"Flexible Path" Scenario E for Cx

[MATTBLAK]

Anyone spending 100 billion for a Phobos landing should receive tar and feathers.

If ISS cost at least $100 billion and Lunar return that much more again, then you can bet your boots an interplanetary transportation infrastructure going 99% percent of the way to Mars is going to weigh in at at LEAST that much money.

[randomly]

My first reaction to the flexible path scenario (no landings on deep gravity wells) was that it lacked the pizzaz to capture public attention. Without public interest it's difficult to get the money without which nothing is possible. But flexible path coupled with telepresence robotic landers has tremendous possibilities. You would get the high-def footage of being on another world, you can do the real time human science thing. You get the human adventure/risk angle to the project so people will connect with it better.
I think it retains the human adventure and exploration of the solar system aspects while avoiding the huge difficulties and costs of getting people in and out of large gravity wells. Certainly people are more accepting of virtual realities these days.

I would certainly consider a manned mission to phobos with a bunch of telepresence robotic landers on mars to be 'going to mars', and just as exciting. I think the most valuable benefit of the Apollo program was the video and pictures that came back. The emotional and psychological impact of those images of exploring another world had more of an impact on humanity than any of the technologies or science that came out of the project.

[tamarack]

Anyone spending 100 billion for a Phobos landing should receive tar and feathers.

The term 'landing' doesn't really apply to Phobos or other asteroids. There is so little gravity it's more like docking. Men wouldn't 'walk' and could only travel as far as their tethers/thrusters. Their tasks would be limited to small scoops of soil and placing sensors - both easily performed by robotics (Grunt).
I agree with you grdja, men on Phobos is a fool's proposal, just like manned NEO and asteroid missions.

[Archibald]

Once the 'battle of the boosters' song and dance is finally over soon, we can all look at a more pragmatic, realistic future manned exploration program

I just agree with that. IMVHO, what we need is a booster (whatever booster, I don't mid!) able to lift 50-70 tons to LEO. That's enough to go to Mars if you use and combine togethers the usual "tricks" to reduce IMLEO - lagrangian points, electric propulsion, ISRU...

25 tons at a time ( = Ariane V, EELVs) is not enough.

[Archibald]

But flexible path coupled with telepresence robotic landers has tremendous possibilities.

amid those possibilities is a very important one: recouncile NASA unmanned and manned spaceflight sections ! Human and probes...

[MATTBLAK]

I absolutely agree with you, Archibald. If we can't work out how to do missions with boosters able to loft 50-70 tons, perhaps we don't deserve to colonise the Solar System! Look, most of us would LOVE to see a 12-million pound thrust, 200-tons-to-LEO booster fly!! It would make designing many spacecraft and mission architectures that much easier in several ways.

But no Congress, President, Prime Minister etc of the forseeable future is going to authorize expenditure to develop an Ares V-like booster anytime soon. Anyone got a spare $40-50 billion bucks to spare? No?

More's the pity...

[mike robel]

The links below show the Ares IV from Star Trek VoyagerL  One Small Step - seems to me a good candidate for Enterprise departinging ISS.  The diameter is the same as a shuttle ET.  Looks like it would be possible.  Service module on the left, habitation module on the right, earth entry vehice on top, commandmodule at front.  Mars lander is never shown.  The mission was said to be flown in 2032.  Voyager Season 5. 

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/factfiles/ares_iv.jpg

In orbit around Mars

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/factfiles/aresiv.jpg

edit:  added Mission Patch

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/emblem-ares.jpg

[Archibald]

I absolutely agree with you, Archibald. If we can't work out how to do missions with boosters able to loft 50-70 tons, perhaps we don't deserve to colonise the Solar System! Look, most of us would LOVE to see a 12-million pound thrust, 200-tons-to-LEO booster fly!! It would make designing many spacecraft and mission architectures that much easier in several ways.

But no Congress, President, Prime Minister etc of the forseeable future is going to authorize expenditure to develop an Ares V-like booster anytime soon. Anyone got a spare $40-50 billion bucks to spare? No?

More's the pity...

Here's my feelings. We live in a capitalistic world were things costly to build (such as, for example, a super-booster!) have to make money once in service, to fill the expense they cost to the taxpayer.

Well, to date, no rocket above 25 tons to LEO (= 10 tons to GEO) will bring  money back, because the sole viable space market  is comsats.

No 100 tons comsat = no commercial need for superbooster. Plain and simple.
The military is no help either. No need for 100 tons spysats.

So NASA (civilian, public-funded) is left alone.

Are we forced to Ariane V or EELVs to go to Mars ? (Mars for less!)

NO

Fortunately, "comsats boosters" (let's call them this way...) can be expanded, stretched well above 25 tons.
BUT the lack of commercial usefulness (again!) rapidly put an upper limit to the stretch = around 50 to 70 tons. You can't really "stretch" the comsats boosters above this limit.
Fortunately, EELVs are modern launchers well adapted to the said stretch (phase 1, phase 2, and so on).

And, fortunately, there's another way of going to 50-70 tons without hurting Congress: build the launcher from the Shuttle. Just because it exists. 
Like the Saturn V /apollo, the shuttle looks like an accident in history, something that won't repeat in the next future.

So in the end we have two ways of obtaining a mid-heavy launcher placing 70 tons to LEO. But this payload is the upper bound if we consider funding.

Don't dream of HLV in the current fiscal context.

Bit the bullet, and do the best you can with 70 tons at a time.

Because of that, Flexible path is the way to go. You can already do a lot of thing with 70 tons to LEO, but "big" missions have to be spreaded over time and locations. Hop after hop, across the solar system...

[MATTBLAK]

Yes.

[tamarack]

...
Bit the bullet, and do the best you can with 70 tons at a time.
 ...

That's a good analogy. Like trying to 'bite the bullet', there's a 99% chance NASA blows its head off attempting Flex-path.

Citizens and Congress will rapidly lose interest watching money being wasted on orbiting tankers for undersized launch vehicles and beyond-LEO habitats performing science easily done at the ISS. Most will quickly see through the facade called 'progress', recognize it as an uninspired jobs program, cancel the project and fire staff.

There's no room for benchwarmers. Go big (Ares V) or go home (LEO).

[Archibald]

Go big (Ares V)

Good luck with two missions per year at exorbiting cost...

CxP's own internal estimate is $1.4 billion for each Ares-V (from an older thread)

[Jim]

There's no room for benchwarmers. Go big (Ares V) or go home (LEO).

That is a fallacy.  There is no need for heavy lift vehicles

[grdja]

Someone misunderstood me. I fully support Phobos mission, if it can be done on a reasonable budget.

Could someone with the knowledge please give a broad estimate of : mass in LEO, transit time, and total delta vee for NEO rendezvous, Phobos rendezvous, manned Mars landing.

[simon-th]

Anyone spending 100 billion for a Phobos landing should receive tar and feathers.

If ISS cost at least $100 billion and Lunar return that much more again, then you can bet your boots an interplanetary transportation infrastructure going 99% percent of the way to Mars is going to weigh in at at LEAST that much money.

Most of your program costs for a Mars surface mission however relate to that last 1% of the way. And no, it doesn't cost 100 billion to go to Phobos. You also don't do 10 missions to Phobos. You do a couple of missions to NEO, 1 or 2 to Venus and one or two to Mars orbit maybe including Phobos. And all that for a lot less than 100 billion, while you develop necessary technology you need for Mars surface missions anyway.

Personally, what's really a waste is spending 100 billion or probably a lot more in the next 20 years without doing anything beyond LEO just so that we can go to Mars surface straight away.

And only to back up the claim about what the costs will be for a Phobos mission vs. a Mars surface mission, I hope you know how the Design Reference Mission 5.0 is structured. The whole first leg of the program (4 Ares V) with payloads etc. are to position required items on the Mars surface. The second leg of the program (another 3 Ares V) are used for BOTH the crew Mars transfer vehicle and the crew descent vehicle to Mars. That being said, a Phobos mission is just a fraction of a Mars surface mission, requires significantly less hardware and - in contrast to a Mars surface mission - only requires a single-digit number of new hardware pieces and technologies that we don't have right now, in contrast to all the challenges we face for a Mars surface mission.

I second that statement of somebody above, whoever wants to spend 100 billion dollars on a Phobos mission should be tarred and feathered. Not because it doesn't make sense to do a Phobos mission, but because that person wants to waste a lot of money for a mission that can be done for a much more reasonable sum.

[simon-th]

Someone misunderstood me. I fully support Phobos mission, if it can be done on a reasonable budget.

Could someone with the knowledge please give a broad estimate of : mass in LEO, transit time, and total delta vee for NEO rendezvous, Phobos rendezvous, manned Mars landing.

They showed a timetable and a launch architecture for Flexible Path on Thursday during the beyond-LEO subgroup presentation. None of the options shown required more than 2 Ares V launches (in addition to a crew launch).

Maybe someone has those slides with a better resolution

[simon-th]

There's no room for benchwarmers. Go big (Ares V) or go home (LEO).

That is a fallacy.  There is no need for heavy lift vehicles

Very much agreed. And it appears the subgroup agrees as well - or at least to a certain extent. If anything, the utmost required for a viable beyond-LEO architecture is a vehicle of 50-75mt. But even without that, we can do exploration just relying on launchers with a LEO mass capacity up to 25mt. It only requires a shift in how we think space flight has to work. Rather than a handful of large rockets, we would have a steady stream of many smaller rockets adding up to do beyond-LEO missions.

[tamarack]

There's no room for benchwarmers. Go big (Ares V) or go home (LEO).

That is a fallacy.  There is no need for heavy lift vehicles

Very much agreed. And it appears the subgroup agrees as well - or at least to a certain extent. If anything, the outmost requires is a vehicle of 50-75mt. But even without that, we can do exploration just relying on launchers with a LEO mass capacity up to 25mt. It only requires a shift in how we think space flight has to work. Rather than a handful of large rockets, we would have a steady stream of many smaller rockets adding up to do beyond-LEO missions.

A very inefficient and expensive proposal. Realistically, incapable of manned exploration beyond the Moon and almost guarantees mankind remains in LEO.

[simon-th]

There's no room for benchwarmers. Go big (Ares V) or go home (LEO).

That is a fallacy.  There is no need for heavy lift vehicles

Very much agreed. And it appears the subgroup agrees as well - or at least to a certain extent. If anything, the outmost requires is a vehicle of 50-75mt. But even without that, we can do exploration just relying on launchers with a LEO mass capacity up to 25mt. It only requires a shift in how we think space flight has to work. Rather than a handful of large rockets, we would have a steady stream of many smaller rockets adding up to do beyond-LEO missions.

A very inefficient and expensive proposal. Realistically, incapable of manned exploration beyond the Moon and almost guarantees mankind remains in LEO.

On what do you base that? The beyond-LEO subgroup of the Augustine committee does think in the same line. They looked at architectures with up to 25mt vehicles, architectures with up to 75mt vehicles and those with vehicles up to 125mt+ to LEO. And they said they *might* need 75mt, but that's still not decided and that they actually started out to look at architectures with 25mt vehicles max at first and that they would work.

The key point of that way to look at an exploration architecture is propellant transfer on orbit. And that's what the subgroup wants to recommend for every single architecture option they provide to the president.

The Soviets launched nearly 50 Soyuz per year 25 years ago. The economies of scale you get from that lowers your cost per kg to LEO tremendously. 

[Jim]

A very inefficient and expensive proposal. Realistically, incapable of manned exploration beyond the Moon and almost guarantees mankind remains in LEO.

Based on what?  Where is your data? What is your background to make such a judgement?

HLLV's are a fool's folly.   They are the ones that are very inefficient and expensive proposal.   Launching 1 or 2 twice a year is the definition of inefficient.   The very design of an HLLV is expensive and the infrastructure even more.

All the past analogies of past exploration didn't require super tankers or container ships. 

[mars.is.wet]

Anyone spending 100 billion for a Phobos landing should receive tar and feathers.

If ISS cost at least $100 billion and Lunar return that much more again, then you can bet your boots an interplanetary transportation infrastructure going 99% percent of the way to Mars is going to weigh in at at LEAST that much money.

People have no clue what space missions cost ... but are willing to propose alternatives that knowledge.  People can't conceive of anything costing a $100B, but Apollo did.