Asteroid Retrieval Mission Debate - 16th Annual International Mars Society Convention

what we're going to have now is essentially a debate but we'll have audience participation on the merit of the NASA's asteroid retrieval mission as many of you may know NASA recently put forward as a concept for a major mission to retrieve a either we who call it a very small asteroid or a part of a larger asteroid but anyway an object with perhaps a diameter of 7 meters not 7 kilometers and using electric propulsion to tug it from a heliocentric orbit into they orbit around the moon where it could then be visited by astronauts who would only have to do a three-day flight out from the earth to go visit it instead of a multi-month flight to explore an asteroid and interplanetary space so that is the basic concept and it has provoked a sharp disagreement as to its merit is this a good idea or not one panel in Congress approved funding of it another unanimously I believe are well makings with a strong majority voted for no funding for it so maybe people just don't understand it and that's why some people don't support it or maybe the people who support it don't understand it we fee in any case we want to try to examine this issue and ok now I did write an op-ed in space news that was very sharply critical of this mission the was entitled NASA's asteroid absurdity where I attacked it on a number of grounds the John Brophy who's with me here he spoke earlier today as you know he is an expert on electric propulsion he was one of the principles in design of electric propulsion system that has been successfully used on the dawn mission and electric propulsion plays a key role in the asteroid capture mission and I leave that you were also involved in the design of this mission concept okay so he is a strong advocate of this mission he sees a lot of merit in it so since you are with the affirmative why don't you go first and explain why this is a good mission okay so let's see there's a variety of stand points to consider this but we'll start first with solar electric propulsion because that's really my expertise NASA has had for a few years now plans to do a high-power solar electric propulsion system demonstration something on the order of 30 kilowatts or so and and the reason for that is there are lots of potential applications for a high-power solar electric propulsion system and there and as we pointed out this morning there's the need for a stepping stone to significantly higher power levels to support human explorations either back to the moon or to provide cargo delivery for Mars missions and so forth and it's too big a step to go from the dawn sized electric propulsion systems to these multi hundred kilowatt systems so NASA recognized that and said okay we need to do a solar electric propulsion demo of around 30 or 40 kilowatts something like that problem is that's an expensive demonstration to do and that demonstration mission was slipping to the right at a rate of greater than a year per year which means it was never going to happen and so the electric purple so this this mission concept needs high-power solar electric propulsion it is enabled by that in fact most people when they first hear about it say we're gonna do what they think it's really a wacky thing and so I'm not surprised at the reaction most people have that reaction because I think you know can we really do this so but it is enabled by high-power solar electric propulsion and in fact if you think high-power solar electric propulsion which is in my view the the most capable propulsion system for in space operation that that has that has yet been has been developed to date and is getting much better at a very fast rate that if you need that system for future human exploration missions this asteroid mission is pulling that demonstration forward it's pulling it earlier in time as opposed to letting it slip out more than a year per year so that's from just the strictly propulsion transportation perspective it's a very good thing to do because it allows NASA an affordable way to do that demonstration mission which otherwise wouldn't happen and makes all the other human exploration missions much more expensive in the future there is a reason that all of the commercial concept manufacturers are flying solar electric propulsion there's a reason that Boeing is going to an all-electric spacecraft bus that all of the spacefaring nations are flying electric propulsion it's because it is the most affordable way to get around the solar system so that's the the demonstration mission pretty much most people I think agree with capturing an asteroid and bringing it back to assist lunar space or translunar space or whatever the right buzzword is that provides a significant real benefit in this cost constrained environment in which it provides a meaningful destination that's reachable by that currently the SLS and Orion that are currently under development by NASA they need no other no other elements than those two and they can go to a destination and do something meaningful in human space flight for the first time in a long time it'll put them in with a only the second celestial object in human history and the first new one in 50 years and it allows them to it'll be you know the farther people have ever the farthest people have ever been away from the planet it allows you to figure out how to deal with an object in a low gravity environment how to anchor to and how to deal with the dust and and so forth but also it has the potential to capture the public's imagination this is a really outrageous kind of mission to do it's something that people didn't most people didn't think was possible and basically you think we're starting to rearrange the solar system for the benefit of humanity if you want to get kind of grandiose about it but and there are a lot there are several other reasons but I'll stop there I believe that the form of the argument that John has just advanced while it is popular at NASA is is the wrong kind of argument to make for a mission that is you don't do a mission to give the things you have something to do okay that's make-work okay in other words the to do this mission to give electric propulsion something to do to do this mission to give the SLS and Orion something to do okay to me is the wrong way to conceive of planning a space program rather what we need to be doing is think about what it is that we want to do and develop the systems that will allow us to do that that is we need to be mission driven rather than constituency driven in this case constituency being people who represent various technologies or various development programs who want to have something to do okay and so you know if we the the robotic space exploration program has been successful because it has been mission driven okay they conceived of a mission we want to deliver a rover to Mars and therefore we need to develop this kind of landing system now as we didn't deliver Spirit and Opportunity to Mars in order to give airbags something to do okay we develop that kind of landing system in order to get spirit to Mars we developed the curiosity landing system to get curiosity Mars we didn't do that because there were people who had this idea about tractor Rockets and stuff and they really had to be given something to do now the the human spaceflight program during Apollo was mission driven we didn't go to the moon to give Saturn fives something to do okay we developed the Saturn 5 and the command module and the lunar excursion vehicles in order to be able to have a set of tools that allowed us to do the mission that we had set for ourselves which has sent people to the moon and back okay that's how that came up since that time however the NASA human spaceflight program has been for the most part constituency driven okay and therefore in other words they fly the shuttles in order to fly the shuttles and they flew 120 some on shuttles okay and four of those missions were really worth doing the launch and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope okay others of them you know for example the mission that the Columbia astronauts died on scientifically indefensible it was flying Columbia to fly Columbia the the following that accident therefore the Gaming Commission which investigated it didn't just criticize the engineering mistakes that were the proximate cause of the accident they criticized the whole concept they said if you're going to take if you're going to engage and accept the risks and costs of human spaceflight you have to have missions that are worthy of the risk and cost of human spaceflight you must have clear and compelling objectives for human spaceflight otherwise you shouldn't be doing human spaceflight ok now the Bush administration sort of took that criticism to heart or at least acted or pretended that it did and said ok we're now going to come up with an objective we're not just gonna be flying people up and down to the Space Station because we've got shuttles and we have to give them something to do ok we're gonna go to the moon okay we're gonna build a lunar base and this is our first step out there ok now there are criticisms that one could make of that but at least it was a clear objective and and there's plenty of criticisms that could be leveled at the way it was executed and and so forth but nevertheless at least it was sane I think there were mistakes made I think the things that were done were wrong but they were saying ok that is they had an objective and they started trying to develop a set of hardware to achieve the objective ok then Obama let it slide for a year because during stimulus they just want to spend money on anything but then in 2010 he comes as well we're cancelling this we don't want to do this ok we have a better idea that was not invented here we're gonna send people to a near-earth asteroid that's much better than going back to the moon because going back to the moon is going back to where we were going to a near-earth asteroid is going beyond we're going to leave the harbor and sail out into the ocean of the solar system we're going to leave geocentric space we're gonna sail out there and that has some merit especially if you're thinking about going tomorrow you will have to leave the harbor now my criticisms of execution of that in the years since it was announced but prior to this announcement is that it wasn't really pursued okay that if you actually wanted to send people to a near-earth asteroid you would say okay what's the hardware set we need it includes a reentry capsule and includes a heavy-lift bestir booster with a earth escape stage and upper stage capable of trance asteroid injection and it includes a hab module and you say that's the pieces we need that's what we should develop and and you do that aggressively and you don't just have this be a vision and I said it's proposal is gonna do that we're gonna do this then you do it you don't just kind of talk about doing it but not do it but then it became apparent that they were not doing it and but furthermore this mission plan was proposed and is certainly popular among electric propulsion community because it would give them something to do but that cannot be the basis of a choice of a mission that it gives certain people some business the because the technologists are not properly speaking the constituents of a mission the technologists are vendors to a mission okay that's who they are okay and you to do a business to do a mission you have to buy things from certain vendors but you don't do something in order to please your vendors okay the but furthermore this mission plan undermined the primary rationale of the Obama asteroid mission which was to leave geocentric space it said well if you want to look at an asteroid we can show you how can do it without leaving geocentric space you know the so it undermined the primary rationale other rationales have been advanced for this mission that it will develop a technology for planetary protection this technology is not appropriate for planet protection this is a 6-meter object the the if you want to deflect a 600 meter object it doesn't have a chance and on any reasonable scale and the even stopping the tumbling of such an object is impossible with electric propulsion if you if you want to deflect a heavy object you're gonna have to do it which is tumbling you're gonna have to do it impulsively okay not with electric propulsion with either missiles with conventional explosives or nuclear explosive blasting off mass from the side of it and giving it a nice chef okay that can be done that's planetary protection if we're talking about asteroid science if we wanted to sample a variety of asteroids that's done much better with a variety of small spacecraft if we wanted to understand the larger composition of major asteroid Alabi X once that's either done with a robotic spacecraft or human sent to the asteroid but you have to if you want to learn about real asteroids and not just rocks you got to go to real asteroids and then finally there was another o in situ resource utilization has been advanced that we can use this rock as a source for space materials that could be used in support of other space operations well the essence of institute resource utilization is you want to use the resources that are available in the place that you actually want to go to if you had a lunar base you would want to know how to use the resources on the surface of the Moon near your base use them to make rocket propellant to fly back from the base if you're on Mars you want to learn how to use Martian resources to support flights up from the surface of Mars but a rock in a retrograde lunar orbit is inconvenient in place to provide useful resources to anything other than operations at that rock which has no intrinsic interest so I think that this mission represents the wrong kind of thinking and I do not think it has any rationale in itself other than it will give certain constituencies something to do okay and rather than looking to give certain constituency something to do we should figure out what we want to do and do that okay so that's my base position and and and that's how the space program needs to go so would you care to be bi sure so I'm a I'm a little maybe I was gonna say I'm a little surprised that you know going sending people to Mars I think most people would agree is it is an expensive endeavor and part of the problem of going sending people to Mars is a transportation problem and far from this asteroid retrieval mission being a mission designed for giving the EP community something to do it's really designed as a stepping stone to to develop the transportation technology that would make future human exploration missions more affordable and the fact that we can if NASA does this mission actually pull that development earlier in time would then help support make Mars human missions to Mars more affordable because the experiment that you've been running so far is is you know they're you know this is not it's not happening it's not affordable and this is a way to help improve the affordability because this is the prop NASA has had this problem for ever and it's not going away if you look at the the way this the Skylab program was done that program went through huge gyrations because of budget problems all along the way and so a bunch of problems at NASA are not new and this not likely to change so looking for more affordable ways to do this in the environment that we currently find ourselves which is the development of the SLS and Orion and that is likely to continue it was my understanding and how do we inspire the community for to give human spaceflights something to do that's affordable in a reasonable timeframe okay once again to give them something to do okay the the problem is that we're looking for think giving them something to do rather than telling them to do what we want them to do okay the look I'm not against the electric propulsion if there are missions that we want to do that electric propulsion supports better than other forms of propulsion then electric propulsion should be employed in those missions okay but mission should not be invented for the per or it's moving 500 ton rocks around okay is it's moving rocks or in okay they where asked for example okay if you can get the mass and cost advantages from electric propulsion by saying to deliver payloads to Mars either by having the electric propulsion spacecraft actually push this payload all the way to Mars from low-earth orbit or as I believe is a preferable mode of operation simply using it to lift payloads from low Earth orbit to very loosely bound Earth orbits where they can be stabilized and dropped right back very close to the earth to a very tight perigee and then given a small chemical kick and sent out to Mars on a home and transfer minimum energy ballistic orbit with the electric ferry just staying in operation in the earth system 1a you where it has plenty of sunlight if you can show advantages in either of those mission modes as a way of sending payloads to Mars then we could use electrical pulse for sending payloads to Mars and we're interested in saying payloads to Mars and for instance if you wanted to send you know you Atlas can lift around 15 tons or something to Earth orbit but only send maybe three tons on trans-mars injection with a system like this in principle if you can meet all the mass targets and so forth that have been identified you might be able to send eight tons on trans-mars injection from an atlas it's deliver much more payload and deliver a bunch of spacecraft to Mars or larger spacecraft to Mars with the same launch vehicle that's an advantage I think that that would be a good use for electric propulsion as part of a space exploration program which is planned around its own objectives and which in innards the mission comes first and then if various technologies if they are the best for that mission well then by all means make use of them but don't invent missions for the purpose of giving technology something to do and don't and then also once again the promise we've got okay that the SLS which is really very similar to the Ari's which was put forward as part of the constellation was a heavy lift vehicle to do a moon program so now they have a heavy lift vehicle but without a moon program or a Mars program or a bona fide asteroid program they've got a heavy lift vehicle without a mission for a heavy lift vehicle and they have an Orion which is bigger than you need to simply send crews up and down to the space station and smaller than what you need for a true interplanetary habitation spacecraft hence hence the asteroid retrieval mission to give the wrong tool something to do and the electric so we're in complete agreement okay well what I'm saying is you have either the wrong tool set or an incomplete tool set to do something meaningful and that if you wanted to do asteroid missions you you could do it with the SLS and an Orion and a half module okay and then you could do real asteroid missions and that would be a subset of the technology you need to do the Mars direct mission where you could have the capsule a hab module then you also need landing in a sense systems but the V and U and you've got your mission but once again to try to create a similar of rationale it's it's like this imagine two couples who want to build their dream house okay couple a sits down they talk about what kind of house they'd really like to have okay and then they hire an architect they sit down with us this is the kind of house that I can pursue sketches it out this that gets it together they look at anything yeah that's it and then they hire a construction contractor they give him that design and he goes and builds that house that is the right way to build a house okay the other couple goes out to garage sales every weekend and buys things that appeal to them as might someday be useful as parts to a house okay so they pick up some aluminum siding a spiral staircase a fountain with a statue of Napoleon in the middle some Doric columns okay they pile all this stuff up in the backyard and then what happens is is the father-in-law comes to visit and he says why do you have all this junk in your backyard and he says well we're gonna build a house with it just I'd like to see the plans for this house and so they hire an architect and they say look we need you to design a house okay but it's got to use all of these parts okay and that's how Nast is proceeding okay that's the problem here there isn't a plan they're proceeding without a plan they're proceeding randomly okay with okay but here's but here's some just to give you a different analogy you know so viens participation was stated thing all right let him answer me and then we will open it up okay so here's here's a different analogy and so say someone said I want you to buy an electric car and drive it from here or from LA to San Francisco okay so you could do that you can say oh okay I can get a Tesla getting on charging stations along the way I can do that but I can't afford that because that's it's like a hundred thousand dollar car and so I that's what I really want to do I'd love to do that I agree with you we should do that I can't afford that I'm stuck with a Nissan Leaf and all I could do is drive around my neighborhood and go around around my neighborhood that's that's that's where we're at and we're all we're doing is going around around in low-earth orbit we'd like to go to Mars we'd like to do lots of things but we you know unless you can change the climate I mean right now you know I'm not I agree I'd love to do all those things but I don't know Howie how you change the political climate okay well sure but I was giving you a different perspective okay you got to be able to if the country has to be able to afford these things and right now we haven't been made making the case to to change the political climate to afford these alright so we've stated our positions and now we will ask promise sir open it up you take the first question okay what my my question was I seen your presentation earlier on the solar electric propulsion and you talked earlier about the larger scale and how many the solar panels they were gonna take and I've got to thinking if you had this like humongo array of solar panels and you put some thrust in the middle of them you're going to have to have some structural support or the thrust is going to try to leave behind the solar panels so you're gonna have some mass out there and is it is it viable I mean is it self-defeating all the mass of the panel's themselves and the racks they're going to have to be on to take the loading of the acceleration are you gonna have a net game there or net loss sure so that's there's a you know it's hard to imagine how electric propulsion actually works but the acceleration of the vehicle is quite low it's on the order of probably 10 to the minus 3 G's or so so the acceleration that you will not have a significant load on on the solar right but where you could have it though is if you in certain architectures as Bob said if you thrust at perigee in Earth orbit and you have big solar panels at that time then you can put a tenth or maybe 2/10 of a G into the arrays and that's a lot harder thing to deal with but the thrust from this electric propulsion system is a non-issue even on very big solar arrays Jesse's clarification I was not suggesting that one thrust with chemical propulsion to push the pulsing system around but in case you did all right all right let's get other questions or comments from the floor in the red shirt over here sir you go on to the asteroids in going to Mars and I agree completely I need to be closer okay I I know you didn't like the asteroid mission concept prior to Mars no the mission agree completely about the mission driven that were we failed to do that we failed to do that for years and years and years so given the reality that may not change the way that this asteroid mission does it kind of gets that whole asteroid thing out of the way so then we could focus on going to Mars from practical standpoint did Obama administration has said Mars is the ultimate destination it's the first asteroid in Mars okay so if you do this asteroid mission and they check it off the box even though like you say it's a lark compared to what they initially proposed it still gets it out of the way still get on to Mars you do have the SLS you do have the Orion there are pieces of getting to Mars even if they're you know not a really a very incomplete set so doesn't it at least provide some value as a stepping point to get us moving no I think rather it threatens the existence of the SLS program and I'll tell you why because if you say this is what we're gonna use the SLS for then you say well why not kill that - because since this isn't worth doing and that's what you proposed doing with this tool that we're paying you to develop okay maybe we shouldn't be developing that tool if this is the best you can come up with the innards the only reason why we need a heavy lift vehicle is to do human space exploration beyond low Earth orbit to go to the moon Mars or the asterisk that's why we need a heavy lift vehicle we don't need a heavy lift vehicle to go up and down to the space station if you can go up and down to the space station with dragons and there you have it okay and you'll get all the urine samples from astronauts that you want and the the but to do exploration so either you're going to do exploration or you're not now as far as checking off the box I mean this thing is actually putting the human spaceflight program in peril we had a congressional committee vote forcefully no funding for this thing okay and then you think but this is what we're developing the SLS for oh well all right I mean look NASA is really playing a risky game here they're letting themselves be adrift in the face of an oncoming fiscal tsunami okay where there's going to be an imperative for budget cuts you know and if you say we're building heavy with vehicles but we don't really intend to do anything significant with them okay or you know what where's the manifest okay what's the plan okay you know launching one of these every five years I mean the and or if that I mean they need to start with look this is what we intend to do we intend to take your pick okay my pick is humans to Mars but there's plausible alternatives so I don't think there is good but I'll mean them anyway which is a moon base a program to systematically explore the near-earth asteroids or are you mr. Mars okay say that's what we want to do and here's the reasons why we want to do it and then this is the hardware set we need to do that okay now and and that's what we need to do now but I mean I had a conversation with a person who's a longtime acquaintance I would say even a friend I'm but I'm not gonna name him here because I don't think his comments do him any credit I invited him to be on this panel he is a strong advocate of this asteroid mission okay he told me we have to do this asteroid mission it is enabling for humans to Mars now really no one ever heard of this thing more than a year ago okay people had all kinds of plans for you and Mars and who would have imagined that moving a asteroid fragment into a retrograde lunar orbit was a requirement sending humans tomorrow's okay I mean it's it's a totally random fate and the now I'm not necessarily even arguing that there aren't certain intermediate missions that might rationally be included as part of the human tomorrow's program okay I think a case could be made I'm not sure it's a valid case but it's plausible that exercising part of the humans to Mars Hardware set on an asteroid mission or two is a useful way to spend part of the total money available as part of a humans to Mars program that that might be a useful intermediate mission to do okay and and I mean there's any number of things you might do but and then that might be more useful than using a heavy lift launch to pre position extra supplies and equipment on Mars or a whole bunch of robotic missions or any number of other things you might do okay but I have to say I just can't imagine that of all the things that one might do as part of the humans to Mars program with a budget of X that moving a 500 ton rock into a retrograde lunar orbit would be on the list and so you know if you're going to do near-earth asteroid missions to near-earth asteroid missions and explain to people why those are important missions okay you want to do a lunar base do a lunar base and explain to people why that's important I want to do what you know humans to Mars do that but but anyway that's I think I mean how do you how do you get them to do the mission specific what say this again how do you get them to do the mission specific goal when they just we've seen it for decades they don't do it well actually I think that Obama gave them an opening he said I want to do an asteroid mission but they didn't take it seriously they never took that presidential call as a call for a program rather than just as of a they let it be a leg vision to put sizzle on a non-existent mistake okay they said well we've got we're gonna do something someday we're gonna go to asteroids as opposed to the president is called for sending us to asteroids here's our plan we can do it by 2016 okay and frankly it's not that hard a near-earth asteroid mission is an easier mission than a manned lunar mission it's it's much simpler mission and he announced that in 2010 they should have gone to work just to figured out how that could be done by 2016 by in his second term and presented him with that as their plan and pushed to do that this is what you want to do this is how it can be done instead of just acting randomly besides just doing besides just capturing the asteroid is there any other like benefits like you know weaponization or but they're like other benefits that could be no seen when we do this so we wouldn't turn it into a weapon you know this is a this is a relative you know a very small object on the order of 7 to 10 meters in diameter so it wouldn't make a very good weapon even if you targeted the earth it would burn up in the Earth's atmosphere and that sort of thing so but one of the you know Bob mentioned is are you Institue resource utilization this if you get if you bring back the right kind of asteroid and eventually so you bring back a carbonaceous asteroid one that has the potential to have hydrated minerals then you have the ability to extract water from that and of course water even in distant retrograde orbit around the moon would be very valuable as a source of variety of uses for water including splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen for propellants oxygen to breathe and so forth and it is right now very expensive to move anything into lunar orbit it's on the order of a hundred thousand dollars a kilogram so while SRU isn't the near-term application for that ultimately there could be a substantial benefit from that NASA has looked at lots of studies at harvesting asteroids near-earth asteroids for their resources and always at is a transportation problem of first order because you have to get to the near-earth asteroid and bring back whatever it is you're going to bring back and and that's that's hard to do and if you're getting the idea that a lot of these problems in getting around space or transportation problems that's true and that keeps us bringing us back to the need to develop advanced propulsion technologies and the best one and the only one that's advancing rapidly is solar electric propulsion in a solar electric propulsion well any road you take will get you somewhere if you keep walking along it but if you keep stopping and turning back and going in a different direction every couple of years obviously nothing that you do is going to get you anywhere at all so it seems to me self-evident that whatever mission you pick has got to be one which has a fighting chance of being accomplished within the time span of one administration because as you say not invented here we're going to go do something else with it with the next turnover in political control whatever the last person did is obviously not worth doing so that's one comment the other one is that I lost it you didn't say it fast enough that's try wellness but it was a good need to take lessons from you Bob know if we can go back to analogies for a moment we're standing on one side of a door and we can peek through the keyhole and we can see paradise on the other side of that door so but we don't seem to have the key to that door so rather than figure out how to open the door rather than find the key what we do is we try and Whittle our dreams down small enough that we can fit them through that keyhole and it doesn't seem to me that that we would need to do that if we were as smart as we used to be about building things in a reasonable time on a reasonable budget I take the the SLS is an example of that I mean tell me that this is not a procurement problem it looking from the outside it seems to me that we could be doing a lot more with the budget that we have if we knew how to do procurement right we have one person inside NASA one outside of NASA but you're still better experts than I am is this a procurement problem in part but it's a procurement problem of the following time we're with both SLS and Orion ok they really decided to make a meal out of it ok and there are people I spoke to in conjunction with the Orion program in particular I said why are you designing this thing so big why are you doing this why are you doing that they said you don't understand this is that we might not get another big program like this for a real long time so we basically we need to you know one of the requirements of the Orion program was that it you know it's development take at least 12 years and cost at least 10 billion dollars and and so forth it's kind of like the space station in that respect okay whereas they're trying to make a meal out of the thing if in fact I mean look Saturn 5 they gave out the contract in 1962 it flew in 1967 it's 5 years and we were inventing it as we went along ok and it was flying people the year after that and the and here you know right but what I'm saying is even today we have programs and I have to say they're primarily in the robotic area although those are not free from waste but nevertheless nobody tried to make a meal out of the airbag program ok to make it will be as long and as expensive as possible it was part of an overall mission and it was approached with look you have to do this within this time frame and this cost and if if the SLS was being pursued not as a thing in itself to give Marshall something to do ok but as part of an overall NASA initiative where you say ok we're gonna return to the moon and the whole program has to be done within 30 billion dollar budget and that means that the budget of the development of the heavy with launch field cannot be more than eight billion dollars and the development to this other thing cannot be more than four billion dollars and so forth and that's how this thing has to work then you you can have a much more efficient procurement but if you have these these programs being pursued as things in themselves and that each one is their own special banquet you know in other words it's like going to the store and spending money in order to give the store business rather than going to the store to buy things that you need in the most economical way possible to get what you want acquired and done that's the problem yeah and I'll just say we're not I this the asteroid retrieval mission by no means is intended to solve all of NASA's problems and solve all of the human spaceflight problems and we're just we're proposing a particular mission that allows NASA to make progress in human spaceflight given the environment that we currently find ourselves Jurgen this mission is sold to the public with one of the main arguments being the future danger by asteroids you you have mentioned it and I think I don't see by any means how this mission could be a preparation for this I mean one day or the other the public will be aware that this mission asteroid called asteroid mission will nothing but if nothing to do with saving the earth for meteorites could you expand a little bit on that yeah so what am i well so it I agree that it that wouldn't be and shouldn't be the primary focus of this mission there are tangential benefits and one of them is the observation campaign that's necessary to find and characterize these small objects will significantly improve the knowledge of the near-earth asteroid population so if you're looking for small ones you will by matter of course find the larger ones that are potentially hazardous objects so there's that tie into planetary defense moving a very small object like the you're absolutely right that is not by any stretch of the imagination a compelling demonstration of a planetary defense approach and I agree with Bob that if you really were going to deflect a large has potentially hazardous object the best way to do it is with some sort of kinetic impactor or or explosive or something that gives you an impulsive Delta V right away now the problem with that is that the effectiveness of that depends on a parameter that deals with how effective that impulse gets transferred to the object and that is largely unknown or at least has a large degree of uncertainty and so by bringing back a whole one even though it's a fragment of a large one because these are all fragments of larger objects it will help inform at least for one object what the internal structure is and that will help do that give you some additional information but it is not the would not be the primary focus we really wanted to do just at planetary defence demonstration there are other and better ways to do that than this one okay other questions or comments okay I'd be interested in knowing how you think this mission relates to what is publicly known about what planetary resources plans to do I mean they plan to find characterized and eventually bring back pieces of near-earth asteroids for economic gain are we doing something that they will be doing anyway in a number of years or are we preparing something that will make their job easier or will they just do it with robotics and we'll have the samples to study without a big expensive multi-billion dollar project okay so let me just clear up the last part this is a priest the initial mission is a robotic mission the one mission I described is a robotic spacecraft that goes out grabs grabs ahold of the asteroid D tumbles it and brings it back so there's a robotic mission only later do you send the crew up there when it's in the stable orbit around the moon so plant our resources of course is a it's a small business and there are they are a very long way from returning you know samples from or mining asteroids they we've talked with Chris Lewicki several times and you know they they're a business trying to survive trying to make money as they go along your first thing they're going to do is you know fly these small telescopes in low-earth orbit so there are just a very long way from from being able to do that if we can if this helps them and it by bringing one back there it may be a way that they can test some of their equipment on this without having to go all the way out to a near-earth asteroid that might be of benefit to them but we don't see this in any way as interfering with competing with anything that planetary resources or deep space industries would be doing over there so I'm too young to really understand this but it seems like a lot of the great developments in the 60s were made in a context of conflict during the Cold War do you think that we need that kind of context again to be able to develop a proper mission not I think what's needed is a mission driven context see Apollo was willing to accept risk okay because there was a mission to be performed okay it was not an option of well we'd kind of like to go to the moon but you know we don't want to do it until we know it's safe which is sort of like the way they're approaching humans to Mars or to be near-earth asteroid even okay you know you know and therefore you have an indefinite time because you'll never actually know that it's safe this is not safe stuff okay me flying up into orbit at you know eight kilometers a second on top of you know very thinly built things that are filled with high explosives that but that's what's needed that you know the people that did Apollo yeah there was the competition with the Soviets but the generation that did it were the younger brothers of people that had landed on Normandy in Tarawa and and you know no one told them that it was going to be safe it was a it had to be done it was mission driven we're going to defeat the the axis who are going to do this and there's risk fine but we're going to do it okay mission comes first and you know if I say right now he does does everyone agree that the primary criteria of design of a human Mars mission should be mission success at Marten we used to have posters on the walls all over the place our primary focus is mission success okay and it seems like motherhood and apple pie oh yeah sure mission success we always want to be successful but you got to realize that mission success includes actually doing the mission you know yeah that's part of mission success and the so if you have a NASA whose leadership has a different primary focus than mission success it's safety or actually more broadly not looking bad the the and that's what's missing okay the and you know I think that a human Mars mission should be designed with mission success as the criteria that means really doing it and it also means if you think about risk that mission success is more important than safety so for instance let me give you an example of what I mean numerical example let's say you were the manager of a robotic Mars exploration program you're going to land Rovers on Mars okay and you have two alternatives as to how you could guide this program you could do a great deal of testing and and and and spend a lot of money on all sorts of technology developments and and things and you'd be able to launch one Rover and you'd have a ninety five chance percent chance of success or the alternative is you do less such preparatory activities but you'd have more money for a flight and you'd be able to launch two Rovers each with a 90% chance of success okay which is the correct decision the second if you know your math it is the second one because if you've got two Rovers each with a point nine mission probability of success that means the chance of at least one of them winning through is 0.99 99 percent that's the better plan and you even have an 81 percent probability of two Rovers succeeding which is impossible with a one Rover plan so the fee so that's a much better plan but on the other hand if you think about it if you were concerned about Rover loss the two Rover plan is a much worse plan okay because you have in fact a 19 percent chance that you were going to lose one Rover and at least one Rover where's the other one's only a 5% chance so if so if you were doing a robotic mission program that's how you would do it the two at the point nine okay now of course if it was two with a point three that would be an inferior plan to one with point nine five okay but you think about that now I think if you're writing a human spaceflight program that's also how it needs to be done the same logic okay needs to apply because we're doing these missions at the cost of many billions of dollars and it is true that if this money was spent outside the space program it could save many lives okay the highway department saves one life with each three million dollars spent on highway repairs okay there are programs for vaccinating children and so forth which even are more cost effective than that well significantly okay so we're not sending people to Mars to save lives we're sending people to Mars to get people to Mars okay and therefore the Paramount criteria needs to be mission success now obviously safety figures into that because once again if the two missions each had a point three chance would be inferior to the point 95 but we can't do an indefinite number of preparatory activities in preference to a finite number of actual flights okay anyway I drifted off your subject but once again the issue is whether your mission-driven now the competition with the Soviets formed a context that made this thing mission driven I think there's other ways it can be mission driven than geopolitical competition or conflict but nevertheless the mission has to come first that has to be the logic behind the program we're out of time and thank you very much

Channel: The Mars Society

Views: 12,232

Rating: 4.9250002 out of 5

Keywords: mars13, Mars Society (Organization), Asteroid (Ontology Class), Mars, Robert Zubrin (Author)

Id: OOcvICvy6iE

Length: 56min 59sec (3419 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2013