The thread for space cadets!

[hobbsyoyo]

@Masada - I wrote an awful lot about that in my last post. Do you just want me to copy/paste it for you? <serious question, it's an awful wall of text and the answers you want are there but I don't blame you for skimming it>

So what's the news with that PRC lunar lander probe? I heard it achieved orbit. Any news beyond that? Will they be landing it anytime soon?

I haven't heard. I'm not sure if they plan on doing a lot of observations before they land but I assume there will be some check-out period in lunar orbit along with waiting for the orbit to line up with a decent landing vector. Probably a few days before they land, possibly a few weeks but I don't really know to be honest.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It's the textbook definition of scale, dude. Not mine.

You're absolutely right, but I went to great lengths to point out this only works largely one-way due to peculiarities of the American launch provider market.

Yeah, it does. Go to 26 rockets, costs fall. Cut to 23, costs rise. Scale.

The cost available at 26 rockets was one-off and going back to 26 rockets won't bring back low costs and in fact could increase costs as I explained in that wall of text.

That's scale right there.

Emphasis on 'might' in my previous post. The Air Force still even isn't sure that they actually can contain costs themselves, which has caused a lot of hand-wringing from Congress.

What's so different about 2012 as compared to 2013?

Lots of things. Seriously, do you want me to copy/paste from my last post?

 

[Winner]

So what's the news with that PRC lunar lander probe? I heard it achieved orbit. Any news beyond that? Will they be landing it anytime soon?

Touchdown on the Moon is scheduled for December 14, China says.

Hopefully it works.

 

[Symphony D.]

1. HLVs being of insufficient volume to drive down sales is a really great incentive to discard that part of the plan and focus on smaller boosters which are A. cheaper per launch anyway, and B. will economically scale better.
2. I've already laid out that cutting payloads up into smaller chunks is not "modular" in the way that Zubrin has objected to, i.e., requiring in-orbit assembly.
3. I've already laid out that you do not need to dock these chunks to get them to Mars (and given you'd be pushing less mass per throw, it'd be easier to get them there).
4. I've already laid out that breaking payloads into chunks makes them easier to get on to Mars, making mission planning and mass required to facilitate descent smaller.
5. I've already laid out that most of these chunks do not require power or heating during flight, and especially not after landing, since they are dumb matter that consists of supplies, equipment, or construction materiel that will not be adversely affected by these conditions. The number of fiddly delicate modules is, comparatively, very small.
6. You spend an awful lot of time talking about docking and plumbing; there is no reason to connect these cargo chunks full of dumb matter let alone to pressurize or heat them. Those concerns only apply to the crew transfer vehicle, whatever form that takes.
7. The kind of equipment you would be sending to facilitate a Mars mission, i.e., chemical processing equipment, habitation modules, reconaissance gear, rovers, and heavy construction equipment, is, with rare exception, nowhere near as complicated or expensive as components of the Iridium or GPS networks, does not have anywhere near the fine-tuned operating tolerances, and comparing the two is like comparing building a warehouse with building a CPU plant. It is an inherently fallacious distortion of the majority of the payload contents.
8. The whole point of Mars Direct, as one can infer from the subtitle of "Creating a Spacefaring Civilization," is not just to put enough stuff on Mars to facilitate the transitory mission crews while they're there, but to stockpile enough materials on the surface to enable permanent habitation and growth, and to establish there a "place to send things." Given whatever is built on Mars will, for quite some time be entirely dependent on Earth for sophisticated wares (even accounting for advances in small-scale to-order assembly), any growth will necessarily correspond to growth in vehicle launches (or the assembly of vehicles in orbit to shuttle stuff back and forth). Either way, launch count only grows unless the whole endeavor withers and dies.
9. Your concerns do apply to the crew transfer vehicle, but given people will be being sent to Mars with far less frequency than the associated equipment, it would make sense that sending them would be correspondingly a far costlier affair.

The point of this program is to totally change the nature of the game and to get away from big event launches, making it more like sending freight on cargo ships or via airline. You can criticize it through the lens of the current industry model, but its entire raison d'être is to utterly obliterate that industry model. The specifics of Zubrin's plan, on paper, are trivial and irrelevant compared to this overall objective, which is the reason he made the Mars Direct model in the first place, regardless of whether he's an egomaniac and prefers his own spin or not.

 

[Masada]

You're not really engaging with what I've said at all. So I'm going to speak in nice simple language. As late as 2012 budget estimates suggested that there were huge scale effects in operation. These estimates would have been prepared by experts who would have included all the relevant cost considerations when preparing them.

I wrote an awful lot about that in my last post. Do you just want me to copy/paste it for you? <serious question, it's an awful wall of text and the answers you want are there but I don't blame you for skimming it>

Lots of things. Seriously, do you want me to copy/paste from my last post?

Whose being smug now?

 

[Crezth]

One could make the point that hobbsyoyo is blinded by the very experience he touts (and doesn't have). A serious case of the undergrads.

At any rate, it is disappointing as hell.

 

[timtofly]

Can't they just start on a space station above mars? Or would even travel between stations be cost prohibitive?

 

[Symphony D.]

I want to recontextualize this discussion.

What Zubrin is doing is sort of akin to how somebody might lay out how they want to go build Plymouth Rock or Jamestown or something, and sort of throwing out some numbers to say "We need this many ships of roughly this make with this much stuff on roughly this kind of schedule," with the implicit understanding that this will be a short-term loss requiring large up-front capital and political will but a long-term game that will massively increase trade volume because you are literally creating an entirely new place to trade with, and whose demands will revolutionize the shipbuilding industry, among many other things. And he's giving you some vague numbers that can show it can be done in principle; maybe he believes in them absolutely or not, it's kind of irrelevant. To-date as of when he presents his plan, everyone else has mostly just focused on getting there as a gee-whiz thing, claiming it for the mother country and going home, making it basically a total net loss.

Then a shipbuilder comes along and starts frantically gesturing at the rigging and the shipyard and saying that there is no way it can be done economically and so on.

It might be valid criticism, but it's rather missing the forest to focus on one very particular tree. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have started this argument here, rather than on the technical end, because I really feel that Zubrin has just been straight-up misread.

Can't they just start on a space station above mars? Or would even travel between stations be cost prohibitive?

This would have its uses since you could dump stuff there (say, Phobos or Deimos) and then deorbit it to Mars as needed, but the majority of the cost is in getting stuff out of Earth's gravity-well. Kim Stanley Robinson, among others, played with this notion in the Mars Trilogy.

 

[Winner]

Can't they just start on a space station above mars? Or would even travel between stations be cost prohibitive?

Well, it's been suggested that before landing on Mars, we could send people to one of the Moons to camp there for some time and operate automated robots on the surface - which without the 20m speed-of-light delay which you inevitably get if you try to do it from Earth, would be much easier.

However, there are many problems with this proposal, the most serious being related to GCR and zero-G exposure. I.e., the issue of cost vs. science/propaganda payoff.

 

[peter grimes]

Then a shipbuilder comes along and starts frantically gesturing at the rigging and the shipyard and saying that there is no way it can be done economically and so on.

It might be valid criticism, but it's rather missing the forest to focus on one very particular tree. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have started this argument here, rather than on the technical end, because I really feel that Zubrin has just been straight-up misread.

To continue your analogy, isn't this more a case where the rigger or shipbuilders is saying that the sort of ship required has never been successfully sailed in the way required? And that a ship capable of it would be unnecessarily large, so maybe it's best to scrap the single ship idea and send a fleet of smaller ships?

I have not read Mars Direct stuff, I'm just casually following along here - so perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

I mean, if the guy's plan says "let's do it by method A", isn't it fair to evaluate method A as presented?

 

[Symphony D.]

I reiterate: do you think that a man would write a book for a mass-market audiences called Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization because: 1. he was interested in presenting an extremely technically nuanced and utterly complete and thorough project proposal for public consumption in the hopes that it would somehow get adopted, or 2. that he was essentially making a political statement against an established bureaucracy (i.e., NASA) that has a history of short-sighted goals that get demolished by the changing whims of political administrations (e.g., Apollo), and was putting what was implicitly a long-term alternative to this way of doing business out there to generate public discussion and influence how the public thinks about space flight (i.e., shifting from short-term mission-oriented thinking to long-term economically-oriented thinking)?

If Zubrin wanted to write up an actual mission plan and dump it on the NASA director's desk I don't think it would be particularly hard for him to do that, regardless of whatever bridges he's burned professionally. That was clearly not his intent, or he would've done it. You're left to ask what the intent was. Now, death of the author and all that, but it's pretty clearly politically motivated, and was not built to shock-and-awe people in the field or to convince people to lobby their Congressmen to adopt exactly this plan.

e: To wit, the very first sentence in the introduction of the book is "This is a book about creating a spacefaring civilization&#8212;the next step in the development of human society." It is not "This is my totally sweet plan to get us to Mars for $X in Y time that has no holes and no problems whatsoever."

This was characterized by hobbsyoyo as "The first half was decent though it was chock-full of mischaracterizations and irrational exuberance," when the whole thing, really, is intended for exactly that purpose. The point of the book is "Dream big," with some token stabs at justifying the legitimacy of the dreams. To write the entirety of that off and focus on the technical specifics is, as I said, rather missing the point, and is frankly like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson out for not having a budget anytime he makes a "We gave up our dreams" speech.

Personally I think Zubrin is wrong, not because of any of his technical specifics, but because there's not (as far as we know) really anything economically viable on Mars to justify going there first that will pay off within less than a century or two. It could be a useful pit-stop because of its shallower gravity-well, and maybe an overflow site for ameliorating overcrowding on Earth, but in and of itself there's very little to recommend it outside of very slowly building up a trading partner. In that regard, I would say his vision isn't ambitious enough, but it was a nice first try at trying to make the case for a different way of thinking of seriously colonizing space.

 

[Winner]

Entering Space was written AFTER Case for Mars, in which he did exactly that, including technical details. And yes, CfM is to be taken as a concrete proposal for a human-to-Mars mission; Zubrin only went public (as in, intended for mass audiences) with it after NASA had already refused it.

Zubrin has consistently shown severe hostility to anything and anyone he perceives as derailing the goal of landing humans on Mars in 10 years (the starting point keeps being pushed forward) in the manner he proposed. He can perhaps tolerate tiiiiiiiiiiiiiny alterations.

Gods forbid somebody proposes something else. At best he reacts with "meh, it may work (but my Mars Direct is sooooo much better so go to hell)", at worst he starts calling them names.

This is basically why he's burned all his bridges to people who could actually fund his ideas.

EDIT: And just to be clear here, I LOVED Entering Space. It reads well, it's visionary, you learn interesting things, and Zubrin isn't nearly as preachy and dogmatic there as he is in other books.

 

[Symphony D.]

That basically confirms my point: Zubrin was politically disillusioned, published his plan (Case for Mars), then published something to try and sway public opinion toward a position more in line with his own (Entering Space). Entering Space itself is pretty clearly heady, soaring-speeches and big-hopes-and-dreams type stuff though.

We can go back to the technical arguments of why Mars Direct would or wouldn't work, and what changes could make it work, and what a jerk Robert Zubrin might be (and again, I wouldn't deny that he is one), sure, and maybe what I've suggested is not actually feasible in practice. I'm willing to admit that possibility. Maybe the aerospace industry is irredeemably broken and dysfunctional when it comes to space flight. Sure. But I'm still going to say that focusing on Mars Direct as written in Entering Space to the exclusion of all else is missing the forest for the trees when reading the book.

 

[Winner]

Who does that? I don't. I even like Mars Direct in principle. I give credit where it is due and I criticize what I disagree with.

Of course, one has to be aware of the mode of any discussion among space nuts. There are, broadly speaking, two:

a) visionary-utopistic (in which people let loose their imagination and firmly hold to their optimism concerning the future)
b) hardcore reality (in which people stick to facts as they are now and call the others "naive" and their ideas "pies in the sky")

One person can engage in both simultaneously, which can be confusing (I've seen myself do that, it's hilarious when you read it later). This often leads to flamewars when somebody introduces mode A idea and somebody else destroys it with mode B arguments. Person A then gets offended and thinks that person B is a narrow-minded jerk while person B is firmly convinced that person A knows nothing about the issue. Both may or may not be right.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You're not really engaging with what I've said at all. So I'm going to speak in nice simple language. As late as 2012 budget estimates suggested that there were huge scale effects in operation. These estimates would have been prepared by experts who would have included all the relevant cost considerations when preparing them.

The article states that costs increased drastically with a slight drop in volume, yes. The article also stated that part of the reason was because of excess components that had run out. That, along with the factors I spoke on (namely an engine shortage, shuttered production plants, an aging workforce and general market instabilities) means that the increase of prices couldn't be entirely avoided and further, that trying to increase volume beyond a certain point can in fact lead to an increase in unit cost. That's not how economies of scale typically work.

Whose being smug now?

Huh? I was trying to be polite by pointing out that I wrote a wall of text and wouldn't mind reposting the relevant parts so you didn't have to wade through it all. The offer still stands - I've re-summarized in a sentence above some of the issues. I went to great lengths to explain them in detail in that wall of text and I don't expect you to have to try and pick out the relevant parts.

One could make the point that hobbsyoyo is blinded by the very experience he touts (and doesn't have). A serious case of the undergrads.

At any rate, it is disappointing as hell.

Hasn't this point already been made? At what point are you going to stop taking shots at me personally and actually prove me wrong? Your sole contribution to the discussion thus far has to been to point out that I don't know what I'm talking about more or less. That's fine and dandy, now kindly show me where I'm in error.

HLVs being of insufficient volume to drive down sales is a really great incentive to discard that part of the plan and focus on smaller boosters which are A. cheaper per launch anyway, and B. will economically scale better.

I agree with the caveat that launch vehicle costs aren't the biggest fraction of a project and that attempting to modularize the project isn't going to guarantee lower overall costs and in fact, could drive up overall costs.

*I've already laid out that cutting payloads up into smaller chunks is not "modular" in the way that Zubrin has objected to, i.e., requiring in-orbit assembly.
*I've already laid out that you do not need to dock these chunks to get them to Mars (and given you'd be pushing less mass per throw, it'd be easier to get them there).

Do you mean sending complete, separate components all the way to Mars and landing them all separately?* That's a good idea though the challenge there is that you'll have to land them all relatively close together. I think that could be done though and especially if you sent some sort of rover with the crewed section(s) then you could drive to the different parts if they land far apart. Of course, parts that would need to be very close together could pose problems. If you land your power plant far from your hab or your ISRU units far from you Mars departure stage, for example, you'd be in a world of hurt.

I have to point out though that overall, this approach is going to cost a lot more. If I'm understanding you correctly, then all of the components would have to be self-sufficient long term and be able to have do everything from launch to TMI to cruising to Mars landing individually. You'd wind up with a ton of redundancies in things like cruise stages and aeroshells/parachutes/retro-rockets, etc that you could avoid with both the on-orbit assembly and all-up approaches. That's going to drive up costs quite a bit, which isn't to say is impossible.

I've already laid out that breaking payloads into chunks makes them easier to get on to Mars, making mission planning and mass required to facilitate descent smaller.

Hey, I said that!

I don't see how mission planning would be made easier by having to co-ordinate an even larger number of precision landings - much less all of the calculations that would go into TMI's and so on.

I've already laid out that most of these chunks do not require power or heating during flight, and especially not after landing, since they are dumb matter that consists of supplies, equipment, or construction materiel that will not be adversely affected by these conditions. The number of fiddly delicate modules is, comparatively, very small.

You spend an awful lot of time talking about docking and plumbing; there is no reason to connect these cargo chunks full of dumb matter let alone to pressurize or heat them. Those concerns only apply to the crew transfer vehicle, whatever form that takes.

What? Everything is adversely affected by space conditions. Why do you think there are so many NASA databases on space-rated materials? Granted, you could probably store certain foods in essentially a deep-freeze as well as things like spare parts, but you can't do that with everything you'd want to send such as water and certain propellants, pumping fluids and so on. The actual electronics of the flight vehicles and parts of their propulsion systems absolutely have to be heated or stuff simply won't work. You can't just throw something at Mars unguided and expect it to do a precision landing on the other end after leaving the spacecraft exposed to space for months.

The kind of equipment you would be sending to facilitate a Mars mission, i.e., chemical processing equipment, habitation modules, reconaissance gear, rovers, and heavy construction equipment, is, with rare exception, nowhere near as complicated or expensive as components of the Iridium or GPS networks, does not have anywhere near the fine-tuned operating tolerances, and comparing the two is like comparing building a warehouse with building a CPU plant. It is an inherently fallacious distortion of the majority of the payload contents.

What? You're honestly saying that a GPS or telecommunications satellite is more complicated than the kinds of vital life-support and mission-enabling hardware you'd need to send a human crew to Mars, harvest resources and then send them back? You're off it dude. That makes no sense.

The whole point of Mars Direct, as one can infer from the subtitle of "Creating a Spacefaring Civilization," is not just to put enough stuff on Mars to facilitate the transitory mission crews while they're there, but to stockpile enough materials on the surface to enable permanent habitation and growth, and to establish there a "place to send things." Given whatever is built on Mars will, for quite some time be entirely dependent on Earth for sophisticated wares (even accounting for advances in small-scale to-order assembly), any growth will necessarily correspond to growth in vehicle launches (or the assembly of vehicles in orbit to shuttle stuff back and forth). Either way, launch count only grows unless the whole endeavor withers and dies.

I understand this and I do not disagree at all. My issue is with the mechanics of how you do that and please note that I haven't said your approach is impossible as you keep implying. I have pointed out reasons why it would be more complicated/more expensive than the approach laid out by Zubrin and would in some ways contradict the reasoning behind his approach.

Your concerns do apply to the crew transfer vehicle, but given people will be being sent to Mars with far less frequency than the associated equipment, it would make sense that sending them would be correspondingly a far costlier affair.

Rhetorical question: Do you know how much it cost to develop the Curiousity rover? Do you know how much it's going to cost to develop and fly the next rover that's based on the same platform? A buttload of cash and years of R&D. That's just two rovers with extremely limited capabilities and discounts the years and billions spent on all of the orbiters that are already there and facilitate Curiosity's mission as well as the other rovers, fly-by's and satellites that have helped define the goals of Curiosity's mission.

Doing anything in support of a manned mission to Mars is going to be much, much more expensive and complicated no matter how it's done. My point all along has been that your approach, as I understand it, could significantly add to the expense and complication of the overall project. I still think it's a worthy goal and I think it's an affordable goal --> especially considering the trillions we've spent fighting pointless wars.

The point of this program is to totally change the nature of the game and to get away from big event launches, making it more like sending freight on cargo ships or via airline. You can criticize it through the lens of the current industry model, but its entire raison d'être is to utterly obliterate that industry model. The specifics of Zubrin's plan, on paper, are trivial and irrelevant compared to this overall objective, which is the reason he made the Mars Direct model in the first place, regardless of whether he's an egomaniac and prefers his own spin or not.

Sure thing. We can talk about the industry we'd all rather have rather than the one that actually exists if you want to.

I want to recontextualize this discussion.

What Zubrin is doing is sort of akin to how somebody might lay out how they want to go build Plymouth Rock or Jamestown or something, and sort of throwing out some numbers to say "We need this many ships of roughly this make with this much stuff on roughly this kind of schedule," with the implicit understanding that this will be a short-term loss requiring large up-front capital and political will but a long-term game that will massively increase trade volume because you are literally creating an entirely new place to trade with, and whose demands will revolutionize the shipbuilding industry, among many other things. And he's giving you some vague numbers that can show it can be done in principle; maybe he believes in them absolutely or not, it's kind of irrelevant. To-date as of when he presents his plan, everyone else has mostly just focused on getting there as a gee-whiz thing, claiming it for the mother country and going home, making it basically a total net loss.

Then a shipbuilder comes along and starts frantically gesturing at the rigging and the shipyard and saying that there is no way it can be done economically and so on.

It might be valid criticism, but it's rather missing the forest to focus on one very particular tree. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have started this argument here, rather than on the technical end, because I really feel that Zubrin has just been straight-up misread.

He hasn't been misread at all. I nitpicked a one-liner about launch capacity that itself was absolutely misleading that he wrote. You launched into a tirade to defend him and his ideas and proposed new ideas that you believe are superior to the specifics of what he came up with in conjunction with NASA. All I've done is pointed out what I see as flawed assumptions with your approach to Mars Direct.

I think that his approach can be done and would be far superior to the conventional approaches as embodied by the 'Battlestar Galactica' plan laid out by the 90-day report. I also think that your approach is far superior to the Battlestar Galactica approach. I think that both yours and Zubrin's original plan are affordable relative to say, the way things are done. I differ with you on your plan being more affordable or this notion that parts of it would somehow be easy. I've focused on the technical aspects that you've laid out and why I don't think you can achieve the kinds of savings you've been talking about. Nowhere did I say it was impossible, nowhere did I state that Mars Direct is itself a bad plan.

Edit: Oh crap, more posts to read, give me a few minutes.
*Genuine apologies if I misunderstood that point.

 

[Crezth]

Hasn't this point already been made? At what point are you going to stop taking shots at me personally and actually prove me wrong? Your sole contribution to the discussion thus far has to been to point out that I don't know what I'm talking about more or less. That's fine and dandy, now kindly show me where I'm in error.

Well, thanks for, erm, making my point for me, I guess.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I have not read Mars Direct stuff, I'm just casually following along here - so perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

I mean, if the guy's plan says "let's do it by method A", isn't it fair to evaluate method A as presented?

Yeah, pretty much. Symphony D has characterized Mars Direct as some sort of broad outline that's lacking specifics. It's not- it's a very detailed plan that he went approached NASA with. At first, they rejected him, but later co-opted his plan which grew into the "mars reference mission" that made some modifications but kept the gist of the plan the same. The outline is that you send vehicles to Mars before you ever send a crew. The vehicles then use Martian resources such as the atmosphere to generate fuel, oxygen and water for later explorers to use. Then you send the actual crew over along with a second set of vehicles to make more resources for the next batch of explorers and continue the cycle.

It's a very good plan and I personally think it's the approach that's going to get humans to Mars. This whole thing kicked off because I called Zubrin a jerk (which is kind of true but probably unfair) with a bad reputation (largely a by-product of him being a jerk) and I nitpicked his characterization of the US's heavy-lift potential. I even stated at the time that the problems with his characterization of the heavy-lift potential would be moot if you broke up his hardware into smaller chunks though this would create issues. That got interpreted by Symphony D as me saying that it was impossible and it went downhill from there.

No one has disproven my point that he mischaracterized the heavy-lift potential yet. I've also tried to show that Symphony D's approach probably wouldn't save money compared to Zubrin's approach. I'm still waiting for an actual technical explanation of why I am wrong, meanwhile I guess it will just have to suffice that I have an incurable case of the undergrads.

I reiterate: do you think that a man would write a book for a mass-market audiences called Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization because: 1. he was interested in presenting an extremely technically nuanced and utterly complete and thorough project proposal for public consumption in the hopes that it would somehow get adopted, or 2. that he was essentially making a political statement against an established bureaucracy (i.e., NASA) that has a history of short-sighted goals that get demolished by the changing whims of political administrations (e.g., Apollo), and was putting what was implicitly a long-term alternative to this way of doing business out there to generate public discussion and influence how the public thinks about space flight (i.e., shifting from short-term mission-oriented thinking to long-term economically-oriented thinking)?

Zubrin wants to do both 1 and 2. I don't see how you're missing that? It's not like he hasn't gone to extreme pains to outline extremely specific steps to accomplish Mars direct, up to and including technical plans and outlines. And yes, he has broken it down for the general public and he's done a very good job of that I might add.

If Zubrin wanted to write up an actual mission plan and dump it on the NASA director's desk I don't think it would be particularly hard for him to do that, regardless of whatever bridges he's burned professionally. That was clearly not his intent, or he would've done it.

He already did exactly that and it resulted in the 'Mars Reference Mission' that I mentioned above.

You're left to ask what the intent was. Now, death of the author and all that, but it's pretty clearly politically motivated, and was not built to shock-and-awe people in the field or to convince people to lobby their Congressmen to adopt exactly this plan.

You're kidding, right? He's literally (and repeatedly) spoken about the need to lobby Congress to adopt the plan in addition to getting boostrap organizations together to do it itself! He even goes into some detail on it (and why the current political system is so messed up with respect to space stuff) in Entering Space.

This was characterized by hobbsyoyo as "The first half was decent though it was chock-full of mischaracterizations and irrational exuberance," when the whole thing, really, is intended for exactly that purpose. The point of the book is "Dream big," with some token stabs at justifying the legitimacy of the dreams. To write the entirety of that off and focus on the technical specifics is, as I said, rather missing the point, and is frankly like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson out for not having a budget anytime he makes a "We gave up our dreams" speech.

So? I can characterize it however I want. That doesn't mean I fundamentally disagree with him. You've read far too much into what I've said here. And please, feel free to show me where I've been wrong on the technical issues I've raised.

Well, thanks for, erm, making my point for me, I guess.

I confess that I am totally lost now. Would you mind explaining? I'm not sure if you've been on the pro- or con- side of the 'you're a complete idiot, hobbs!' side-debate and as such I can't parse your intent.

 

[Symphony D.]

Well, then I'm willing to write Zubrin himself off as an egomaniac. Anyway, for the sake of brevity I'm going to focus mainly on what I see as the core points of contention:

What? Everything is adversely affected by space conditions. Why do you think there are so many NASA databases on space-rated materials? Granted, you could probably store certain foods in essentially a deep-freeze as well as things like spare parts, but you can't do that with everything you'd want to send such as water and certain propellants, pumping fluids and so on. The actual electronics of the flight vehicles and parts of their propulsion systems absolutely have to be heated or stuff simply won't work. You can't just throw something at Mars unguided and expect it to do a precision landing on the other end after leaving the spacecraft exposed to space for months.

My view is that the majority of the materials will be essentially inert, and that which will be active on Mars will need whatever capacities are necessary to work there (e.g., heating) built in and will be built to activated from a cold-start on the surface. A lot of the rest, e.g., food supplies, can be packaged in such a way as for this to be a non-issue; this is already done for long sea voyages, military operations, etc.

What you essentially need is a "cargo container" equivalent that you can shove whatever into, attach a deorbit package to, and put on a booster and fire at Mars (on whatever kind of orbit to economize, be it the Interplanetary Transport Network or whatever), where it may or may not have some assembly required depending on what it is and what it does. There may be "big ticket" items this doesn't work for, including the crew. The equipment has to be robust enough to do this for it to at all make sense economically. To that end:

Rhetorical question: Do you know how much it cost to develop the Curiousity rover? Do you know how much it's going to cost to develop and fly the next rover that's based on the same platform? A buttload of cash and years of R&D. That's just two rovers with extremely limited capabilities and discounts the years and billions spent on all of the orbiters that are already there and facilitate Curiosity's mission as well as the other rovers, fly-by's and satellites that have helped define the goals of Curiosity's mission.

What? You're honestly saying that a GPS or telecommunications satellite is more complicated than the kinds of vital life-support and mission-enabling hardware you'd need to send a human crew to Mars, harvest resources and then send them back? You're off it dude. That makes no sense.

These ultimately form, I think, the basis of where we cannot reconcile our differences.

My view is that in order to justify doing a Mars Mission economically, you are not going to want custom, one-off equipment. You are going to want mass-produced equipment that is not what the US Air Force would call "a 99% solution," but a "75% solution." Solutions that are expendable and good enough, not exquisite ones that cost an arm and a leg. The cheapest way of doing this is by 1. volume, 2. lowering quality standards (albeit not quality control), and 3. modifying off-the-shelf hardware. A lot of those components would need modification due to a different operating environment (mostly the cold and lack of oxygen, rather than the much lower pressure) but really a lot of the engineering and operating principles are done. This will of course invite a certain failure rate into the process, but that's just a cost of mass-producing any given item and using it in an extremely hazardous environment.

While I acknowledge these items will still be much more expensive than Earth-based equivalents due to a need to focus on saving mass, operating under extreme conditions, and potentially modularity, I still do not anticipate them being remotely as expensive in R&D because the plan will call for lots of them to be churned out, and for their construction to not be particularly "unique." This difference begins to look like the difference between a completely custom car (e.g., Curiosity, Cassini, Lunar Rover, Hubble, Voyager, etc.; basically every single one-to-two build scientific package we've ever thrown into space) and a mass-produced Model T, although it would in fact take a spacefaring civilization existing for it to ever become that routine.

Using the existing model of very fiddly, very expensive, very exquisite, very custom scientific hardware is simply not sustainable, not tennable, and not desirable, because as you've identified, that is currently where a lot of the cost is, and the whole point of sending Humans is really to gain that flexibility, redundancy, etc., in the Human operators themselves. The other cost is in the total launch architecture and more specifically the cost of getting kilos off Earth. It's my view that the very nature of the mission as an open-ended, long-term, "we have reserves" disposable approach will force payload procurement costs down, and this can be coupled with reducing launch costs to dramatically reduce overall mission expense. The alternative is economically unfeasible, and so it must be discarded.

You apparently disagree as to the odds of this happening. Fair enough. I think it's a natural outcome of the strategy, and actually one of the biggest reasons to push for it. One might compare this difference as the shift from brick phones in the 1980s to cellphones the average person upgrades every two years; for space flight and more specifically colonization to become viable, the payloads themselves have to become expendable instead of practically priceless.

e: to put it another way, NASA needs to stop thinking like NASA and start thinking like Air Mobility Command. This is less an expedition and more of an invasion. If one isn't willing to commit to that, one shouldn't be doing it at all.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

My view is that the majority of the materials will be essentially inert, and that which will be active on Mars will need whatever capacities are necessary to work there (e.g., heating) built in and will be built to activated from a cold-start on the surface. A lot of the rest, e.g., food supplies, can be packaged in such a way as for this to be a non-issue; this is already done for long sea voyages, military operations, etc.

What you essentially need is a "cargo container" equivalent that you can shove whatever into, attach a deorbit package to, and put on a booster and fire at Mars (on whatever kind of orbit to economize, be it the Interplanetary Transport Network or whatever), where it may or may not have some assembly required. The equipment has to be robust enough to do this for it to at all make sense economically.

So, something akin to an ATV or Dragon capsule which deliver stores to the ISS? Yeah, you can do that, but again, it's the vehicle itself that needs to be able to function in that kind of environment (in addition to launch, TMI and Mars precision-landing) even if the payload itself is completely self-contained and inert. That's where all the issues with heating and plumbing come into play though your approach would drastically simplify the problem if you aren't trying to assemble parts and just basically dump them on Mars.

I think the Dragon and Cygnus capsules in particular show how this could be done economically. Still won't be cheap though!

My view is that in order to justify doing a Mars Mission economically, you are not going to want custom, one-off equipment. You are going to want mass-produced equipment that is not what the US Air Force would call "a 99% solution," but a "75% solution." Solutions that are expendable and good enough, not exquisite ones that cost an arm and a leg.

And I hear what you're saying, I do. I'm simply pointing out that unless we are talking about literally dozens (and probably multiple dozens) of components to be launched per year, you are simply not going to get mass-produced costs.

In a heartbeat, I'd support such an effort if that makes any difference.

While I acknowledge these items will still be much more expensive than Earth-based equivalents due to a need to focus on saving mass, operating under extreme conditions, and potentially modularity, I still do not anticipate them being remotely as expensive in R&D because the plan will call for lots of them to be churned out, and for their construction to not be particularly "unique." This difference begins to look like the difference between a completely custom car (e.g., Curiosity, Cassini, Mars Rover, Hubble, Voyager, etc.; basically every single one-to-two build scientific package we've ever thrown into space) and a mass-produced Model T, although it would in fact take a spacefaring civilization existing for it to ever become that routine.

Yup. But then Lamborghini's are technically mass-produced but still cost and arm and a leg. I don't see any realistic way to get around the problem of essentially low volumes/high cost unless we're talking about so many vehicles/launches per year that you no longer are talking about Mars Direct, but rather Oregon Trail In Space.

You apparently disagree as to the odds of this happening. Fair enough. I think it's a natural outcome of the strategy, and actually one of the biggest reasons to push for it. One might compare this difference as the shift from brick phones in the 1980s to cellphones the average person upgrades every two years; for space flight and more specifically colonization to become viable, the payloads themselves have to become expendable instead of practically priceless.

I'm actually very optimistic that things will develop along the lines of Mars Direct in the not-to-distant future. The picture on this page gives me hope.

Anywho, apologies for all the dick waving.

 

[Symphony D.]

I think the Dragon and Cygnus capsules in particular show how this could be done economically. Still won't be cheap though!

Ultimately I think what you want is to refine this down to a standard storage package (the "cargo container" aspect), which you can fit a highly standardized guidance and orbital insertion package to; much the same way as a JDAM kit is fitted to an ordinary gravity bomb, only you don't want your payload to explode on impact. A lot of the rest would be working out how to pack these things as fully as possible and how to arrange the launches, but it would really just become a logistical challenge at that point.

Yup. But then Lamborghini's are technically mass-produced but still cost and arm and a leg.

While I'm by no means an expert at economics, I think this is actually very telling; a Lambo doesn't cost nearly as much to make as what it's sold for, either in terms of effort or materiel; even an ultra-high end supercar is not going to cost generally more than $10,000 to put together. Most of the price is for the badge and prestige. This applies to any given consumer product, whether it's Tide or a Cessna. The manufacturer, distributor, etc., are all getting their cut, and they want to keep their profit margins high. There are usually competitors, but they all essentially informally agree to keep prices within a certain range to keep these margins up (and because demand is limited and numerous other considerations). It's usually less "this is what it's actually 'worth'" though, and more "this is what someone is willing to pay," particularly for finished goods.

What you see in big competitions directly between manufacturers for a direct large contract is for them to try and squeak their bids under one another because the competition is basically zero-sum, you get the contract or you don't; when they wind up bilking their purchaser (e.g., government) it's usually due to spiraling development costs or some other mechanism (they lowballed, or screwed up).

ULA as an entity is particularly problematic because it's basically a cartel that has a monopoly on the (US) market and so it jacks up costs; it holds almost all the cards. When times are tough, it can basically set prices at whatever it wants. That SpaceX has so dramatically undercut them, from basically nothing reveals the degree to which they've been basically price-fixing. (For reasons which are understandable from a business perspective, sure, but true nonetheless.)

While I wouldn't accuse universities, JPL, etc. of doing the same thing (mostly due to the fact they are making one-off hardware) on the payload side, I do think a serious, large, robust government contract (or international consortium contract; whatever) with strong incentives for competition (particularly internationally) would be such a windfall to the given hardware manufacturers (be they boosters, power drills, nuclear reactors, whatever) that you would see serious cut-throat competition for these products; especially if there were ample lead-up time and opportunity for brand name promotion and recognition from those products. (How much is having your corporate logo behind the first man setting foot on Mars worth?) I'm not that big of a believer in the free market, but I do think this is one area where, if it was done right, government and corporate contractors could actually bring costs down considerably in a mutually beneficent way. It will never be "cheap" but it could be "cheap enough," and this is the benefit of something like Mars Direct: "tricking" the free market into giving you the best deals you can get.

Coupled with an "invasion" mentality (i.e., "we are going to Mars, and we are going to Mars to stay") I think this could synergistically bring costs down enough to do. You then run into the problem of justifying the long-term mission as a whole in the first place, and that's where pathos comes in.