Radical Manned Mars Mission Architecture

Radical Manned Mars Mission Architecture:

- Utilizing the Ares V SDLV and Orion derived Hab architecture. It is a direct continuation of Project Constellation.

- Under the plan, an ERV, together with the required in-situ technology and large nuclear power source, is not initially required, if at all. This enables the mission to be executed immediately after the new Lunar goals have been fulfilled.

- Initially, a Hab module is all that is required. This will be smaller than the Mars Direct hab, with a crew of 3, but will contain vastly more consumables.

- After the crew safely lands on the surface, the goal becomes increasing the crews tenure and ability to perform useful science.

- To meet these goals, succesive deliveries are of cargo vehicles, which contain more consumables, spare parts, scientific equipment, etc.

- These cargo vehicles are based directly on the Hab architecture, and may even provide a substitute living space in case of primary hab failure; thus further improving crew survivability.

- One particularly important piece of cargo may be a wheeled truss assembly, together with a small RTG power source, both of which can be easily bolted to the frame of the Hab to make it mobile.

- Having a mobile hab greatly increases science return, and at the same time improves crew morale. I beleive it is also a much safer alternative to long-range rover sorties.

- The 'initially one-way' mission architecture is politically unkillable, and also much more sustainable under NASA's new fixed budget.

- This means surface operations can be gradually expanded as more crews are sent, along with the successive cargo vehicles required to sustain them.

- Over time, the technology required to bring the crews back home may eventually develop. In fact, the uniquely flexible 'initially one-way' architecture will not only ensure continuous funding over many years (in order to sustain the crews on the surface), but may also practically guarantee that the funding is made available in order to develop the technology required to bring them home safely.

- Perhaps the beauty of this plan then, is not in its cost savings, but in the way in which it practically guarantees funding. However, the plan would require vastly less initial development costs, and would therefore be very easy to implement.

- The other issue is that of asset building and science return. Previous mission architectures have simply discarded previous assets (science equipment, life support, energy supplies, etc.) on the surface. With this new architecture, assets are kept with crew for a much longer period.

- The number one asset is the crew themselves, and this is why the architecture should have way more bang-for-buck than previous architectures. By keeping the crew on the surface for longer, much more science can be accomplished, and there is the benefit of building on previous knowledge.

- The crew will have the best science equipment available to them in succesive cargo missions. This means that samples are not needed to be returned to Earth for analysis. All the necessary data will simply be beamed back to Earth.


Summing it up:

* Sending the crew is relatively cheap and easy.

* Sustaining the crew is relatively cheap and easy.

* Getting them back safely is the difficult and expensive bit.

* But once they're there, no politician would dare condemn them to the surface. Funding would be guaranteed.

I say: just send volunteers with one-way ticket

I am sure we will have thousands of them, far more than seats available. So we can even be very picky who is good for the "job".

Once on Mars and knowing that hey should settle or die out, chances are pretty high that they will chose the first alternative.

People proved to be rather good at surviving.

How about Project Troy?
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/pdf_documents.html
Going to mars in 12.5mt chunks, only 200 or so launches.
"We went to mars and all we got was a a robust rlv ssto infrastructure" T-shirts could be everywhere.

This has a lot of similarities to an idea I had along these lines. The crew would return to Earth but an infrastructure would be in place. The probability for success would be dramatically increased through redundancy. Three Mars Direct style hab structures and three Mars direct style return vehicles sent on ahead. Three transfer/docking stations with landing craft attached with extra fuel, supplies, etc. Three pure space craft either flying in formation or attached to go from Earth to Mars and back. The magic number of three is used because at this level of redundancy the probability of success is optimised. If any one system breaks down, a second can be used. If the second breaks down a third is still available. If all three breakdown the crew will most likely be able to cannibalize enough to continue any aspect of mission. Using a standardized modular design all aspects can be developed in an assembly line manner, launched into space in a routine manner and assembled there. Along these lines a single module will be expensive to produce, but a second would be significantly less expensive, and three built in an assembly line manner would be cheaper than building two separately from scratch. Yes initially expensive, but cheaper in the long run since some of the redundancy and infrastructure is already in place. Second mission would be about half of the first, the tird would be about two fifths, and it would probably level out at about one fourth of the original for all subsequent missions.

I just really love Skylon. Although I fear that by the time it could be built it could be superceded technically by a full combined cycle scramjet SSTO. however the SABRE engine would a perfect fit as part of such an cycle.

lkm wrote:

I just really love Skylon. Although I fear that by the time it could be built it could be superceded technically by a full combined cycle scramjet SSTO. however the SABRE engine would a perfect fit as part of such an cycle.

Skylon is a great idea, but I think just like with SSTO it is ahead of it's time. The shuttle was ahead of its time as well. It's nowhere near as inexpensive, durable, or reliable as it was meant to be. If they were to go clean-slate today then they could easily build a shuttle system that could meet the original objectives of the STS program.

Here's an idea. Split the Skylon system into two separate vehicles. Vehicle A is a large carrier to get to the edge of space. Vehicle B a smaller vehicle to get the rest of the way.

Skylon as it now sits could get into orbit, but the question, is how much could it carry into orbit and how cost effective would it be? If you split up the mission then you could maximize the payload.

Vehicle A carries most of the fuel and does most of the work, but since it doesn't go into space, minimum weight is wasted on heat shielding. It would use SABRE engines up to the LACE stage but not the rocket stage. Vehicle B is riding A piggyback. It carries all the payload and needs to carry minimal fuel. It has the LACE and rocket stages from the SABRE.
Vehicle A carries B up to the LACE stage, then B starts its LACE stage and assists A to get to the edge of space. At this point, B separates and goes into orbit. It has used minimal fuel and the vast majority of the oxygen is has used has come from the atmosphere, therefore being able to carry more payload. A flies back and since it hasn't had to go through the stresses of reentry, turnaround time and expense is minimal.
Vehicle B could almost be made expendable, but could quite realistically be reused like the shuttle. Waddaya Think?

You've basically just described the original space shuttle. The only reason the space shuttle doesn't look like that and can't really do all those things it was meant to do was because the OMB told it the american government would rather pay a great deal more in operational costs and much less in development costs and that the shuttle could not cost more than a billion dollars in any one fiscal year. It was a conscious choice to have the shuttle cost as much as it does, and yet even so every launch today costs about 350 million and can put seven people and 20mt in orbit. That is cheaper than its replacement will do the same in a duel launch, cheaper than any other current launch setup.
If Skylon works, and really it should because the technology risk is low, its costs will primarily be operational, hanger space, vehicle turn arround, airport support, if it was TSTO those costs would double as you would now have two craft. Secondly you would have the new expense of returning your first stage to you launch site. Remember that it will have landed down range and then be flown or shipped back. In return you would have greater payload, but wether that $/kg has not just got worse I couldn't say. The Sabre engine isn't that complicated, or that new, or that difficult, the only original feature is the heat exchanger, which has already been built. All the rest is just engineering, no more difficult than a new airbus. Someone just has to want to build it.
It should always be remembered that there are no new ideas in aerospace, everything that has been done in the last forty years was thought of in the previous ten. NASA had everything planned by 1970 and has just waited paitently for it to be funded.
I suspect that the NASA plans were correct, the launch market will consist of an RLV shuttle and a heavy lift EELV, and that it will always look like that. I don't think the shuttle should be trying to compete on payload, it competes on logistics.
Your suggestion, if I understand correctly, doesn't seem to understand SABRE. SABRE is a precooled lightweight hydrogen high preasure turbo-jet up to mach 5.5 at which point its inlet closes and it continues on an internal LOx supply, it doesn't collect liquified air. If the first stage flies to mach 5.5 then stages, and the second stage then flies to orbit as a pure rocket then you would improve your mass fraction but you would loose out by carrying two sets of engines, landing gear etc as well as having to design a safe staging method at mach 5. Also at that speed you would need almost as much TPS on the first stage as the second. You might find that designing two craft to do all this would be more challenging than just the one.

I guess essentially I have described the original shuttle concept. The shuttle as we know it today was ahead of it's time in the seventies. Today given comparable resources with today's technology this shuttle concept would be relatively easy and could meet the original objectives. The original shuttle concept could be done to today, but it would be challenging and would fall short of SOME objectives. IMHO Skylon would have similar difficulties now to what our existing shuttle had in the seventies. IMHO it is still ahead of it's time. My suggestion was just an interim step.
My mistake about the LACE part. I still think that Skylon would use an obscene amount of fuel for this objective and sacrifice a lot of payload. Also the turnaround costs might be on the same scale as the shuttle.

Having said that I hope I can be proven wrong. In fact I would be ecstatic to be able to stand up and say "you're right and I was wrong" as Skylon was landing in the background! Hell, I'd put it to music! LOL

If it wasn't ahead of its time it would already exist and we wouldn't need to build it. I've always been puzzled by that phrase, surely technology that's 'ahead of its time' is exact the sort of technology that we should be pushing"?
The main benefit to Skylon development is that it shares most of its major development costs with Lapcat, a design for a hypersonic airliner based on similar engines and aeroshell. For around 30 billion euros you could have both.

Not technology being ahead of its time the CONCEPT being ahead of its time. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "the concept is ahead of the technology."
Here's an idea. Strap a Skylon to the top of a Lapcat and you have the interim concept that I've been suggesting! LOL

Seriously, this is good stuff. In the US we don't hear much about concepts from other countries. There is very little consideration given to the ideas of non-Americans. The "we're right and everyone else is wrong" attitude is very prevalent. That's true of all subjects not just technological ones. I will freely admit that the US is backward in many social, political, and economic issues. Thankfully I'm not a completely "ugly American". Both my parents are British and their point of view has allowed me to maintain some objectivity and open-mindedness.

There are only whispers of concepts like Skylon in the US. All the US wanted to talk about was X-33, so having two completely different approaches to the same problem ca stir some very constructive debates.

I actually quite like the x-33, if it hadn't been canceled at 90% completion the US would have had a hypersonic research craft since the mid 2000's, think of all the invaliable flight data that could have been accumalated, the surface materials that could have been flight tested. As it is they're just going to have to build something else to do the same job, total waste of money and effort. And if NASA had actually fully committed they could have had something going to orbit by 2010, even if it didn't look quite like they started out with. A bimese venturestar probably would have worked fine and been the full TSTO RLV the shuttle was meant to be, maybe they knew that and were deliberately aiming high so that when OMB beat them down they got to where they wanted to be all along. Only it all went pear shaped.
The x-30 was the same, it would have produced something by 2010 if it had been committed to but a twenty year timetable was beyond the political radar of those in control.

In order to get into orbit, an X-33 derived SSTO would need the internal fuel capacity of at LEAST two shuttle external tanks making it impractical. But as a TSTO RLV, this idea could be a next generation shuttle and meet the objectives of the orignal shuttle concept. I like Skylon because it strives to use as much atmospheric oxygen as possible, and this is why I like the TSTO concept. Do as much lifting as possible with an airbreathing first stage and only then take over with an internal oxygen source on the second stage.

Regardless of whether x-33 was on the path to orbit it would have been an operation hypersonic reasearch aircraft, it would have produced real numbers into the hypersonic flight regime and most likely been available to test new tps. Given the money currently being spent on Falcon and the HTV's I would have thought that finishing the x-33 would have answered some of the questions sooner and cheaper allowing Falcon to be further ahead than it is today.

Sadly NASA got budget cuts and focus was taken off experimentation and put onto operational projects like moon missions. So instead of pursuing these experimental programs that show great long term promise they've had to become myopic or lose their funding.
The UK has a different set of priorities than the US with respect to space R&D. This might be another area that has caused more wire-crossing between us. There's a lot of focus on seeing results in the US. If a project can't show results in a short period of time, abandon it and move on.
I believe this was where I was looking at the interim design with Skylon. Go for TSTO, show results, get more funding, then go for SSTO. When you think of all the great ideas that have been on the drawing boards and the ended up being abandoned, it enough to make you cry.

Along these line I realize that I need to qualify my original premise about solar power in the CS electricity thread:

(At this point in time and with respect to the world as a whole) solar is the best choice for electricity production. The reasons still hold true but with respect to LOCAL electricity production, solar may not be the best. I was thinking about Iceland. Given their remote location and volcanic activity, clearly geothermal is by far the best choice, and all other technologies are absurd by comparison.

Personally, I think Skylon/Lapcat would be a perfect Concorde style pan european megaproject. The eurofighter is all but completed and now would be the perfect time to aim high with something stunning and daring as a replacement for it.

I like that idea. The aviation infrastructure would still be in place so it wouldn't be like starting from scratch. As you point out this would be a similar untertaking to Concorde so there is already a production template to follow.

A decidely more wild outcome would be something like a Lapcat x-30. As I understand it Lapcat phase 2 is studing two concepts, the mach 5 A-2 Skylon derivative airliner and a mach 8 scramjet aircraft. If the two ideas were mated it wouldn't be far off the original DARPA dream.

Well, they're on their way with the X-43 Perhaps Reaction Engines could start with a scaled down Skylon design and compare it with the X-43 find out which aspects of either concept are the best and incorporate them into one design, then work on scaling it up. With the information I have read about with carbon nanotubes I wonder if nanotubes might make a good material for heat shielding, or maybe it could be used as an ultra light but strong airframe material.

I've often thought CN would make great radiators for battlestar scale spacecraft. Braided nanofibre cables from fore to aft which can be unbraided by revolving one end and by charging each fibre so they repulse each other. You get a tuneable surface area to dump heat into until you start to melt the fibres.
I had some thoughts about Skylon TSTO, obviously from a position of ignorance. Firstly, your either going to have to stack two identical aircraft the size of an airbus or have something more WK2. All things considered I think you'd probably end up with a twin hulled A-2 with a reduced Skylon slung between them, like WK2. Unless you try and run the Skylon's engines bimese style from the carrier planes tanks from take off having anything other than conventional rocket engines would just add weight. If you don try to run its engines from take off you repopen the problem of placement, Skylon kept it simple by puting the engines near the middle for weight balance and far from the fuselage for clean air, alot more difficult to find slung from another craft.
A reduced Skylon would face TPS problems in that it will indoubtably come out more dense at reentry and thus need a more technically chalenging system, with smaller wings it would face a faster landing speed and greater restrictions on the type of runway it could land on.
The more I think about it, the more it sounds simpler just to build it as a SSTO, in many repsects it really is a KISS sort of plan, with very little than is new or innovative expect than in how it's put together. Materials wise it's pretty conservative and in design it most resembles early Max Faget shuttles. I think trying to make it TSTO really would just increase the complexity and the cost.

I guess to me it's what can we AFFORD to do now as opposed to what can we afford to do in the future. With Apollo money was basically no object. If this had been the case, the Max Faget shuttles could have been built, but they would probably still be as expensive as the present shuttle to turn for subsequent flights.
If money were no object, then I would say pursue SSTO, but if funding is a constraint, then an interim TSTO program to be a proof of concept might be a better way to go.

P.S. Something that I have wondered about for a long time was why rear thrust aircraft still use the standard wing in front and horizontal stabilizer in back configuration. This makes sense with a puller propeller set up where the thrust is generated in the front, but for rear thrust, like with pusher props and jet engines it seems that a canard set up would be more useable and more stable. Your thoughts?

That was certainly the European and Russian solution with the eurofighter, Rafale, and several sukhoi's. As to why the different approaches, I couldn't say. Perhaps it has an impact on stealth which American designers are more aware of.

The stealth aspect is a very real possibility. Based on my experience I kinda think that it is at least partially due to pig-headed stubbornness on the part of military leaders to stray from a traditional configuration!!
I would be very curious to find out what flight characteristics there are with canards as opposed to horizontal stabilizers. I know that with Rutan's Long EZ the plane can't stall because the front "wing loses lift before the aft wing so the angle of attack is reduced preventing a stall.

I noticed you commented on reusing jupiter cores on NSF, and it made me think. As I understand it, the RS-68 isn't restartable for two reasons, firstly it uses an ablative nozzle and secondly the mechanism for starting it resides at the launch pad.
However if the RS-68 regen is developed you could possibly develop a restart service module that could dock with the discarded cores in orbit and replicate the ground start functions of the launch pad. It would, presumed have to dock at the base of the core and ideally you'd want to design it such that it could mate with up to four cores clustered round it. From there it's just a matter finding the nearest fuel depot and refueling, again through the service module, and hey presto, you have a large EDS.
Obviously nobody would trust it with humans, at least not at first, but for cargo it could prove cost effective. With a full service depot at LEO and LLO and four core stages the EDS could just continueously go back and force, discarding cores as they fail and replacing them back in LEO. The module itself could have a ion engine capable of return to LEO at low speed if all four cores fail. In effect, it is a partially reuseable EDS for the cost of a robust space tug.
The module itself may take up an entire jupiter launch, but after that it would require nothing more than the DIRECT proposal functioning as described.
Of course this is probably all bollock.

I was thinking about this in a different way.  If the nozzle were designed with a large and predictable ablative layer then it could actually be more efficient because the inside of the nozzle would wear away making it more efficient at higher altitudes as well as in space.  If this layer were thick enough then it might actually be feasible for a restart in space.     I don't know the method that is used to start the RS-68, but I'm sure that a swingdown arm could be made to start the ignition sequence in space.
I definitely don't consider this bollocks. It's going to take a lot of fuel to go to Mars and if the heavy tanks to carry the fuel as well as the the engines on the tanks to transport the fuel (oh, and the crew module as well!!) then 90% of the work is already done.

I was imagining that an ablative nozzle would have an iherently shorter lifespan than a regenerative one. I was also thinking that the only feasable system is one that require minimal, if not no changes to core production and design. The idea would be to so closely mimic the launch pad services as to make it equivalent for core, save for the module remaining attached.
This sort of operation would make ideal for a commercial operation, rights to core salvage in orbit could be purchased for cents on the dollar, the module could, with efficient design, maybe even be loftable on a commercial rocket, and once up there operating costs and just in orbit refueling and telemetry. It could make some sort of COTS lunar cargo possible.

In proselytizing Skylon I forgot to mention one of its biggest benefits, it can be sold. There are a half dozen countries today pursuing a space program today and probably three times that who would be interested in one.
A Skylon/A-2 development program would take, say, thirty billion and ten years, or 200 million a year per EU member. At the end of it Airbus would be able to sell both a hypersonic airliner and a RLV space program, they could be marketed as a combined package given the shared infrastructure and an eager customer for one could be wooed with the added benefits of buying both. They could easily break even with a hundred or so sales, but the best part would be that Boeing would be down and out, thanks to ITER there would be no sort of response to Skylon that they could sell internationally, even if they built an equivalent SST.
Think of it, Japan, India, South Korea, Brazil, Israel, who wouldn't buy a Skylon fleet?

Who wouldn't buy a Skylon fleet? Investors in Virgin Galactic! Just bein' a smart ass!
As long as in some way a commercial space venture will benefit and help mankind to pursue an extensive and fruitful space exploration program I don't care who "wins."

Some how I think the US government might care, especially if it woke up in 2025 and discovered most of the world had better space access than it did, it might be little peeved. It might force it to at least begin to properly support its hypersonics program in the same way concorde forced a a SST response. Otherwise everbody will start quoting Casper Weinberger again, and nobody wants that.
Going back to Project Troy, you can appreciate the wisedom of the idea, in both creating a CRATS infrastructure and a task for them do as part of an integrated mars plan it is both sustainable in operation and leaves a define legacy of useable hardware. Unlike some other mars plans.

I was looking at a bigger picture.  I believe that the ultimate objective of Mankind should be to strike out into space and establish ourselves on other celestial bodies, establishing self-sufficient colonies so that if some catastrophe were to befall Earth the human race would go on.  Hopefully this effort will eventually become global rather than national and all of Mankind will benefit.  Yeah, I know, nice fairy tale! LOL
A CRATS infrastructure for Mars is definitely the way to go. In fact Buzz Aldrin came up with an ingeneous way of making the Earth-Mars commute very cost effective.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/2076326.html
shows this concept very well.

Everyone knows the future we want, but nobody is willing to put in the work to make it happen.

Well, there are some people, like Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society, but this is obviously not enough to really do anything. We can hope that the ground work that has been laid by groups like these and by the probes that have landed on Mars will eventually reap rewards.

Question: for the cost of the wall street bailout, how many people could NASA put on Mars?

in the area of 100 or so, including developement.

Sadly this is a pretty accurate estimate!! Makes ya cry, don't it!!

I like going very big and with mass structure for human Mars colony. With the highest technology that we can develop that isn't already in use, but has to be developed for our future use on Mars. Strung out over forty to sixty year time frame to get it done.

Before I state what I would like to do on Mars, I would like to state what I intend to accomplish as a result of doing such a big thing such as this.

1. I want a space program that develops new technologies that would not be developed unless we had to meet this goal in the time frame that we wanted to do it in. This new technology that we would have to develop to hit our goals would then be plowed back into the US Economy as technological spin off like we did with the Apollo Moon program did that returned fourteen dollars for every dollar that we spent for going to the moon. I want a space goal big enough that we have to develop new technologies to hit it, but I don't want it too far out of our technological capabilities that we can't hit it either.

2. I want a reason to develop new space shuttle that can carry twenty to forty people into space and have some place for them to go besides the ISS space station. We will need re-usable shuttle for both the moon and Mars also.

3. We will need several hundred nuclear powered space ship to carry the people and freight to Mars. They will need to be either and or both fission powered and fusion powered space craft.

4. We will also have to go to the moon, because we have to build a skunk works there so we can build the ships big enough to have that fleet of ships that we are sending to Mars. We will also need excelleration sled to through those space ship off the moon and into Lunar orbit so we can get them into space.

This is what we would have to do to achieve the goal of what I would like to do which is:

Build a major base on the Moon and then use that to build a City on Mars of 100,000 population. So it would be in a two phase program with the moon being first and for runner to the Martian City that we are going to build twenty years later or so. It going to take forty to sixty years to both develop the new technology and build the infrastructure to be able to actually build that Martian city.

Setup the funding for the project and the commitment to follow through with this project and then hand it to NASA to get it done. We would also want to setup a private sector to support this NASA effort like what Mike did with Space X and maybe use Bigelow habitats at the beginning and such.

This NASA space project that I want them to do would only be a continuation of what I want to do inside the United States or of building major infrastructural projects down here in America also. By this kind of government investing in infrastructure is how America went from being a former backward colony into a first world and world power that we are today and I would like to continue this process into the future.

Larry,