NASA Has a New and Improved Plan for the Journey to Mars

[TexasTowelie]

NASA officials have released a new and improved plan for how the federal space agency will get astronauts to deep space and Mars by the 2030s — and no one seemed to notice.

The details were unveiled during two presentations Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA, gave for the NASA Advisory Council last week. Gerstenmaier showed the council sharp new designs for a small moon-orbiting space station and a reusable transport ship to carry astronauts to Mars and back and laid out how the federal space agency plans to put astronauts on the red planet by the 2030s, but the announcement was barely even reported, and was summed up in a NASA release.

NASA officials are most likely just fine with that. The space agency has often been used as a political bargaining chip, something astronauts currently seem to be trying their best to avoid since the only shot they have of ever going to Mars is by staying neutral enough that nobody decides to hack away at their funding for political purposes.

There's been a push for NASA officials to come out with a specific plan about how exactly they are going to get astronauts to Mars ever since the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, was announced in 2011.

Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/nasas-new-improved-plan-to-go-to-mars-that-youve-never-heard-of-9346879

[Warren DeMontague]

1. It's totally how I would do it in Kerbal Space Program.

Seriously, a lunar vicinity outpost makes WAY more sense than that pointless asteroid-lasso thing.

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. This is bad news for space science.

The push to send astronauts to Mars will divert money from more worthwhile activities, such as robotic deep space missions.

Humans today are no different from those in the 1950s, when space exploration began. In those days, computers had vacuum tubes, which took up a lot of space and used up a lot of energy, turning it into heat. Robots couldn't do much, because complex electronic circuits were unreliable. Nowadays, microelectonics are reliable, energy efficient, and dirt cheap. Consequently, robots are getting smarter every year. Furthermore, the destruction of a robot is not a tragedy of the same magnitude as the death of a human being.

In a rational tradeoff between a manned and unmanned mission to learn about objects in space, the robots win every time.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. NASA page for this:

In addition to demonstrating the safe operation of the integrated SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the agency is also looking to build a crew tended spaceport in lunar orbit within the first few missions that would serve as a gateway to deep space and the lunar surface. This deep space gateway would have a power bus, a small habitat to extend crew time, docking capability, an airlock, and serviced by logistics modules to enable research. The propulsion system on the gateway mainly uses high power electric propulsion for station keeping and the ability to transfer among a family of orbits in the lunar vicinity. The three primary elements of the gateway, the power and propulsion bus and habitat module, and a small logistics module(s), would take advantage of the cargo capacity of SLS and crewed deep space capability of Orion. An airlock can further augment the capabilities of the gateway and can fly on a subsequent exploration mission, Building the deep space gateway will allow engineers to develop new skills and test new technologies that have evolved since the assembly of the International Space Station. The gateway will be developed, serviced, and utilized in collaboration with commercial and international partners.
...
The second phase of missions will confirm that the agency’s capabilities built for humans can perform long duration missions beyond the moon. For those destinations farther into the solar system, including Mars, NASA envisions a deep space transport spacecraft. This spacecraft would be a reusable vehicle that uses electric and chemical propulsion and would be specifically designed for crewed missions to destinations such as Mars. The transport would take crew out to their destination, return them back to the gateway, where it can be serviced and sent out again. The transport would take full advantage of the large volumes and mass that can be launched by the SLS rocket, as well as advanced exploration technologies being developed now and demonstrated on the ground and aboard the International Space Station.

This second phase will culminate at the end of the 2020s with a one year crewed mission aboard the transport in the lunar vicinity to validate the readiness of the system to travel beyond the Earth-moon system to Mars and other destinations, and build confidence that long-duration, distant human missions can be safely conducted with independence from Earth. Through the efforts to build this deep space infrastructure, this phase will enable explorers to identify and pioneer innovative solutions to technical and human challenges discovered or engineered in deep space.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/deep-space-gateway-to-open-opportunities-for-distant-destinations

[hunter]

4. Death by radiation exposure doesn't seem noble to me.

Electronics can be hardened against radiation. Human can't.