An Easier Way to Get to Moon - NASA should make lunar lander part of competition

The Lunar Robotics Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will be staying put, at least for another six years at $20 million a year. The office was originally slated for closure by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin as part of a cost-cutting move. Unfortunately, Griffin did not reckon on the wrath of Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama's senior senator. Shelby balked at the closure and, working with other senators and representatives of both parties, successfully prevented it.

The office is currently managing the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which is scheduled to launch to the moon in late 2008. A third lunar probe, which was designed to land in the permanently shaded area of the Lunar South Pole, was also cancelled, though it is now said to be under review.

When the lunar lander mission, known as the Robotic Lunar Exploration Precursor 2, was cancelled, its estimated cost had ballooned from about $400 million to $750 million. NASA decided that because of budget shortfalls caused by both congressional action and the burgeoning cost of returning the shuttle fleet to flight after the Colombia disaster, a lunar lander was no longer needed or affordable.

Unless the lunar lander mission, which was originally slated to launch in 2011, is restored, the Lunar Robotics Office will have little to do after the missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite have concluded.

But if the lunar lander is restored in the same form it was when it was cancelled and NASA's budget outlook remains the same, some very hard choices will have to be made. Something else will have to be cut. With the exploration program already slipping six months behind and with Congress already complaining about cutbacks in NASA's science and aeronautics accounts, there would seem to be very little give.

It is true that Congress could provide more money. Indeed, there is some talk of doing that. Space supporters in Congress have complained that NASA's budget is being shortchanged by the White House and that the space agency hasn't enough resources to accomplish everything that is on its plate.

There is one way, though, to make the stress on NASA's budget that would result from the restoration of the lunar lander a little easier. That would be to make the lunar lander a part of the Centennial Challenge competition.

The Centennial Challenge is an innovative program run by NASA in which teams of people compete to build and demonstrate various technologies that would be useful in the exploration of space for cash prizes. Challenges that have already run have involved tethers, beam power, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, robotic excavation of lunar soil and more flexible astronaut gloves. With the exception of astronaut gloves, none of the competitions have had a winner yet.

The Lunar Robotic Lander has been suggested for being part of the Centennial Challenge competition, but has so far not been funded. The way it would work is that a prize — of, say, $50 million — would be awarded to the first group to land an instrument package in a predetermined area of the lunar surface, such as the South Pole, and return data. NASA would define what sort of data it is looking for, but it would be up to the private competitors to determine how to obtain it.

If such a competition were to be funded, there would be no reason why the newly saved Lunar Robotics Office could not manage it. It would give the office something to do after the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite finish their missions.

The private sector would get a chance to develop some innovative technology, which would be useful to both NASA and the private sector.

NASA would get a lunar lander mission for a fraction of the cost it had originally contemplated.

It would be a different kind of space race, in which the country would be the winner.

Whittington, of Houston, is a space policy analyst and is the author of "Children of Apollo."

Well back then NASA had I think 5% of what was then the USA’s annual GDP. Now it’s probably around 1/2 of 1% (although GDP has grown a lot since then).

Meanwhile, back then the internet was hardly commonplace and plane travel was more costly so sharing information was tougher and organizing around otherwise inconvenient schedules and geographical distances posed more of a problem than it does today. Meanwhile we didn’t have as many technologically sophisticated folks who could get stuff to the Moon back then like we do now. Also, back then we were only in a race against the USSR (as far as I can recall) whereas now plenty of countries are pursuing the Moon, including China this year and India next year, not long after the Europeans have already orbited it. Also we now have a record high national debt:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm

It’s time for a Lunar Prize instead of more wasteful Lunar welfare, wouldn’t you agree?

A return to the Moon should avoid reinventing the wheel. By this, I mean that when we last went there, our purpose was to just get there, muck about a bit, and make it home in one piece.

We now have to transcend this, with the idea of going to the Moon for a long time, and *doing* something while we are there.

Both of these ideas require practicality with known and crude technologies, not esoteric scientific research.

To start with, we need to get a lot more equipment to the Moon than we did last time. For this reason, we don’t need a single space ship, we need *two*.

The first one should be modular and assembled in orbit, and it should be an unmanned engine and fuel tank. Its purpose is to shuttle the other spaceship to Lunar orbit and back to Earth orbit. Once assembled, it stays in space, so must be designed for reuse.

Because it does the majority of the transit, the second spaceship can carry a lot more equipment and a lot less fuel. It is a launch and landing craft.

We don’t have to worry about trying this system out, because the first landing on the Moon should be unmanned. It should carry mining robots and a small nuclear reactor.

Probably built by Caterpillar, the purpose of these mining robots is to approach a vertical cliff face, and slowly dig a tunnel into the hard rock. These robots will never leave the Moon and will continue to improve these tunnels as long as they function. They may operate with only intermittent commands from Earth for a year or two before astronauts arrive.

Why build tunnels? Because if astronauts have rock tunnels to live in, to a great extent they are protected from surface and cosmic radiation, the terribly abrasive Lunar dust, extremes of heat and cold, and vacuum. Being built before they arrive saves thousands of man hours on the Moon to do just the same thing. The alternative are exceptionally heavy artificial surface environments.

Since they robots never return to Earth, only the shuttle returns, they can cannibalize their Lunar lander for parts such as reinforcing rod, pressure doors and flooring for the tunnels.

And once they have dug sufficient tunnels, they can do things like mine for water ice and dig cisterns to put it in for storage. Eventually, the nuclear reactor will perform a new duty, as a furnace for Lunar dust, to extract its precious Helium-3 for shipment back to Earth, and to convert the water ice to hydrogen and oxygen.

When the astronauts arrive with the next shuttle, a year or two after the robots, the tunnels may already be pressurized with oxygen, spray sealed for leaks, and near ready for occupancy. This means that besides finishing supplies, most of what they bring with them can have other purposes.

The robots might be versatile enough so that the astronauts can re-tool them for other tasks, such as removing the radioactive Lunar dust from the entrance to the tunnels, and collecting and piling it up for processing, building a large landing pad for spaceships and conducting geological surveys.

Finally, the concept of returning to the Moon must have a cumulative philosophy. That as much as we can, what is brought there stays there, that once we create a base, we continue to improve it with each new arrival. And that the lessons we learn there can to a great extent be applied to the conquest of Mars.

I’m not proposing the abolition of the human race. I’m proposing that we rely on robots in space exploration instead of people. The thing that has dogged the space program in recent years is the human element. 99.999% of the expense has been associated with keeping the humans safe, and most of the setbacks have been associated with the failure to do so. Not only that, but we keep doing the same thing over and over, with no real goal in mind.

It’s time for the next step. A lot more can be accomplished robotically, at less cost and risk, and in the process, a strong robotics industry could be the spin off.

Send up the robots to construct a moon base.

A couple of ideas : EMSL and the Magnetic Sail. The quenched superconducting ring-cannon concept was developed 20 years ago. Each ring is quenched by lasars just ahead of the sabot/projectile. At a 45 deg angle it would have been about 500’ long. The exit velocity would be 5 mps. The top of the cannon would be movie film chambers. As the sabot/projectile smashes thru they advance one frame to maintain the internal vacuum.

One pound in LEO is energy-worth 4 KWH or about 40 cents @ 10 cents/KWH. That’s 16 times cheaper than postage @ 39 cents/oz. Even with a 10% system efficiency that’s $4/#. Now compare that to $20,000/# on the shuttle. NASA of course turned a deaf ear to the whole EMSL effort, vested interests don’t like COMPETITION.

Magnetic sail : thin ring of superconducting wire, about 1 km in diameter, creates a dipole field. Central cabin sits like a spider at the center of lines to the ring. It can be moved off center by simple pulleys. No propellant needed, the interaction with the solar magnetic field causes it to either sail outward or drop inward. It can be quickly assembled in orbit of course.

So, a couple of 20 year old ideas ignored by nasa, there are even more advanced ideas that make this whole story moot.

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