier to humans on Mars isn’t perhaps as absolute as you’re thinking.
U.S. probes landing on Mars are very, VERY clean – far cleaner than what I would have called “sterile” in my lab.
(If they’re so squeaky clean, why does NASA have “special areas” that are no-go zones?)
Oh, and as there are Mars meteorites here on Earth, there have also been — though not yet found — Earth meteorites, laden with Earth bugs, landing on Mars.
Anyway, the point is that the time for making Mars an Untouchable Planet came and went ages ago because probes have been landing or crashing there for decades.
I have other things to do than to educate someone with a fake name on a topic that they can simply Google.
Viking certainly was. The more modern landers and rovers weren’t, as I understand it, subject to as strict standards (although still very strict ones.) But what about the failed European or UK landers, or the older failed Soviet landers? They got to the surface intact (well, intact enough to carry microbes) and I’m not sure what sterilization practices were required for them. Especially the early Soviet ones.
That’s what is bullshit. You get to define “Earthlike” however you want, but then pretend that is synonymous with “habitable” or “easiest to colonise”.
Mars is a rocky planet with a rotational period just under 25hrs. That’s where the similarities end. And both partial gravity and day/night cycle are about the easiest things to simulate. Everything else about Mars is horribly unearthlike.
A settlement on Mars will be, in essence, a space-station. Closed
environment, filtered air, protected from radiation and meteors. It will be an artificial environment. Any trip outside the hab will be a full-blown EVA mission.
So if you are comparing “space-station”-like settlements, then any carbonaceous asteroid could provide the equivalent raw materials, and any simple rotating habitat within that asteroid would provide the rest. The most “earthlike” environment off Earth will be one created by humans.
You mistake the surface (literally and figuratively) similarities with “Earthlike”, while ignoring the deep differences. But if you don’t see that surface similarity, you can’t see the potential. Isaac Asimov called it “planetary chauvinism”. And it will waste decades of blood and treasure.
Well, I stand by what I said. Conditions on the surface of Mars are closer to those on Earth than the surface conditions on any other planet we know about.
And when we build a Mars habitat someday, let’s invite Paul451 for a visit (with all expenses on the house), so he can make an on-site determination.
Which, as I said, means nothing.
I’ve said it before, but Titan has 1.5 bars of atmospheric pressure, lakes, seas, weather and possibly rivers. (The rivers might be more properly seasonal creeks.) Despite the temperature, that strikes me as more Earth-like than Mars.
…But its temperature and hydrocarbon chemistry make all the difference! Both are totally un-Earthlike.
Or to put it in practical terms, we’ll have a crewed habitat on Mars decades sooner than on Titan.
The temperature of Mars is totally un-Earthlike. Titan is a bit more so, but not so much by human spaceflight standards. Once you need serious thermal control, 220 K and 100 K are more different in a quantitative manner than a qualitative one.
Hydrocarbon chemistry? If you can’t breathe the air, that isn’t a huge issue. The people would need habitats providing a breathable air mixture. What makes the outside air unbelievable isn’t a huge difference. It’s not like you could simply compress Martian air and make it breathable.
I think you just have your own, unspecified criteria for “Earth-like”, both in terms of the variables and how much they have to vary. Then you apply them and say that it’s obvious. It may be obvious to someone who shares your assumptions, but your unstated assumptions may be wrong. They are, at least, debatable.
“…I think you just have your own, unspecified criteria for “Earth-like”…”
Indeed I did, fcrary, and that was an error. So below is a quickly compiled list of martian geological and geomorphic processes and features shared with Earth. About the only terrestrial geo-features not found on Mars are plate tectonics and a global magnetic field.
seasons, 24-hour day, effusive volcanos, explosive volcanos, lava flows, pyroclastic deposits, inverted topography, lakebed deposits, fluvial channels, stream-bed deposits, conglomerate rocks, mudstones, dry waterfalls, shorelines, wet-based glaciers, cold-based glaciers, valley glaciers, moraines, eskers, ice caps, ice ages, snow, frost, periglacial landforms, avalanches —
groundwater, ground ice, sedimentary rocks, igneous rocks, impact craters, impact breccias, clays, diagenesis, clouds, wind, dust storms, dust devils, sand dunes, wind erosion, yardangs, faults, rift valleys, canyons, graben, collapse pits, lava tubes —
The list is not exhaustive, but what popped to mind when I sat down to write this. For a systematic treatment, see Michael Carr’s The Surface of Mars, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Some of these are known on other solar system bodies. But anyone stepping out on Mars today would face a landscape that is largely familiar, and a physical environment shaped by processes with close analogs in terrestrial geology.
Even the amount of ground to cover is similar. Mars is about half the size of Earth, but the martian surface has roughly the same area as dry land has on Earth.
As I said way back at the beginning, Mars offers us both a complex world as well as a frontier to explore. Make of it what you will.
And with this reply, I’m going to leave to others the current discussion, which has been enjoyable and thought-provoking. Thank you all.
Very small thinking. It is a 9 billion acre asset waiting to happen. Resources to fuel a space economy right in our back yard.
If, as a species, we are to stupid to routinely exploit our back yard we are definitely not ready to try for 50 million miles..
The situation may change, but at present on the Moon and Mars virtually any research goal can be achieved at lower cost and less risk by robotic systems. With time the division between biological humans and AI may become irrelevant.
Comments on Keith’s “NASAWatch-2040 Edition” will include incessant yammering about the orbiting outpost. We will all be bitching about how NASA missed the boat- that would be the boat that eschews rockets, transfer vehicles, and landers, in favor of direct-to-Luna vehicles like BFR but, I hope, modernized through decades of experience- the 2020s, 2030, etc.
Weaknesses in the model are apparent even now in 2018, including the need for unique landers at each destination. Consider the conceptual purity of a single vehicle capable of leaving Earth, thence landing (just about) anywhere in the solar system.
Sound like a dream? Well, it IS a dream, in many ways, but this is where BFS is heading. It is the kind of hardware that obviates the Luna first/ Mars first question, one fraught with obvious bespoke requirements. This kind of hardware means no lunar lander. It also means that we can take the ‘pup tent’ with us; the pointy end of BFR easily serving as temporary living quarters.
It is simplicity.
like only one kind of car plane or boat..
This Moon vs Mars thing seems to miss something IMHO.
If we are to be a truly off-planet species, we need to be able to do-it-all. In other words, we need to be able to have bases on the Moon, as well as Mars. With sorties exploring Europa and Enceladus. If our technology, political will and economy restricts us to one or another, we are not going to be able to truly extend ourselves into the solar system as a species.
It is fine to set priorities as to what should come next in our explorations. But be assured, if we do not have the resources or technology to do it all, we will not be a multi-planet species.
http://hopsblog-hop.blogspo…