34 thoughts on “Republicans Don’t Like The Asteroid Mission”

  2. One thing the article doesn’t mention is that it’s not just Congress that’s tepid about ARM; it’s also our international partners, too. Come to that, enthusiasm for ARM is not all that it could be in the U.S. space community, either.

    Doing ARM instead of the Moon certainly avoids gravity wells, with all that they cost to operate in (and this does seem to be much of the motivation for ARM: “Hey, we’re doing this because we think it’s all we can afford on projected NASA budgets.” A lander, hab and rover would certainly cost a fair bit of money to develop, no question. But maybe, just maybe, if we didn’t have to blow billions on SLS, we might just be able to afford them. Are Ted Cruz and the other big space state senators and representatives willing to face that music? Maybe, maybe not; but they could hardly be any worse than their predecessors in this regard.

    1. Come to that, enthusiasm for ARM is not all that it could be in the U.S. space community, either.

      It would be more accurate to call it the planetary community. NASA and its Congressional masters appear to have very little interest in exploring or developing space per se. They view gravity wells as the destination and space as merely an inconvenient obstacle they must overcome to get there.

      Are Ted Cruz and the other big space state senators and representatives willing to face that music?

      Who cares? Ted Cruz has said his first priority as chairman will be renewing the Commercial Space Launch Act. That’s what anyone who cares about space should be focusing on; not the trivia of what NASA will try to build or where they will try to go next.

    2. Are Ted Cruz and the other big space state senators and representatives willing to face that music?

      No. From a Cruz interview in the Houston Chronicle on 14 January: “SLS and Orion are critical to our medium- and long-term ability to explore space, whether it is the moon, Mars or beyond. Absolutely I support them.”

      Maybe, maybe not; but they could hardly be any worse than their predecessors in this regard.

      True. And the status quo makes perfect sense, anyway, if you assume that their objective is getting federal money for their districts rather than space exploration.

      1. “And the status quo makes perfect sense, anyway, if you assume that their objective is getting federal money for their districts rather than space exploration.”

        Generally speaking, this is usually the safe assumption to make with these things. Alas.

    3. If TPTB don’t like asteroids, it’s their own fault. They gave NASA money to build a launcher but no payload other than the billion dollars per unit Orion. The plan, as far as there seems to be one, is to build hab modules, landers, etc. in serial. So, take 10 years to design and build a hab module, then 10 years to build a lander, etc. Problem is, figure about a decade per new item, and we’re into the 2040’s before we can do much with SLS. By that time, so many components of SLS and Orion will be obsolete and antiquated that there will be major redesigns needed. NASA is on a path that could lead them to never doing much of anything, while managing to spend $3-6 billion per year in the process. It’d probably be a decent bet that there will be no NASA boots on another solar system object for at least 40 years.

  3. I think doing some asteroid prospection, mining, and capture missions is actually a lot more useful than other missions I have heard bandied around. As for the Moon a lot could be done teleoperating robots from orbit as a precursor for a similar mission on Mars. I doubt there will be a lot of money to do large manned bases in the near future.

    2. I agree with Andrew_W. Asteroids are very interesting, exploitation of their resources will have to be done robotically, because putting people in the picture blows the economics out the window. I think sending a crew to an asteroid in it’s native orbit would be cool, because it would be a demonstration of deep-space human operations. But it’s not about science or resources: when it comes to asteroids, robots are suited to those roles.

      1. It only blows the economics out the window if you intend to bring them back. If they are colonists on Phobos, however, different story.

  5. Have you noticed that on most science-tech enthusiast sites, the articles seem mainly designed to bash “teabaggers” and “deniers” and are only secondarily concerned with actual science and tech?

    1. This happens to a degree. e.g. backlast against anti-vaxxers. But quite a lot of people in the engineering community do not like the cult surrounding AGW and think its bad science.

    2. I’ve noticed that even on Engadget in the last few weeks, the last general tech site I read. Pretty annoying. I dropped the Gawker sites after Gamergate, not much else out there.

  6. When a mission is “To boldy go where no man particularly wants to go,” you sure won’t find a lot of support. Unless Hillary gets elected, and she wants to go there… Well, if we don’t, we’ll never hear the end of it.

    1. There are plenty of people who’d jump at the chance to go to an asteroid. If NASA’s astronauts don’t want to go, then NASA is hiring the wrong people.

      NASA is always comparing itself to the military. Military personnel don’t get to decide where they want to go. They go where their country tells them to. Why should NASA astronauts be any different?

  7. Maybe moving an asteroid to a lagrange point will provide the need for a more permanent presence there, like the ISS, to study it. Then before you know it, it will be supporting moonar missions to Luna and maybe even trips to other earths like Mars. Who knows it might even have cryogenic storage tanks that could be used for something.

    1. There’s another factor between the Lagrange points and lunar orbit; delta/v to get the space pebble there. The NASA ARM plan to to move the space pebble (technically an asteroid, but it’ll be smaller than the Orion capsule) to high lunar orbit. Once they have the pebble in high lunar orbit, SLS/Orion sends a mission to it to explore it. (Thus, exploring something smaller than their capsule!) They plan to select either a boulder on a larger NEO, or a free flyer, and in either case one requiring low delta/v. So, let’s assume they get lucky and find one that needs only a .1 kps delta/v to get it, after several years, to earth/moon capture point. From there, they have to get it to high lunar orbit, and even with some clever grav-assist moves, that’ll take at least a further .25 kps, minimum. However, earth-moon capture is essentially L1 or L2, or pretty close, so what we’re really talking here is more than doubling the delta/v budget to get it to high lunar orbit.

      L1 or L2 would be a heck of a lot better – you either use a smaller retrieval spacecraft, or get a bigger rock. And, it’d get it there a couple of years sooner than you could achieve high lunar orbit. (the retrieval mission, as planned, is expected to take 6 years or more after launch)

      However…. there’s an even lower Delta/v solution, one that yields a better result, too: move the pebble to high inclination LEO, 51.5 degrees to be exact, where it can be examined at leisure at ISS. The way to avoid the delta/v penalty this entails is aerocapture; repeated passes through the fringe of the atmosphere (much like they’ve used on non-shielded Mars probes to brake into a circular low Mars orbit). It’s actually less propulsive Delta/v to do this, and it’d put the pebble somewhere far more useful (as well as return your retrieval probe to LEO for a refueling of Xenon). You’d have the pebble where it’d be more useful, and have the means (the refueled retrieval probe) to sample others. And, no need for an SLS launch – but that, I think, is the problem.

      Science isn’t the reason for the ARM mission, and nether is exploration. The real reason is that this is basically the ONLY mission Orion/SLS can do (Orion doesn’t have the duration to visit a real asteroid in situ – it’s limited to 21 days, and SLS doesn’t have the delta/v to loft Orion plus a hab). So, it’s either ARM, or SLS does nothing. Thus, IMHO, the real objective of this mission it to pretend SLS/Orion aren’t useless boondoggles.

      1. Science isn’t the reason for the ARM mission, and nether is exploration. The real reason is that this is basically the ONLY mission Orion/SLS can do (Orion doesn’t have the duration to visit a real asteroid in situ – it’s limited to 21 days, and SLS doesn’t have the delta/v to loft Orion plus a hab). So, it’s either ARM, or SLS does nothing. Thus, IMHO, the real objective of this mission it to pretend SLS/Orion aren’t useless boondoggles.

        Couldn’t agree more.

      2. Moving pebbles to LEO will not happen. No matter how noble the intent, it would be described as a military exercise to practice bombing people with asteroids. If ARM actually happens, which I greatly doubt, I expect there to be calls for some sort of treaty to create a “keep-out zone” for asteroids, maybe no closer GEO or maybe even lunar orbit.

      4. Aerobraking drag passes take some precision. Go a little too low and the rock burns up in the upper atmosphere and that ends the mission. This sort of precision might be difficult with a payload this size. If using ion engines, the thrust might not be adequate to make rapid changes as the rock descends deeper into earth’s gravity well.

        Also there would be fears an impact could cause destruction. These fears would be largely unfounded but it still makes for political opposition to aerobraking. Besides delta V this was one of the reasons the Keck guys chose lunar orbit (See page 15 of the the Keck Report

        The Keck guys say they could park a rock in lunar orbit for .17 km/s. I’d like to see how you could park a rock in I.S.S. orbit for less than that. Your claim would be more credible if you flesh it with more details.

        1. Since the rock is smaller than an Orion capsule they may as well stick it into a heat-shield and land the damn thing.

        2. Hey Hop. Might the need for high thrust adjustments be mitigated if the first pass is so high so that it is just barely sufficient to achieve Earth capture into a highly elliptical Earth orbit followed by numerous repeat passes through the high atmosphere with plenty of time for the ion thrusters to make pass by pass adjustments and then eventually circularizing adjustments until it is in a stable circular Earth orbit?

      5. The SLS/Orion, like the Shuttle and ISS, is a platform looking for a mission, any mission, to justify its existence. But remember, politically it’s a success so long as the politicians who’ve pushed this monstrosity keep getting reelected.

  8. I have a similar mission in mind, and I think NASA is going about it all the wrong way. We want to put an asteroid into a low or high Earth orbit so we can send astronauts to study it, having retrieved it using incredibly expensive hardware and a very complex mission profile. But we have meteorites on Earth, which are just asteroids that have slammed into our planet. It would be simple to load one of those onto a Falcon 9 and launch it into a high orbit, and then send the SLS/Orion up to rendezvous with it sometime later, so the astronauts can study it. It would remove a lot of unknowns.

  9. I have a suggestion for what Ted Cruz should get NASA to focus on: geoengineering (or, at least, the precursors needed to establish the knowledge base that will be needed to do it, should it become necessary.)

    Think about this for a bit.

    First, it puts his global warming opponents on the defensive. They cannot consistently say warming is a crisis, yet also say geoengineering should not be investigated. if it such a threat, why is a potential course of action being so quickly dismissed?

    Second, it’s a sop to fossil fuel interests, including those in his home state.

    Third, it’s up NASA’s alley. NASA does both environmental monitoring and “big” engineering.

    Fourth, it provides a use case for manned space activities, if space-based geoengineering is one of the options. Use of material mined from the moon or asteroids for construction of shades, for example.

    1. You don’t get the Luddite mindset. People and progress are evil so global warming is a sin and the beatings will continue until morale improves.

  10. The first thing on my list for developing things to go to the Moon would be about $50 million for Masten to modify the Centaur upper stages which ULA has permanently lent them for the development of a terrestrial demonstrator if a large, reusable, cryogenic, full-sized lunar lander. Get videos of that thing flying around and I think that opinions would change as to how relatively easy, cheap, and soon it would be to return to the Moon — this time to stay.

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