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#420
by
darkenfast
on 27 Mar, 2015 02:47
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Does anyone think that the voters are really going to buy the idea that this is a worthwhile step on the way to Mars?
The voters won't notice. No one other than us enthusiasts pays any attention until there is a launch.
True to a point. But American voters vote for whoever promises them the most benefits for their particular identity group. If Politician A supports the SLS and so forth, and Politician B says I will re-direct that wasteful spending to (fill-in-the-blank social program), then there won't be any launches for us enthusiasts to watch. Go look at the comments below on-line news stories about this asteroid boulder mission.
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#421
by
arachnitect
on 27 Mar, 2015 02:48
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Read an article today in Wired about ARM going to option B. Notably absent was any of the whining and kvetching that's standard in all space press articles about ARM.
I'm tired of "the public" being invoked in opposition to ARM. The opposition to ARM is mostly about internal power struggles in the space community.
Most of "the public" can't really explain anything NASA has done since 1970, but they care that -whatever it is- America is really good at it and there are cool pictures.
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#422
by
saliva_sweet
on 27 Mar, 2015 07:36
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A while back somebody from NASA basically said that the two missions were worth doing even if the rock and the astronauts don't end up in the same place at the same time, so be careful what you wish for.
That's exactly what I'd wish for. This frankenmission should be split to three missions:
1) Crew BLEO flight
2) Bring asteroid boulder back to earth
3) Alter the path of a big asteroid (may be the same asteroid as in mission 2)
Would result in three useful, well defined and scoped missions and each can be optimized to best achieve their goals.
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#423
by
alexterrell
on 27 Mar, 2015 07:53
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The ARM concept has less to do with the rock and more to do with the technologies of getting there and back.
The greatest value would be with some technology to process the rock.
Send up a refinery and turn the rock into its constituent elements. If NASA could bring back a few grams of gold extracted from the rock, people might notice.
Pack the rest of the material around a Bigelow habitat to provide radiation and micrometeorite protection.
(It's probably a CC rock on a CC asteroid, but maybe not).
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#424
by
AntiAnti
on 27 Mar, 2015 08:02
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Cygnus and Exoliner are possible options for a habitat. Given LM built Orion converting the Exoliner into companion habitat should be reasonably straightforward.
That makes sence. They do need hab module, small at least. It's too hard to live in a 9 cubic meters of the Orion cabin for a three weeks.
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#425
by
TrevorMonty
on 27 Mar, 2015 08:12
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The ARM concept has less to do with the rock and more to do with the technologies of getting there and back.
The greatest value would be with some technology to process the rock.
Send up a refinery and turn the rock into its constituent elements. If NASA could bring back a few grams of gold extracted from the rock, people might notice.
Pack the rest of the material around a Bigelow habitat to provide radiation and micrometeorite protection.
(It's probably a CC rock on a CC asteroid, but maybe not).
Developing Asteroid mining technologies is commercial industries job eg DSI and PR.
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#426
by
mikes
on 27 Mar, 2015 08:49
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It's too hard to live in a 9 cubic meters of the Orion cabin for a three weeks.
Gemini VII was two guys in 2.5 cubic metres for two weeks.
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#427
by
Darga
on 27 Mar, 2015 09:41
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The ARM concept has less to do with the rock and more to do with the technologies of getting there and back.
The greatest value would be with some technology to process the rock.
Send up a refinery and turn the rock into its constituent elements. If NASA could bring back a few grams of gold extracted from the rock, people might notice.
Pack the rest of the material around a Bigelow habitat to provide radiation and micrometeorite protection.
(It's probably a CC rock on a CC asteroid, but maybe not).
Developing Asteroid mining technologies is commercial industries job eg DSI and PR.
So involve them in the process? "We'll get you there, you do your thing"
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#428
by
AntiAnti
on 27 Mar, 2015 09:52
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It's too hard to live in a 9 cubic meters of the Orion cabin for a three weeks.
Gemini VII was two guys in 2.5 cubic metres for two weeks.
I doubt there was very comfortable two weeks. And it was 50 years ago, explorations missions in XXI century shouldn't be so extremal.
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#429
by
RonM
on 27 Mar, 2015 10:22
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Does anyone think that the voters are really going to buy the idea that this is a worthwhile step on the way to Mars?
The voters won't notice. No one other than us enthusiasts pays any attention until there is a launch.
True to a point. But American voters vote for whoever promises them the most benefits for their particular identity group. If Politician A supports the SLS and so forth, and Politician B says I will re-direct that wasteful spending to (fill-in-the-blank social program), then there won't be any launches for us enthusiasts to watch. Go look at the comments below on-line news stories about this asteroid boulder mission.
While that is true for some issues, manned spaceflight is very low on the list of political priorities. The reality is that social programs are already the majority of the US budget. People are more concerned about their falling standard of living than space exploration.
The battle for how much money NASA gets is pretty much already resolved. The fight is internal to government as to which projects get funded. It doesn't rise to the level of public attention.
NASA probably won't get enough money for payloads and SLS will have to be cancelled not on technical merits, but because there won't be anything to launch.
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#430
by
laszlo
on 27 Mar, 2015 12:12
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Option B is even more pointless than the original asteroid in a bag mission. If you want a boulder from an asteroid, just walk across the National Mall from NASA HQ into the Smithsonian and take your pick. Having watched Apollo happen, I don't see how NASA can talk about this mess with a straight face.
Just cancel the stupid thing and use the money for real human exploration.
This is an all too common, but frustratingly ignorant argument.
Simple fact is that meteorites are not exactly a representative example of asteroid properties, especially when it comes to carbonaceous chondrites. Meteorites you can actually pick up tend to self select for the most structurally sound samples, because the weaker ones by definition burn up on the way in. And having meteors on the ground tell you nothing about how to do zero-g processing, or how the reentry thermal environment has changed the chemical composition of the samples, or what regolith (which also by definition typically gets blown off during reentry) is really like.
We have meteors from Mars and the Moon too. Should we say "good enough, why do we need to go to Mars now since we have samples back here on earth?"
Also, comparing ARM to Apollo is also ridiculous. ARM is just a precursor mission, part of a bigger story. Think more along the lines of Ranger or Gemini. Something that gets us useful exploration, and paves the way for more ambitious future missions. ARM is going to be less than 3% of NASA's HEOMD budget over the next 10 years. Stop acting like it's 97% (and this applies to a ton of other people too).
~Jon
I'll add: context, context, CONTEXT.
Forum-gurus correct me if I'm wrong here: Scientists have determined a small fraction of the meteorites collected here on Earth came from the Moon and Mars (and Vesta). No one knows from WHERE on these bodies the meteorites derived. You can't point to a latitude/longitude location on world X and say--"See that crater; this meteorite came from here."
Context was fundamentally important regarding the Apollo lunar samples. It will be fundamentally important regarding Mars Sample Return, and is important now for the mission planning.
Why would this be any different for an asteroid? It isn't.
No context--a fundamental scientific reason for the mission is removed.
My 2 quatloos,
Zubenelgenubi
PS
Jon, thanks for covering the briefing!
The original mission was supposed to be an actual manned flight to an asteroid, in-situ, for the purposes of demonstrating US deep-space manned capabilities. The sample returns were a bonus. It devolved into a robotic mission to bring a tiny asteroid back to where it could be examined close to Earth. Now it's devolved into a robotic sample return mission with an expensive and unnecessary manned component that costs so much and adds so little value that it's in real danger of cancellation. The trip to the Smithsonian is simply the final devolution, the logical extension of an illogical process.
Bringing Apollo into it again, when they wanted to demonstrate pinpoint landings, they didn't pick an anonymous crater on a flat plain, they made a conscious decision to target the Surveyor spacecraft. This was a target that was unambiguous, easily understood by everyone and inspiring.
The original ARM mission to send people out to where the asteroid actually is was also unambiguous, easily understood and inspiring. Space travel is about going to real places and seeing things. The new missions removed the inspiration. They introduced ambiguity and confusion.
A robotic sample return mission is valuable, as is a manned test beyond lunar orbit. But combining the 2 and calling it a trip to an asteroid is as valid as calling the Smithsonian expedition a trip to an asteroid.
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#431
by
arachnitect
on 27 Mar, 2015 15:16
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Option B is even more pointless than the original asteroid in a bag mission. If you want a boulder from an asteroid, just walk across the National Mall from NASA HQ into the Smithsonian and take your pick. Having watched Apollo happen, I don't see how NASA can talk about this mess with a straight face.
Just cancel the stupid thing and use the money for real human exploration.
This is an all too common, but frustratingly ignorant argument.
Simple fact is that meteorites are not exactly a representative example of asteroid properties, especially when it comes to carbonaceous chondrites. Meteorites you can actually pick up tend to self select for the most structurally sound samples, because the weaker ones by definition burn up on the way in. And having meteors on the ground tell you nothing about how to do zero-g processing, or how the reentry thermal environment has changed the chemical composition of the samples, or what regolith (which also by definition typically gets blown off during reentry) is really like.
We have meteors from Mars and the Moon too. Should we say "good enough, why do we need to go to Mars now since we have samples back here on earth?"
Also, comparing ARM to Apollo is also ridiculous. ARM is just a precursor mission, part of a bigger story. Think more along the lines of Ranger or Gemini. Something that gets us useful exploration, and paves the way for more ambitious future missions. ARM is going to be less than 3% of NASA's HEOMD budget over the next 10 years. Stop acting like it's 97% (and this applies to a ton of other people too).
~Jon
I'll add: context, context, CONTEXT.
Forum-gurus correct me if I'm wrong here: Scientists have determined a small fraction of the meteorites collected here on Earth came from the Moon and Mars (and Vesta). No one knows from WHERE on these bodies the meteorites derived. You can't point to a latitude/longitude location on world X and say--"See that crater; this meteorite came from here."
Context was fundamentally important regarding the Apollo lunar samples. It will be fundamentally important regarding Mars Sample Return, and is important now for the mission planning.
Why would this be any different for an asteroid? It isn't.
No context--a fundamental scientific reason for the mission is removed.
My 2 quatloos,
Zubenelgenubi
PS
Jon, thanks for covering the briefing!
The original mission was supposed to be an actual manned flight to an asteroid, in-situ, for the purposes of demonstrating US deep-space manned capabilities. The sample returns were a bonus. It devolved into a robotic mission to bring a tiny asteroid back to where it could be examined close to Earth. Now it's devolved into a robotic sample return mission with an expensive and unnecessary manned component that costs so much and adds so little value that it's in real danger of cancellation. The trip to the Smithsonian is simply the final devolution, the logical extension of an illogical process.
Bringing Apollo into it again, when they wanted to demonstrate pinpoint landings, they didn't pick an anonymous crater on a flat plain, they made a conscious decision to target the Surveyor spacecraft. This was a target that was unambiguous, easily understood by everyone and inspiring.
The original ARM mission to send people out to where the asteroid actually is was also unambiguous, easily understood and inspiring. Space travel is about going to real places and seeing things. The new missions removed the inspiration. They introduced ambiguity and confusion.
A robotic sample return mission is valuable, as is a manned test beyond lunar orbit. But combining the 2 and calling it a trip to an asteroid is as valid as calling the Smithsonian expedition a trip to an asteroid.
A native orbit asteroid mission might still happen as money becomes available in the late 2020's, but I think a lot of people would now rather skip it and build straight for a Martian moon mission instead. I don't know exactly what happened with the manned asteroid mission concepts, but the enthusiasm for those didn't seem to run very deep either, and the number of large candidate asteroids with workable launch windows was very small.
ARM may have been originally conceived as a clever way to do "a mission to an asteroid" but I'll readily acknowledge that's probably not a valid way of describing it. It's a technology and training mission with a really cool planetary defense bonus.
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#432
by
notsorandom
on 27 Mar, 2015 18:37
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This is heresy I know but why need humans in this at all? The four main arguments are sample retrieval, hardware testing, planetary defense, and positioning a rock for potential later experiments. All of those except for the sample retrieval are going to be accomplished before the crew even launches. Basically the only thing the people will be needed for is selecting the samples to bring back. A robotic craft could be sent up to preform the sample retrieval. Figuring out how to do that robotically doing that would be much more useful for ISRU.
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#433
by
RonM
on 27 Mar, 2015 18:47
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This is heresy I know but why need humans in this at all? The four main arguments are sample retrieval, hardware testing, planetary defense, and positioning a rock for potential later experiments. All of those except for the sample retrieval are going to be accomplished before the crew even launches. Basically the only thing the people will be needed for is selecting the samples to bring back. A robotic craft could be sent up to preform the sample retrieval. Figuring out how to do that robotically doing that would be much more useful for ISRU.
That would be correct if the point was remote ISRU testing, but the main objective is to test human exploration techniques. The lessons learned will be useful in manned missions to Phobos. Missions to Phobos will be good shakedown missions before trying to land on and explore Mars.
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#434
by
jongoff
on 27 Mar, 2015 18:51
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ARM may have been originally conceived as a clever way to do "a mission to an asteroid" but I'll readily acknowledge that's probably not a valid way of describing it. It's a technology and training mission with a really cool planetary defense bonus.
No, ARM was based on the KISS Asteroid Retreival study, which was explicitly about bringing back a large asteroid sample both for science and ISRU development. NASA latched onto that as an asteroid mission they could afford early in the 2020s, but the concept wasn't created as some attempt to fill a politician's arbitrary goal.
~Jon
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#435
by
Robotbeat
on 27 Mar, 2015 23:13
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The ARM concept has less to do with the rock and more to do with the technologies of getting there and back.
Then forget the rock. It's just that I was looking at the video catldr posted and it looked really great until three minute mark when a guy with a pickaxe and a suitcase showed up in a huge rocket. The two missions should be split. Each part is making the other one worse.
So, you'd launch to empty point in space, then go do an EVA, wave around a pickaxe and come back inside and back to Earth?
Yes, MUCH better.
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#436
by
Robotbeat
on 27 Mar, 2015 23:13
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ARM may have been originally conceived as a clever way to do "a mission to an asteroid" but I'll readily acknowledge that's probably not a valid way of describing it. It's a technology and training mission with a really cool planetary defense bonus.
No, ARM was based on the KISS Asteroid Retreival study, which was explicitly about bringing back a large asteroid sample both for science and ISRU development. NASA latched onto that as an asteroid mission they could afford early in the 2020s, but the concept wasn't created as some attempt to fill a politician's arbitrary goal.
~Jon
Indeed, the predecessor (Arkyd) to Planetary Resources was involved in the original study.
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#437
by
Robotbeat
on 27 Mar, 2015 23:16
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How would you do enhanced gravity tractor without basically building the entire robotic portion of the ARM Option B mission, sans maybe a docking adapter?
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#438
by
arachnitect
on 28 Mar, 2015 01:55
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ARM may have been originally conceived as a clever way to do "a mission to an asteroid" but I'll readily acknowledge that's probably not a valid way of describing it. It's a technology and training mission with a really cool planetary defense bonus.
No, ARM was based on the KISS Asteroid Retreival study, which was explicitly about bringing back a large asteroid sample both for science and ISRU development. NASA latched onto that as an asteroid mission they could afford early in the 2020s, but the concept wasn't created as some attempt to fill a politician's arbitrary goal.
~Jon
Okay sorry. I know a little bit about the Keck study but not much. I don't know exactly what the genesis of the whole idea was. If I remember though, the administration picked up on it
really quickly, like before it had much of a chance to bounce around the community. I suspect the administration thought it solved a whole bunch of problems for them.
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#439
by
the_other_Doug
on 28 Mar, 2015 03:09
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It's too hard to live in a 9 cubic meters of the Orion cabin for a three weeks.
Gemini VII was two guys in 2.5 cubic metres for two weeks.
And was one of the most miserable experiences, to hear Borman and Lovell talk about it, they ever went through. They would never have managed it in the regular Gemini G5C suits; only the lightweight, thin-canvas, removable G7C suits made it even possible.
But note that it was stated that the current baseline mission, which doesn't include a hab module of any kind, is for a
two-person crew on a 23-day flight. An Orion is actually somewhat roomy for only two people (especially in microgravity), and I imagine that the small crew complement has as much to do with maintaining good margins on the consumables as anything else.
Now, if you decide to test out a prototype support/hab module on this mission, you could increase crew and/or mission length. But, as was noted, that's not in the current plan, though I imagine it could be incorporated. If you're going to do a support/hab module on a 2025 mission, though, you need to decide within the next two or three years, I think, if you want to have time to design, build and test it.