Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is a piece I wrote for the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society’s Stellar Sentinel in the January

I’ve witnessed the space program since before Sputnik. I watched the United States Vanguard program from its inception to attempt the launch the first satellite. It turns out that the Russians and the US Army beat Vanguard for the first successful US satellite. The three and a quarter pound satellite Vanguard 1 launched in 1958, with the first solar cell power is the only satellite from the early days still in orbit. Though silent it is still being tracked.

Back to Sputnik. It was a real surprise one October evening, while watching TV a news flash came over the TV announcing that the USSR (Russians for you younger folk) had launched a satellite. They showed a dot crossing the screen and the beep beep beep it emitted as if to say: “We’re in orbit and you’re not!” It turned out that it’s not nice to mess with America’s pride. We beefed up our science teaching, and math. I was old enough to miss most of the new math. Now helping my youngest granddaughter with her 4^th grade math homework I’m learning a newer math, and as an old computer programmer I’m seeing how they now break problems into manageable bits, just like I do now, but wasn’t taught to me in school.

Back to the past. The 1960s were a heady time for space buffs. The manned Mercury, Gemini programs leading to the magnificent Apollo lunar landings. Along the way we sent spacecraft beyond the moon to Venus and then to Mars. After the Apollo 11 landing the will to proceed with the last three Apollo landing died in Congress, and the general public had the “been there done that” attitude, while scientists and we astronomers amateur and otherwise though it was just getting interesting. The first and last geologist who went to the moon did so on the last flight.

The next big NASA project was the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to save money and make access to space routine. Unfortunately it was built on a starvation budget which ultimately drew out its development time and weakened the spacecraft due to the shortcuts that were taken to keep it almost within budget. It was built to hopefully make trips to a space station that it didn’t begin to construct until the latter third of its lifetime. After the fiery demise of the second shuttle with its seven person crew it was finally determined that the shuttle was indeed too fragile to fly, and the program was abandoned after the International Space Station (ISS) was completed.

Without the space shuttle we have to bum rides to the ISS from the Russians whose 1960’s technology Soyuz space capsules are still perfectly capable vehicles. The Soyuz capsules also serve as life boats for the ISS. Maybe in a few years one of the commercial space companies will have a manned spacecraft ready to go. The three contenders that have received NASA grants are SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada. NASA’s working on the Orion Capsule, to take astronauts past the moon, to the asteroids and to Mars.

Whatever we send to these destinations the Orion capsule will not be the living quarters. It’s for launch and reentry. The rest of the spacecraft will most likely be much larger with a rotating component to provide artificial gravity. The actual manned mission would be preceded by cargo missions to establish a habitat and a martian launch vehicle. It’s possible that the martian moon Phobos would be a staging area for a possible martian landing. This seems to be the thinking of the Russians who have sent, or tried to send spacecraft to Phobos, including the failed Phobos Grunt (Soil) mission of a year ago. The Russians found out that you can’t do this stuff on the cheap. That and that fact that Russia has had miserable luck with Mars.

The current guesstimate on the time of a manned landing on Mars is the 2030s. Back in the late 90’s after the successful Mars Pathfinder mission, I answered a Planetary Society member questionnaire as to my opinion as to when a manned landing on Mars would happen. I guessed 2030. It may be optimistic by a decade or two. The first man or woman to set foot on Mars is probably in grade school right now.

A good dress rehearsal for landing on Phobos or Mars would be a trip to a near earth asteroid. These will be a shorter trip than to Mars. As it happens one docks with an asteroid rather than lands on it. Other than that, we must learn a lot more about asteroids if we are able to defend the earth from them. So asteroid missions are not only good practice, but vital in learning how to defend ourselves from one on an intercept course.

The current China’s Chang’e 2 mission started as a photo mission to the moon, It was then sent to the earth-sun Lagrangian 2 or L2 location, One million miles directly opposite the sun from the earth. From there it was sent to fly by the asteroid Toutatis, which it did in December 2012. Maybe the Chinese have something. Maybe L2 might be a place to hold in reserve asteroid defense rockets. They’re outside the gravity well of the earth, so can be pre-positioned to launch to intercept an asteroid.

To practice living off the land on Mars, a lunar mission to the poles of the moon may be necessary. The moon’s low angular tilt means that lunar craters at the poles contain water ice and other frozen volatile compounds. South polar permanently shadowed craters are known to contain water ice. Also with permanent sunlight at the crater rims, solar power can be readily available. Problem is the lunar poles are part of the lunar highlands, some very rugged terrain. It makes landing there way more than exciting.

Mars has water, lots of it, either at the polar caps, and/or located as permafrost below the surface and possible methane good for rocket fuel. If water in sufficient quantities is found, then hydrogen and oxygen can be made for breathable oxygen and again rocket fuel. A manned martian population will have to be much more self-sufficient than a lunar one. Care packages to Mars can only be sent at 26 month intervals, while the moon is only 3 days away by rocket.

One of the big questions with space exploration is manned versus robotic missions. Actually I’m in favor of both. First must come the robotic missions to survey the lay of the land, the atmosphere and determine the feasibility of even sending astronauts. That’s what we’re doing to Mars. We will have to determine what life Mars has or had before we send people who will bring their own biological contamination. Even the Curiosity rover may have brought organic contamination to Mars. It may have been sterile but it came from a planet loaded with the stuff.

Robots can go to places humans can never go: Deep inside the radiation fields of Jupiter, onto the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Suicide plunges into the atmosphere’s of the gas giant planets. Other than that they don’t need the care and feeding of humans, and are much cheaper than a human mission, humans are much more adaptable, able to thing on the spot. Of course the humans that operate the robots are pretty good at improvising with their charges too.

Currently NASA is doing all its current and future missions with one half of one percent of the federal budget. Recent events in the Congress of the United Stated don’t give me much hope that that will improve. Congress is still starving NASA. They want all these great things, like the Space Launch System, but won’t finance it well enough to do it right. I fear the cutting of corners and eliminating science programs to finance their big rocket that currently has no manifest.

The climate scientists are quite positive that the climate is warming and 90% sure that humans are causing it. The last and next chairmen of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee are climate change deniers. What’s the chance of anything positive coming out of that committee?