Astronomy interviewed Aldrin at the iHobby Expo in Chicago in October 2004. We talked for more than 90 minutes and produced more than 7,000 words. Many of those appeared in the May article. Here you’ll find the rest of the story.
Buzz Aldrin: My interest right from the beginning has always been: How do we get into orbital space travel for private citizens, knowing that suborbital flights may come along first? But it’s going to be so difficult to make that transition. The only way orbital will happen is by spinning off of a government activity and then using similar facilities.
I still feel that way, but there’s a possibility that one can contribute to the other. And there’s a strong indication from Virgin Galactic that they really do want to move into orbital and beyond, to hotels and other space activities. If they do, then I think there’s an opening to look at the spacecraft being launched from an airplane.
The spacecraft could evolve into a very similar spacecraft that could go orbital by vertical launch with a different set of rockets. The spacecraft may be pioneering in its configuration and how it operates. Take a look at the innovativeness of SpaceShipOne. It uses variable geometry during reentry. There’s a change in the geometric configuration for reentry, and then, once it becomes subsonic, the tail comes back down into a landing configuration. That feature is something that has attracted me for 8 or 10 years. We should try to find a home for a design where wings can deploy outward once the spacecraft becomes subsonic, with hinges that run alongside longitudinally. They would be partially shielded from the hot gases around the corner, and then the wings would fold out without being in the heat flux during reentry.
In the government exploration end of things, it’s been discouraging looking at the past shortcomings of trying to come up with replacement launch vehicles for the shuttle. I’m thinking of the Air Force and NASA trying to work together on something that could replace the Air Force’s Atlas and Titan rockets, and the shuttle. The two agencies couldn’t get their national launch system to work. Then came the Air Force’s space-lifter followed by the single-stage Delta Clipper VCX. That was followed by NASA’s version, which looked at three contractors: Rockwell with its shuttle kind of thing, McDonald-Douglas with a vertical launch/vertical landing vehicle, and Lockheed with their version. The more difficult one was selected: Lockheed’s X-33 and the full-scale version, called Venture Star.
A: Would the market have to get a lot larger for aerospace companies to do much innovation beyond expendable launchers?
BA: The EELV [Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle] Air Force competition started out with four companies and narrowed it down to two. Then, instead of picking one with redundancy sufficient to be able to have assured access to space, the Air Force decided that two companies — Boeing and Lockheed — with their increased market, were going to build them anyway. So they picked two winners.
The problem with that approach is that neither company wants to proceed with reusables. They were looking just at expendables. If you pick one winner, then the other one would investigate something more advanced than trying to build a case for reusables. But if you have just two winners with their cost-efficient expendables, they’re going to convince everybody that the market doesn’t exist for reusables. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard them say the business case won’t close. You wouldn’t expect them to say that if they just convinced their shareholders that they made a great deal with the Air Force, and they’re investing money for the next 20 years in expendables. They sure don’t want anybody to think that anybody can make the business case with reusables.
A: But your company was looking in that direction, wasn’t it?
BA: Our company’s approach for the past 8 or 10 years has been to look at an evolutionary way into reusables, spurred by an objective to replace the solid rockets on the shuttle. So we started looking at ways we could replace them with Russian Zenit rockets.
So we developed something that was pretty innovative. Instead of the EELV having a single core with solid boosters and three cores for the heavy version, we had an expendable core stage inside two reusables. In addition, we put the fuel tanks for the expendable on the sides where they could drop off. So, you’d have two reusable engines and a center engine burning together at launch. When the reusables are empty, they separate, but the drop tanks for the core stage are only half expended. So, they continue to burn. Once you drop those, you have the full core-stage left.
There’s a lot of commonality in the design, and you move from reusable to expendable. We’ve never found anyone interested in investing a lot of money in this concept. Whether it’s small, medium, or large, there’s a whole family of rockets you can develop with this feature.
Anyway, the EELV program is moving along, whereas the single stage to orbit — the X-33 and Venture Star — went by the wayside. Three or 4 years, a million dollars or more, and nothing to show for it.
Then came the space launch initiative, which was trying to develop multi-stage reusable rockets. It ended up being a three-stage reusable, but they didn’t call it that because they didn’t want to irritate the dedicated single-stage advocates. Just to explain what that entailed: The first stage blew back and landed; the second stage didn’t have a payload, but would barely go into orbit and then come back and land; the third stage was reusable and would go to the destination. Take a crew to the space station, for example.
That method clearly was going to be way too expensive, so our approach has always been to look at basic ways of doing it incrementally. But because our organization did not have a total package of redesign, rebuild, and relaunch, and we have all the upper stages, we didn’t have the people to do that. We just wanted to say: “Hey, we know how to build reusable boosters.” It just never caught on.
A: It seems like you keep bumping up against the small-market problem.
BA: Absolutely. So many innovative, entrepreneurial, smaller companies trying to compete with the big aerospace companies said to themselves: “We don’t want to deal with the government. The government has too much red tape.” Right from the very beginning, our objective was to get NASA to replace their solid rockets on the shuttle, so we were never really going after the commercial market — we were going after the government. Unfortunately, the government had its own way of looking at how it was going to do things.
A: How did that play out when NASA was first thinking about the space shuttle and space station?
BA: I don’t want to get into all the different things I’ve thought about as to how the station could have been different. But looking back, there was a “what if” in my mind. In the early 1970s, I was still with NASA, and I looked at the two-stage, fully reusable shuttle concept. The boosters didn’t fly back, the orbiters didn’t fly back. They put a cockpit in the booster, and the moment I saw that, I knew it was wrong, but I was not able to convince people, “Hey, that’s stupid.” So they continued on for a year, until it was obviously way too expensive. Then they had to redesign the shuttle in a hurry.
One of my team members said, what if, in the early 1970s, with the reduction of support for the station and then the shuttle itself, the head of NASA had said: “Well, Mr. President, if we can’t fund this adequately, why don’t we defer this reusable delivery system and keep doing what we’re doing,” which was launching Apollo capsules on Saturn I rockets to Skylab.
We build a second Skylab so, when the first one’s successful, we fly the second and we join the two together. And we keep flying command modules up there with six people in it because we know how to do that; we could put six people in the command module.
Just keep building those on into the ’80s, and we would have had a great space station. We could have added things to it, and lots of people would have gotten lots of time on it. We’d have been so much better off than waiting until ’81 to fly the shuttle and then waiting until now to ever get the station going. It just would have made things so different had we looked at things differently. I really feel we’ve got to look at the past and learn the lessons for deciding what it is we want to do in the future.
A: How long should we keep the shuttle flying?
BA: We’re frustrated in looking at a shuttle replacement. There were some people who said we can fly the shuttle not only to 2020, but probably to 2025. And then, bango, Columbia. Before Columbia, our company was looking at an orbital space plane on an EELV, and my engineers were getting frustrated trying to sell reusable boosters. We decided to take a look at shuttle safety if we were going to fly the shuttle that long.
We looked at a four, six, or eight-person pod that could be ejected from the shuttle at any time. Just redesign the whole front end of the shuttle — the nose, the cabin, everything. Replace it with a pod. If it’s for six or eight people, it’s just too big and heavy, and it interferes with the cargo bay and the bulkhead. You could do a four-person pod and upgrade the four shuttles one at a time over a long period, but we didn’t think NASA would go for it.
We didn’t think anyone would ever do that, but we liked the design. In order to fly it, we’d just take the shuttle launch system — the solid rockets and the external tank. Okay, we wouldn’t have any engines because we’d taken the orbiter off and retired that. So, let’s take the engines and put them where they belong, which is on the bottom of the tank. We’ll get the engines from the EELV program, from the Delta, and put them there and take a pod from the upper stage of the EELV. We put our two modules, cargo, and the engine in there, so that’s what we submitted to NASA.
We still think it’s a good idea. It was better than the orbital space plane, but it looked like the orbital space plane was not going to live anyway. That was because a lot of other things were going on that summer [of 2003], and a lot of rumors about where the United States would be heading next in space. We weren’t sure the president was really going to come out with something concrete, so our group proposed a Space Vision Institute in early December to start working early in 2004.
A: Can we bring in international partners to help us with this?
BA I have encouraged the technology that the Russians are using in moving from a capsule to a lifting-body vehicle. I think that’s what we should do. That’s what our design employed, the one that has an ejectable pod.
It has a rounded bottom, and the edges go up so you can have these cylinders on either side. The heat shield protects those cylinders and they can rotate outward. As they rotate outward, wings deploy, and you do all of this subsonic. You have a parachute for ejection throughout the early part of the flight. Instead of carrying along an escape tower, you have ejection rockets. If they’re hybrid and you fire a lot of them, you could get enough thrust to reach orbit. But then, once you’re in orbit, you could use fewer of them for maneuvering and set aside a certain number for reentry. It’s more of an orbital vehicle that would be designed like this, with the potential for upgrading it so the wings fold out. You would not want to have that additional weight on the crew module that goes to the Moon and back, because you probably can’t count on targeting it for a runway landing anyway.
It’s that kind of shape that I think we can suggest to Virgin Galactic as a replacement for SpaceShipOne, using the variable geometry they’ve already successfully introduced. But now we want a variable geometry that comes from orbit and handles the heating and the g-forces and all that. We want you to design something that then can make a runway landing without having to have wings as you come down.
The European Space Agency has tried to bring a bunch of nations together. It’s not a really good model: Whatever you contribute, we’ll give you work to do rather than the technology to support it. Single, unitary leadership is really essential, and that’s tough to do when the Russians clearly want to beat us to Mars — with our money. And they have the unity and purpose to be able to make a design and stick with it — and not have to have competing designs.
I do think we need to bring in what other people have to offer. Not just say: What can we all do now? Let’s sit down and talk about how we are going to get there. That’s difficult to do. You need to chart a course and then figure out how you can add to it. And I really think that bringing in China early fills the gap in the space station and allows Russia to develop something that’s a follow-on to something that’s been around too long anyway — the Soyuz. Let’s replace that, and let’s not design something that has no compatibility with what the United States wants to develop.
I’m unimpressed with the idea of launching a crew on an EELV because it’s not big enough. You have to assemble it in Earth orbit at least three launches before you can get a crew to L1 [Langrangian Point 1] or the Moon. I think we should go with a shuttle-derived launch vehicle having a heavy lift capability that’s capable of growing even more by going from a four-segment solid booster to a five-segment solid. That’s assuming we can’t develop an economical, liquid, expendable booster that’s the forerunner of a liquid reusable booster. We should do that when we can afford it.
I’m not sure how it all plays out, but I think we need to get a crew to the Moon with one launch if we can. Maybe we can meet the lander there. To me, the lander probably isn’t the same vehicle you launch the crew in, with the same heat shield coming back. But that may prove to be wrong if we can come up with much lighter-weight materials. The proposed crew exploration vehicle may, indeed, be the module, but it then would attach to a lander that could be reusable. It’s not clear yet exactly what that’s going to be.
There’s one thing I have not understood in all this discussion of heading back to the Moon. People talk about going to the lunar south pole or north pole, where there’s probably ice. The ice resides deep in craters, places that remain in permanent shadow, and maybe there are spots on the rims of the craters that are in sunlight all the time. Why don’t we make use of those temperature differences?
Some companies have looked at ways of using temperature changes on the surface of Earth or in the oceans to generate electricity. There have been a lot of experiments done on how to do this. By god, the temperature extremes on the Moon are far greater than any of those on Earth. I’ve never understood why somebody hasn’t thought of using the lunar temperature differences to drive a turbine. It’s not my field, but it just seems so logical to me. I think I convinced the nuclear guys at NASA to begin to look at it. Whether they will or not, I don’t know.
Now, I make a point of saying we should build up a permanence on Mars but we don’t necessarily need to build up a permanence on the Moon. That’s directly opposite the opinion of Tom Payne, a respected guy who was the administrator of NASA when we landed on the Moon. He made a lot of key decisions, and he’s the one who told me, when I was looking at using cycler spacecraft to go to the Moon: Why don’t you look at Mars? He encouraged me to look at that, so I did. Later, he headed the National Commission on Space and it, in essence, endorsed the future use of cycling spaceships between Earth and Mars. Other people, because it wasn’t their idea, have not been so gracious in endorsing this concept, but some of the other people just want to commit to nuclear propulsion. And that’s still an iffy proposition.
The sophistication of automation and robotics is really increasing. The real problem that would hamper automation at Mars is the transmission time. While automation would thrive on the Moon, it won’t work quite as well at Mars because you don’t have the human intelligence. Unless, as I said before, you have the human intelligence in a nice permanent place orbiting Mars. You may not want it at the surface, but I don’t know why — there are more resources on the surface.
I think there is clearly a balance between the robotics that you send somewhere, the telescopes that you put in different places, and how you service them. For example, if we put a telescope at Sun-Earth L2 [Langrangian Point 2], which is in the shade of the Sun and 4 times farther away than the Moon, do we service it with humans there or do we bring it back more leisurely to Earth-Moon L1 and service it there? I can see building up a permanence at Earth-Moon L1 to process the fuels that could be produced robotically, with some supervision, at the Moon’s poles. We may find it advantageous just because of the shipping convenience to have a human permanence at L1 and not at the lunar poles. If there’s water ice at the poles, we send the fuel up in the form of water and ice. We’ve known how to deal with pumping water for centuries. We pump water in the tanks, and we launch them to L1. We then convert the water to oxygen and hydrogen leisurely, in zero-g conditions, for propellant. Then that becomes our propellant farm.
A: And how do we use that propellant to go elsewhere in the solar system?
BA As the Moon moves around Earth, it eventually will get to the right marshalling orbit. By that I mean, if we’re going to Mars, we’ll know several months ahead what orbit we should be departing from and how that orbit will precess up to the time of launch. So, we start marshalling things in that high elliptical orbit. We then bring the propellant to the spacecraft, which is still in this big orbit, and each time the Moon comes around once a month, we can get off the Moon and into that particular orbit.
The crew’s not going to be there, the crew is going to be on Earth. The crew gets on the spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, rendezvousing with the ship as it comes around. Once it leaves, there may be some skeleton structure left behind, along with the people who’ve been assisting the launch. Maybe you abandon that to move on to the next location, although that might be hard to do in the time period you’ve got. But that’s getting way ahead of ourselves. Certainly, the people who prepare the launch to the high ellipse go back to Earth again.
Now I’ve got a cycling spaceship coming back, so we know what the orbit is we’re trying to get into. The cycling spaceship forces you to launch on time. We know how to do that. What you’re doing with smaller interceptor vehicles or taxi spacecraft is to look at how to implement the process. The whole idea fascinates me. It means you don’t have to have a gigantic interplanetary spaceship that is in orbit around Earth, then leaves Earth, goes to Mars, and enters Mars’ orbit. I don’t think you can throw it away each time you go to Mars. I think you’re going to want an Earth-to-Mars vehicle and an Earth-return vehicle, and you’re going to want an interceptor that leaves the surface of Mars for short durations. That may be the same craft that, when you get to Earth, you get in and reenter the atmosphere. You may have taken it all the way there, but you don’t live in it all the time.
I guess I’m still of the opinion that we ought to become a space-faring society, so we don’t have to rush to a gravity field and do exercises in zero-gravity en route. Let’s really look at creating artificial gravity for a cycling spaceship that doesn’t start or stop. You can establish a rotation and keep it going all the time. It can get bigger and bigger and you never have to slow it down.
You can have the mechanisms to rotate the spacecraft in a central core, and you rotate around the center part. Maybe you have a reactor for power off to one side, and the habitable part on another. If you compare this design with bringing it all together somehow in a non-rotating spacecraft, you’re going to have more weight for sure. And the more weight, the more it argues for cycling spaceships than it does for starting and stopping with the use of propellant, whether it’s nuclear or chemical.
Buzz Aldrin: My interest right from the beginning has always been: How do we get into orbital space travel for private citizens, knowing that suborbital flights may come along first? But it’s going to be so difficult to make that transition. The only way orbital will happen is by spinning off of a government activity and then using similar facilities.
I still feel that way, but there’s a possibility that one can contribute to the other. And there’s a strong indication from Virgin Galactic that they really do want to move into orbital and beyond, to hotels and other space activities. If they do, then I think there’s an opening to look at the spacecraft being launched from an airplane.
The spacecraft could evolve into a very similar spacecraft that could go orbital by vertical launch with a different set of rockets. The spacecraft may be pioneering in its configuration and how it operates. Take a look at the innovativeness of SpaceShipOne. It uses variable geometry during reentry. There’s a change in the geometric configuration for reentry, and then, once it becomes subsonic, the tail comes back down into a landing configuration. That feature is something that has attracted me for 8 or 10 years. We should try to find a home for a design where wings can deploy outward once the spacecraft becomes subsonic, with hinges that run alongside longitudinally. They would be partially shielded from the hot gases around the corner, and then the wings would fold out without being in the heat flux during reentry.
In the government exploration end of things, it’s been discouraging looking at the past shortcomings of trying to come up with replacement launch vehicles for the shuttle. I’m thinking of the Air Force and NASA trying to work together on something that could replace the Air Force’s Atlas and Titan rockets, and the shuttle. The two agencies couldn’t get their national launch system to work. Then came the Air Force’s space-lifter followed by the single-stage Delta Clipper VCX. That was followed by NASA’s version, which looked at three contractors: Rockwell with its shuttle kind of thing, McDonald-Douglas with a vertical launch/vertical landing vehicle, and Lockheed with their version. The more difficult one was selected: Lockheed’s X-33 and the full-scale version, called Venture Star.
A: Would the market have to get a lot larger for aerospace companies to do much innovation beyond expendable launchers?
BA: The EELV [Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle] Air Force competition started out with four companies and narrowed it down to two. Then, instead of picking one with redundancy sufficient to be able to have assured access to space, the Air Force decided that two companies — Boeing and Lockheed — with their increased market, were going to build them anyway. So they picked two winners.
The problem with that approach is that neither company wants to proceed with reusables. They were looking just at expendables. If you pick one winner, then the other one would investigate something more advanced than trying to build a case for reusables. But if you have just two winners with their cost-efficient expendables, they’re going to convince everybody that the market doesn’t exist for reusables. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard them say the business case won’t close. You wouldn’t expect them to say that if they just convinced their shareholders that they made a great deal with the Air Force, and they’re investing money for the next 20 years in expendables. They sure don’t want anybody to think that anybody can make the business case with reusables.
A: But your company was looking in that direction, wasn’t it?
BA: Our company’s approach for the past 8 or 10 years has been to look at an evolutionary way into reusables, spurred by an objective to replace the solid rockets on the shuttle. So we started looking at ways we could replace them with Russian Zenit rockets.
So we developed something that was pretty innovative. Instead of the EELV having a single core with solid boosters and three cores for the heavy version, we had an expendable core stage inside two reusables. In addition, we put the fuel tanks for the expendable on the sides where they could drop off. So, you’d have two reusable engines and a center engine burning together at launch. When the reusables are empty, they separate, but the drop tanks for the core stage are only half expended. So, they continue to burn. Once you drop those, you have the full core-stage left.
There’s a lot of commonality in the design, and you move from reusable to expendable. We’ve never found anyone interested in investing a lot of money in this concept. Whether it’s small, medium, or large, there’s a whole family of rockets you can develop with this feature.
Anyway, the EELV program is moving along, whereas the single stage to orbit — the X-33 and Venture Star — went by the wayside. Three or 4 years, a million dollars or more, and nothing to show for it.
Then came the space launch initiative, which was trying to develop multi-stage reusable rockets. It ended up being a three-stage reusable, but they didn’t call it that because they didn’t want to irritate the dedicated single-stage advocates. Just to explain what that entailed: The first stage blew back and landed; the second stage didn’t have a payload, but would barely go into orbit and then come back and land; the third stage was reusable and would go to the destination. Take a crew to the space station, for example.
That method clearly was going to be way too expensive, so our approach has always been to look at basic ways of doing it incrementally. But because our organization did not have a total package of redesign, rebuild, and relaunch, and we have all the upper stages, we didn’t have the people to do that. We just wanted to say: “Hey, we know how to build reusable boosters.” It just never caught on.
A: It seems like you keep bumping up against the small-market problem.
BA: Absolutely. So many innovative, entrepreneurial, smaller companies trying to compete with the big aerospace companies said to themselves: “We don’t want to deal with the government. The government has too much red tape.” Right from the very beginning, our objective was to get NASA to replace their solid rockets on the shuttle, so we were never really going after the commercial market — we were going after the government. Unfortunately, the government had its own way of looking at how it was going to do things.
A: How did that play out when NASA was first thinking about the space shuttle and space station?
BA: I don’t want to get into all the different things I’ve thought about as to how the station could have been different. But looking back, there was a “what if” in my mind. In the early 1970s, I was still with NASA, and I looked at the two-stage, fully reusable shuttle concept. The boosters didn’t fly back, the orbiters didn’t fly back. They put a cockpit in the booster, and the moment I saw that, I knew it was wrong, but I was not able to convince people, “Hey, that’s stupid.” So they continued on for a year, until it was obviously way too expensive. Then they had to redesign the shuttle in a hurry.
One of my team members said, what if, in the early 1970s, with the reduction of support for the station and then the shuttle itself, the head of NASA had said: “Well, Mr. President, if we can’t fund this adequately, why don’t we defer this reusable delivery system and keep doing what we’re doing,” which was launching Apollo capsules on Saturn I rockets to Skylab.
We build a second Skylab so, when the first one’s successful, we fly the second and we join the two together. And we keep flying command modules up there with six people in it because we know how to do that; we could put six people in the command module.
Just keep building those on into the ’80s, and we would have had a great space station. We could have added things to it, and lots of people would have gotten lots of time on it. We’d have been so much better off than waiting until ’81 to fly the shuttle and then waiting until now to ever get the station going. It just would have made things so different had we looked at things differently. I really feel we’ve got to look at the past and learn the lessons for deciding what it is we want to do in the future.
A: How long should we keep the shuttle flying?
BA: We’re frustrated in looking at a shuttle replacement. There were some people who said we can fly the shuttle not only to 2020, but probably to 2025. And then, bango, Columbia. Before Columbia, our company was looking at an orbital space plane on an EELV, and my engineers were getting frustrated trying to sell reusable boosters. We decided to take a look at shuttle safety if we were going to fly the shuttle that long.
We looked at a four, six, or eight-person pod that could be ejected from the shuttle at any time. Just redesign the whole front end of the shuttle — the nose, the cabin, everything. Replace it with a pod. If it’s for six or eight people, it’s just too big and heavy, and it interferes with the cargo bay and the bulkhead. You could do a four-person pod and upgrade the four shuttles one at a time over a long period, but we didn’t think NASA would go for it.
We didn’t think anyone would ever do that, but we liked the design. In order to fly it, we’d just take the shuttle launch system — the solid rockets and the external tank. Okay, we wouldn’t have any engines because we’d taken the orbiter off and retired that. So, let’s take the engines and put them where they belong, which is on the bottom of the tank. We’ll get the engines from the EELV program, from the Delta, and put them there and take a pod from the upper stage of the EELV. We put our two modules, cargo, and the engine in there, so that’s what we submitted to NASA.
We still think it’s a good idea. It was better than the orbital space plane, but it looked like the orbital space plane was not going to live anyway. That was because a lot of other things were going on that summer [of 2003], and a lot of rumors about where the United States would be heading next in space. We weren’t sure the president was really going to come out with something concrete, so our group proposed a Space Vision Institute in early December to start working early in 2004.
A: Can we bring in international partners to help us with this?
BA I have encouraged the technology that the Russians are using in moving from a capsule to a lifting-body vehicle. I think that’s what we should do. That’s what our design employed, the one that has an ejectable pod.
It has a rounded bottom, and the edges go up so you can have these cylinders on either side. The heat shield protects those cylinders and they can rotate outward. As they rotate outward, wings deploy, and you do all of this subsonic. You have a parachute for ejection throughout the early part of the flight. Instead of carrying along an escape tower, you have ejection rockets. If they’re hybrid and you fire a lot of them, you could get enough thrust to reach orbit. But then, once you’re in orbit, you could use fewer of them for maneuvering and set aside a certain number for reentry. It’s more of an orbital vehicle that would be designed like this, with the potential for upgrading it so the wings fold out. You would not want to have that additional weight on the crew module that goes to the Moon and back, because you probably can’t count on targeting it for a runway landing anyway.
It’s that kind of shape that I think we can suggest to Virgin Galactic as a replacement for SpaceShipOne, using the variable geometry they’ve already successfully introduced. But now we want a variable geometry that comes from orbit and handles the heating and the g-forces and all that. We want you to design something that then can make a runway landing without having to have wings as you come down.
The European Space Agency has tried to bring a bunch of nations together. It’s not a really good model: Whatever you contribute, we’ll give you work to do rather than the technology to support it. Single, unitary leadership is really essential, and that’s tough to do when the Russians clearly want to beat us to Mars — with our money. And they have the unity and purpose to be able to make a design and stick with it — and not have to have competing designs.
I do think we need to bring in what other people have to offer. Not just say: What can we all do now? Let’s sit down and talk about how we are going to get there. That’s difficult to do. You need to chart a course and then figure out how you can add to it. And I really think that bringing in China early fills the gap in the space station and allows Russia to develop something that’s a follow-on to something that’s been around too long anyway — the Soyuz. Let’s replace that, and let’s not design something that has no compatibility with what the United States wants to develop.
I’m unimpressed with the idea of launching a crew on an EELV because it’s not big enough. You have to assemble it in Earth orbit at least three launches before you can get a crew to L1 [Langrangian Point 1] or the Moon. I think we should go with a shuttle-derived launch vehicle having a heavy lift capability that’s capable of growing even more by going from a four-segment solid booster to a five-segment solid. That’s assuming we can’t develop an economical, liquid, expendable booster that’s the forerunner of a liquid reusable booster. We should do that when we can afford it.
I’m not sure how it all plays out, but I think we need to get a crew to the Moon with one launch if we can. Maybe we can meet the lander there. To me, the lander probably isn’t the same vehicle you launch the crew in, with the same heat shield coming back. But that may prove to be wrong if we can come up with much lighter-weight materials. The proposed crew exploration vehicle may, indeed, be the module, but it then would attach to a lander that could be reusable. It’s not clear yet exactly what that’s going to be.
There’s one thing I have not understood in all this discussion of heading back to the Moon. People talk about going to the lunar south pole or north pole, where there’s probably ice. The ice resides deep in craters, places that remain in permanent shadow, and maybe there are spots on the rims of the craters that are in sunlight all the time. Why don’t we make use of those temperature differences?
Some companies have looked at ways of using temperature changes on the surface of Earth or in the oceans to generate electricity. There have been a lot of experiments done on how to do this. By god, the temperature extremes on the Moon are far greater than any of those on Earth. I’ve never understood why somebody hasn’t thought of using the lunar temperature differences to drive a turbine. It’s not my field, but it just seems so logical to me. I think I convinced the nuclear guys at NASA to begin to look at it. Whether they will or not, I don’t know.
Now, I make a point of saying we should build up a permanence on Mars but we don’t necessarily need to build up a permanence on the Moon. That’s directly opposite the opinion of Tom Payne, a respected guy who was the administrator of NASA when we landed on the Moon. He made a lot of key decisions, and he’s the one who told me, when I was looking at using cycler spacecraft to go to the Moon: Why don’t you look at Mars? He encouraged me to look at that, so I did. Later, he headed the National Commission on Space and it, in essence, endorsed the future use of cycling spaceships between Earth and Mars. Other people, because it wasn’t their idea, have not been so gracious in endorsing this concept, but some of the other people just want to commit to nuclear propulsion. And that’s still an iffy proposition.
The sophistication of automation and robotics is really increasing. The real problem that would hamper automation at Mars is the transmission time. While automation would thrive on the Moon, it won’t work quite as well at Mars because you don’t have the human intelligence. Unless, as I said before, you have the human intelligence in a nice permanent place orbiting Mars. You may not want it at the surface, but I don’t know why — there are more resources on the surface.
I think there is clearly a balance between the robotics that you send somewhere, the telescopes that you put in different places, and how you service them. For example, if we put a telescope at Sun-Earth L2 [Langrangian Point 2], which is in the shade of the Sun and 4 times farther away than the Moon, do we service it with humans there or do we bring it back more leisurely to Earth-Moon L1 and service it there? I can see building up a permanence at Earth-Moon L1 to process the fuels that could be produced robotically, with some supervision, at the Moon’s poles. We may find it advantageous just because of the shipping convenience to have a human permanence at L1 and not at the lunar poles. If there’s water ice at the poles, we send the fuel up in the form of water and ice. We’ve known how to deal with pumping water for centuries. We pump water in the tanks, and we launch them to L1. We then convert the water to oxygen and hydrogen leisurely, in zero-g conditions, for propellant. Then that becomes our propellant farm.
A: And how do we use that propellant to go elsewhere in the solar system?
BA As the Moon moves around Earth, it eventually will get to the right marshalling orbit. By that I mean, if we’re going to Mars, we’ll know several months ahead what orbit we should be departing from and how that orbit will precess up to the time of launch. So, we start marshalling things in that high elliptical orbit. We then bring the propellant to the spacecraft, which is still in this big orbit, and each time the Moon comes around once a month, we can get off the Moon and into that particular orbit.
The crew’s not going to be there, the crew is going to be on Earth. The crew gets on the spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, rendezvousing with the ship as it comes around. Once it leaves, there may be some skeleton structure left behind, along with the people who’ve been assisting the launch. Maybe you abandon that to move on to the next location, although that might be hard to do in the time period you’ve got. But that’s getting way ahead of ourselves. Certainly, the people who prepare the launch to the high ellipse go back to Earth again.
Now I’ve got a cycling spaceship coming back, so we know what the orbit is we’re trying to get into. The cycling spaceship forces you to launch on time. We know how to do that. What you’re doing with smaller interceptor vehicles or taxi spacecraft is to look at how to implement the process. The whole idea fascinates me. It means you don’t have to have a gigantic interplanetary spaceship that is in orbit around Earth, then leaves Earth, goes to Mars, and enters Mars’ orbit. I don’t think you can throw it away each time you go to Mars. I think you’re going to want an Earth-to-Mars vehicle and an Earth-return vehicle, and you’re going to want an interceptor that leaves the surface of Mars for short durations. That may be the same craft that, when you get to Earth, you get in and reenter the atmosphere. You may have taken it all the way there, but you don’t live in it all the time.
I guess I’m still of the opinion that we ought to become a space-faring society, so we don’t have to rush to a gravity field and do exercises in zero-gravity en route. Let’s really look at creating artificial gravity for a cycling spaceship that doesn’t start or stop. You can establish a rotation and keep it going all the time. It can get bigger and bigger and you never have to slow it down.
You can have the mechanisms to rotate the spacecraft in a central core, and you rotate around the center part. Maybe you have a reactor for power off to one side, and the habitable part on another. If you compare this design with bringing it all together somehow in a non-rotating spacecraft, you’re going to have more weight for sure. And the more weight, the more it argues for cycling spaceships than it does for starting and stopping with the use of propellant, whether it’s nuclear or chemical.
