NASA’s Flexible Path evaluation of 2025 human mission to visit an asteroid

• #260 by 2552 on 28 Apr, 2010 15:53
• http://csis.org/multimedia/audio-nasas-new-vision
  
  In this address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Lori Garver mentions this mission, specifically naming the NEO 1999AO10 as an "intriguing candidate", at 17:22.
  
  Edit: link found via Lori Garver's twitter page.
  
  
• #261 by Solman on 03 May, 2010 22:01
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  Super propulsions like Plasma and Ion are unsuitable for launch, thus of no impact until the 2025+ missions.
  

      For LEO, or for deep-space? Solar-powered ion drives exist right now: Deep Space I. VASIMR is the poster child, but more conventional ion drives and solar arrays or even solar-thermal are reasonable technologies for sending infrastructure to Mars.
  
  

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  The areas that COULD impact costs and ARE being discussed include EELV based Flexible Architectures and Fuel Depots. As far as I know, neither of these needs any real research.
  If EELVs and Fuel Depots are the path forward, then why doesn't the FY11 plan just shift 5 years and start development right now. There are no technology 'game changers' on the horizon.
  I don't see anything that will change the Augustine Commission cost estimates, so why burn Billions of dollars with unnecessary delays and useful - but not game changing - research.
  

      You're right, that strictly speaking, cryogenic fuel transfer, depots, sun shades, and automated docking are not really "research" problems: but they are perceived as "unproven" risks to a science or HSF mission. Thus the need for (D)evelopment missions to advance the lab tech up the TRL tree, to where it can be baselined for SMD or HSF flights.
  
     And we should start Development right now: and that's the wonderful aspect (as I understand it) of the FY 2011 plan.
  -Alex
  
  [/quote]
  
   I have long argued that solar thermal potentially has unique advantages that have not been fully appreciated, not the least of which is to use almost anything as propellent.
  This has obvious implications for fuel depots. The issue of which propellents to store becomes far less constrained.
   In addition, the requisite solar concentrator can double as a solar furnace to facilitate ISRU.
   Also the concentrator, via concentrator style PV, can provide electricity at high efficiency and specific power for electric propulsion along with thermal.
  
   I believe solar thermal can be the "game changer" if all of its potential is exploited.
  
  Sol
• #262 by Robotbeat on 03 May, 2010 22:07
• The specific power (W/kg) of solar electric can be just about arbitrarily high (i.e. much higher than even the power conversion electronics and certainly higher than the thruster itself) in the inner solar system if you use thin-film solar arrays, though near-term systems and operational constraints will probably favor either concentrating systems or derivations of the "Ultraflex" concept (the round arrays used for the Phoenix lander), which can have specific power of >500W/kg and >220W/kg, respectively (for megawatt-scale arrays). Ultraflex is here, now, at better than 150W/kg specific power and 30% efficiency and scalable now to 15kW per wing (obviously can have more than one wing, though having more than two adds mass).
• #263 by Chris Bergin on 18 Oct, 2011 16:08
• Move and bump to the HLV section