Dual Drill Designed For Europa Ice Mission

A mole-like thermal drill designed to cut through the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa could be on a future mission slated for launch in 2020. Such a device would represent the best of both worlds by using heat to melt through the ice and rotating drill blades to clear away rocky material. The drill would be nestled inside a larger penetrator probe that would burrow itself into Europa's icy shell.

"Penetrators are the most feasible, cheapest and safest option for a landing on Europa today, and the knowledge to build those is there," said Peter Weiss, a post-doc now at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. He and his colleagues at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University worked with other researchers at the Institut fuer Weltraumforschung in Graz, Austria on a study detailed in the January issue of the journal Advances in Space Research.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have teamed up on the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), with both Russia and Japan also showing interest. The mission could be composed of several orbiters peering down at Europa, but Russia has its eyes on a possible lander - and the Russians have already built penetrators for past missions, such as the failed Mars 96 mission.

"A thermal drill could be the 'nose' of a penetrator, to taste the ice of Europa," Weiss explained.

Drilling gets hot
Any landing probe that wants to search for signs of life on Europa must go deeper than two meters into the surface ice, because heavy radiation and particle bombardment would have erased any biological traces in the top layer.

Having a robotic lander make a soft landing before preparing to drill would be a more complicated and expensive task compared to a penetrator, Weiss said. A thermal drill could simply deploy from the side of the penetrator after impact, and begin drilling through the pristine ice below to sample material at depths of up to 10 meters.

Estimates for the thickness of Europa's ice shell vary between a few kilometers and tens of kilometers, but Weiss says it doesn't make sense to go much deeper than 10 meters because of the current state of technology. For instance, the drill would be tethered to the penetrator by a communication cable, and the length of cable would be limited based on how much the probe could carry.

This cable would allow data collected from the drill to snake back to the main scientific instruments in the penetrator, and then the data would get beamed up to an orbiter.

Lab experiments showed how a thermal drill design fared much better in dealing with the combined challenge of ice and regolith, as opposed to a melting probe such as the Cryobot that relies upon heat alone.

Inner pressure inside the hole is expected to increase and allow for liquid water once the initial borehole has refrozen. That would allow the drill to sample water by using a micro-pump, but the refreezing hole would also protect the pristine ice against possible contamination from the outside.

Forget the submersibles
Some concepts of a submersible exploring the supposed ocean depths of Europa have appeared in past years, and NASA has tested robotic subs in the frigid lakes of Antarctica.

But Weiss, who draws upon several years working with sub-sea robotics, said that current technology cannot deploy a submersible on Europa. Just packing in all the cabling that would connect a submersible to the main landing craft would represent a problem. While the ice shell is thought to be at least several kilometers thick, no one knows exactly how far down the ocean may be - there could be a thick layer of slush between the ice shell and ocean. Another question is the distance down to the ocean floor.

"The ocean beneath - if existent - could be 100 kilometers deep," said Weiss.

Robotic subs on Earth have reached ocean depths of 11 km (6.8 miles), but weighed several tons and required huge surface support ships. That doesn't work for a mission to Europa that needs to travel light.

"Institutes that pretend to develop sub-sea robots 'to explore the bottom of Europa's ocean' should be financed by Hollywood, not NASA," Weiss said.

Waiting for a call
The researchers have so far tested their drill in both pressure and vacuum environments, but still want to boost its efficiency. A next logical step might test how well a thermal drill survives impact aboard a penetrator.

Whether or not a thermal drill or any sort of landing probe gets a shot at Europa's icy surface remains up in the air. But even as the different space agencies figure out their roles and budgets, Weiss says there's a sense of urgency to find out what's going on with Europa.

A mission that consisted of only orbiters might find more interesting evidence that supports the possibility of life on the Jovian moon, but would not have the ability to go down and find proof. And a follow-up mission might not even launch until the 2040s - good reason for the current generation of scientists to want some surface explorer element.

"Otherwise, we won't have any confirmation on astrobiology on Europa - or maybe even in the solar system - during our lifetime," Weiss said.

ENDURANCE May Explore Europa's Oceans

Image comment: ENDURANCE would need to be scaled down for a prospective mission to the Jovian moon Europa
Image credits: Stone Aerospace

Europa is perhaps the most famous moon of Jupiter, and for good reason. Data sent back years ago by the Galileo spacecraft hinted at the fact that the small world might in fact be covered in a liquid ocean, although it could be buried as deep as 100 kilometers or more under a thick ice sheet. Still, the prospect of liquid water on a distant world is much too appealing for scientists to let it slide, and so they have been looking into devising methods of studying it for a long time, Space reports.

These efforts are finally beginning to pay off, they announce, as the ENDURENCE robot has just finished its second test season successfully. The machine, called the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-Ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer, was put through trials at Lake Bonney, a peculiar landscape feature located in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The lake is composed of two “lobes” connected to each other via a narrow channel. It is covered by ice, just as the waters of Europa could be, and researchers needed to melt a hole through the cover before they could put the robot underwater.

During the experiments, the scientific instruments aboard ENDURANCE proved to work remarkably well, and researchers are hopeful that they may one day use a similar machine to explore Europa. They say that scaling back the current design is critical for this, given that the current robot weighs about 1,300 kilograms. Delivering such a heavy load as far as Jupiter is highly unlikely, provided that even the Curiosity rover, bound to go to Mars next year, is less than a ton, while being the size of a Mini Cooper. But experts are already working on other ideas other than miniaturization.

One possible option would be to create a “parent” explorer, outfitted with several mini-subs that could be operated individually. This means that the largest robot would only steer through safe locations, while producing coarse maps of its environment. Whenever an interesting structure is found, it could deploy specialized observatories, which would take high-resolution images and readings, and would also return samples to the parent explorer, for analysis. An additional problem that needs fixing is determining how to make the machine function with more autonomy, at the same time ensuring that the maximum amount of data is produced from the overall mission.

Jupiter-Bound Juno Spacecraft Taking Shape

Image comment: The Juno spacecraft is beginning to take shape at a Lockheed Martin facility, in Denver

Image credits: NASA / JPL / Lockheed Martin

In August 2011, NASA plans to launch a new space exploration mission, this time aimed at Jupiter. Dubbed Juno, the spacecraft will travel the distance from Earth to the gas giant within an estimated five years, and is scheduled to reach its destination in 2016. Officials at the American space agency are now proud to announce that the final version of the probe is beginning to take shape at the Denver, Colorado-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

According to experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, the mission is destined to help astronomers, astrobiologists and planetary scientists gain more insight into how the planet appeared, developed and evolved. The main objectives of the flight can be compared to the ones Cassini has in exploring Saturn, also a gas giant. The principal investigator of the Juno mission will be scientist Scott Bolton, who holds an appointment at the San Antonio, Texas-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

“We're excited the puzzle pieces are coming together. We're one important step closer to getting to Jupiter,” reveals Bolton. He explains that the assembly, testing and launch operations phase of Juno began recently, on April 1, inside a high-bay clean room at the Lockheed Martin facility. What this means is that, over the next few months, an army of engineers and technicians will be in charge of outfitting scientific, navigation and propulsion instruments on Juno.

“We plan to be doing a lot of testing in the next few months. We want to make sure the spacecraft is ready for the long journey to Jupiter and the harsh environment it will encounter there,” adds JPL Juno project manager, Jan Chodas. The team hopes that, by peering through the thick layer of clouds surrounding Jupiter, they will be able to gain additional insight into the processes that governed our solar system a short time after it first formed.

Determining If Europa Could Support Life

Image comment: A photo showing Europa's surface, as collected by the Galileo spacecraft

Image credits: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona / University of Colora

Jupiter's moon Europa is undoubtedly one of the most interesting celestial bodies in the solar system, right alongside Titan and Enceladus, natural satellites of Saturn. This space rock is believed to be covered in an icy cap that may very well be hiding a liquid ocean of water underneath. Cracks in the surface of these caps contain sulfur-rich materials that researchers believe could shed some light on the composition of what's below the ices. In order to get a better understanding of this, astronomers are now turning to the Arctic, which they plan to use a “simulator” for Europa, Space reports.

The biggest assumption that experts are making is that the sulfur-rich materials on the surface of the moon may be containing organic matter that was drawn upwards from within the moon. If that is indeed the case, then early forms of life may have developed inside Europa's liquid oceans, and this would be tremendously important for science.

“Europa's liquid water layer contains twice the volume of all the Earth's oceans combined, an enormous potentially habitable environment, not billions of years in the past but at the present day. The composition of the ocean directly controls our view of the habitability of the environment, our understanding of whether microbial life could survive there, and if so, what metabolic pathways or geochemical gradients it could utilize to gain energy,” says Damhnait Gleeson, an expert in astrobiology who works at the Pasadena, California-based NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

While investigating the Canadian High Arctic for Earth-based equivalents to the conditions on the Jovian moon, the JPL team discovered such a rare combination of elements at Ellesmere Island. They were basically trying to find a place where sulfur-rich springs met glacial ice. In the Arctic, where spring comes late, and only lasts for a very short time, studying the interactions that appear in such ecosystems may hold the key to making more accurate predictions about what is going on millions of miles away, on Jupiter's orbit.

“These results represent the first data on the detection of sulfur minerals on ice in a terrestrial setting. These new data improve our ability to correctly identify these minerals in other locations. Technology under development for future missions could benefit from field-testing in this Europa-relevant environment,” the team leader adds.

Helium Rains Cover Jupiter in Neon

Over the past 15 years, astronomers have been puzzled at a seemingly-inexplicable mystery. When the Galileo space probe first arrived at the gas giant Jupiter, back in 1995, it revealed the fact that the upper atmosphere of the planet was poorer in the noble gases helium and neon than anyone anticipated. These are the lightest noble gases in the Periodic Table of Elements, and experts could not find the reason for which they were lost from Jupiter's atmosphere. Now, thanks to modern computers and simulations, experts are able to identify the reason underlying this phenomenon.

Because sending a sample-return mission to any gas giant is a financial and technical impossibility at this point, researchers need to assess the internal composition of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn using nothing more than comparisons with the Sun. They scan for the planets' constituent elements, and then look at how abundant these chemicals are in the celestial bodies as compared to the Sun. Through this method, a research team discovered that Jupiter had a lot less neon gas, and also less helium than models had predicted. Details of the work are reported in the current issue of esteemed scientific publication Physical Review Letters.

After Galileo first presented its findings, a group of experts proposed that the neon gas was slipping away from the upper atmosphere, and further within the gas giant. However, up until now, no one knew what mechanism could possibly be driving this. The new models suggest that a layer must exist within the atmosphere, where helium condenses into droplets, rather than mixing smoothly with the hydrogen gas. As the helium rain falls, it also strips neon from the upper atmosphere, taking it further towards the planet's core.

The new investigation was conducted by investigators at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB). They developed a computer model that was capable of taking into account the interactions of the hot gases that make up Jupiter's core, and this approach led them to the conclusion that the condensation layer must exist somewhere in the atmosphere. The same could hold true for Saturn as well, the investigators say, although atmospheric missions to these two locations are needed before a clear conclusion can be drawn from the models.

Thermal Images Reveal Details About Jupiter's Great Red Spot

These images show the interaction of three of Jupiter's largest

storms -- the Great Red Spot and two smaller storms nicknamed Oval BA

and Little Red Spot.

(Photo Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA/L. Fletcher)

New Thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and composition with its color.

“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition — and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” says Leigh Fletcher, lead author of the study in Icarus that documents the research results.

“Although we can speculate, we still don’t know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm.”

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. The observations, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system’s best-known storm system.

Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about -160 degrees Celsius, is so wide that about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.

The thermal images were mostly obtained with the VISIR instrument attached to ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, with additional data coming from the Gemini South telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

The images have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and extended the coverage provided by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-metre NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these giant observatories is for the first time comparable to visible-light images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

VISIR allows the astronomers to map the temperature, aerosols and ammonia within and surrounding the storm. Each of these parameters tells us how the weather and circulation patterns change within the storm, both spatially (in 3D) and with time. The years of VISIR observations, coupled with those from the other observatories, reveals how the storm is incredibly stable despite turbulence, upheavals and close encounters with other anticyclones that affect the edge of the storm system.

“One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 degrees warmer than the environment around it,” says Fletcher. This temperature difference might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns in the belts and zones.

Citation: Leigh Fletcher et al., 'Thermal structure and composition of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from high-resolution thermal imaging', Icarus, March 2010; doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.01.005

NASA and Space - The Future vs. the Past

In covering the uproar over the just-released NASA budget and its implications, the major media headlines have been trumpeting: "Lunar Program Cancelled". Yes, sadly the budget has cancelled the current lunar program, based on the NASA designed Ares boosters and Orion capsule. However, as some other writers have pointed out, the Vision for Space Exploration program (VSE), which was conceived by a true government consensus after the Columbia disaster, was in effect hijacked in 2005 by the last person anyone of us would have ever suspected, the greatly respected aerospace engineer, Dr. Michael Griffin. That the VSE envisioned by the White House was hijacked is in little doubt, since the only representative of the space advocacy community specifically invited to attend the former President's 2004 speech was Rick Tumlinson, no friend of business-as-usual in US space policy. The White House shares no blame for picking Dr. Griffin, since many in the space community saw him as a very good choice. Other writers have pointed out that the VSE and Constellation which supposedly implemented it are very different programs. In an interview, Brett Alexander said "I was a primary author of the Vision for Space Exploration.....But they chose the most expensive architecture (for Constellation) and they had cost and technical issues with it. The cost overruns are astonishing."(Amy Klamper - Space News 2-1-2010).

Under Admiral Craig Steidle starting early in 2004, the VSE was a forward looking program that was open to new ideas and the development of fundamentally new, innovative technology. Griffin shut the door firmly on most of those new ideas in 2005. Instead, he looked backward at what had been stolen away from him and the space community by politics 40 years ago - a continuation of the Apollo Program, and tried to re-create it as "Apollo on Steroids". Any studies which had been underway involving re-usable rockets or spacecraft were apparently ruthlessly suppressed, so that the public and most outside experts never got to see the results. Critical long-range programs were cancelled and their funds raided for the short-term goal. Everything that possibly could be made expendable to save a few pennies was. MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics professor David Mindell says in a Space and Earth article posted on physorg (2-5-2010) that "NASA is eating its seed corn for Constellation". The result was exactly what I warned about in 2005 (Return to the Moon p. 137 - 2005) - the use of "giant expendable LEMS" (Lunar Modules) in the new program, itself only symptomatic of NASA's institutional mindset under Griffin.

I have had the experience of being laid off and I know what an terrible impact this has on a person and his family. I have also experienced the frustration of having a project taken away from me. I thus totally commiserate with any and all of the employees who may lose their current NASA jobs, and who have expended herculean efforts on trying to make the Constellation program work. But we need to think about the whole purpose of the space program. The concept of NASA as a short-range jobs program has to end, since it is politically and economically unsustainable. The unwillingness of Congress and the previous President to adequately fund the program that they superficially publically supported proves this beyond a doubt. Dr. Griffin also consistently and massively underestimated the development and construction costs of all the single use vehicles that would be needed for any lunar program and the program's annual operating costs. All of the jobs currently about to be lost would have been eventually lost, but with even greater trauma and distress at the additional wasted effort.

Why has the announcement been received so negatively by many whose jobs are not at risk?. Newspapers and politicians of both parties from the affected areas uniformly responded negatively to the proposal, due to the loss of local jobs. Reaction from national news outlets was mixed and more balanced. It is also now clear from other writers that the announcement gave some of them the impression that the long-range intent was to end human spaceflight. For example, Stephen Weinberg, a long-time opponent of manned space flight and supporter of the "look but don't touch" viewpoint, threw contrary evidence to the wind with the title of his article "Ending Manned Space Flight Is The Right Thing For Science".

As a result of this and similar opinions, fear grew that the budget announcement was intended to kill the current Constellation program but then not replace it with anything. Even the Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords echoed fears that "We may soon abandon our mission" (of manned space exploration). The current budget does remove the Constellation Lunar program without replacing it with any specific destination or goal. (It is admittedly very hard to come up with a specific first goal without at least a year of discussion, and the Augustine Commission deliberately did not focus on a single first goal.) The most obvious first goal for a human expedition would be a near earth asteroid, since it would not require the development of a lander. One comment following a negative article by Astronaut Tom Jones (Popular Mechanics 2-2-2010) made an excellent analogy to support the fact that we can't go very far yet since we do not have a space infrastructure in place: (placing propellant depots in orbit in 2020 is the equivalent of building a road network and gas stations to enable auto travel in 1920).

In addition, those of us who have watched with frustration as mankind was restricted to Low Earth orbit (where we have now been stuck for about 38 years), were depressed at the thought of another whole decade stuck in Low Earth Orbit, even if the human program survives. The justification for staying in LEO has been that we were preparing for further exploration beyond LEO. Bolden's honest press conference comment (2/6/2010) that we would not be flying the Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) needed for further exploration until after 2020 did not help. Practically, though, to develop a really inexpensive and practical HLV would probably take about that long, and to develop payloads to put on it would also take about the same amount of time. All of the serious, current, competing, expendable HLV plans are so expensive that very few would ever be launched. One writer agreeing with Augustine Commission member Leroy Chiao's blog of 2-4-2010 pointed out that what we need is "indefinitely affordable technology" to access the Moon and other destinations. (Constellation would have been affordable only very temporarily at best).

If you would ask any of the older astronauts, many of them would tell you in effect, that "Space is about the future". It is not about the past. While we greatly honor all of the past work that has been done on the program, if we only focus on the glories of the past, we miss the ultimate point of the program - the future and long term survival of the human race, and using space resources and energy to protect the Earth. A one-planet species is eventually a dead end. Many other individuals and groups have rallied to the defense of the new path, including Buzz Aldrin, the X-Prize Foundation, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, the Space Frontier Foundation, The Planetary Society, The Economist, and Wayne Hale, who made an eloquent reference to Robert Heinlein and his writing in support of space (NASA Blogs 2-2-2010).;
Lori Garver, NASA Associate Administrator, said "We're not cancelling our plans to explore space: we're cancelling Constellation" (Leslie Mullen - Astrobiology 2-3-2010).

There is also an article from someone who's job is obviously NOT at stake, and who is a long-time friend of the space program, Director James Cameron (Washington Post 2-5-2010). Cameron is a calm, clear and practical thinker and manager who knows how to pick good technical people, and how to use his resources and funds most effectively to make good movies. He has directed the development of very advanced technical equipment which will soon be used to very good effect by many other producers and directors. He (with his picked staff), had to imagine what this equipment would do, why it was needed and how it would work, before they designed it. He is also able to follow engineering arguments so that he has a respect for the opinions of engineers and does not order them to do the impossible or the dangerous. Thus he has many of the exact skills that would be needed to make high-level decisions about a large technical program. He is obviously far more competent in such matters than the NASA manager who so little respected engineers that on the day in 1986 before the Challenger exploded, he said the immortal, despised and ultimately deadly words "take off your engineer's hat and put on your manager's hat".

About 10 years ago, Cameron attended one of the early Mars Society Conventions. He sat in the audience with us, soaking up all the Mars technical lore for his projected Mars TV series which was probably cancelled by all the quickie competition from the cheap Mars movies that were made during that period. Later, in a talk to the whole convention, he revealed a better pressurized manned rover design for the Moon or Mars than any that I have ever seen from NASA. As a result of operating cameras in the Russian submersibles during the filming of the actual wreck of the Titanic, miles deep under the North Atlantic, he wanted to be able to reach out and pick up objects on the ocean floor, which was of course impossible due to the extreme pressure. As a result, his rover design allows the entire rover to "kneel down" on its axles when a promising object on the surface is spotted. A robot arm then can pick up the object and place it into a small airlock. When the inner airlock door is opened, the rock can be immediately examined, without the hours required to "suit up" just to collect a single rock.

Some of the comments on Cameron's article criticize him for expressing his opinion while not being a "rocket scientist". The answer to this may lie in what led Dr. Griffin astray. Griffin is a world-class and magnificent engineer, but without casting aspersions on engineers, who I greatly admire for their technical skill, he is "only" an engineer. Cameron (as described here) is thus in effect operating at a level "above" the level of the engineer. He has to respect engineers, but also be more than an engineer. If you ask a space engineer to design a space program, he will probably design it based on vehicles. This is the famous "If you have a hammer - the answer is a nail" trap. Before you ever start designing hardware, first you have to decide the overall purpose of the program - why are we doing this at all, then what that hardware should do and then how it should do it. Only then should hardware design begin. Griffin and his team instead began with hardware designs and created a program that partially fit those designs.

While the cancellation of the lunar program has made many of us depressed at the prospect of returning to the treadmill of going in circles in LEO for another decade or two, the actual choice is one of going in bureaucratic circles forever or not. The basic question is (if you work in the space industry): do you want to get to the point where large numbers of people can travel to and can work in space, or do you want space to be too expensive for that for decades to come? Do you want to build expendable rockets forever, or start building Mars landers and lunar mining equipment. Government agencies by their very nature cannot and will not reduce operating costs. Private companies have to do that to compete. Without reducing operating costs dramatically, our space future will be left on the ground.

What will happen if the new program (which once more opens NASA to new ideas) is allow to proceed? It is even possible that with private enterprise handling the known hazards of transport to LEO, NASA will be able to re-focus its old genius on transport and exploration beyond LEO, so that we might even be able to return to the moon sooner than under the current program. (That is, of course, if we can formulate a good scientific or economic reason to go back there immediately.)

So yes, we will not be going to the moon on impossibly expensive expendable rockets, with expendable crew capsules and expendable lunar ferries, and without even knowing why we are going back or what we would do once we return. What we will be doing (hopefully - if the politicians keep their promises, which no-one can guarantee), is beginning the transition to the expansion of the human economic sphere into space. The so-called "flexible path, if it is followed properly, will open up access to multiple destinations and space activities. For example the use of space for production of clean, continuous solar energy could be enabled (although this option was unfortunately not mentioned in the announcement). Reduced cost of access will also allow much more and better space science to be done. Human and robotic expeditions to the Moon, Mars, its moons and to near earth asteroids would become possible and much safer.

How will we be able to tell if the program is going in the "right" direction? The government should go ahead and create launch contract guarantees with at least two companies for ground to LEO operations. It should never develop or operate an earth to orbit vehicle again. We (the future-oriented space community) will need to see actual funding supported and enacted to allow development of advanced and innovative technology, such as plasma rocket engines like the VASIMR for use in deep space, and hypersonic air-breathing engines for future launch vehicles. We want several companies to be able to develop systems to safely, reliably and cheaply deliver cargo and passengers to low Earth orbit destinations. We want the government to underscore the critical need for a heavy lift booster (HLV), and encourage the private sector to develop one itself, preferably as a re-usable two stage booster (no easy task).

We want to see the development of a truly and fully integrated space transportation system by NASA in conjunction with the private sector, one that will allow access to all areas within and including the Moon's orbit (cis-lunar space), as well as the nearby Earth-Sun LaGrange Points 1 and 2. This system should include both vehicles and nodes and incorporate delivery of propellants to orbit by private launch vehicles to be stored in large propellant depots (nodes). This would allow deep space vehicles to be launched without propellants in their tanks, greatly increasing the size of vehicles that can be launched. We want to see the development of generalized, re-usable vehicles (space taxis, space tugs, lunar ferries) for transport of humans and cargo to points beyond low earth orbit and return to their starting point for re-fueling. We need to see a long-range, realistic plan for actual exploration missions based on reduced transport costs and the actual funds available. We want crew safety, redundancy and creation of self-rescue abilities and crew refuges to be a high priority. We also need solid reasons and rationales for each exploration mission. We also expect closer cooperative efforts in manned exploration between the US and other countries with less visible US domination. In space, countries should cooperate and companies should compete for the benefit of all.

What can we do to make the current massive lurch in the space program palatable to its critics. In the near term, exceptional measures should be taken to assist NASA and contractor employees to find new jobs with either orbit access service providers or within NASA to begin work on the new in-space transport system. We would hope that the government would encourage the new companies to open facilities in some of the communities which stand to lose the most jobs, as Bolden suggested at his press conference. Within just a few years, reduced costs could mean even more space-related jobs than there are now as cost savings spill over into the private sector and encourage more launches by both government and business. Reduced access costs could thus mean more missions. We should establish a clear path and timetable to the availability of a private HLV, and specific payloads for its manifest, such as giant space telescopes and propellant depots. As soon as feasible, a logical sequence of human mission destinations with a rough timetable should be established, to show everyone that human exploration beyond LEO will continue.

Space is a very, very hard row to hoe. Some of the projected entrepreneurial milestones will happen later than expected and expenses will initially be higher than expected. Disasters will probably happen. However, the benefits of space commerce and clean energy and being a multi-planet species far outweigh the risks and costs if they are accomplished by business methods. Space must become economical before it is practical. Give the new (and old) space entrepreneurs a real chance to accomplish this and I believe that the results will be truly amazing.

Source:- http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1377