NASA kills lunar space station to focus on ambitious Moon base
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Sunk cost fallacy. Gateway to Nowhere was always a terrible idea, it’s fantastic news it’s been canceled.
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No, you need a way to dump waste heat to safely operate a nuclear power plant. On Earth, heating water and dumping it into the environment is often convenient. In space it's usually not.*
In space there are two ways. One, you can radiate it away, which is difficult, but it's frequently needed for things besides nuclear power plants, so they'll figure out methods. Or, two, you can throw something hot overboard. Such as rocket exhaust.* That's how a nuclear powered rocket works. (But it still needs some radiative cooling too.)
* That rocket exhaust might be hot water, though more likely it's a hot component of water, hydrogen.
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It’s just been fantastic news since Jared took over.
The old plan was ridiculous. Gateway wasn’t needed but chewing up huge amounts of resources. There was no real plan for how to get to landing astronauts, ie site selection/preparation and equipment caching. There was no real plan on how they would survive lunar nights.
Now they are filling in the blank spots with solutions that are achievable on reasonable timelines, if just not on this aggressive one. It’s starting to feel real for the first time ever.
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It would be very cool to see all this happen. It would make for a very exciting next 10 years.
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This is all awesome news, and I’m thrilled, however SpaceX, Blue, and Axiom still have to show up with their respective pieces. I still think it’s 2030 at least before we land on the moon.
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Only VIPER (a mission that cost $433.5 million to built with $235.6 million budgeted to launch the lander) and other landers/missions already funded 3 years ago (>$100 million on average per mission) have a chance of launching by December 2028. Most of the previously funded missions are already slipping into 2027 for launch see Blue Ghost II and IM3). Zero chance NASA can afford 15 new lunar missions that will each cost >$100 million a piece (or even $50 million) and meet schedule successfully in 2027/2028....let's also not forget the poor landing record of this "cheap" landers
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This was a jobs program for mission control (MMC-H), the flight directors office and former space station flight controllers to give them a new home after ISS retires. To preserve the culture so to speak was the rally cry from the flight directors office. Gateway reality was more about protecting jobs and bureaucratic backscratching than it was about accomplishing anything useful in space. I'm glad this chapter is closed, with out too much taxpayer waste.
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The article over promissed on space stations. From the second paragraph, quote "Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements ... and major changes to commercial space stations."
Can we have the news on the commercial space stations please.
Can we have the news on the commercial space stations please.
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21 launches to get 4 tons to the surface seems like an insane waste of time, money and effort.
Couldn't you do more with a single Falcon Heavy, let alone a single Starship?
Couldn't you do more with a single Falcon Heavy, let alone a single Starship?
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Sure, understood...
But they aren't just talking rockets to get there, they're talking reactors on the surface (both Mars and the Moon) to support infra. The surface area to provide radiative cooling is going to be prohibitive for DCs in orbit... Were talking massively less waste heat than a nuclear reactor. Admittedly, it's easier and more cost effective to build permanent infra to deal with the heat but it's still going to end up being massive for any appreciable amount of power generation, right?
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
If you change the plane prior to LOI you are not on a free return trajectory. That involves incredibly high risk. If you want to change the plane as part of the LOI DeltaV in general increases with lattitude. Alternatively you can loiter in LLO via a 2 burn manuver but that adds mission time.
So I guess I should have been more precise to say it is harder to land humans on the southpole safely. For cargo it wouldn't matter.
In case someone brings us later Apollo missions: for Apollo missions after Apollo 12 they didn't technically fly a free return trajectory. They flew a hybrid flight path in which they transitioned off free return in mid course but they remained close (in terms of propulsive DeltaV) to a FRT right up to the LOI. This had the capability of opening up mid latitude landing sites as far 30N & 30S however even a polar landing was considered too marginal.
In the case of Apollo 13 they were able to return to FRT with just 11.5 m/s (not a typo) of DeltaV a capability that almost certainly contributed to saving the lives of the crew. So when I say close I mean close. Apollo 13 later did a much larger burn to pickup speed in order to reduce the transit time but that technically wasn't required. The 11.5 m/s got the crew back on a return trajectory.
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I just saw a study that Martian gravity isn't enough to maintain muscle mass. (In mice.) They'll likely either need good drugs or they'll need a centrifuge somewhere.
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Building the world’s first rapidly reusable orbital launcher is an ambitious task. Almost all of Starships failures can be traced to reusing the upper stage, ie the complexities of the propellant system with header tanks, re-entry shielding issues etc.
If necessary, they could shortcut these issues and build a far simpler expendable upper stage to get into service now, which would offer the side benefit of significantly increasing payload to orbit.
But they probably won’t have to do that. Starship’s development has been incredibly quick, it’s only been 7 years when simple expendables like Vulcan and SLS take over a decade.
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The size of the radiator needed is to the fourth power of the temperature. Cooling hoter things is easier than cooling cooler things. Space Based Reactors run very hot, hot enough they would melt CPU this reduces the radiator size relative to power dramatically. In fact the secret sauce for space based power is reactor cores which run very high even compared to terrestrial power plants. The kilopower prototype for example was tested at an 800C core temperature. In comparison a PWR on Earth operates at around 300C and a GPU likely limited to 90C.
Cooling CPU in space isn't just hard because radiating heat away is hard it is hard because they operate at very low temperatures. The cooler you want to make the cooling loop the larger the radiator size for a heat given load grows exponentially.
For the same waste heat a datacenter radiator would be about 50x larger than a space based power reactor. Even having SBP operate at conventional reactor temps of 300C is likely a deal killer. Radiators would be on the order of 12x larger.
The thing about datacenters in space is none of it is impossible it is just idiotic. You could build a lexus dealership compete with service station in space too. Technically there is nothing that prevents someone from opening a Lexus dealership in space. You take a Crew Dragon to check out the cars, pick the one you like and they ship it down to you on a Starship. When you need service just drive it up to SpaceX pay $30M and they will get it safely roundtrip to the Lexus Dealership in space.
(On edit: should be in kelvin not celsius for comparison, reduces the ratios. thanks for the correction)
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From the article;
“Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including … Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.”
Once China announced that they would build a Moon base at the lunar South Pole by 2035, then NASA getting rid of an intermediate station orbiting the Moon, the Gateway, was an extremely logical decision. That logic should hopefully overrule the Gateway advocates in Congress.
“Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including … Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.”
Once China announced that they would build a Moon base at the lunar South Pole by 2035, then NASA getting rid of an intermediate station orbiting the Moon, the Gateway, was an extremely logical decision. That logic should hopefully overrule the Gateway advocates in Congress.
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Just a little skepticism given the ridiculously advanced timeline and total lack of any current hardware is called for, wouldn't one think Mr. Berger? It's exciting, but let's be real at the same time.
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If you are on the surface, you can just build a heat exchanger inside the regolith. You heat the regolith, and you end with less heat on your nuclear reactor.
You use radiative cooling in space, because you don't have something to dump your heat into. If you are on an object with a significant mass, you just figure a way to dump your heat into that object.
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That’s a study on mice, not men, and not the actual implication.
The test Mice didn’t wear heavy space suits in outdoor excursions, they didn’t lift and carry heavy equipment and supplies. And they didn’t use the basic exercise equipment that the ISS has provided astronauts since early in its existence.
The only applicability of this study seems to be that it shows that a sedentary individual in a small cage can’t rely solely on gravity to maintain muscle mass in the 1/3 to 2/3 gravity range. That means Martian astronauts will likely need to still use exercise equipment, but only a fraction of the time ISS astronauts are forced to.
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So your criticism isn’t that they will happen, just that it will take a couple more years?
News for you, only a certain senile Whitehouse resident believes the schedule. But the plan itself seems very good, and easily accomplish-able.
Edit: Also lets point out that NASA actually has a pretty good track record landing on the moon, and the opportunity to learn from recent failures by other organisations. In addition, launching dozens of probes/rovers etc to the surface of the moon is an opportunity to benefit from mass manufacturing optimizations. They could design a single lander type and single rover/probe types that can be easily modified for each specific mission, and get large economies in shared design/testing/manufacturing that's not available for bespoke landers and probes.
So while the schedule is way too optimistic, the costs may not be and the risks of landings may not be high either. And if a few landings fail mass manufacturing means making replacements is fast and cheap.
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Why would you put 21 different probes, satellites and rovers on a single rocket? You understand the massive complexity of the mechanisms to launch them separately from inside a single fairing?
And you’d need a rocket at least the size of the Saturn V to deliver 4 tons to the surface.
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This weekend some billionaire will send Taco a check and next week it'll be back on the agenda
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I'm certain someone has thought about why this wouldn't work, but could some kind of weighted clothes help? I imagine in 1/3 gravity even walking would be awkward.
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The previous Senator Trent (R-AL) would of course disagree because his pork-crew saw millions of "returns" and tied an anchor around the US space program for decades!
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I think ISS is being extended to 2032 and commerical LEO space stations are still being funded. Maybe use PPE for station keeping when ROS module Zarya of ISS completely fails. Maybe PPE could lift ISS into graveyard orbit instead of deorbiting. Most likely is government warehouse or museum storage for PPE and HALO to save on launch costs.
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Would encourage you to read up on Mr. Isaacman if you haven't already. Not saying he's the NASA Messiah™ we've all been waiting for, but there's certainly more than just a breath of fresh air with what he is vociferously advocating for in terms of NASA's direction.
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I can't wait for Elon to announce that xAI will use liquid-core datacenters! Only the finest molten GPUs!
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We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
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On whether a Falcon Heavy do more than 4 tons to the Moon:
Falcon Heavy is listed at 16,800kg to TLI. What am I missing here? Sincerely asking.
Edit: Ah, Blue Ghost dry mass is 469kg. That changes the math.
Falcon 9, with TLI capacity of 1,900kg, delivered the 1,500kg Blue Ghost lander. So with 3 Falcon 9 launches, you'd already be over 4,000kg delivered.
Falcon Heavy is listed at 16,800kg to TLI. What am I missing here? Sincerely asking.
OK, let me rephrase: an expendable cargo-only version of HLS should be doable in the next 2-4 years. Doing 21 launches averaging less than 200kg each until then just seems like dicking around in the margins and pissing away money.
Edit: Ah, Blue Ghost dry mass is 469kg. That changes the math.
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Does this mean that NASA, rather than Congress, will now determine what missions to fund and what hardware to build?
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4 tons of payload is the metric that requires a lot more than 4 tons including lander and propellant. Landing on the moon is hard as it is 100% propulsive. Blue Ghost can land up to 150 kg but even assuming every payload will perfectly be 150 kg is dubious. Say it could land 100kg on average. So 4 tons total would require 40 Blue Ghosts. Alternative to land 4 tons of payload on the surface requires throwing about 20t to 80t on TLI depending on the size and number of landers (smaller landers less mass efficient because not everything scales down).
Falcon Heavy 100% expendable is >15t but everything else is more like 8t.
Blue Moon Mk 1 is the largest currently built lunar lander and it can land 3t on the lunar surface with a gross (wet) mass of 21.8t which is too large for FH and wouldn't fit in the fairing anyways. If a properly sized lander existed FH 100% expendable could land maybe 2t payload on the moon and a reusable FH about 1t payload on the moon. So it would require four FH missions at cost of $200M to $300M each.
However the goal is to have this mass distributed. Different payloads in different places intentionally. Also building out the capabilities of multiple companies. Creating an ecosystem of service providers that can be relied upon in the future. Some will fail, some will go bankrupt but like commercial resupply and commercial crew maybe there are a few gems in there.
Is it? Elon ego has resisted all attempt at looking at an expendable upper stag even after being years late on HLS something which technically doesn't need a reusable upper stage at all. The Chinese might beat us to the moon. SpaceX has been paid $2.7B to date and is already three years late likely will be five years late and still adamant no expendable upper stage.
Of course if it is ready in 4 years how do you land payloads starting next year?
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They're utterly delusional to think they'll have 2 launches this year, AND 10 next.
Yeah, that whole graphic proves that grift focused space exploration sounds great on paper. But I'll lay high odds that graphic fucking disappears from their website in about six months when reality beats the ever-loving shit out of them and they reassess things.
And if Artemis doesn' return four healthy astronauts safely to earth, it might be a hell of a lot sooner than six months.
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Sadly no. This is the administrator trying to build a reason for Congress to do this. It does seem he has support of Congress though. China is a good motivator but ultimately every cent will need to be appropriated by Congress.
He has made quite a few "surprise" announcements but they haven't surprised Congress and there has been no pushback yet.
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I think this has been explored in this hard sci-fi drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Force_(TV_series)
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Having a base on the moon will be important for checking on the nuclear waste we’re going to be storing there. Nothing could go wrong, of course.
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And the SR-1 "Freedom" NEP Mars mission (that will NOT launch in 2028 as announced) is the rope they tossed to JPL to cover for shutting down MSR. It makes sense in no other context. Two years to design, build, test, and launch a NEP propulsion system is purest fantasy.
The loss of Gateway and gain of a surface base is exciting. Couple that with using HLS as the TLI stage for Orion, and it feels like we've finally gotten closer to a rational and serious lunar program.
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