Jeffrey Bell has a thought-provoking article over at Space Daily today on the potential costs of the president's space initiative, and the viability of doing the lunar base. However, my thoughts haven't been adequately provoked yet to respond, or even decide to what degree I agree or disagree with it.

Kudos, Rand. I was just about to e-mail you and Jeff Foust to encourage a thread on the Bell article. You win.

A very interesting article with some juicy bits of information... the political nature of it all is frustrating, but it's the environment that must be dealt with.

Still I find myself being Johnny-One-Note, if the question is cost, the answer is focus. It's easy to fabricate technical and political reasons for enormous costs. Take the budget for this plan and turn it into grant money to be paid for successful completion of stages. We'd then have multiple colonies on Mars in 8 to 12 years.

Again, it appears the baseline cost estimate he is using is the current SSTO pound to orbit. A shuttle derived vehicle sans the parasitic weight of the orbiter should be able to loft three times as much at no more than the same cost.

It should be even less considering that the bulk cost of the Shuttle Porgram is the orbiter/orbiter processing and the attendant army of techincians dedicated to orbiter processing and their resultant salaries.

I see no reason why a shuttle stack/eelv derived heavy lifter could not best the current Orbiter delivered cost per pound to orbit by a large margin and should be able to deliver payload to the lunar surface cheaper than the Shuttle orbiter currently delivers payload to ISS.

Remember, any facilities we deposit on the lunar surface would remain in place for future crews with no station keeping required. There is no danger an unattended lunar habitat is going to loose attitude control while left unattended for prolonged peroids. The moon does not require propellant for reboost and oxygen at a minimun and possibly water and hydrogen can be generated or obtained in-situ. An advantage over ISS in that regard.

If politics is frustrating, don't read Jeff Foust's article focused on Neil deGrasse Tyson.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/116/1

Actually do read it because its excellent and fits nicely with Dr. Bell's article. Space advocates have their work cut out for them now, and Dem -v- Repub bashing won't help.

Mike, I agree with you and have been flogging shuttle derived ever since January 15th.

One problem with EELV derived HLLV is the production rates for Delta IV and Atlas V components as Bell points out in his article. EELV derived HLLV will require Boeing to very significantly increase its production capacity, which affects total cost.

An RS-68 based shuttle B/C could fly fairly soon and even help finish ISS, saving money there for other purposes.

Here's what I'd like to see debated, as it challenges a lot of my assumptions about how we'll go back to the Moon:

"People who say that a manned moon mission could be assembled in LEO out of small pieces launched on existing boosters like the new EELVs are dead wrong. This option was never seriously considered by either the Red Team or the Blue Team back during the Moon Race. It vastly magnifies the chances of failure."

Well OK, but that decision was made based on current experience in the early 60's. Haven't our capabilities for on-orbit construction increased considerably since then? If not, he's got a good point but otherwise its a straw-man argument. That's like saying we can't build a supersonic jet today because it was unrealistic in 1948.

Yes, Patrick, that's one of the parts with which I disagree. Of course, I don't think that it should be done with expendables at all, so I guess I agree with it as far as it goes...

"We also can't use fuel cells in the CEV Service Module because of the same space-storage requirement. All CEV concepts show big Soyuz-style solar panels and batteries for dark periods."

Gee.. even theis lowly non-aerospace background Environmental Engineer has heard of regenerative fuel cells that use surplus electricity derived from solar cells to re-crack the water generated by cell usage back into hydrogen and oxygen for later re-use during 'dark times'.

He has to say that that EOR won't be considered, because all his later analysis depends on it not working.

Other points that bother me-- yep, will need to send a backhoe up to help bury any base. But it's not like that backhoe is only going to work for a few hours and then be junked. The same for all the other equipment-- it's making a one way trip and we should be learning how to build it tought. Heck, forget all these robots to Mars, how about sending some robot backhoes to the Moon and dig before we even get there? It'll be cheaper than Mars, and faster to deliver more if they break, and we'll learn some ENGINEERING instead of science for once. (But it won't be glamorous, and I think that's what drives the robophiles.)

He mentions the Discovery programs and their overruns. So? In an environment where overruns are practically rewarded, you are going to get overruns.

Hey all,

I have to agree with some of Jeff Bell's points, and disagree with most of the rest.

First off, he is right that an ELV based lunar project is going to be more expensive than if we have RLVs available.

Second, yes lunar habitats should definitely be buried. Not only for solar flare protection, but also for limiting the normal GCR issues. Not to mention that if you go for underground habitats built right into the regolith, you might be able to eliminate a significant chunk of the upmass needed to do a proper base.

That said, he put up a nice strawman and knocked it down when it came to spacecraft design. He claims that the minimal size for a useful direct descent mission is ~180,000lbs. Bullox. I've run the numbers myself, and depending on your definition of minimal, you can get away with as little as 21,000lbs in orbit (though 20-40klbs makes things a lot more comfortable). It all depends on how you setup your transportation architecture.

I could go into others, but I have to head out for work now.

~Jon

There are a lot of things wrong with this piece. He seriously misunderstands a lot of stuff (but is confident that he understands it all).

Examples:

The Apollo shape was selected in part because of both modeling and materials limitations at the time. That sharp angle back from the base was considered necessary because they expected heating on that area (the "forebody") to be high. That can be compensated for. You'll note that there are plenty of proposals for a vehicle that looks more like a gumdrop than the Hershey's Kiss of Apollo (meaning more internal volume). In addition, rather than ablatives, there are other alternatives.

"Critics of the 90-Day Report" claim that the program outlined in that report was a wish-list of programs which mostly did not relate to the manned Mars mission."

First, it was not the "90-Day Report," it was the "90-Day Study." This would be forgiveable if one got the sense that Mr. Bell had actually _read_ it (it's on the web in a big honking pdf file). But he obviously did not, because manned Mars was a big chunk of the report.

There's other mistakes as well, such as his claim that the Bush plan calls for "return to the moon to stay." I'll have to go read the policy document, but I'm sure that this is not in there. In fact, NASA is currently considering only extended lunar operations, not a permanently manned base. Limit the time on the moon and you don't need to bury the habitat.

I'm guessing that Bell hoped to compensate for his mistakes by adding an extra dose of attitude. It doesn't work.

I'll have to go back and reread it--I just skimmed it quickly this morning because I didn't have time to really give it much thought. But it strikes me potentially as another strawman that he kicks apart, as Garwin and Tsipis used to do with missile defense in SciAm back in the eighties.

Heck, forget all these robots to Mars, how about sending some robot backhoes to the Moon and dig before we even get there? It'll be cheaper than Mars, and faster to deliver more if they break, and we'll learn some ENGINEERING instead of science for once. (But it won't be glamorous, and I think that's what drives the robophiles.)

You da MAN, Raoul!

And, hey, screw glamorous. It'd be a neat hack. That's reason enough to do it right there.

Here's maybe a good place to start. Weighs ca. 3.5 tons Earthside.

Off-the-top-of-my-head "Mooncat" conversion checklist:

1. Leave out the driver's seat.
2. Swap tires for Teflon-Kevlar replacements.
3. Slip some bellows-type "boots" over the hydraulic rams and any exposed shaft seals (Teflon? Metal?).
4. Swap any hoses/belts for vacuum-compatible units (standard braided stainless?).
5. Swap out the engine for a sealed electric motor.
6. Put the electricity source (regenerative fuel cell? - hat tip to Mike - radioisotope-thermal?) where the driver used to sit.
7. Rig actuators to work the controls.
8. Sit a pair of video cameras on a 360-pan, 180-tilt mount on each end of the driver cage.
9. Put an auto-Earth-tracking dish antenna on a stalk in between.

And it needs a motto. My pick?

The Moon; can you dig it?