Main Engine Cut Off - T+5: Space Stations Around the Moon and Mars, ExoMars 2016, and China’s Momentum in Space

Episode Date: May 25, 2016

Orbital ATK and Lockheed Martin unveiled proposals for space stations around the Moon by 2020, and Mars by 2028. ExoMars 2016 completed a functionality analysis test ahead of its October arrival at Mars. China revealed plans for its third space station, and is set to launch a new rocket, with a new spacecraft, from a new launch site in June. Orbital ATK Advocates Cislunar Outpost as America's Next Step in Human Space Exploration | Orbital ATK News Room Mars Base Camp · Lockheed Martin Orbital ATK unveils cislunar habitat plan, potential missions for SLS and Orion | NASASpaceFlight.com Lockheed Martin outlines plan to send humans to Mars orbit by 2028 - SpaceFlight Insider Thales Alenia Space-built ExoMars spacecraft completes functionality analysis. All is nominal on board | Thales Group China reveals design for planned Tiangong 3 space station - SpaceFlight Insider China to debut new rocket and spaceport next month – Spaceflight Now Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

The U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space held a hearing last Wednesday to talk about some future deep space habitation capabilities that would support NASA's missions to the Moon and Mars. There were a number of industry members present at that hearing, but most interestingly was Orbital ATK and Lockheed Martin, who each unveiled proposals for a lunar orbit station and a Mars orbit station, respectively. Orbital ATK's plan would put a station in lunar orbit that could support four people, and they would put it in orbit by 2020. The station itself would be a Cygnus-derived module with potential for future expansion. Once the station was in

lunar orbit, it would stay there for about a year to undergo checkouts to make sure that all is well for when astronauts would arrive by 2021 at the earliest. In their proposal, they talked about different missions that could go to the space station, different expansion that they could do in the future, different launch vehicles that could get the station to lunar orbit. So they've really got a plan laid out for what we would do there initially, what we would put there eventually, what would go there over the course of five, ten years that that station would be in orbit around the moon. On the Lockheed side they have a similar plan but to go to Mars instead. So by 2028, Lockheed would put a habitat that would support six people in orbit of Mars. This would be based heavily on what we have today,

so it would use Orion pretty heavily, which is not surprising because Lockheed is the prime contractor on Orion itself. But they would use different launch vehicles to get it there. They would use some of the same hardware that is used on the station today for life support, for communication, for navigation. It's really quite the same plan as orbital, which is, let's put a habitat in orbit, leave some potential for future expansion and future use by humans who would come to that station eventually. So the very fine details of these plans still need some work and still need some polish applied to them, but these are the basic proposals for what could happen in the next 10 years.

This November, we're going to get a new president. We're going to get a new administrator of NASA. We're going to get some new congresspeople that are in there and part of the subcommittees. There's going to be a lot of changes coming in terms of policy over the next year or two. As always, the new administration is going to do an assessment on NASA's plans for the future, and when the committee that is doing the assessment looks at NASA's plans for the moon and Mars, they're not going to see a whole lot that is hard and set in stone right now. They're going to see a lot of this vague proposal for what we could do to get to Mars and what we could do around the

moon to support that, but there's nothing in action for that decade, for the 2020s decade, or even the 2030s decade. And these two proposals from Orbital and Lockheed fit in perfectly with that roadmap that they have right now. Because what the roadmap says is we would go to the moon first, we would go in cis-lunar space, there would be some habitation there. And after that, we would go to Mars, we would do some orbital missions first. So we would go to Mars orbit, maybe see some of the moons and do some checkouts of that. And both of these plans are specifically tailored to that roadmap. So really this is positioning from these two contractors for potential contracts to fill in those gaps in the mission architecture right now.

This sort of fits in nicely with the types of policy and strategy decisions that I'm seeing over the last 10 years and the next 10 years. Instead of the Apollo grand plan, grand vision, very motivated roadmap, we're doing this sort of policy and strategy making where we're biting off what we can chew and what we can get done within the next 8 to 10 years. So at the beginning of Obama's term, we bit off the chunk that we could chew, which was the heavy lift launch vehicle. So at the beginning of Obama's term, we bit off the chunk that we could chew, which was the heavy lift launch vehicle. Supporters of NASA's vision for how to get to Mars say that we need this heavy lift launch vehicle that can lift 70, 120 plus tons to low Earth orbit to even begin those plans. So we bit off that chunk we can chew and started building that heavy lift rocket.

And by the end of his term, we have flight hardware coming together. We have different missions planned, only two or three at this point, but we actually do have these things in order, and it's a somewhat uncancellable plan as of right now. With the next administration right around the corner, the policymakers and the decision makers seem to be saying, what's the next piece that we can get done within the term of the new administration? Orbital ATK has now said that we can do the station in lunar orbit by 2020 and support it throughout the term of the next administration. So as far as the politics go, this is a very enticing plan. This is something that could be achieved very quickly and they could get done by even, you know, halfway through their term.

The other interesting part of these plans is the way they use SLS and Orion. The Orbital ATK plan specifically calls out SLS and Orion as supporting the lunar orbit station. According to Orbital, the initial module would be launched by a commercial partner in 2020, maybe 2019, depending on the schedule, but that would be conducted by a commercial partner. So based on the timeline, we could guess that Falcon Heavy would be a good candidate. Who knows if Vulcan will be flying by then, and if it would have the capability to get this to lunar orbit. But if it does, that would certainly be a good possibility for the launch vehicle itself.

We're not quite sure what it would use yet, but hopefully the industry stays in a good place like it is right now to be able to support this type of launch. Beyond that, humans would be carried to the station by Orion, and SLS for that matter, and the earliest possible that they would be there is 2021, which right now is the earliest possible date for EM-2. Orbital ATK even mentioned EM-2 in their discussion, so they're even trying to lobby NASA to change that flight plan for EM-2 from the first crewed launch of SLS and Orion to a lunar orbit to actually go to their lunar orbit station, which would be orbiting the moon for

about a year at that point already. They did mention that in the future, the expansions to this station might be carried up by SLS if they have heavier modules that wouldn't really be a good fit for a commercial partner. They could use SLS to launch those modules and send it to the station itself. It seems like they would make good use of Orion carrying a lot of crews up to the station throughout the 2020s. So this plan from Orbital ATK really relies heavily on SLS. Now, for obvious reasons, Orbital ATK wants SLS to fly a lot because that's more work for them to build those solid rocket boosters. But it's also a plan that's, again, interesting for the policymakers who have been getting a lot of heat for this Orion and SLS program that doesn't have a particular mission, doesn't have a lot of uses, doesn't have a lot of launches on their manifest.

This is a very, very good plan to fix a lot of those issues politically. Now they could say, look, we're doing these missions to lunar orbit. We have all these missions happening. We have all these missions manifested. They could even get the flight rate of SLS up to that two times a year that they really want. Ideally, they could do one crewed launch a year and one cargo launch a year and have a really good flight rate of both SLS and Orion, or at least a lot better than it looks

like it will have right now. Lockheed Martin also included SLS and Orion in their plan. As I said, Orion is their contract vehicle itself, so they're going to use that pretty heavily, but they did say that SLS could be used to launch different modules to Mars orbit, different modules to low Earth orbit. So both of these plans are making heavy use of two things that have been getting a lot of flack over the years for not having any missions. Now what I see happening is Orbital ATK putting this station in lunar orbit and kind of getting sidetracked at the moon for a couple of years. I wouldn't see us just using this for a few years for a few different missions and then ditching it in lunar orbit and moving on past that. I could see this being in heavy use by the U.S. but also by international partners in the 2020s. The European

Space Agency has this plan for a moon village which is an actual colony on the surface of the moon and you could see them using this station as a staging point and a checkout point before going down to the surface. They might even leave some people in the station to be an orbital station in support of the ground station on the moon's surface. So this is something that could see a lot of use over the next couple of years as these governments focus on the moon. In general, I'm a much bigger fan of the Mars Direct proposals that have been put out there by people like Robert Zubrin, the head of the Mars Society.

He's been promoting that idea since 1990. He did a study back in 1990 that said we could get to Mars's surface with technology we have today, and we can go right there. We don't need to screw around in lunar orbit for a while. We don't need to do Mars orbit missions first. We can go directly to the surface. But this is the proposal right now that looks like it would have the political sway. It supports missions for all of the major contractors that have been supplying NASA with different flight vehicles and launch vehicles for years, and that seems to have a lot of sway in terms of what policies get put into action. So it has all the old players, it has the very NASA type iterative and somewhat long duration missions that they are looking forward to. So,

I think politically, the proposals that have been put out there are going to get action taken on them, but we do have somebody coming down the line that would have something more like a Mars Direct proposal, and that is SpaceX. So, on one hand, we have these old contractors saying, we can do these missions with the vehicles that we already have contracts to build, and we can do it over the next two decades and kind of guarantee ourselves work in that way. But SpaceX, on the other hand, is just going ahead and doing it. They're self-funding a mission to the surface of Mars.

They're going to send their Dragon, like we've talked about, to the surface of Mars to scout out potential colonization sites, to do some initial science, maybe even support a sample return mission. So they're going ahead and doing this. They're just putting these plans into motion by themselves. They're self-funding. They're getting support from NASA, but no funds from NASA. They're just getting support of the Deep Space Network, different knowledge that NASA has about landing on Mars. So this is a really good example of these two mindsets at play. You have a company like SpaceX who is determined to get to a goal, which is humans on Mars, and they're going to use what they've already got going to do it.

On the other side you have contractors like Orbital ATK, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, all of these different players that have been in the industry for so long, doing it the old typical way, which is lobbying Congress, going to Congress and saying, here's our plan, here's our proposal, give us some money and we'll do this. And for two reasons, I have a lot more confidence in the SpaceX model. And that's due to the changing dynamics and economics of the launch industry itself. SpaceX is cutting the costs down a lot farther than what they've been with the old contractors and the old stagnant companies, and SpaceX and other new space type companies are really changing the game in that way. As we've talked about a lot,

we already see ULA changing their business plan for the future and trying to become more competitive with companies like SpaceX and even Blue Origin if we look down the line a little bit. So they're already changing the economics of the industry itself. And on the other side, we have politicians who are very risk-averse. They don't like missions that have a lot of risk on the line, because they don't want to be the ones who sign the check that sent people to potentially die on Mars. And that's totally understandable, but that also holds back what we could do at Mars in the next decade. The risk-averse nature of politicians are one thing, but you also have this shifting of priorities that happens every few years

due to election cycles and different parties winning and different administrations coming in. So there's a lot of unpredictability for the future of space policy, and it's hard to have this big grand plan that takes years and years to build up to when you're subject to all of this upheaval every few years. The SpaceX model is much more consistent. They can set a goal for a decade ahead of time and know that if all goes well, the same people will be in charge by then, so they can see that plan through throughout the decade. There's a lot of stability in that type of plan, and it's more conducive to this long-duration nature of a plan to get to Mars. Where it gets interesting from here is when these two plans come together and butt heads. In September, we're going to get some plans from SpaceX, and we're going to see what their Mars architecture looks like to get people to the surface of Mars.

Now, they're probably not going to do that alone. They're going to have support from NASA. What nobody knows yet is if it's going to be support from NASA like they're getting for the Red Dragon mission, which is just knowledge and technical support, or if they're going to get funding from the government itself to go on that mission and be part of that mission. You could very well see the government funding that mission in exchange for some NASA astronauts to be on that mission, to be boots on the ground on Mars once they get there. But what that means is that plan itself would come up head-to-head with the old model, the old Orbital ATK, Lockheed Barton types of model in Congress.

They would come head-to-head and we would have to fund one or the other. Certainly, I would hope that we could fund both because the more people going to space, the better. But you could see a situation when the SpaceX plan costs X and the old contractor plan costs Y and X is less than Y. So we're going to fund that one because it'll get us there sooner. It'll get us there cheaper. We'd have to be OK with a little more risk because it is a little more risky. But it is something that given a motivated president, a motivated administrator, a motivated

Congress, we could do, plausibly, in the next decade. Now, switching focus a little bit to the international side of things, the ESA and Russia have been working together on an ExoMars program. The ExoMars program is a multi-mission program that is going to send a series of orbiters and landers and rovers to Mars, and the first one is due to arrive on October 19th. It just completed a functionality analysis on its way to Mars, so all looks good for the arrival of this. And it has two things on board, an orbiter which is going to map the sources of methane on Mars, which would pave the way for future landing sites of rovers and landers as they continue on through the ExoMars program. In addition to the orbiter, it has a lander aboard, which is due to land in a plane on the equator of Mars, pretty close to where the

rover Opportunity is operating right now. Now, the most exciting part of the lander itself is that to this point, no one has successfully landed on Mars except for NASA-led missions. So with a successful landing here, it would pave the way for future missions from ESA and Russia, notably their rover which is the next mission to go, and that just got delayed from 2018 to 2020. So over the next couple of years, we'll see some of these missions heading to Mars, hopefully landing on Mars, and we'll have both NASA missions and ESA Russia missions operating on the surface.

In other international news, China unveiled designs for their third space station this week. It's a much, much bigger station than their first two, the first of which launched in 2011 and had two missions up to it. The second is due to launch at the end of this year and is somewhat bigger, though it's the same type of model as their first space station. But this third one is much bigger. It looks somewhat like the Russian side of the ISS. It'll have multiple modules attached to it, so they're going to be docking different components to the space station itself, and then flying crews and cargo up to it to support it over the few years that it is in orbit. But it's a much, much more advanced

and complex plan for a space station than they've done in the past. In addition to the space station designs, they're planning to launch a new version of their rocket, the Long March 7, by the end of June on a test flight. Apparently the payload for this test flight is an uncrewed prototype of a new human spacecraft that they would use to support their space stations and other missions that they would plan in the next couple of years. Not only are the rocket and the spacecraft new, but it will launch from a new spaceport in the South China Sea. It's actually out on an island in the South China Sea there. So there's a lot of momentum right now in the Chinese program.

We've got new space stations, new rockets, new spaceports, new spacecraft. So they're doing some really interesting things and making a lot of progress as they move forward. So it'll be interesting to see what they start doing as they get some of this stuff proved out and working. And with that, that'll be it for me this week. Thank you very much for listening to the show. If you have any feedback on this episode or any thoughts about the plans for the future, I'd love to hear them on Twitter at MECOPodcast, M-E-C-O podcast, or to the email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. If you're enjoying the show, I would appreciate a rating in the iTunes store or recommendation

on Overcast or whatever platform you use, or just spread the word to a fellow spaceflight nerd that you know. Thanks very much, and I'll talk to you soon.