Should be earth-moon L-1:
The first Earth-Moon Lagrange point, or EML-1, offers a number of key advantages that make it an ideal destination for activities in cislunar space. Over the near-term, however, its utility is constrained by a lack of physical infrastructure. This can change if our approach to space moves away from destinations and towards a strategy of enabling capabilities.
I agree. Unfortunately, it’s a hard mindset for many people to accept. For many simple-minded people, if you don’t have a planet, a date and a really big rocket, it’s the “end of human spaceflight.”
I agree 100%. A station and refueling depot at EM L1 gives you the Solar System.
Yes, it’s very hard to get funding for “enabling technologies.”
I hadn’t thought of the instability of EML1 as a plus before, but it definitely would be essentially debris free. As a fuel topping off point it would allow for smaller vehicles to have sufficient delta-V for greater payloads.
But our very first destination is less of a destination than EML1. Our first destination should be a refuelable ship at LEO that acts as a mobile fuel depot within all of cislunar space. If you want to build facilities at EML1 this provides a high level of support for that.
Great article, though I still can’t wrap my little brain around the Interplanetary Superhighway System serving any sort of advantage.
OT (sort of): I was watching video of the recent Delta IV launch out of Vandenburg ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2DVpIECgo ) and I was wondering how this rocket compares to Constellation etc.?
Excuse me, I meant Ares.
OK, as an attempt to answer my own question, am I correct in thinking that Ares I has half the capacity of the Delta IV Heavy, and the Ares V has ~3.5 times the capacity?
Add a reusable lunar lander and a reusable deep space transfer vehicle and we can visit the Moon and NEOs and park those vehicles at EML-1 between missions.
Also, deploying an EML depot will give LEO depots a purpose and as Ken notes, an EML depot can be fed from any LEO orbital inclination.
PS
I also believe EML depot(s) and LEO depot(s) should be deployed together as part of an integrated plan.
It is not “either/or” it is “both”
These architectures are also launch vehicle agnostic. I believe Jupiters would be ideal, however the architecture will also work just fine with EELV, SpaceX Falcons, Ariane, Proton/Soyuz & Long March.
Bigelow could setup an EML1 station and offer it for telepresent opperations on our moon. A continuing human presence that close to our moon guarantees that humans will want to land and setup shop. Studies going back decades have indicated that orbital refueling opperations would be 10 to 15 times cheaper with lunar O2. It now looks like we should also be able to get H2, N2 and CO2, enough to support orbital depots for both fuel and life support needs. So, lunar opperation begins to pay for its self.
Part of what we still need, which could be provided by NASA R&D, are radiation protection (mini-magnetospheric plasma looks good) and compact nuclear power.
This idea has been floated by many others, including in very recent papers in the Space Review. This piece doesn’t add anything new. In fact, a habitat at Earth-Moon L1 was the notional architecture for the Decadal Planning Team ten years ago. This particular piece is somewhat unfortunate, though, because it makes a few mistakes with regard to optimal NEO sensing (L1 is really a pretty poor place from which to do that) and the prospects for pole-sitters (which are certainly not needed for farside communication, and don’t look anything like terrestrial pole sitters).
Tom,
The point of the IPS is to create a reusable network of sensors throughout the Solar system. They are sent out on the IPS, take up station for a few years, then wander home on the IPS to be picked up near EML-1 for servicing, refueling, etc. before being sent back out on station (or swapped out in a more permanent architecture). In this way, we can supply a steady stream of ongoing data for our scientists, versus the one-off data sets we collect now. (Please note the article at Time.com about reusing spacecraft) Also, we’re not throwing expensive tools into the void anymore. Rather, like Hubble, we would continue to use them over decades.
Harris,
I am well familiar with the work of the Decadal Planning Team, having gotten a briefing from one of the team leads during the Goddard NASA Academy visit to JSC in 2002. What struck me at the time was how closely their results mirrored my independent study project at ISU that I conducted while interning at Boeing HSF&E in 2001. When I presented it to the Boeing folks (IIRC, Andy Aldrin, Brent Sherwood, and their boss whose name escapes me at the moment) they all indicated that they’d seen all this stuff before, though they were a bit surprised that I had reached that architectural solution given my background (10+ years of international finance and banking at the time). And I did provide a link in the article to the Paine report from the 1980s.
Of course this is not new. What in the space industry wasn’t thought of 50+ years ago?
Please check what you read. I did not address “optimal NEO sensing”. What I said was “This, then, is an ideal “first mission” for instruments emplaced at EML-1.” Not the same thing at all. I’ll readily agree that EML-1 is not the ‘optimal’ location for NEO sensing, but I would call it preferable to LEO for gosh sakes, with all that clutter out past GEO you’ve got to filter out. Plus over the course of a month you’ll be getting the whole sky as the EML-1 point revolves around the Earth. If you have identified the optimal location for NEO spotting, I’m sure everyone would like to know.
As for the pole sitters, please note that the presentation to which I linked was actually for a hybrid solar sail/plasma propulsion concept. I didn’t assume that a Moon pole sitter would function the same as an Earth pole sitter, especially given the much lower tilt of the Moon’s axis of rotation, but conceptually I don’t think the Moon’s orbit around the Sun excludes such a solution.
Sure I could have gone with the easy ‘comm sat in halo L-2 orbit’, but isn’t that what everyone talks about? Personally, I’m trying to retain some small notion of a radio protected site at the center of the Lunar far side for radio astronomy that doesn’t have a comm sat parked right above it, but whatever. I do think pole sitters are an elegant concept, like aerospike engines and EML-1 stations.
Everyone else, thank you for the positive comments.
My understanding of the Interplanetary Superhighway is that it provides a low energy solution for sending cargo ahead of any manned mission.
However, only two of five Lagrange points are stable and the stable ones would tend to collect debris.
As a source point Lagrange makes sense. I’m not so sure as a destination. In the case of mars, are either of its satellites massive enough to create useful Lagrange points? Would any of the mar-sol Lagrange points be of any use?
Would any of the mar-sol Lagrange points be of any use?
Absolutely. A massive MTV shouldn’t have to climb up Earth’s gravity well, transfer to Mars, descend into Mars’ gravity well, lift itself back out again and so on, back and forth. Its job should be to cycle between an Earth (or moon) Lagrange point and a Mars Lagrange point, both located at the edge of a gravity well. That would save a lot of energy and propellant. Specialised craft could take care of transport to and from the surface or to and from low orbit.
See:
The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space
http://iaaweb.org/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/Study%20Groups/SG%20Commission%201/exploringspace.pdf
Ken, as well as MPM’s comments, keep in mind that at least a few asteroids reside in the Mars-Sun LaGrange points, such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5261_Eureka
(First Mars Trojan asteroid found.)
For clarity, MPM is referring to Mars-Sun L1 and L2, and I’m referring to L4 and L5, which are a hell of a lot farther away from Mars, but at least provide a stable spot relative to Mars to find an asteroid besides Phobos and Deimos.
Bob-1,
hmmm, given the info provided on it 5261 Eureka might be a good destination for a mission. It might well provide insight into the early Solar System.
If my brain still functioned (“of all the things I miss…”) I could probably figure out the delta-V from the mar-sol lagrange points to mars orbit. Anybody know a good link/reference?
Specialised craft could…
Definite agreement. However, we do want to use generalize vehicles where we can. A craft working a number of different environments is going to be very sub-optimal.
Reverse my last two sentences and it’s much easier to understand what I meant.
In response to Dean‘s last remarks.
if memory serves, Rand, you told me this 32 years ago. You were right.
I like the EML-1 idea. Most geeky enigeering types would too. It’s gonna be a lot harder to sell to John Q. Public though.
Doh! Bad spelling! I meant engineering…
Gene,
You only need to sell john Q. Public if you plan on using NASA money. If you forget NASA and start thinking commercial, Real Commercial, not the pretend type NASA is calling Commercial Crew, then you only have to convince your investors. And one thing investors are, its rational profit seekers. Just show them the business model.
@ Thomas:
Real commercial won’t happen until the UN Space Treaty of 1967 is changed or overturned. To my chagrin, I don’t see that happening soon.
Treaty smeaty (and I think ya got enganeer right the first time!)
People need to just land on the moon and start claiming parcels. Who’s going to stop them? They can worry about the paperwork down the road (after the property is firmly established by work to be theirs.)
They don’t have to make any loud proclamation (and shouldn’t.) They just need to act in accordance with claiming the property.
Gene,
The belief that you need real property rights on the Moon or elsewhere is space is a fallacy based on Earth based thinking.
The current legal model in which you add value to a rock by picking up, and thereby create ownership is far superior. And yes it is established, both by Russia auctioning off its lunar samples and NASA lawsuits that identified its stolen samples as stolen government property. And that is the only reason owning Apollo samples is illegal, because they are government property and the government never sold any into the private market.
No, there is nothing in the 1967 OST that prevents space commerce. Indeed, its ban on national sovereignty over celestial bodies is actually a plus because it keeps the tax assessors and environmental regulators at bay 🙂