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Stepping Stones to Mars?

Asteroids and the moons of Mars could lay the foundations for humans to explore the surface of the red planet.

Stephen Cass 08/12/2009

  • 14 Comments
The asteroid Ida is about 55 kilometers long. It is one of thousands of asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA

New Scientist is reporting that the Augustine Commission, chartered to make recommendations on the future of the US human spaceflight program, may suggest that NASA embark on a series of deep-space rendezvous and flyby missions before attempting to land astronauts on Mars.

Flying to an asteroid would be a natural stepping point between an expedition to the Moon (a roughly 10-day mission) and one to the surface of Mars (a roughly 1,000-day mission). Flybys of Mars and Venus would help to further build up deep-space experience, possibly culminating in a penultimate mission to the surface of Phobos, Mars' largest moon. These would be exciting missions that could finally move NASA's human spaceflight program beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in nearly 40 years.

These ideas are not new--in 2000, for example, NASA published a strategic plan that focused on a similar scheme, dubbing such stepping missions "design reference points." And the idea of conducting manned flybys of Mars prior to a landing dates back to Wernher von Braun. And this is part of the problem--the truth is that the Augustine Commission is unlikely to propose any option for going to Mars, or anywhere else, that hasn't already been proposed, possibly several times (a monograph published by the NASA history office, titled Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950-2000, makes for depressing reading: in the minds of optimistic mission planners, sending astronauts to the red planet is always just a few years away--like the end of the rainbow, forever just out of reach).

This lack of originality is not in itself a drawback--what's important is an engineering solution that works, and if that happens to be an idea dreamt up in 1965, fair enough. The question is, if these ideas couldn't garner congressional support, or survive NASA's internal bureaucracy, when they were first proposed, will they really make a difference now, even if wrapped in the bright packaging of a new Commission report? In 10 years time, will we still be debating when we should retire the shuttle, and how we should escape low Earth orbit for the first time in nearly 50 years?

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doanwon

76 Comments

  • 915 Days Ago
  • 08/12/2009

feasible alternative?

I wonder if you could put a satellite(s) that orbits the sun on an orbit midway between the Earth and Mars.  Such station could serve as a platform for rendezvous for resupply or emergency.

Also, you can possibly have a satellite elliptically orbiting the sun with trajectory that passes near Earth and Mars (or other planets). Then when we want to reach the planet we would need to just launch a craft that piggy ride on that satellite to reach other destinations.

Trajectories and timing can all be done easily with mathematics.

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djweber

10 Comments

  • 915 Days Ago
  • 08/12/2009

intermediate platform

There really isn't a point "between" Mars and Earth where you could put a station, although you could probably something close part of the time.

But you can't sanely use it for resupply. When you are in space, you are moving, and it would take lots of energy to stop to resupply, and a lot of energy to start back up again. Add in the energy to put this midway station there in the first place and it's a big loser.

With cyclers you are onto something.  IIRC Buzz Aldrin proposed some Earth-Mars cyclers, and if you use Google you can probably find the animations. The hard part of cyclers is that you have to set them up in the first place, which uses tremendously more energy than a handful of Earth-Mars missions. If we have a colony on Mars it might be worth capturing some asteroids and using them to build the cyclers, but that still requires space-docking, which is very hard.

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Gaetano Marano

246 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Re: intermediate platform

.

I've suggested that TWO years ago in my "Asteroids as Deep Space Probes" article:

http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/013asteroids.html

maybe... Buzz has read it...? :)

.

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leesvalentine

2 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Re: intermediate platform

Eugene Shoemaker suggested using asteroids as stepping stones forty years ago. It is well documented in the space flight literature.

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leesvalentine

2 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Re: intermediate platform

The best location for a re supply platform appears to be in low Earth orbit. 

Most of the mass for a Mars, or Moon, mission is propellant and a propellant depot allows gradual aggregation of propellant mass from a variety of launchers, stimulating competition and driving down the cost both of the propellant and the larger mission.

Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, discussed propellant depots advantages in Augustine Commission testimony last week.

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Gaetano Marano

246 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

>>> it's an old idea that can't happen without FUNDS, that's why I've proposed my "Money for Mars" initiative >>>

.

it's an old idea that can't happen without FUNDS

that's why I've proposed my "Money for Mars" initiative!

my proposal is to invest NOW at least $2 billion per year in the next 10 years from 2010 to develop and test "everything we need" to accomplish a manned mission to Phobos or Deimos and (later) to the Mars surface!

you can find the DETAILS and REASONS of my proposal (with a, possible, speech of the President Barack Obama that announces it at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum or, maybe, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in this article:

http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/047gotomars.html

if you like it and agree with my proposal for Mars, please JOIN AND SUPPORT IT sending a email with a link to the Augustine Commission within this month before it end its job writing the final report!

hq-humanspaceflight@mail.nasa.gov

.

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camdaddy09

38 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Dr.Zubrin

Obviously anyone looking into a mission to mars with any sense of seriousness would come across Dr. Robert Zubrin. He's already worked out everything that would be needed for a mars mission within a decade.

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Gaetano Marano

246 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Re: about... Zubrin's concept

.

he has surely a good experience in the project but, as I've said in my article, ALL the dinghy-based Mars travels (like Mars-Direct) seem pretty close to a SUICIDE for the astronauts (despite the "price" of these "low cost travels" to Mars are in the $50-70 Bn range...)

unfortunately, a Mars mission needs something more complex and safer (that's why the costs are so high)

.

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jschantz

5 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Mars

The answer to Mars or for that matter, any deep space exploration is simple: robots. NASA should shelve human space flight plans for some future date when we have the technology. In the meantime, it should pour funding into robotics and self aware machine intellegence. The quality of the research will be just as good as what humans can do at greatly reduced risk and cost. The side benefits will also have practical application here on earth.

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Gaetano Marano

246 Comments

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Re: about... Mars with A.I. robots

.

the exploration with A.I. based robots surely is the BEST choice, but, unfortunately, the A.I. robots, did NOT exist... and probably they will be not available in the next 20-30 years...

however, the A.I. robots will be very good for the exploration of planets and moons, but, if we want to colonize (e.g.) Mars, we always need some kind of spacecraft to send humans on the Red Planet

.

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lgroner

1 Comment

  • 914 Days Ago
  • 08/13/2009

Stepping Stones to Mars?

Any attempt to send humans to Mars must be preceded by an extensive exploration of the planet and its regional variations. This can only be done with robots. Robert Zubrin's ideas  for sending unmanned landers and return vehicles before humans are sent also presupposes robots for inspecting, testing and possibly repairing them before humans arrive.

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garylynn

44 Comments

  • 913 Days Ago
  • 08/14/2009

Stepping Stones to Mars?

The asteroids ARE the mission. Forget Mars as a goal-- go for mining asteroids until we get an established Belter colony going and paying for itself.
Gary

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doug l

2 Comments

  • 913 Days Ago
  • 08/14/2009

multi-task moon mars more

I should think that the intermediate step which makes the most sense is one to the geostationary orbits from which we could develope a really permanent station. From there we could address a number of different goals simultaneously, such as: engineering skills to operate in deep space over longer times, building/assembling craft for exploration of the moon and mars without having to account for climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well, the economic exploitation of asteroids (the value just the platinum group metals within the mass of a 100 meter nickle/iron meteoroid could go some distance in paying for freight, and the odd chunk of organic enriched cometary ice could be a very usefull reactant/propellant) additionally it would serve as a marvelous manned observation platform for potential cosmic impactors and other earth phenomenon, and perhaps most significantly a station in geostationary orbit would be the platform for a demonstration model/prototype for space based solar energy collection, microwave transmitting system to earth's surface..or the moon, or the craft we'll be sending to Mars, or to the  vacuum o' space, oxidiation free, zero-G asteroid processing hangar we'll be building. Shedding the burden of a system designed for the shuttle and ISS with their compartmentalized and hyper cautious oversight over systems, now long past their intended purposes, is probably as difficult a task as any. There are suggestions to offer international prizes with significant awards in cash and future contracts to stimulate private industry. It worked for the aeronautics in its infancy and we have a lot more billionaires with forward vision than we did a century ago at the dawn of flight when everyone thought flying was never going to "get off the ground" so common folks could fly...and now a 19 year old without a highschool education can probably scrounge up enough money at a part time mimimum wage job to fly to anyplace on earth, using the internet to find the cheapest fare. There's never been a better time to begin than now.

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jabaman

1 Comment

  • 904 Days Ago
  • 08/23/2009

stepping stones

The real stepping stone we have is the moon.  Creating a base there should have a fundamental purpose and that is to take advantage of the potential it has to offer. Nasa needs to get the government out of the way and provide the fundamental technology to mine and manufacture on the moon so that the greatest economic system in the world can create the funds that make space exploration possible. The budget at nasa comes from taxes that are being wasted by congress.Do you really think that they will fund you properly?
We've had the technology since the 60's to get to the moon and explore it but where is the technology that can let us get a return on the investment that the tax payors have made and that you want us to make in the future. Do you know what a proforma is ? Sell the people on how we can make money in space. We're not a dumb as you think. The population is over 6 billion, how long are we going to survive here without killing each other to survive? For starters what is the value to the public of the h3 , titanium and irridium on the moon ?

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Bio

This blog focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of space technology. We're interested in the hardware that's actually going into orbit and beyond. We write about what's involved in building, launching, and operating spacecraft, exploration vehicles, and habitats (and what it takes on the ground to support them) today.

Delta-V is written by Stephen Cass, a senior editor at TR who has covered space technology and exploration for nine years, and Brittany Sauser, a space technology reporter at TR.

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