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The Moon is the key resource needed to open up the frontier of space

Last fall, after much anticipation, the Augustine Committee presented us with their assessment of the future of space exploration.  Its basic conclusion was that at currently envisioned budgets, the Program of Record (a.k.a. ESAS, Project Constellation) would not get us back to the Moon before many decades had passed, if then.  This meme has been picked up by many in the space community to the point where is it now cliché to claim that we don’t have enough money to do anything in space.  Hence, the direction proposed in the new budget takes NASA out of the space transportation business entirely, freeing up their budget to focus on technology development, and contracting with commercial providers to create access to low Earth orbit (LEO) and the International Space Station (ISS).

How are costs estimated for space systems?  The costing exercise for the Augustine Committee was done by The Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit science and engineering company run for the U.S. Air Force.  Their costing procedures (described briefly on page 82 of the committee report) includes estimating the time and level of effort it takes to develop a system, informed by data from past projects.  The vast bulk of this costing effort deals with launch vehicles and systems.

Looking over cost estimates is a strange experience.  Almost anyone can immediately see inflated levels of costing for things they know about, but are uncertain for other items.  Bob Zubrin wrote a stinging rejection of the Aerospace Corporation’s costing just before the Augustine Committee released their report.  He noted in particular that the estimates included several years of increasing ground operations costs, even while nothing was being launched.  Of course, if you pull together a ground crew, you have to pay them to keep them around, even during slack times.  But his point is a good one; why should it cost more than Shuttle does now to support a launch system that requires an order of magnitude less preparation than the highly complex Shuttle Orbiter?

Using these estimates of the cost of the existing architecture, the Augustine Committee concluded that it was unaffordable.  What did they do then?  Rather than fix the problems with the ESAS architecture, they discarded the entire Vision for Space Exploration and came up with the so-called “Flexible Path” (FP).  Although cloaked in platitudes about how technology development will give us options to go to many destinations beyond LEO, the real motivation for this idea is revealed by the committee’s words on “public engagement” (e.g., “It (FP) would provide the public and other stakeholders with a series of interesting “firsts” to keep them engaged and supportive.” – Augustine report, p. 15).  Thus, the goal of FP is to create Apollo-like spectacles for public consumption, rather than creating steps toward increased space faring capability.

We can wait and hope for the proposed technology development program to provide us with magic beans, or we can begin that process now by returning to the Moon with robots and humans to learn how to harvest and use its material and energy resources.  Creating a sustainable system of space faring that can take us anywhere we want to go would be a real accomplishment.  By gaining this knowledge and expertise, mankind will be free to choose many space goals, thereby achieving “at will” space destination capability.

Jeff Greason, President and co-founder of XCOR Aerospace and a member of the Augustine Committee, recently spoke at the annual Goddard Memorial Symposium.  He asserted that for the near future, we have no path to move people beyond low Earth orbit because the options the Augustine Committee looked at cost more than the United States can afford or is willing to spend.  His principal message to Symposium attendees was to “deal with it.”

According to the Augustine Committee, “The cost of exploration is dominated by the costs of launch to low-Earth orbit and of in-space systems.”  This outlook is one reason why so much of the costing focus was on building Ares V, the super-heavy lift (188 mT) launcher designed for human Mars missions.  For such a mission with chemical propulsion (the only technology currently available) you need about one million pounds in LEO, of which more than 70% is propellant.  Going to Mars is expensive because you must lift all of that fuel out of the deep gravity well of Earth.  Even with the economies of scale provided by a super heavy lift rocket, it still costs tens of billions of dollars to mount such a mission.

Making propellant on the Moon completely changes these numbers, yet use of lunar resources is discussed in only a few brief paragraphs of the Augustine report.  We now know (as the committee did then) that water is present at the lunar poles in significant quantity and that its use to make rocket propellant can create a transportation system that could routinely access all of cislunar space.  This should be the objective of lunar return: to create a space “transcontinental railroad” through the use of lunar resources.  Once established, we can go to the planets with relative ease.

Is any of this possible under the existing budget?  Not if we dissipate our money with pointless and unfocused technology development.  Of the many advantages of the Moon, one of the biggest is that it is close enough that preliminary work can be done by robots on the lunar surface – controlled and remotely operated from Earth.  By emplacing robotic assets on the Moon before human arrival, we can begin to survey, process and store water for use well in advance of human arrival.  Sending robotic assets in advance of people allows us to start creating capability now, without a major increase in budget.  It simply requires a sense of clear objectives; we have the technology to work this problem now.

Simply put, our space objectives need to be – arrive, survive and thrive.  To do that, the goal must be stated, mapped out and achieved before setting out to the next destination.  A sustainable, expandable transportation system in space can be devised by using the resources we find in space.  We will learn how (and if) we can do this on our Moon.  Once we don’t have to haul everything with us from the Earth, costs become lower.  When you don’t have to use 90% of your travel budget just to get out of town, a lot more people can take the trip.  Before you know it, you have a space-based economy.

The nation has important strategic and economic interests in cislunar space and it is entirely appropriate for the federal government to develop a sustainable and extensible cislunar transportation system.  NASA needs to lead and point the way so that the private sector (not just aerospace companies) can invest in and develop the yet unknown technologies that will improve our lives here on Earth as we move out to explore and ultimately settle the new territory of space.

The Moon is a classroom, a test bed and a supply depot.  By using its resources, humanity can create the capability to live, work and travel in and beyond cislunar space.  As a nation, we cannot and must not pass on this enterprise.

Radar mosaic of the floor of the north polar crater Peary, showing many craters with elevated CPR inside, but not outside, their rims. This material is probably water ice.

Last year, India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter spent eight months mapping the surface of the Moon.  I had the honor of being the Principal Investigator of an experiment on that mission, the Mini-SAR imaging radar.  The purpose of this experiment is to map and characterize the deposits within permanently dark areas of the poles.  These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, may be present in quantity here.  Our radar team has just finished the first round of analysis of data returned by the Mini-SAR for the north pole and results will soon be published in the technical journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

Mini-SAR is a lightweight, low power imaging radar.  It uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize the lunar surface composition and physical state.  Mini-SAR transmits pulses of left-circularly polarized radar.  Typically, reflection from planetary surfaces reverses the transmitted polarization, so that Mini-SAR radar echoes from the Moon are right circularly polarized.  The ratio of received power in the same sense transmitted (left circular) to the opposite sense (right circular) is called the circular polarization ratio (CPR).  Most of the Moon has low CPR (about 0.3), meaning that a reversal of polarization is the norm, but some specific areas have high CPR (greater than 1.0).  These include very rough, rocky surfaces (such as a young, fresh crater) and ice, which is transparent to radio energy.  In this latter case, the radar penetrates the ice and is scattered and reflected multiple times by inclusions and flaws in the ice, resulting in the reflection of many same sense polarization echoes, leading to higher CPR values than normal.  High values of CPR are not uniquely diagnostic of either surface roughness or ice; we must take into account the geological setting of the high CPR signal to interpret its cause.

Many craters near the poles of the Moon have interiors that are in permanent shadow from the Sun.  These areas are very cold and water ice is stable permanently there.  Fresh craters show high degrees of surface roughness (high CPR) both inside and outside the crater rim, caused by sharp rocks and block fields that are distributed over the entire crater area.  However, Mini-SAR found craters near the north pole that have high CPR values inside, but not outside their rims.  This relation suggests that the high CPR is not caused by roughness, but by some material that is restricted within the interiors of these craters.  It is not geologically reasonable to expect rough, fresh surfaces to be present inside a crater rim but absent outside of it.  The craters that show this enhancement are all permanently cold and dark, where ice is stable.  We thus interpret this high CPR to mean that water ice is present in these craters.

Over forty small (2-15 km diameter) craters near the north pole of the Moon are found to contain this elevated CPR material.  The total mount of ice present at the pole depends on how thick it is; to see this elevated CPR effect, the ice must have a thickness on the order of tens of wavelengths of the radar used.  Our radar wavelength is 12.6 cm, therefore we think that the ice must be at least two meters thick and relatively pure.  At such a thickness, more than 600 million metric tones of water ice are present in this area.  Such an amount is comparable to the quantity estimated from the 1998 Lunar Prospector (LP) mission’s neutron spectrometer data (several hundred million metric tones).  The LP neutron spectrometer only sees to depths of about one-half meter, while we penetrate at least a couple of meters, so the neutron data would underestimate the total quantity of water ice present.

The emerging picture from many experiments on several different lunar missions indicates that the creation, migration, deposition and retention of vast amounts of water are occurring on the Moon.  Such an astounding result was totally unexpected by most lunar scientists, including myself.  The emerging picture is consistent with earlier studies from the 1994 Clementine mission and subsequent Lunar Prospector as well as the more recent reports of the presence of water-bearing minerals at high latitudes (Moon Mineralogy Mapper), the detection of water vapor in the LCROSS impact plume (a few percent water content at its target site), and a variety of new supporting measurements, such as the discovery of unexpectedly cold polar temperatures by the DIVINER experiment on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (as cold as 25 degrees above absolute zero, colder than the estimated surface temperature of Pluto).  The Moon experiences complex geological processes that were wholly unexpected before the recent results.

The quantity of water present at the lunar poles is significant; at the north pole alone, the 600 million metric tons of water there – turned into rocket fuel – is enough to launch the equivalent of one Space Shuttle (735 mT of propellant) per day for over 2000 years.  The discoveries we are now making show that the Moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific and operational destination than we had previously thought.  The Moon is the key to sustainable human presence in space.  Its resources enable us to create a reusable, sustainable transportation system, one that can routinely access not only the Moon, but all points of cislunar space.  Once established, such a system can be used to go forward into the Solar System.

The SP-100 space nuclear reactor

Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program.  Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering.  My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to go to the Moon several decades ago, as having an “Apollo cargo cult” mentality (i.e., Pacific islanders waiting for parachutes to once again drop wondrous things in crates from planes, as they did during World War II).  A counterpart to the so-called “Apollo cargo cult” also exists in the space community and they rely on their own talismanic thinking – a belief in some technique or item that allows us to go farther and longer in space, with incredible new capabilities.  The talisman takes different forms for different groups, but in all cases, they ward off the evil spirits of physical and bureaucratic reality.

Early in the history of the Vision for Space Exploration, talismanic thinking was apparent with Project Prometheus.  This was a program to develop an advanced space nuclear reactor for missions to the outer Solar System – where the Sun’s rays are too weak to provide enough energy to power systems.   Used anywhere, such a capability enables activities to take place in a power-rich environment, making many necessary and routine operations easier, safer and more efficient.  Former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe was enamored of Prometheus, so much so that he often unintentionally overstated its capabilities.  For him, Prometheus was a talisman – a unique capability that enabled the otherwise unobtainable.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden fancies his own talisman – the technology to “go to Mars in days and weeks, rather than months.”  Bolden is probably referring to VASIMR, the plasma rocket engine designed and undergoing testing by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz.  In principle, a VASIMR-powered vehicle could go to Mars on non-minimum energy trajectories, thereby cutting transit time between planets to a fraction of that required for a chemical rocket.

VASIMR is an interesting concept and some form of it will be very useful when we are ready to travel to the outer planets.  However, one aspect about it that I have not heard mentioned by Bolden is the low mass, high power system needed to run it.  The only known systems approaching the necessary power density needed are nuclear reactors.  Which brings us back to Project Prometheus, a joint NASA-Department of Energy (DoE) effort.

Prometheus was canceled in the FY2006 budget.  It was deemed too complex and too costly for its proposed use, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.  This was a robotic spacecraft designed to tour the Jupiter system and obtain data on its satellites during multiple flybys.  Note well: this power system was thought to be both too complex and expensive for a robotic mission.  A similar system for human missions – which involves many more systems, power requirements, and propulsion – would be even more complex and expensive.  Tack on international participation and – well, you get the picture.

So where does this leave VASIMR?  Chang-Diaz notes that nuclear reactors can be launched empty and then assembled and fueled in space, presumably by human astronauts.  Thus, there are no safety considerations associated with its launch.  The problem is that the pieces of this reactor don’t exist and aren’t even being thought about being built.  For decades the DoE community has talked about a space reactor of the 100 to 1000 kW class; a VASIMR-powered Mars vehicle would need a 10 megawatt reactor.  Billions of dollars went into the SP-100 program in the 1980s and 1990s and still the reactors needed to power VASIMR exist only in the mind’s eye of some space dreamers.  The United States Navy has been building and operating nuclear reactors for over 60 years, so one would think that building a space reactor would be achievable, but practice has proven otherwise.

VASIMR is Bolden’s talisman, the magic beans that will grow a stalk that we can climb to Mars.  Such a rocket engine would be a technological breakthrough promising capabilities well beyond our current reach.  But for now, a Mars craft using VASIMR is imaginary.  Reality will not come about by spending massive amounts of money on general technology investment.  When VASIMR is finally built, it will be because it is needed for a specific application or mission.  Once again, the ends will drive the means, not the other way around.

Talismanic thinking is common in much of the current discussion about the new path for NASA.  Other talismans include cheap access to low Earth orbit, commercial transport replacing Orion, and an “exciting space goal” to engage the public.  These new dogmas (all of them means, not ends) clearly illustrate that there is no strategic thinking or thoughtful leadership guiding America’s space program.  Those at the top need to know where they are going and understand why; the fact that they currently do not bodes ill for the future of our country.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently said that “he is trying to find middle ground between groups “radically” in favor of keeping the Constellation program and others lobbying for reliance on commercial space entities.”  But he is still confusing the means with the ends.  We should re-affirm that our mission is to use the resources of the Moon to build a transportation infrastructure whereby all can travel to wherever they choose as often as they want.  Our direction in space goes through the Moon or we go nowhere.

Our new space program. "You think that you hate it now... But wait till you drive it."

The release of the proposed NASA budget and new “direction” has led to an intense “cage fight” in the blogosphere over who has the best rocket and the best architecture.  Many “New Space” advocates are ecstatic, viewing the cancellation of the Constellation program as vindication of their view that:  a) this was a stupid architecture to begin with; and b) the purchase of launch services by NASA is more desirable than the development of same by the agency.  In the other corner, defenders of the existing program and paradigm see human spaceflight as still largely an experimental activity and that by contracting for launch services, astronauts’ lives will be put in danger, leading to the eventual termination of America’s human spaceflight program.  Both sides are locked in a fierce battle over the ownership of the “how,” while seemingly unconcerned as to the “why” or the “what” they are fighting for.

Once again the debate focuses on launch vehicles, the need or lack thereof for a heavy lift vehicle, and all the wonderful new technical development and leaps forward possible once NASA is freed from its responsibility to build and operate a space transportation system.  I agree with the New Space people that alternative options for launch and orbit are desirable and that a flexible, extensible architecture is the way to move beyond LEO.  On the other hand, I agree with the “Ares huggers” that this change will not result in the space utopia its advocates promise and that an agency saddled with an unworkable approach is a ripe target for elimination.

Those cheering the new path should step back from their celebrations, take a sober look at the landscape and ask themselves, “Now what?”  The “new path” has no mission.  Despite what many believe or have said, Project Constellation was not same thing as the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).  Constellation was the implementation that NASA chose to carry out that mission.  The VSE was both a set of destinations and a group of specific activities at those locations.  The Vision’s objective was to give us new spaceflight capability by learning to use the material and energy resources of space, first on the Moon and then from other objects in space.

The new policy indicates a lack of understanding of the difference between “means” and “ends” within both NASA and the current administration.  When they cancelled Project Constellation, the Vision was terminated as well.  And what was put in its place?

Nothing.

All of the current hand wringing and angst is focused on which rocket and spacecraft to build.  But to what end?  The “Flexible Path” concept came from the Augustine Commission.  It’s main focus was to find an affordable way to move people beyond low Earth orbit.  Using their concept, we would visit places beyond low Earth orbit that had very low gravity – libration points, near Earth asteroids, and the moons of Mars.  The supposed advantage of such places is that they do not require a large propulsive maneuver to land on (or more accurately rendezvous with) them.  Thus, the supposed enormous cost of building a landing vehicle is saved.

The “new path” called for in the budget envisions a government funded and commercially built and operated space launch system, freeing NASA from the necessity of building rockets.  The agency would “invest” in new technology.  Somehow, these new and wonderful approaches will lead to the spontaneous generation of a space faring infrastructure capable of taking us beyond LEO into the Solar System – anywhere and everywhere.  But to do what?

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden seems to think that a return to the Moon should be ruled out because “there are already six American flags there.” It is hard to imagine that he believes that the purpose of space exploration is to plant a flag and move on to the next destination.  Such a template will exhaust possible destinations quickly.  If the goals of travel beyond LEO are more significant than that, what are they?  What will people do at an asteroid?  What do we get from such a trip?  What capability does it create?  What are we buying? Again, the “means” and “ends” argument attempts to focus on outcome.

We had a considered and well crafted strategic direction in space – to go to the Moon and use its resources (which we now know are even more abundant and accessible than we thought) to create a new transportation system that will reduce costs and increase access to cislunar space.  That mission was not just the proposal of the former President; it was endorsed by two different Congresses (in 2005 and 2008), under the leadership of different parties, and both times, by huge bipartisan majorities.  The Vision for Space Exploration is our national space policy and will be until the Congress passes a new authorization bill, changing the mission and goals of the space program.

Currently, the proposed budget casts aside this hard-won, bipartisan policy and puts nothing in its place.  This new policy is striking in that, rather than serving America’s national security, economic and scientific interests, it undermines them.  The “new path” was apparently put together by a very small group of people, without significant debate or input from outside sources.  Whatever the circumstances of its genesis, it is poorly conceived; if it were well considered, we would know exactly where we were going, what we would do there, and what benefits would accrue from these voyages.  The idea expressed by some in the blogosphere, that we will now be able to “go everywhere and do everything” is ludicrously naïve.  Given the past performance of this agency (or any agency) given no direction, random motion is a much more likely outcome, at $20 billion per year.

If the current architecture is broken or unaffordable, fix it or change it.  If getting NASA out of the rocket-building business is the right way to go, do that.  But don’t discard our strategic direction.  The space program can survive a change in the business model of its implementing agency; it won’t survive fecklessness and a complete lack of direction.

The administration proposes; Congress disposes

The release of the new proposed budget for NASA has unleashed a blizzard of news articles and commentary.  The administration proposes to terminate Constellation, the agency effort to design and build a new space transportation system to carry people to low Earth orbit and beyond.  In its place, they plan to let contracts with several companies to provide orbital launch and spaceflight services, both as transport to ISS and to “destinations beyond LEO.”  This major change in the agency’s business model follows in the wake of last summer’s Augustine committee report, which concluded that NASA’s “program of record” to return to the Moon and beyond was inadequately funded and possibly, misdirected as well.

The Augustine “Flexible Path” was an architecture designed to take people beyond LEO, but to low gravity targets: L-points, near-Earth asteroids, and Phobos and Deimos, the asteroid-like moons of Mars.  The idea behind that concept was two-fold.  First, it was a way to send people into deep space without the very high programmatic expense of developing a lunar landing spacecraft.  Given that Constellation is significantly over budget, cost control is certainly an issue.  The second motivation for FP was the feeling (not explicitly stated in the report, but clearly implied) that the agency plan for lunar return was largely a repeat of the Apollo experience of 40 years ago.  The strength of this impression varied among the committee members, with some thinking that the chosen architecture was simply the wrong approach while others questioned the value of going to the Moon at all.  The new proposed budgetary direction seems to follow the Augustine Flexible Path (FP).

I have previously discussed what I perceive as the most significant problem with FP, namely, that it is activity without direction.  The administration’s budgetary version of this path confirms this perception.  Much verbiage is thrown around about multiple missions to all sorts of destinations, blazing new trails with new technology, trips to Mars that last weeks instead of months, and “people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts.”   But nowhere in the budget documents or agency statements is there anything about the mission that we are undertaking.  So we’re going to an asteroid.  What will we do there?  Why are we going there?  What benefit accrues from it?

The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) of 2004 not only laid out a clear path, but also described exactly why such a path was being taken.  It is not a repeat of the Apollo experience.  We go to the Moon to learn how to create a sustainable human presence in space.  We do this by experimenting with and learning to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to create new space faring capability.  These skills enable us to build a space transportation infrastructure that allows routine access not only to the Moon, but all of cislunar space (where our space assets reside) and the planets beyond.  All of this activity is to be accomplished under the existing budgetary envelope; as there is no deadline, we trade time for money.

Many conflate the VSE with Constellation, the agency’s program to build the Ares launcher and Orion spacecraft, but they are different and distinct.  The former is a strategic direction; the latter is an implementation of that direction.  This is not some academic distinction; it goes to the essence of the current debate about NASA and the space program.  Virtually all of the argument and debate about our future in space has been about means rather than ends.  Launch vehicles, spacecraft, and architectures have been grist for the mills of the space blogosphere.  Beyond a vague notion that people should “move into the Solar System,” the purpose and meaning of that movement has been articulated much less often.  Partly that’s because different people have differing notions of what those motivations should be – science, settlement, curiosity, and technical innovation all have their adherents.  But if you do not clearly understand what your mission is, you are not likely to successfully implement it.

The VSE was a clear strategic direction.  It not only identified the path forward, but also the specific activities that would enable that path to be followed.  The new budget outlines the means (new commercial launch and transport) but not the object of our space program.  But more critically, it discards the clear and practical direction of the original VSE.  Before the new budget, we knew exactly where we were headed and why: a return to the Moon to learn how to live and work productively on another world.  Now, all we know is that at some point in the future, we will somehow go somewhere to do something.  Or other.

I wrote recently about a variant of the Flexible Path architecture outlined at the blog Vision Restoration.  I think that this approach has a lot of merit, but suggest one critical modification: it does not have a statement of the mission.  The VSE in its original guise should be stated up front and made a clear and unalterable part of the architecture.  If during the course of the program the implementation somehow falls short, change the implementation, not the mission.  The failure to do this in the Constellation Program led us into a blind alley of cost and schedule overruns, the Augustine committee, and now, cancellation.

This new policy will increase NASA’s natural tendency to engage in organizational “Brownian motion.”  We are already seeing agency leaders call for new studies to determine what will be done at the (so far unspecified) new destinations.  The current program looks upon itself as a transportation architecture; the activities undertaken at any given destination are irrelevant.  The new “direction” outlined in the budget request is similarly focused on means (e.g., commercial launch and transport) rather than ends (e.g., What will humans do at Earth-Sun L-1?).  And it will likely come down the same path, as indeed it appears to be starting to.  NASA as an organization will adjust to this; after all, viewgraphs are easily changed and mission studies easily re-written.  But what about the aerospace industry?  They find it very difficult to pivot on a dime when the direction changes.

I’ve often written about how I think the VSE ought to be implemented and have found the existing program of record wanting in several respects.  But at least it aimed in one direction.  We need a program plan that gets us beyond LEO using small, incremental, cumulative steps and the new model promises to do just that.  But small, incremental steps taken in random directions yield uncertain progress.

What is your mission?  It’s not just the most important thing; it’s the only thing.  NASA forgot that during the last 6 years.  Now, the White House has joined them.