Main Engine Cut Off - T+16: Moon Express Licensing, and NASA’s Disdain for Artificial Gravity

Episode Date: August 10, 2016

Moon Express gained government approval for their upcoming mission to win the Google Lunar X Prize. And I go on a rant about artificial gravity and how NASA shrugs it off as unnecessary. Moon Express wins U.S. government approval for lunar lander mission - SpaceNews.com NASA exploration focuses on Deep Space Hab systems and crew health | NASASpaceFlight.com Gerstenmaier Shrugs Off Artificial Gravity - Main Engine Cut Off Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and I want to start off talking this week about Moon Express getting government clearance for their mission out to the moon in 2017. Now the particular details of this exact story are not that interesting. They're really not that interesting to talk about. And, you know, they did get a lot of media hype. And I think that's partly because it's been a pretty boring few weeks in terms of spaceflight news. So there was something to talk about. So everyone kind of jumped all over it, made a lot of noise about it. And, you know, partially Moon Express, being a small company

with a small audience, wants to increase their audience, increase their visibility, things like that. So they're really not going to, you know, tamper any expectations that there may be out there for what this particular incident means. But the long story short is that they got cleared by the FAA, the Office for Commercial Space Transportation. They were mainly in charge of this clearance, but it was clearance from the entire U.S. government in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty to allow this commercial entity to head out towards the moon. Right now, they are shooting for 2017. Moon Express is part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, and I'll talk a bit more about the details of their mission in a few minutes because that's the interesting half of the story. But the long and the short of it is that they'll be heading out

there in the later parts of 2017 to win the Google Lunar X Prize, which has an end date of December 31st, 2017. Who knows if they'll extend it again? They already have a few times here and there. But right now, we should see them going to win that prize before the end of 2017. So while I said the details of this particular story are not really that interesting, what is interesting is that this is a trend we will see over the next few years of a commercial company getting licensed for a mission beyond Earth, a mission to the moon, a mission to Mars, a mission to an asteroid. This is a trend that we're going to continue to see. So even if this is not that interesting to

talk about, I do want to talk about it because it's something we're going to be following. And it's something that we're going to be following the process of over the next 5, 10, 15 years. You know, we've got a SpaceX mission to Mars in 2018, hopefully. And every two years from that point forward, SpaceX will be heading out to Mars with a handful of missions, either two Red Dragons or eventually their bigger Mars ship that will be heading out that way. We've got a lot of companies interested in asteroids right now, no concrete plans, but there are things like Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources, these different companies that are looking to head out towards near-Earth objects that would all need licensing for this type of activity. So what would be

interesting to see is how Moon Express went about this, how they got licensed for launch and for their entire mission, and to watch how that will change as these things become more common. Because this is the first one, you know, this is the first thing that a commercial company is doing beyond Earth in this manner. And just like the launch industry, when that was just getting going, you know, there was a lot of tiptoeing around that whole process because we didn't know how to work it yet. And at this point, we've got it pretty ironed out. The FAA, Office of Commercial Space Transportation, licenses launches and reentries for commercial companies. So every time you see a commercial

launch that is licensed by the FAA, every time you see a reentry of Dragon right now and in the future Dream Chaser and things like that that is also licensed by the FAA so they're kind of the organization in charge of that licensing but Moon Express in order to get that license also sat down with NASA with the State Department with a handful of other government agencies who had a little bit of skin in the game when it comes to this type of licensing. And certainly, you know, being the first incident of this type of activity, the government wanted to make sure that they were not violating the Outer Space Treaty by any means. So there was a little

bit more tiptoeing around this particular incident than there probably will be in the years to come. You know, once we figure out how we want this process to work, if it's okay to just let the FAA, Office of Commercial Space Transportation, be in charge of it, or if we need another government agency, which the government seems to always like to create, that is all what we will be watching over the next bit of time here when we see how the government wants to structure this.

But for right now, it seems like it's all going to go through the FAA. So Moon Express sat down with that handful of agencies and did a pretty deep overview of their payload, of their mission, what they would be doing when they get there. Really just a completely open and honest rundown of their mission architecture. And that's what they went through to get this license approved. What I will be interested to see is if SpaceX will do the same sort of thing, you know, maybe next year or so when they've got a Dragon capsule ready to be looked at, when they've got a more ironed out mission architecture, Falcon Heavy would need to fly in order for that mission to go off without a hitch. Now we hear that Falcon Heavy is delayed until early 2017, which to my eyes looks like the first third of 2017. I would kind of divide that year into early, mid, and late. So I wouldn't be surprised

if Falcon Heavy was, you know, March or April at this point with the kinds of delays that they've been having. So that will have to fly before they're ready to go for the Red Dragon mission. So I'm not sure when we'll see them go through this process. But it should be pretty soon in terms of, you know, a timeline that is a space mission. It should be pretty soon. So I'll be interested to see who they talk to when they go through that process, what kind of details they lay out, and who, you know, if it's the FAA again, that gives them that final approval, how, you know, any of that kind of stuff would be different that time around, and even the ones beyond that of that kind of stuff would be different that time around, and even the ones beyond that. It'll be interesting to track how that changes throughout the years.

Now, Moon Express in general, the mission that they're going to fly to win that Google Lunar XPRIZE, or hopefully win the Google Lunar XPRIZE, this is a small lander they're sending up to the moon. Last October, Moon Express signed a launch contract with Rocket Lab, which is a US-based company that launches out of New Zealand. They are a pretty small rocket. So the lander itself, when they made the announcement about the launch contract, they said that the lander would be something under 10 kilograms to the surface of the moon. This is a pretty small lander, almost like a CubeSat lander. Very tiny, but good enough to win that Google Lunar X Prize. And the goal for that is to land something on the moon, take some photos or videos, send them back, and then travel 500 meters and do

it again. So a lot of the companies that are running for the X Prize are planning on using a rover of sorts to do that 500 meter traverse. In Moon Express's case, they would actually be hopping. So they'd be taking off and landing again, and then, you know, send those photos back to win the XPRIZE. So this would be a double landing type of situation, which would be really cool to watch. But, you know, so getting back to Rocket Lab for a second, they signed three launches with Rocket Lab. The first two were supposed to take place in 2017 the third one would be a date beyond that and Rocket Lab right now their Electron rocket has not flown yet like I said the first launch is coming up in late summer so hopefully a few

weeks from now no more than a month and that is a demo launch of sorts and then beyond that Rocket Lab is hoping to ramp up their launch rate from there. They're planning their first commercial launch in February of 2017, a NASA Venture Class launch in June of 2017. So they have a few things on the books to launch before it comes around for Moon Express. And again, the XPRIZE cuts off on December 31st, 2017. So Moon Express would need to be launched and at the moon by that point, which you would assume is a very late 2017 launch at the absolute latest. They could do it in the fall of 2017, most likely sometimes toward late fall before everything's ready to go, but we'll see how all that shakes out.

So really, if you're interested in Moon Express, what you need to be watching over the next few weeks is Rocket Lab. You need to see how that demo flight goes, see if everything goes off without a hitch to let them get into their operational portion of their schedule. If something does happen, which is somewhat typical for first-time rockets, then we could see the entire manifest get pushed backwards and hopefully Moon Express would still be ready to fly, but there's a chance that they would miss the x prize date unless that gets extended again which is pretty typical of this x prize but even without the x prize at this point i would imagine that moon express does launch and land on the moon hopefully they are all successful in that process but again if you are interested in this mission follow along with with Rocket Lab. I'll be talking about them here as we get closer to that demo flight.

Hopefully, we get some nice pictures and videos as they're on their way to that demo flight down in New Zealand. But we should hear more pretty soon. Moving on, I want to focus on a topic that I brought up on the blog this past week. And if you haven't been reading the blog, I would highly recommend checking that out. If you're liking the podcast and the things I talk about here, I think you will really enjoy what I'm doing over on the blog. So go ahead over to mainenginecutoff.com and check out what I've been writing throughout the week there. I've been writing a bit of longer form things, linking out to interesting articles and things that you should check out if you like what I'm interested. And if

you are liking what's on there, I would suggest following the Twitter account at WeHaveMiko. That's where I post all the links to the blog and the podcast and just various other thoughts that I have about the goings on in the industry. So just to get back to that blog post, it was a blog post about artificial gravity. Now, the blog post surrounds some comments made in the NASA Advisory Council meeting. And that was something that I was listening to, listening to all these hearings. And this particular incident kind of ticked me off a little bit, but I didn't write about it at the time because I hadn't really, you know, fully processed all the comments that were made. And

then there was an article over on nasaspaceflight.com that kind of ran through some of these different thoughts that were brought up, some of the different things that were said. And, you know, in reading that, I think I realized the particular pieces that were most disturbing to me about NASA's view of artificial gravity. Artificial gravity is of a lot of interest right now, because we're looking at these longer duration missions out beyond Earth to Mars or other places. And microgravity is really, really detrimental to your health. And that's what we're finding on the ISS, where there's a lot of health issues associated with microgravity. Things like muscle atrophy, bone loss, there are a lot of balance issues,

eyesight issues, there's this intracranial pressure issue that we haven't quite solved yet, a lot of eyesight issues in general related to that intracranial pressure issue, things like this that are hard to solve. And, you know, the astronauts right now are working out two to three hours a day to kind of fight off the atrophy and the bone loss, and those things seem to be working out. But there are a lot of these other issues that haven't yet been sorted out and aren't really showing any signs of being sorted out with what we're doing in microgravity right now. The eyesight one is particularly worrying because you don't want to send your

astronauts all the way to Mars and then get there and realize that they don't have the eyesight they need to be useful on the surface of Mars for that scientific stay or the construction phase of, you know, building a small base on Mars, things like that. That is a big issue that really needs to be solved. So this is something that came up in the NASA Advisory Council. Wayne Hale asked if artificial gravity is something that NASA was looking at to counteract some of these long-duration microgravity issues and kind of put them to bed and not have them be something that's lingering over the mission that we haven't figured out yet that might compromise the mission entirely if we can't

figure them out yet. And Bill Gerstenmaier, who we've talked about a lot on the show the last few weeks, he's the head of the human spaceflight section of NASA. So he's kind of in charge of the roadmap on how to get to Mars. And he's often the public face for these kinds of hearings and these kinds of discussions. And he's the one that provides NASA's view on the roadmap, on the way that we're going to get to Mars, on the systems we need there, how we're going to fly there, how we're going to land there. All of those questions that are typically asked are directed towards Gerstenmaier. And he responded saying that NASA had no studies showing the need for artificial gravity. And he also said that currently all of

the issues that we've found with microgravity, there are solutions either in place or under development. Then he went on to say that you are never going to provide partial gravity environment throughout an entire space vehicle, which is kind of a non sequitur in a way. But then beyond that, he made a longer statement that was the most disturbing part. He said, I think the changes associated with trying to provide partial gravity are so fundamental and large that I don't think that's an area that's really a problem. We have real problems that need to be addressed and partial gravity isn't something that we should be spending quality time on right now. So those are a lot of

statements from Gerstenmaier. I'm going to go through one by one, kind of pick off the things that really bother me about each statement, talk about some things that I disagree with, some things that are blatant lies, to be honest, and not lies in, he's not trying to lie, but he kind of is forced to because of NASA's roadmap. Before I get into the particular quotes, I do want to say that Bill Gerstenmaier is typically very precise with what he says. He's very particular about the words he uses, the phrases he uses, the things that he says. He's typically on his game and extremely good at this political side of NASA. But none of these statements are that. They are all very weird and things that I wouldn't typically expect him to say, things that are a little bit short-sighted or off-base or misleading in general. So that's

really the part that bothered me is that you have this guy who's typically so on his game, and then you've got all these statements that are very weird for his personality and his demeanor. Something is a little bit weird about that. And partially, part of me wants to believe that that's because he doesn't necessarily believe the thoughts behind this, but it's kind of the NASA line that he has to toe, which we'll get into. But something just seems a little off about these statements. So first, Gerstenmaier said that NASA had no studies showing the need for artificial gravity, which I find completely silly because I would say the entire history of humans in microgravity are the studies that show the need

for artificial gravity. There are all these health issues that we see that come into place when we are without gravity. When we are on Earth, we don't have these health issues in this particular way. When we get up to orbit, where we're in a microgravity environment, all of these issues come out. So I would say that that is the study that shows the need for artificial gravity. Whether or not you can mitigate those issues through other means, exercise or different types of treatment or medicine or anything like that, that's a completely separate issue than whether or not there are studies that show the need for this. So that's one of those things that's just kind of an odd statement to

make that doesn't really make any sense for what we know about the situation. Next, Gerstenmaier went on to say that all of the microgravity issues that we know of today either have solutions in place today or have solutions under development. Now, he's not necessarily lying here. If you say that we've got those solutions under development but give no context around what the development may be, then he's totally right. By under development, he could mean that we have a long-duration study going on on the ISS, has a completely indeterminate timeline, could be completed between now and when the ISS gets deorbited in a decade, then he's totally right, because we do have a long-duration study going on on the ISS. And this is precisely the issue I have with saying that artificial gravity is not something that we should be interested in. The timelines for these research projects are so long and indeterminate

that it is impossible to plan missions around these things. We could say that, hey, we've got 10 things to try, but we need to try them all for a year or two before we can really say whether they work, and we can't have them going on side by side because we need a control group and all that kind of stuff. That puts your timelines at 10 to 20 years before you can even make any assumptions. So that's really just not a workable timeline for these types of missions out to Mars and things like that. Unless you're like NASA and you want to say that, hey, we're not ready yet, we need time. And you've consistently said that for decades to kind of put off the inevitable of heading out to Mars. So you've got these long studies going on, where you have these giant budgets that are operating for extreme amounts of time, and you don't really have a clear direction yet because you haven't done enough study.

And that's where we're at today, where we're saying, well, let's do year-long missions and try out a couple of different things. And these timelines are just growing and growing with no end in sight. So by all means, I would call that underdevelopment as well. But the part that he left out is whether or not we have a clear solution at the end of any of those developments. We've mostly mitigated the muscle and bone issues thanks to a lot of exercise and things like that, but there are some other issues like the intracranial pressure or the vision issues, things that we have no clear ending or no clear resolution to. So as I'll get into in a minute, that's why I think artificial gravity is a much better solution for some of these issues. And I'll talk about that in

a second once I get through the last few of these quotes. The next quote was Gerstenmaier saying, you're never going to provide a partial gravity environment throughout the entire vehicle. Again, this is one of those statements that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I guess technically he would be true if you consider, you know, a tether type system where you're spinning two objects, the habitat and the counterweight, right in the middle of that tether there might not be partial gravity, but there's no people there, so does that matter? He's not lying, but it's also not a very truthful statement because you can certainly design a system that would provide partial gravity environment throughout the entire habitat area of the vehicle.

You know, who cares if the counterweight end or the tether in the middle, who cares what's going on at those particular things as long as they're providing partial gravity to the humans. So for instance, in the Mars Direct program that Robert Zubrin and David Baker developed back in the 90s, in Mars Direct, you have the upper stage that threw you to Mars as the counterweight in a tether system with your habitat. So the habitat and the upper stage are the counterweights that spin around a tether to provide a partial gravity environment in the habitat area. Right in the middle at that midpoint where the things spin, right there there's not gravity, but again, it's a tether, so who cares? So it's not a false statement by Gerstenmaier, but it's just kind of a complete non-sequitur that didn't really

belong anywhere in this hearing and was kind of just part of this fear, uncertainty, and doubt that he seemed to be spreading regarding artificial gravity. Now the last quote, This is the real meat of it. Now, not even getting into the fact that I think the changes are so large that I don't think that's really a problem, that's a disturbing statement in its own, because it's kind of saying like, hey, these changes that we need to get there are so big that NASA has decided that that's no longer a problem. That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That's something that is very disingenuous to say, so I'm not sure where that part of a statement came from. But the other side is we have real problems that need to be addressed and partial gravity isn't something we need to be spending quality time on right now. That's saying the same thing. We have these real problems. Artificial gravity is

something that would address those real problems. So getting back to the first part of a statement, that is where you really get the nugget of info from NASA and how they see artificial gravity. The changes associated with artificial gravity are so fundamental and large that they cannot even think about artificial gravity. Their entire timeline and their entire roadmap is dedicated to this ISS right now. We might not even be getting rid of the ISS till the end of the 2020s decade. So the entire roadmap of NASA is built around the ISS. And one of the key parts of the ISS is learning about long-duration microgravity environments for humans. It's one of the key rationales for the creation and the operation of the ISS is that we

need a lot of time on orbit with humans to figure out how to live in microgravity. If you came along and said, we're going to start this artificial gravity program. And, you know, a few years down the line, when you figured out how you want to operate in microgravity, maybe you've done a few engineering tests, a few flight tests of small scale things and things like that, you're ready for a large scale thing. If you're able to solve how to create artificial gravity with these kind of very engineering problems that we have, where they're, you know, they're just engineering problems. We figured out how these theories can work. We figured out how centrifuges work here on Earth. We can do the same in space. We just need to fly it. If you came along

and did that, you would invalidate a lot of the reason that we are still operating the ISS today. The ISS has a large amount of time and resources devoted to microgravity health and biology and all the things that are involved with this microgravity health issue. If you were to create something successful that could provide artificial gravity and solve all of these issues that we're experiencing, you would completely invalidate the usefulness of the ISS. And the ISS would be made to look like a giant waste of time and money on NASA's part. the ISS would be made to look like a giant waste of time and money on NASA's part. So when he says the changes associated with trying to provide partial gravity, he's not talking about the changes to a spacecraft that hasn't even been built yet. Because remember, the habitats that we're going to be riding in on the way to Mars are not even off of paper yet. They're still on paper. So when he says the changes, he doesn't mean the changes to that spacecraft. He means the changes

to the way that NASA operates, the changes to the way the roadmap works, the way that the lobbying works, the way the contracting works, all of the old big space type stuff that we've talked about on the show so many times, the way that, you know, companies get contracts and they're kind of always looped into the same programs. It's been the same contractors for the shuttle to the SLS and Constellation, all of these different things that go into it. That is all the way that NASA works. And if you were to come in with artificial gravity, that would be completely disrupted because we've tied ourselves to this mission of long duration spaceflight with microgravity. We've tied ourselves into that roadmap. So you don't want to have this big kind of disruption come through and completely change

the way that the things work. It all feels very similar to something that Robert Zubrin always talks about a lot, who again is the creator of Mars Direct. He says, how much rope does it take to connect two posts? It depends if you're trying to connect the post or if you're trying to sell rope. If we have these projects with indeterminate timelines, that fits very well for just kind of dragging on these projects with more money to contractors, more money to the bureaucracy that runs these kinds of government programs. It's really a manifestation of how bureaucratic NASA has become, that they're not willing to say, I think artificial gravity is the way to go. And I think if you were to look at this problem from an engineering side of things, completely detached to all the politics and all of the money that's tied into these things,

if you were just to look at it from a pure what solution is best kind of mode, which is the point of Mars Direct and those types of theories about how to get places, artificial gravity is an absolute king in that manner because we understand gravity environments, we understand how humans work in the gravity environments that we know. Maybe we don't need full 1G. Maybe we need Martian gravity or moon gravity. Those are the things that we need to play with. But what we do know is that when you are within a gravitational environment, you do not have these health issues. So if we spent our money working on these artificial gravity environments, then I think we would be much more successful and we'd be to Mars sooner. And that's for two reasons. One is that you don't have this giant budget that

is the ISS dragging on year after year with no particular end date because it's impossible to set an end date for pure academic research on health issues. And the other is that we don't have an end date for pure academic research issues. But if you were to say we need to develop an artificial gravity method of transportation, we would be able to put a roadmap together. We're going to do a small-scale test of a tethered system of a centrifuge, and you do small-scale tests of a couple of different issues, a couple of different ways of handling those issues, and then you figure out which one worked best, which one looks the most promising, which one fits within your budget, and you do a full flight model here in low Earth orbit to develop that. And this is, you can see how this is a much less time-intensive program to build a piece of hardware than it is

to categorize the health issues of humans in microgravity, figure out what we need to figure out, and then figure out how to solve those issues. It's something that is a much more engineering-focused solution, and I think that is always particularly more achievable than something that is much more ephemeral and medical-focused, because those things tend to drag on. So for all these different reasons, artificial gravity would upset the cart that is NASA, would be much more achievable, because it's kind of a known problem in that we really just need to solve the engineering side of it, and it would get us to Mars sooner. Artificial gravity is something that I'll be looking for particularly in SpaceX's Mars

architecture announcement that is coming in just over a month now. In late September, they'll be doing their announcement about their Mars architecture. I'll be interested to see if artificial gravity is a part of that. If it's not, I'm going to be a little disappointed, to be honest. Now, I could see them doing some smaller scale tests if they're going to do some sort of tether system. Maybe if they have two ships heading out to Mars, they can tether them up and spin them and get that artificial gravity that way. And if that's the case, I could see them doing smaller scale tests on their red dragon flights. As they said in the future transfer windows past the 2018 transfer window they would probably be

sending two red dragons per window so I could see them doing smaller scale tests where they link those dragons up and spin them in a way that they would be doing similarly on their larger craft. But all that's pretty hypothetical all it is to say is that I'm interested to see how SpaceX handles this issue. I hope they handle this issue and they don't completely punt on it the way that NASA has here. Now I'll be having a guest on in the next few weeks that will be interested in talking about artificial gravity, I'm sure, especially when it comes to these kinds of missions. So if you want to have the opportunity to ask that person a question or bring up a topic in that show, hop on the Patreon right now and help support Main Engine Cutoff. Because if you support at the $5 a month level, which is just about $1 per show, you'll have

the opportunity to find out who those guests are early. You'll get access to be able to ask questions or present topics for those shows. And then you'll get early access to those probably raw, unedited interviews. So if you want to help support Main Engine Cutoff, the blog, the podcast, and everything else that I do here, head on over to patreon.com slash MECO, all spelled out M-E-C-O. If you've got any feedback about the topics I brought up, if you want to talk about artificial gravity or Moon Express and their missions out towards the moon, I would love to hear from you on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or through the email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Thanks for listening,

and I'll talk to you next week.