Possible cost-reduction possibilities for the NASA portions of MSR

[MickQ]

 

In a no doubt futile effort to end the "Is not! Is so!" dialogue that we seem to have fallen into …….

Yes please  🙏

[VSECOTSPE]

If a project is more difficult, it just meant it'll need more engineering hours, more testing, etc, all of which are reflected in cost estimates.

Cost is not an indicator of technical difficulty.  By that logic, Orion and SLS are currently NASA’s most technically difficult development projects because they’re NASA’s most expensive development projects.  That’s obviously not true.

And yes, the human factors in HLS makes it harder than MSR, but it's not just ECLSS ("keep crew alive"), it's also the payload mass.

Getting astronauts to and from the Moon has been done before.  Bringing a sample back from Mars has not.  The latter involves several technical challenges that have never been attempted.

Whatever adjective is used (hard, difficult, etc.), trying to do something that has never been done before necessarily involves more unknown unknowns and the risks associated with them than replicating a prior feat.

That doesn’t mean a private sector organization can’t retrieve samples from Mars.  But known ECLSS technology and mere spacecraft mass should not be equated with firsts like the first supersonic retropropulsion at the planet in question, unprecedented landing accuracy at that planet, the first launch from that planet, the first rendezvous/docking/transfer in orbit around that planet, etc.

As for Bugatti hypercar and McMansion, that's comparing apples to oranges.

Which is my point.  Construction firms have built mansions before.  By definition, a company trying to build a record-breaking automobile has not built that high-performance car before.  There are many more unknown unknowns associated with the latter than the former.  We should not equate them.  They’re apples and oranges in the same way that HLS and MSR are apples and oranges.

For one thing, only major SpaceX detractors like thunderf00t would use DC-X to belittle what SpaceX has accomplished.

I don’t know thunderfoot or what they’ve written, but it’s not belittling SX to point out the debt that F9 and SS owe DC-X.  Musk himself has paid tribute to DC-X and its MacDac and SDIO managers:

“Just continuing the great work of the DC-X project!” wrote Elon Musk to Bill Gaubatz and Jess Sponable, the former McDonnell Douglas and SDIO program managers, respectively, of DC-X.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3556/1

Also it's funny you use Lunar Lander Challenge as an example of "government work" when it's literally new space companies designing and building things.

NASA provided the prize money, wrote the rules, staffed the judging, and provided other support.  (Northrup Grumman covered the X-Prize Foundation’s costs for running the competition and events.)  I know this because I was the program exec at NASA HQ who started that prize competition.

Finally, government also "for the most part are revisiting and remaking capabilities that the government proved out decades ago", for example all the Mars parachute designs can trace back to Viking.

No disagreement there.

For starters, nobody is proposing propellant production on Mars for MSR.

We don’t know that.  We don’t have much insight into the industry studies (or the various NASA and APL studies).  Propellant production is the baseline for Starship operations from Mars, and it has shown up in other/older Mars sample return studies.  RadMod is probably right that Starship can manage the round trip without adding propellant at Mars.  But he might not be right, and there may be other technical issues with managing that much propellant for that long through all those mission phases.  And we have even less insight into most of the other studies.

As for the others, they're not inherently difficult, just haven't been demonstrated yet.

Some are inherently difficult.  Rendezvous and docking around Mars or anywhere else that distant, with the errors that get multiplied at those distances, with that much comms lag, without the benefit of GPS, and tracking something that small with signals that weak is potentially very tricky.

Others may be deceptively easy.  Surely we can relight something as reliable as Raptors after umpty-ump StarLink launches, right?  Or light a simple solid rocket motor at Mars, right?  But we won’t know for sure what the transit, EDL, and surface environments do to those rockets/motors until we actually try to light them on Mars.  Those are the unknown unknowns that come with doing something for the first time.

And HLS also requires capabilities that have never been done before, cryogenic in orbit refueling for example.

At the scale and tempo that Starship needs, yes.  But like DC-X was a precursor to F9R, there are govt precursors to Starship refueling.  It’s not unproven in the way that supersonic retropropulsion, 10x meter landing radii, launch, and rendezvous/docking/transfer at Mars are unproven.

Also it's funny you make MSR sounds so difficult, yet you have no problem with Rocket Lab - a startup with ~2k employees - proposing to do this for just $2B.

What I actually wrote was that — knowing what little we do know about RL’s architecture and assuming RL’s architecture was given a thorough independent technical review at LaRC, Aerospace Corp, etc.  — I would be comfortable making a _side bet_ on RL.  The devil is in the details, but RL’s architecture does not appear to present the same drawbacks as some of the others.  But I would _not_ bet the entire MSR effort on RL.  I was clear about that.

RL is not a startup.  The company is almost two decades old, has over 50 launches of nearly 200 spacecraft (including four of their own spacecraft) under its belt, and is currently developing its second generation launcher.  RL also has experience with unmanned interplanetary spacecraft, experience that, IIRC, none of the other industry study participants besides LockMart bring to the table.

You know what program RL didn't even bother to bid on? HLS.

RL is in the unmanned launch and spacecraft business, which is what MSR is.

HLS is manned spacecraft.  Yet another reason not to compare those apples and oranges.

You didn't bother to read what I write. I specifically didn't include F1 or F9 landing.

I don’t know what you meant to include or not when you wrote: “they didn’t need it for F9 and Dragon”. 

But Falcon 1 should be included.  That’s where SX learned (the hard way) how not to do staging and about destructive harmonic oscillations.  Without that F1 learning experience, there likely would have been early F9 failures on ascent.

And F9R reentry, descent, and landing failures and Grasshopper testing should obviously be included since one of the most critical phases of MSR is the EDL.  If SX needed a lot of test flight and failures to get EDL right here in Earth, it would not be surprising if they need more than one shot to do the same at Mars.

They need multiple windows to execute MSR, not for getting a successful Mars EDL.

2029 is a test EDL at Mars.  The SX team thinks they may need more than one window to get their Mars EDL right and are planning accordingly.

What does testing have anything to do with this? It's a non sequitur.

You keep claiming that SX, and now JPL, are able to achieve technical firsts without prior demonstration.  That’s just not true.  Those statements are ignorant of the preceding prototypes, flight tests, demonstrations, and failures.

And no, I didn't argue that "all the industry studies had to address all segments of the MSR mission"

Again, I’m not trying to be overly nitpicky of old posts, but that’s literally what you wrote here:

you can't just tell NASA "here's one element, you figure out the rest"

So? What does this have to do with anything?

You claimed to have made a prediction about an architecture at the same time information was leaking publicly about that architecture.

Funny you claim that you "don’t mean to be overly critical" then go after my spelling. You do realize some of us don't have English as our native language?

I think your English is great.  But given inaccuracies about US law, NASA programs, SX, RL, etc. in some of your posts, I guessed you were writing from overseas and might not know all our idiosyncratic idioms.

Yes please  🙏

Apologies.  I’m trying to stick to to the facts but sometimes there are a lot inaccuracies.  FWIW...

[JayWee]

On thursday, there was an ESA Council meeting. Afterwards Josef Aschbacher held a press conference, in which Maria Smith asked a question on MSR.

Question:
To what extent is ESA participating in NASA's review of mars sample return options? And do you envision any changes?

Response:
Thank you. Daniel is not here, but I can answer regarding the interactions he's had and that we have had.
I personally met with NASA's top administration last week at the ISC in Milan. It was a very positive and constructive exchange with Bill Nelson, Pam Melroy, and their colleagues.
Daniel is also in daily contact with NASA on many aspects, with Mars sample return certainly being one of them.

I can only say that we are kept very well informed by NASA. The process is still ongoing, and there are parallel studies being undertaken right now. NASA has to wait for the results of these studies, and so do we at ESA. But I can assure you that there is strong and close coordination and cooperation with NASA on all aspects involved.

There’s nothing more we can say today because we need to wait for the results of these studies.

[dglow]

This of course doesn't solve the problem that Starship can't be made Cat IVb-compliant, but the conops is indeed really simple, once Starship can reliably land on Mars.

Recent findings may lead us to question assumptions around planetary protection altogether. Samples from Ryugu have been documented with bacterial infiltration in spite of enormous efforts to combat this:

Rapid colonization of a space-returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms

[Don2]

Recent findings may lead us to question assumptions around planetary protection altogether. Samples from Ryugu have been documented with bacterial infiltration in spite of enormous efforts to combat this:

I don't agree they made enormous efforts to protect the sample from bacterial infiltration. In Table 1 in the paper you reference they admit that the sample was exposed to the terrestrial atmosphere. What concerns me most about that is it means the sample was exposed to oxygen and water vapor for the first time. We have all seen rust growing on steel. I wonder if the features they interpret as bacterial cells might actually be the result of the sample reacting with water and oxygen.

What is proposed for the Mars sample is better than a  BSL-4 biological lab. That is much more secure and expensive than what was done with the Ryugu samples.

I posted about this paper on the Hayabusa2 thread.
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=45811.1000