Well, it would be, but recall that ALH84001 has never been found ITTL, so there's less interest in astrobiology, and in particular Martian astrobiology. MACO's focus is on geological and meteorological data and gasses, though you never know what might turn up...
Well, it would be, but recall that ALH84001 has never been found ITTL, so there's less interest in astrobiology, and in particular Martian astrobiology. MACO's focus is on geological and meteorological data and gasses, though you never know what might turn up...
ISRU on the Moon? That's a VERY different kettle of fish from isru on Mars.
On the moon, you're smelting oxygen out of lunar rock, while on Mars, you're turning local co2 to methane and oxygen (using landed hydrogen). Given the fuel for a lunar ascent module will be, what, 10x the dry weight of the vehicle, and given that 95% of the fuel can be manufactured on Mars, leaving only 5% to be landed there, that option is very, VERY attractive. (1 ch4 + 2 O2 is 80 amu, of which only 4 are hydrogen from Earth)
Yes, you might want to make sure the fuel manufacturing craft was working well before you launch the actual MSR mission, but if you need to send on craft ahead with rovers anyway....
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Using ISRU isn't really that complex. The actual chemical processing of using the Martian atmosphere not something really groundbreaking as far as chemical processes go. The use of ISRU for a MSR allows the demonstration of the technology for future manned missions. Before any manned mission using ISRU you will need to demonstrate this. The missions can build on each other instead of being looked at as separate parts of a Mars exploration program. Trying to do ISRU on the lunar surface first to me doesn't make much sense because we are not even sure where the resources are actually located. You also are not really validating the technologies for ISRU beyong just the basic concept of ISRU. For Mars doing ISRU can be done at any location on the surface.
If you wanted to do a MSR really cheaply you can use the same method that was used for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Keep it simple and you target the lander at a interesting location, you then just drill down and take your sample. You can then return .5 kg sample back to Earth using ISRU. This can be verified on a relativelly cheap mission, easily under 1-Billion. Remember that both Mars Exploration Rovers where developed, built, launched and landed for less than 1-Billion and that was two rovers.
There is your MSR on the cheap. You can verify the technology and you haven't blown Billions of dollars. For the next MSR you can then move onto using ISRU with a rover which would involve heavier loads landed on the surface. However with ISRU you can move much higher mass of samples back to Earth. You also have a higher degree of confidence about the technology working. The key is building on the technology and continuing to build on it until you get to manned landings.
Oh, no doubt - it would be a different kind of ISRU on the lunar surface. But it would also be a cheaper one, too.
Well, mass matters on these Martian missions. The mas you're saving on the ascent vehicle is going to have be paid for on the descent vehicle that goes out before. If you can squeeze a sufficient ISRU unit along with your rover or rovers on the lander without having to be be forced to alter the surface delivery method to something more complex and risky (and expensive), it's worth discussing. But I am for simplicity and cost control. The mission is about sample retrieval.
Better to attempt a Martian ISRU on some separate mission, where there's no primary, high value mission to put at risk.
Yes, the use of isru makes the first lander with the rovers rather more expensive. But it makes the second one with the ascent vehicle a LOT lighter. Plus it proves tech for future missions.
The second mission ALREADY requires pinpoint controlled landing 'on a pillar of fire', so you cant use the balloon bouncing and rolling technique of light missions.
I'm not saying that it WOULD be done, but that it COULD and may be SHOULD be done. It ups the risk, and it ups the expense of the (first) probe, but it significantly ups the capabilities and lowers cost on the second. And. It proves tech for future missions.
Spread the cost out over 2 missions, and each one is conceivably possible. But, yes probably too pricy for Congress.
The ISRU unit is going to have lower mass than bringing your fuel you need to bring the sample back to Earth.
That's sort of the issue ISRU-for-MSR has, and one reason the planetary science community have a bit of a love-hate relationship with MSR: it's a test-drive for a manned mars mission on a variety of technical development levels--large mass through EDL, precision landings, Mars surface rendezvous, ect. Thus, you get the HSF lobby weighing in in support, which you don't usually get--a boon to getting the mission approved for development.
But....those same HSF supporters will want in exchange to test and demo unproven technology they want to depend on in their missions, like ISRU, or fancy aeroshell shapes and landing systems, or the like. And there's a solid case that these enable your mission as much as they'll enable the HSF missions--you'll get a bit more sample from your mission, and why doesn't that make you happy?
But the problem is that building those unproven--and thus risky--technologies into the critical path of your mission unnecessarily risks not getting your sample home at all. The sample which will make-or-break the career of everyone on the MSR science team from the primary investigator on down. So...MSR prefers to avoid those technologies in practice, and instead use a slightly bigger, more proven, slightly lower-capacity system, and that annoys the HSF people. And since for HSF, MSR is a useful-but-not-critical precursor that's mostly useful as a tech demo and for the planetary guys MSR is a somewhat interesting sample mission that gets some extra HSF support around the edges...it ends up being no one's baby when Congress comes calling with the ax.
Precisely my concern.
It's just this sort of mission creep that ends up driving up cost (and mission) overruns. Which is how missions get cancelled.
Reliability has to be the premier factor in a big, expensive mission like this. Right after that - cost containment. The sample either comes back or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it's a complete bust. (Yes, there might be some useful data returned from the site exploration, but the science team won't be getting what it came for, and for Congress, it will viewed as a dead loss.) That makes it unlike most other missions, where some useful science usually can be salvaged if there's a failure somewhere along the line, and the definition of "success" can be more qualified.
If you assume MSR has to be big expensive mission and using ISRU means it doesn't as long as you are willing to forgo the rover component and focus on just returning a sample.
Some MSR missions, especially the early ones, obviously have proposed doing just that - pick as good a site [typo fixed] as you can, and just content yourself with whatever your robotic arm can scoop up from around the lander. Certainly that would have some value. You could even do it in one launch.
Of course, you won't get much a representative sample suite that way.
MEPAG back in 2008 summarized what it felt would be most valuable from an MSR:
Abandoning most of those objectives would certainly get the cost down to some extent. But I assume that a minimalist profile like this would throw out ISRU since the development costs would eat up more budget, and - as e of pi notes - throw a risky, unproven technology on your critical path.
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It is the balance between cost/risk and science. What is intriguing for me is a possible MSR like outlined here - http://www.pioneerastro.com/Team/RZubrin/Mars_In-Situ_Resource_Utilization_Based_on_the_Reverse_Water_Gas_Shift_Experiments_and_Mission_Applications.pdf.
The MARS Phoenix Mission lander was about 400kg without heat shield. So if you can get your lander down to around this you can get your cost down. The ISRU is relatively straightforward and I don't see development costs being astronomical. The Mars Phoenix Mission was about $400 Million. Also once you drive down costs you are not betting so much money on a single mission. You can then at that point be risky. You drive the costs down so it isn't a flagship mission.
I was going to reply on the subject of MSR too; I was looking solely at the capability of the Saturn Multibodies to send mass to TMI, without considering cost. I bogged down on some key questions--working backwards through the mission, which is the best way of estimating masses I know:
1) assuming the sample will be returned to Earth in an aerobraking body that will land/splash down somewhere on Earth (it might be recovered midair while parachuting down, whatever) what is the best ratio of recovered material to the containing aeroshell masses we can achieve? This determines the mass of material we can recover--along with
2) should we go for direct launch from Mars surface to Earth, or should the sample launcher on Mars send the sample up to low Mars orbit to rendezvous with a Mars orbiter that includes the aeroshell and the propellant and rockets to then launch from low Mars orbit to Earth encounter? Whichever of these is best determines how much we can launch from Mars, bearing in mind that if we go for direct launch from Mars we need to land the aeroshell for Earth return, and the fuel to launch it and sample
The fuel, it has been pointed out might be synthesized in situ on Mars--provided we have a stock of hydrogen we send down! But it is hard to keep hydrogen in liquid form, particularly on a long Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mars, and then to keep it from boiling off while it is immersed in the Martian atmosphere, which is thin and cold by Terran surface standards to be sure, but quite conductive relative to a vacuum despite its thinness, and quite warm compared to liquid hydrogen storage temperatures! It would help if we get cracking turning it into methane and LOX pronto, but surely that process takes time.
I suppose if we have very bulky balloons that are tough enough not to be ripped apart by a Martian sandstorm or flying gravel whipped up in those winds (or we avoid sandstorm season and move fast enough to stay ahead of the next storm) we might let the hydrogen boil once we've landed on Mars, storing it in the balloon until we've managed to convert it into the more manageable fluids. Looking into gaseous storage of hydrogen in vacuum, it seemed a very poor alternative to storing it as liquid; on Earth we have the pressure of ambient air to do a lot of the work of containing it and so our balloons can be made of light stuff--out in space the material must be strong enough to hold it in under full pressure, and it seems to be a losing proposition to contain significant masses that way. Mars has a surface pressure but it is very low, so low I doubt it helps much here--and yet it poses hazards that require extra mass for toughness.
It also isn't clear to me how much power it will take to drive the reaction that cracks (very stable) CO2 into methane and oxygen, and then we have to compress and liquefy both, and store them chilled. (Sometimes on Mars it will be cool enough that keeping the propellants cold will be little bother; other times it is a lot warmer though). The power to do this is I believe in the Mars Direct manned proposals blithely assumed to come from a nuclear power plant! Realistically here it would need to come from solar power, and that determines how slowly the conversion will take place, hence how long we need to keep the hydrogen in elemental form. It might make more sense to use some solar power to keep chilling the hydrogen and keep it in compact, moderate-pressure low temperature condensed form (probably above its critical temperature, so it wouldn't technically be liquid but rather superfluid)
Anyway I hadn't considered the option of in situ fuel production; I assumed that all rocket operations beyond TMI would need to be done with hypergolic propellants (or conceivably ker-lox or other hydrocarbon, such as methane, LOX).
Therefore it seemed to me we would do best to aim for Mars's aphelion--it took me some time to verify it but I believe that the velocity difference between a Hohmann orbit with aphelion matching some portion of Mars's orbit and that planet's varying orbital velocity would be minimized then, when Mars is some 1.666 AU out.
However
3) it is not clear to me how much speed we can reasonably and conservatively hope to lose via some kind of aerobraking off Mars's atmosphere, versus having to cut it down (for Mars low orbit or landing) via rocket thrust alone. The speed with which the craft would approach Mars from a Hohmann orbit to Mars's aphelion is I estimate about 2 kilometers/sec; the kinetic energy this represents relative to Mars is small compared to the velocity the craft picks up in Mars's own potential well, so the craft will come in at just a bit above Martian escape velocity. Thus it actually makes little difference whether we go for the slow, minimum energy Martian encounter (but maximum TMI) or aim instead to encounter at perihelion, which will involve a faster transfer from Earth to Mars and yet at a lower TMI that allows a given mass launched to orbit to send a bigger payload. The more we have to brake that payload with rocket thrust rather than aerodynamic friction, the more we pay for the cheaper launch with a more expensive landing, but I suspect the difference in the latter variable is small considering most of it is losing Martian escape energy.
Anyway lacking good information as to how much aerobraking we can rely on, I have to pessimistically assume none--that landing will need to be done on rocket thrust, involving more than 5 km/sec delta V. Anything that can cut that down would be quite helpful!
4) choosing between an encounter where the whole mass of the craft lands on Mars, and then launches a direct-ascent sample back to Earth directly, versus one where the mass splits between a descent portion and one that remains in Martian orbit, for the sample to later be sent up to join, and be boosted from orbit on to Earth encounter, is tricky, to reiterate.
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And 5) is not so unclear to me as all the above sticking points, but I do hate to be on a different page with the authors regarding the basic capabilities of their own spacecraft!
But it seems to me that there is nothing stopping the mission from being launched on an H03 tipped with a Centaur third stage, and that plugging in figures for this configuration into Silverbird, going to C3=15 and with perigee at 185 km, inclination 28.5 degrees (which is Canaveral latitude I think) the maximum Heavy can launch not 15, but 25 tons to Mars!
Note also--C3=15 is an orbital energy that does reach Mars at aphelion. To reach perihelion instead would be somewhat cheaper--drastically so, in fact--4.4 in the same units. (Silverbird calculator however does not process fractional units of C3, they have to be integers.)
In terms of velocities (that is, C3^1/2) it's 2091 m/sec added to Earth's speed around the Sun to reach Mars at perihelion versus 3873 for your C3=15, that brings us out to Martian aphelion.
In terms of a launch from a 185 km altitude parking orbit, the latter requires just 464 more meters/sec delta-V, added to 3426 for the former from orbital speed of 7798 m/sec--a bit over 10 percent difference in mass to TMI if the boost is all from a Centaur's RL-10 engine with its ISP in the mid-440s, giving us almost three tons more to play with braking at Mars if we go for perihelion instead of aphelion.
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I tried to rough out a two-launch mission, where one launch sends down a probe including rovers, an in-situ processing plant, and some hydrogen, and assuming we can use hydrogen-oxygen rockets (for everything but the final sample launch from Mars, since that uses methane) since if we can carry the seed hydrogen down to Mars and store it there until we can process it into methane, we can probably store the hydrogen for the spacecraft to use approaching and landing on Mars as well. Trying to take into account gravity losses I estimated we could land about 5.5, maybe 6, of the 25 tons. I got tripped up by trying to take some shortcuts though so I gave up.
I think that even with a single launch and pessimistic assumptions--needing to use only hypergolic fuels brought with a single probe, minimal effort given to sampling (grab what is right around the landing site and call it good)--it should be possible to launch at least 100 kg back to Earth, half of that samples. With any breaks at all--being able to cut down the landing speed significantly with aerobraking; being able to use hydrogen-oxygen fuels for landing; sending two probes; using rovers (even, dare we suggest, flying rovers to range many hundreds of miles for choice samples?) on a second lander, using in situ processing and a ton or more of landed hydrogen-it could be possible to send back a ton or even several tons.
A lot depends on the answers to the questions posed above.
And now I'm thinking about Venus, and how the layer of Venus's atmosphere that is the same temperature as Earth's surface is also the layer at the same pressure, and hydrogen balloons won't pose any danger of burning in at atmosphere mostly made of carbon dioxide (and we only need 2/3 the mass or volume of hydrogen gas, because CO2 is 3/2 the molar mass of atmospheric gases on Earth) and there is hydrogen already available in the acid that laces the carbon dioxide, and wouldn't an airship base in Venus's atmosphere at that level, solar powered, be very feasible? We could even have the airship gradually accumulate LH2 and LOX for rockets to lift away from it back to orbit, and aerobraking there would not be problematic at all, and someday there could be aerostats that fly down to the surface and examine the weird metallic chemistry at those pressures and temperatures.
Heck, there might even be the possibility of very weird high temperature, probably metallic based, life down there.
And Venus is easier to get to than Mars energetically (although harder to get off of, good thing there is all that hydrogen available after all...)
OK, the problem is, no Buck Rodgers, no bucks. Astronauts to either Mars or Venus pose the problem of heavy radiation exposure to GCRs in the many months it takes to get there on minimum energy orbits--were it not for this, I'd say missions to either were feasible in the 1970s, with little more than Saturn V capabilities. (In fact the Saturn V still outclasses the H03 with Centaur, although only by a couple tens of percents). The notion of fuel creation in situ is pretty exciting, allowing remarkably economical returns from Mars (again, except for the radiation exposure problem) and even more so from Venus, despite the much higher launch delta-V required-but the hydrogen is readily available there.
For that matter, nowadays we believe Martian regolith has as much as 2 percent water content, so we might not even need to ship hydrogen to Mars.
The infrastructure we would need to ship to exploit either of these return options is heavy I guess, so much so we need not bother the authors with proposals to do it. By the time someone might consider it, new options for high-ISP thrusters with enough thrust to make the travel time shorter than Hohmann orbits significantly would probably be coming on line.
1) assuming the sample will be returned to Earth in an aerobraking body that will land/splash down somewhere on Earth (it might be recovered midair while parachuting down, whatever) what is the best ratio of recovered material to the containing aeroshell masses we can achieve? This determines the mass of material we can recover--along with
2) should we go for direct launch from Mars surface to Earth, or should the sample launcher on Mars send the sample up to low Mars orbit to rendezvous with a Mars orbiter that includes the aeroshell and the propellant and rockets to then launch from low Mars orbit to Earth encounter? Whichever of these is best determines how much we can launch from Mars, bearing in mind that if we go for direct launch from Mars we need to land the aeroshell for Earth return, and the fuel to launch it and sample
The fuel, it has been pointed out might be synthesized in situ on Mars--provided we have a stock of hydrogen we send down! But it is hard to keep hydrogen in liquid form, particularly on a long Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mars, and then to keep it from boiling off while it is immersed in the Martian atmosphere, which is thin and cold by Terran surface standards to be sure, but quite conductive relative to a vacuum despite its thinness, and quite warm compared to liquid hydrogen storage temperatures! It would help if we get cracking turning it into methane and LOX pronto, but surely that process takes time.
I suppose if we have very bulky balloons that are tough enough not to be ripped apart by a Martian sandstorm or flying gravel whipped up in those winds (or we avoid sandstorm season and move fast enough to stay ahead of the next storm) we might let the hydrogen boil once we've landed on Mars, storing it in the balloon until we've managed to convert it into the more manageable fluids. Looking into gaseous storage of hydrogen in vacuum, it seemed a very poor alternative to storing it as liquid; on Earth we have the pressure of ambient air to do a lot of the work of containing it and so our balloons can be made of light stuff--out in space the material must be strong enough to hold it in under full pressure, and it seems to be a losing proposition to contain significant masses that way. Mars has a surface pressure but it is very low, so low I doubt it helps much here--and yet it poses hazards that require extra mass for toughness.
It also isn't clear to me how much power it will take to drive the reaction that cracks (very stable) CO2 into methane and oxygen, and then we have to compress and liquefy both, and store them chilled. (Sometimes on Mars it will be cool enough that keeping the propellants cold will be little bother; other times it is a lot warmer though). The power to do this is I believe in the Mars Direct manned proposals blithely assumed to come from a nuclear power plant! Realistically here it would need to come from solar power, and that determines how slowly the conversion will take place, hence how long we need to keep the hydrogen in elemental form. It might make more sense to use some solar power to keep chilling the hydrogen and keep it in compact, moderate-pressure low temperature condensed form (probably above its critical temperature, so it wouldn't technically be liquid but rather superfluid)
Anyway I hadn't considered the option of in situ fuel production; I assumed that all rocket operations beyond TMI would need to be done with hypergolic propellants (or conceivably ker-lox or other hydrocarbon, such as methane, LOX).
Therefore it seemed to me we would do best to aim for Mars's aphelion--it took me some time to verify it but I believe that the velocity difference between a Hohmann orbit with aphelion matching some portion of Mars's orbit and that planet's varying orbital velocity would be minimized then, when Mars is some 1.666 AU out.
However
3) it is not clear to me how much speed we can reasonably and conservatively hope to lose via some kind of aerobraking off Mars's atmosphere, versus having to cut it down (for Mars low orbit or landing) via rocket thrust alone. The speed with which the craft would approach Mars from a Hohmann orbit to Mars's aphelion is I estimate about 2 kilometers/sec; the kinetic energy this represents relative to Mars is small compared to the velocity the craft picks up in Mars's own potential well, so the craft will come in at just a bit above Martian escape velocity. Thus it actually makes little difference whether we go for the slow, minimum energy Martian encounter (but maximum TMI) or aim instead to encounter at perihelion, which will involve a faster transfer from Earth to Mars and yet at a lower TMI that allows a given mass launched to orbit to send a bigger payload. The more we have to brake that payload with rocket thrust rather than aerodynamic friction, the more we pay for the cheaper launch with a more expensive landing, but I suspect the difference in the latter variable is small considering most of it is losing Martian escape energy.
Anyway lacking good information as to how much aerobraking we can rely on, I have to pessimistically assume none--that landing will need to be done on rocket thrust, involving more than 5 km/sec delta V. Anything that can cut that down would be quite helpful!
4) choosing between an encounter where the whole mass of the craft lands on Mars, and then launches a direct-ascent sample back to Earth directly, versus one where the mass splits between a descent portion and one that remains in Martian orbit, for the sample to later be sent up to join, and be boosted from orbit on to Earth encounter, is tricky, to reiterate.
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And 5) is not so unclear to me as all the above sticking points, but I do hate to be on a different page with the authors regarding the basic capabilities of their own spacecraft!
But it seems to me that there is nothing stopping the mission from being launched on an H03 tipped with a Centaur third stage, and that plugging in figures for this configuration into Silverbird, going to C3=15 and with perigee at 185 km, inclination 28.5 degrees (which is Canaveral latitude I think) the maximum Heavy can launch not 15, but 25 tons to Mars!
Note also--C3=15 is an orbital energy that does reach Mars at aphelion. To reach perihelion instead would be somewhat cheaper--drastically so, in fact--4.4 in the same units. (Silverbird calculator however does not process fractional units of C3, they have to be integers.
)In terms of velocities (that is, C3^1/2) it's 2091 m/sec added to Earth's speed around the Sun to reach Mars at perihelion versus 3873 for your C3=15, that brings us out to Martian aphelion.
In terms of a launch from a 185 km altitude parking orbit, the latter requires just 464 more meters/sec delta-V, added to 3426 for the former from orbital speed of 7798 m/sec--a bit over 10 percent difference in mass to TMI if the boost is all from a Centaur's RL-10 engine with its ISP in the mid-440s, giving us almost three tons more to play with braking at Mars if we go for perihelion instead of aphelion.
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I tried to rough out a two-launch mission, where one launch sends down a probe including rovers, an in-situ processing plant, and some hydrogen, and assuming we can use hydrogen-oxygen rockets (for everything but the final sample launch from Mars, since that uses methane) since if we can carry the seed hydrogen down to Mars and store it there until we can process it into methane, we can probably store the hydrogen for the spacecraft to use approaching and landing on Mars as well. Trying to take into account gravity losses I estimated we could land about 5.5, maybe 6, of the 25 tons. I got tripped up by trying to take some shortcuts though so I gave up.
I think that even with a single launch and pessimistic assumptions--needing to use only hypergolic fuels brought with a single probe, minimal effort given to sampling (grab what is right around the landing site and call it good)--it should be possible to launch at least 100 kg back to Earth, half of that samples. With any breaks at all--being able to cut down the landing speed significantly with aerobraking; being able to use hydrogen-oxygen fuels for landing; sending two probes; using rovers (even, dare we suggest, flying rovers to range many hundreds of miles for choice samples?
) on a second lander, using in situ processing and a ton or more of landed hydrogen-it could be possible to send back a ton or even several tons.A lot depends on the answers to the questions posed above.
And now I'm thinking about Venus, and how the layer of Venus's atmosphere that is the same temperature as Earth's surface is also the layer at the same pressure, and hydrogen balloons won't pose any danger of burning in at atmosphere mostly made of carbon dioxide (and we only need 2/3 the mass or volume of hydrogen gas, because CO2 is 3/2 the molar mass of atmospheric gases on Earth) and there is hydrogen already available in the acid that laces the carbon dioxide, and wouldn't an airship base in Venus's atmosphere at that level, solar powered, be very feasible? We could even have the airship gradually accumulate LH2 and LOX for rockets to lift away from it back to orbit, and aerobraking there would not be problematic at all, and someday there could be aerostats that fly down to the surface and examine the weird metallic chemistry at those pressures and temperatures.
Heck, there might even be the possibility of very weird high temperature, probably metallic based, life down there.
And Venus is easier to get to than Mars energetically (although harder to get off of, good thing there is all that hydrogen available after all...)
OK, the problem is, no Buck Rodgers, no bucks. Astronauts to either Mars or Venus pose the problem of heavy radiation exposure to GCRs in the many months it takes to get there on minimum energy orbits--were it not for this, I'd say missions to either were feasible in the 1970s, with little more than Saturn V capabilities. (In fact the Saturn V still outclasses the H03 with Centaur, although only by a couple tens of percents). The notion of fuel creation in situ is pretty exciting, allowing remarkably economical returns from Mars (again, except for the radiation exposure problem) and even more so from Venus, despite the much higher launch delta-V required-but the hydrogen is readily available there.
For that matter, nowadays we believe Martian regolith has as much as 2 percent water content, so we might not even need to ship hydrogen to Mars.
The infrastructure we would need to ship to exploit either of these return options is heavy I guess, so much so we need not bother the authors with proposals to do it. By the time someone might consider it, new options for high-ISP thrusters with enough thrust to make the travel time shorter than Hohmann orbits significantly would probably be coming on line.
I just realized something very important!
This doesn't really make much sense. The very design of HOPE (H-II Orbiting Plane) resembles a miniature version of the Space Shuttle, and was probably inspired by it. Since the Shuttle and the Shuttle-inspired spacecraft of other agencies (Buran and Hermes) do not exist in this timeline of Apollo, TKS, Longxing, and even Minotaur, why would the Japanese be developing a Shuttle-like space plane? If they were developing a cheaper capsule (Fuji!) in the first place, it might have been more likely for it to dodge the post-bubble Lost Decade of budget cuts and cancellation.
I just want a Japanese manned spacecraft, dang it!
This doesn't really make much sense. The very design of HOPE (H-II Orbiting Plane) resembles a miniature version of the Space Shuttle, and was probably inspired by it. Since the Shuttle and the Shuttle-inspired spacecraft of other agencies (Buran and Hermes) do not exist in this timeline of Apollo, TKS, Longxing, and even Minotaur, why would the Japanese be developing a Shuttle-like space plane? If they were developing a cheaper capsule (Fuji!) in the first place, it might have been more likely for it to dodge the post-bubble Lost Decade of budget cuts and cancellation.
I just want a Japanese manned spacecraft, dang it!
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We mentioned this back in Part II, I believe, but the answer is that the Japanese originated the idea in the 1980s as a method of 'leapfrogging' other developed countries. That is, their long-term goal was to develop a fully-reusable launch vehicle using the aerodynamic paradigm, with HOPE and H-II (that uses an all-hydrogen core) being parts of a long-term development program. At the time, they had abundant resources and, although it is a bit convergent, we felt that it fit the zeitgeist of the period and the fact that Japan, including IOTL, was making major investments to 'leapfrog' the rest of the world (such as the Fifth-Generation Computer program). Of course the economic downturn in the early 1990s and the subsequent malaise mostly killed the project, but they can't quite give up on the idea of 'leapfrogging' and, hence, HOPE.
Umm... Space planes were what EVERYBODY assumed space travel would use, once the emergency rush using capsules was past. NASA had been working with lifting bodies for some time before the Shuttle, and e.g. OTL's Hermes looks like a halfway compromise between a shuttle-esque winged plane and a lifting body.
Admittedly (OTL's) HOPE seems to be a bit more shuttle-y.
I don't remember what TTL's HOPE looks like, but 'space plane' is entirely reasonable. It might look more like a lifting body than OTL. OTOH, the Japanese probably need more cross range capability if they want any kind of flexibility when the craft can land - Japan is an awfully small area of the earth, compared to e.g. the US or Europe.
We don't have an image for TTL's HOPE, if it doesn't look like the OTL's.
Speaking of lifting bodies, this is my Japan-like country's (Hatsunia's) spacecraft, the Reusable Crew Vehicle. (not canon anymore as of 2021) HASDA (Hatsunia Aerospace Science and Development Agency) is basically Japan space-wank with a Miku theme. (The character of Miku has been associated with space before in real life.)
OTL JAXA has done some research on a lifting body post-HOPE (called LIFLEX),and I based the RCV on that.
There was also HYFLEX, which was a ultra-low L/D ratio lifting body in preparation for HOPE. Japan was also planning for HOPE to land on Christmas Island to avoid flying over China and the Koreas.
OTL JAXA has done some research on a lifting body post-HOPE (called LIFLEX),
There was also HYFLEX, which was a ultra-low L/D ratio lifting body in preparation for HOPE. Japan was also planning for HOPE to land on Christmas Island to avoid flying over China and the Koreas.
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I might recommend playing around with a C3 plotter (this one can be finicky, but works for Earth and Mars). The 15 km^2/s^2 on the wiki is perhaps slightly pessimistic, but anything less than about 8 km/s takes a very special launch window indeed.
Basically, with a good aeroshell (loaded to something between 150-200 kg/m^2) you'll get from interplanetary velocities down to someplace around Mach 2. That's about the point where you need to drop parachutes or start up supersonic retropropulsion with engines, but it lets you kill many km/s without burning--in fact, a 6m aeroshell (which would fit within a standard Saturn Multibody fairing, much less the Multibody 10m widebody fairing) could get 3 tons or so of payload to the surface while only requiring a Saturn M02C, which will knock about a quarter billion dollars off your mission cost right from the start. A 10m aeroshell integrated into the body of a widebody fairing could get about 10 tons payload to the surface, and the separation mass the launch vehicle would need to push would only be about 15 tons. This is the main reason we don't list Centaur-fitted variants of the larger mediums and Heavy Saturns--they start to "bulk out" (run out of fairing space) rather than mass out. Of course, if you wanted to go for the pure maximum interplanetary payload on a Saturn vehicle in this Tl, there's a better tool than the Centaur-E...Pegasus! Rough ballpark (I don't have the numbers handy) that could push more than 40 tons to TMI, but getting that to the surface would be a trick and a half, especially since you lose a lot of fairing length to the Pegasus.
Depends on one's confidence on an aerocapture into Mars orbit for the vehicle you leave in orbit, then the unmanned launch of the MAV and rendezvous in orbit. It's a big savings in delta-v for sure, assuming minimal ISRU, but it's a lot of complexity. OTOH, so is ISRU if you're making methane. (I had a brief flirtation with Carbon Monoxide/LOX engines for Mars ISRU--the test cell engineers will hate you, but the propellant can all be made on Mars with local materials--no seed hydrogen, just electrolysis, and for (IIRC) lower kJ/kg of prop that CH4/LOX.)
Going for very large sample return poses challenge, since -you really need to sweep an area and select, otherwise your big sample isn't of any more scientific use than a much smaller one. That said, a one-ton ERV on the Martian surface could return something in the 25-50 kg range, assuming all-hypergol, Earth-fueled vehicle. That'd fit on a single-landing mission using a Saturn M02-launched ~6m aeroshell using parachutes and propulsive final landing. Of course, that's about 6 tons of aeroshell, lander stage, rovers, and return spacecraft, which could easily fall further into the James Webb budget trajectory than would be preferred. On the other side of the spectrum, you have a little half-ton kg system like the one Brovane linked to using ISRU, but which has to contend with hydrogen storage on Mars, returns in the ballpark of 1 kg of sample, and is apt to be more expensive to develop on a per-kg basis. Returning a very large sample also poses problem in selection-I think that even with a single launch and pessimistic assumptions--needing to use only hypergolic fuels brought with a single probe, minimal effort given to sampling (grab what is right around the landing site and call it good)--it should be possible to launch at least 100 kg back to Earth, half of that samples. With any breaks at all--being able to cut down the landing speed significantly with aerobraking; being able to use hydrogen-oxygen fuels for landing; sending two probes; using rovers (even, dare we suggest, flying rovers to range many hundreds of miles for choice samples?
Venusian balloons have a pretty large showing in science fiction and in some NASA studies for lifting payloads off Venus' surface to get above the worst of the smothering aspects of the atmosphere. Workable Goblin pointed me in the direction of a few reports on the subject you can find on NTRS search "venus balloons", aimed at either atmosphere-sampling missions or the initial stage of a rockoon system for surface sample return. Not much about Venusian ISRU, though--it's a challenging task without more knowledge of precise conditions in the atmosphere (though those levels of CO2 in the atmosphere do make me think about CO/LOX instead of trying to crack hydrogen off of airborne acids...).
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Is that to any altitude, or can the mass delivered to the surface increase if you aim at Hellas Basin or Mariner Valley, where the increased atmospheric depth should slow the lander down further?
Part IV, Post 6: Freedom operations and the Artemis 5 moon mission
Good evening, everyone! Last week, we went over the decisions in American probes in the 00s. However, probes aren't the only things leaving Earth orbit--Artemis 4 certainly wasn't the last Artemis flight. This week, we're checking back in with manned operations, starting with Freedom and Artemis 5.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part IV: Post #6
As debates on the ground raged about the future plans for what was to follow Artemis and Freedom, the primary day-to-day focus in space remained maintaining and operating America’s existing space program. If NASA’s post-Freedom station plans remained obscure, and whether there would even be a post-Artemis program entirely opaque, that--in the eyes of many within NASA’s Operations and Science Directorates--made ensuring that the already-approved missions made the best of the resources they had all the more important. In particular, it was important that as much data as possible, with as much supporting information as possible, was collected and returned by each individual mission in order to make the best arguments possible in favor of continuing Artemis sorties and Freedom station operations. Less optimistically, if either program was terminated without a successor, then collecting so much data would at least ensure the maximum amount of raw data would be available later. Secondly, though not any less importantly, it was critical that both programs continued operating safely, keeping any possible ammunition out of the hands of those who would see either or both programs cancelled. Despite the steady stream of Freedom support flights and Artemis Saturn Heavies departing from Kennedy, careful, conscientious care continued to be a necessity in preparing and stacking each mission.
For Freedom, this was little more than a continuation of long-standing mission objectives. Upon completion of construction in 1993, its crews had transitioned from work crews putting together the world’s largest orbital laboratory into scientists and technicians focusing on the scientific potential of their station, running experiments in a wide variety of disciplines and carrying out the regular maintenance necessary to keep it functioning to its fullest potential. Between monitoring experiments and keeping up with the usual array of computer glitches, malfunctioning sensors, and mechanical headaches, the ten-person crew’s schedules aboard the station were no less packed than that of any of the assembly crews. However, unlike the days when modules had flown to station with clockwork regularity, and with “routine, boring” station ops like those that had filled the last two decades falling into the shadow cast by the Artemis missions, Freedom’s operations had faded out of the public limelight. The streams of data flowing through NASA’s communication networks or extracted from experiments returned by Europe’s Minotaur capsules went little noticed by public or press.
That was not, however, to say that the station had stopped producing scientific data, or that it had remained static even after the completion of construction in 1993. The station’s ongoing centrifuge experiments were perhaps the most noted by fans of classic science fiction, for whom a great disappointment in Freedom’s design was its lack of a large rotating section for crew habitation in full or partial gravity. It was also a prime focus for advocates for space colonization, for whom breakthroughs in crop growth and animal development in partial gravity like that of the Moon or of Mars would be critical in answering the question as to whether these worlds could ever really be new homes for humanity. The centrifuge laboratory had been in near-constant use in the decade since its installation in 1990, with the initial round of rat testing focusing on quantifying the relationship between (pseudo-)gravitational force and health impacts. With the effects of partial gravity at least partially explored, the next round of experiments, between 1994 and 1996, had largely been focused on exploring the relationship between spin rates, adaptation periods, and Coriolis sickness to determine minimum parameters for any crew-scale centrifuge which might be utilized on trips to Mars or (in the more distant future) on even longer-ranged manned missions.
The results were promising in some ways: adaptation between microgravity and spin gravity tests had shown that rats adapted to spin gravity could accommodate intermittent periods in microgravity with minimal physiological issues beyond the basic risks of space sickness, meaning that future spacecraft could, at least in theory, incorporate both spun and de-spun sections for different purposes without introducing any special physiological problems or requiring prolonged periods of adaptation between the one and the other. Less fortunately, a third of Earth gravity appeared to be the minimum sustainable level for extended occupation (on the order of years) without introducing adaptation difficulties upon return to Earth gravity levels, and the maximum spin rate that rats showed capable of easy adaptation to was just over 4 RPM [1]. Simple calculations thus showed a minimum centrifuge size of roughly 18m in radius--while no concern for a traditional “Von Braun wheel” or the kinds of orbital platforms O’Niell’s Lunar Society envisioned as work sites for L-5-based power stations for their lunar tube colonies, this was quite large compared to the size of a spacecraft or near-term space stations. While engineers digested these results, the lab continued with studies of long-term space adaptation, with the breeding of the first litter of rat pups in orbit, which were allowed to grow to maturity in the centrifuge, with the intention that after living a natural life of several years, they could be returned to Earth for detailed autopsy and determination of the effects of whole-life occupation of partial gravity.
Not all of Freedom’s experiments were aimed solely at the enabling of future spaceflight and space development, with physics, basic biology, and Earth observations also receiving considerable attention. For instance, one of the noted effects of microgravity which artificial gravity was intended to counteract was accelerated decay of human bones, similar to the effects of age-related osteoporosis seen on-planet. This meant that crews aboard the station served as a useful test group for accelerated trials of drugs aimed at treating the condition on Earth, helping to improve the lives of millions of senior citizens by reducing the risk of fractures and other injuries. As with their predecessors on Skylab and Spacelab, astronauts aboard Freedom also had a battery of instruments ranging from handheld cameras to sea-scattering radar to direct towards the Earth below, and with relaxing in the Cupola to watch the Earth go by being a popular pastime, they were often able to make use of them. Despite the low inclination of Freedom’s orbit, chosen in part due to the relatively low scientific utility of Skylab and Spacelab’s Earth observations compared to the costs imposed by their high-inclination orbits, these observations were often of some utility, with astronauts capturing short-lived phenomena that might have been missed by a robotic platform, or supplementing other experimental platforms with their intense focus on the seas and tropics the station most often traveled over.
The station’s position above Earth’s atmosphere also allowed a unique opportunity to sample interplanetary particles and cosmic rays, something which space physicists were eager to explore given results from the previous decades. Early trials of rocket and balloon-lofted particle detectors in the 1970s and 1980s had revealed higher-than-expected levels of anti-protons in cosmic rays, leading to proposals to base a detector in space to conduct continuous measurements of the cosmic ray flux, rather than the brief glimpses that could be obtained from Earth-based tests. Initially, the focus was on an experiment launched on a dedicated platform or to Spacelab, but Freedom’s announcement and further analysis showed that a station-mounted module would, for the same cost, be larger, more sensitive, and longer-lived due to the station’s assumption of support duties such as power supply, data handling, and orbital maintenance that would otherwise have to be handled by the experiment. Additionally, a station-mounted facility could be upgraded over its lifetime with modified or new detectors, allowing the same basic experiment to change in response to its own discoveries. By the time Freedom was beginning to launch, the Particle Astrophysics Magnet Facility, or Astromag, had been approved, with work already underway. In 1996, the first portions of Astromag reached orbit mounted in the external cargo bay of a routine resupply Aardvark. Though not particularly massive, the facility was bulky, consisting of three modules--a central Core Facility module, housing the cryogenic systems and electromagnet ring which provided the main fields for the facility, and up two replaceable experiment modules which could mount to either side of the core facility. Each was sized to be carried within the external cargo bay of an Aardvark Block II, and to be assembled onto the station using the twin CanadArms. The modular design not only facilitated ease of assembly, but also would allow changing out the experiments to conduct further studies of other particles in the future. The first experiment modules arrived in 1997, and the station began work examining interstellar antimatter and cosmic rays, continuing its role as a prime scientific research platform.
However routine the station’s day-to-day operations were, the challenges of spaceflight were never absent. While day-to-day struggles with the vagaries of microgravity plumbing, radiation-hardened electronics, and long-duration spaceflight were familiar to station crews, just days into the new millenium, the station’s Freedom Expedition 45 crew and ground controllers would encounter their first major engineering problem since the completion of the station’s construction in 1993. As the station’s experiment loadout had evolved over its lifespan, the load on its onboard power systems had increased--and with it, the amounts of waste heat that required ejection into space using the station’s radiator modules. To maintain a stable condition, both radiators aboard station required their ammonia-based coolant loops to be functioning at full capacity. However, just as the Freedom Expedition 47 crew was preparing to fly to the station to allow the Freedom 45 crew to return home and handoff command to the Freedom 46 crew [3], the pump module on the S1 truss developed a serious leak, requiring the entire starboard cooling loop to be shut down. To compensate, the station’s power use had to be temporarily minimized to prevent excessive heat loading, and some of the higher-power experiments like AstroMag and the centrifuge module had to be disabled to eliminate their power draw.
While a spare pump module was already onboard the station, brought up during construction to prepare for just such an occurrence, the situation was complicated by the planned arrival of the Freedom 47 crew. The stress of supporting 15 people for the short handover period instead of the standard 10 was one that ground controllers hoped to avoid while they sorted out the situation. Instead, the launch of the new crew was postponed, while the Expedition 45 crew handed off the station’s problems to the five members of Expedition 46, and returned home. For the first time since declaration of Initial Operational Capacity a decade before, Space Station Freedom was only home to five astronauts, reducing the load on the station’s thermal management systems. The Expedition 46 crew began their solo operation of the station by carrying out a set of EVAs aimed at the removal of the failed pump module and its replacement with the spare unit. However, while the removal of the module was successful, the installation and connection of the new module proved more difficult than anticipated. After two extended EVAs failed to resolve the task, the station’s ground controllers were forced to quickly improvise alternate tools to solve the problem. However, they required components not present onboard, and training that differed from the standard changeout procedure. Thus, once the tools were prepared, the “go” was given for the Expedition 47 crew, who had received quick training on the revised procedures, to launch to Freedom, carrying with them the new toolkit. With the added hands and tools, the repair process was finally completed in an EVA on January 28 and the station’s systems and experiments could be brought back to full power.
Unfortunately, the failed pump module couldn’t be returned to Earth for inspection--bringing the ammonia-contaminated pump unit into the airlock for internal return aboard a Minotaur posed health risks, and would throw off the station’s downmass schedule. Instead, it would have to simply be disposed of in the bay of a deorbiting Aardvark, and a new spare module would have to be launched in case a similar issue recurred. Though a dramatic illustration of the benefits of the modular system design of the American Freedom, compared to the more integrated design of the Russian Mir station, the pump repair incident overall stressed that while Freedom was a mature scientific platform, its age brought not just familiarity, but its own risks as it continued its scientific duties.
Unlike Freedom, the Exploration Office was still pushing forward into unbroken ground. Despite accumulating more crew time on the surface than the entire Apollo program, Artemis 4 had only been one flight. Everything about it, from its landing site in the relatively-flat and uninteresting Oceanus Procellarum to its crew operations schedules and restrictions on rover traverses had been set up to provide a trial run for unproven hardware in one of the Moon’s less challenging geological areas. While the mission had been a spectacular success from its high public profile to its visitation and engineering evaluation of the Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 landing sites to the discovery of new geological features like the so-called “KREEP” at even a previously-visited site, the ambitions of Artemis’ scientific advisors were only whetted by the mission. Artemis 5, which was already in preparation when Hunt, Keeler, Duncan, and Seleznev landed on the moon, would be their first chance to branch out, and deploy the extensive scientific capability of an Artemis sortie to a previously uncharacterized site--one which could be selected for scientific value, not engineering concerns. The list of possibilities considered was extensive, but the final selection for the second site was Mare Smythii, on the lunar limb between the near and farside of the moon, which was selected as the mission’s primary landing site in June 1999, barely a month after Artemis 4’s crew had returned from the moon.
The mare showed several interesting geological features that lead to its selection. First, its floor was dark, consisting largely of basalt theorized to be from two eras of lunar history. Second, many of the craters which littered the mare showed cracked floors, indications of potential magma uplift beneath the floor of the mare. Third, and recently reconfirmed by the work of the European GRIMALDI probe studying the variations of the lunar gravitational field, a large mass concentration--one of the infamous “lunar mascons”--was situated within the mare. Landing a crew for two weeks of fieldwork at Smythii offered the chance to compile data aimed at answering questions about the history of the Moon and Earth that could cause such a variety of features. For astronomers and astrophysicists, it also offered their first taste of the advantages of farside instruments, as Smythii’s limb location meant that telescopes erected at the site would be out of view of Earth for part of the month, and protected from Earthshine and Earth-generated radio noise. This was also attractive to the operations team, as a landing at Smythii could allow a first trial to be made of the L-2-based Mesyat communications array before farside or lunar polar missions were attempted. Additionally, the mare offered a large selection of relatively flat terrain, and images from the LRP and LIO could surely be used to isolate at least one landing site free of rocks and boulders. Though a step up in difficulty from the Artemis 4 landing site, Smythii was reckoned to pose only a minor navigational challenge for the unmanned cargo lander preceding the crew.
The crew assigned to the mission was already into advanced training by the time the decision was finalized on where they would be landing. Unlike Don Hunt, the commander was not a member of the 1977 astronaut class of “twenty freaking new guys”. Instead, the post went to one of the stars of the next generations of astronauts. The commander of Artemis 5 would be Chris Valente, a member of the 1983 Astronaut Group 10 who had flown to Spacelab and previously commanded Freedom Expedition 7, as well as serving as commander of the Apollo crew vehicle in the Artemis 3 “orbital relay race,” where he had flown “safety spotter” duties as Jack Bailey had put the Artemis lander through its paces. Now, it was Valente’s turn to fly the lander, and his mission wouldn’t be swerves back and forth in LEO, but rather two weeks of intensive scientific exploration of one of the most geologically interesting sites on the lunar surface. As his second-in-command, he had one of the astronaut corps’ few geology-trained flight scientists, Beverly McDowell, herself a veteran of two flights to Freedom who neatly met the recommendation from the surface science team that at least one member of each crew be a trained geologist and the unstated policy that NASA was, for public affairs purposes, aiming to ensure at least one woman was in each crew that flew to the Moon. They would be joined by pilot Phillip Whitt on his second flight, with the fourth seat on this flight held by the first astronaut to be flown on Artemis by the European Space Administration.
The selection of Europe’s first moonwalker had, naturally, been the subject of some debate. Traditionally, seats to Spacelab and then to Freedom had been distributed among the members of ESA’s astronaut corps with some eye to ensuring a “fair” distribution of seats between large contributors like France, the UK, Germany, and Italy, as well as smaller members like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. However, while the reliability of ESA’s standing seat-per-flight since Spacelab had allowed assurance that nations would eventually see one of their astronauts fly, the fact that only two European seats were available on the initial Artemis missions meant that the exact opposite would be true: many of the consortium’s members would never see one of their citizens walk on the moon. Thus, the distribution of these seats became a hotly debated topic--one that hinged largely on a definition of what was “fair”.
France, in particular, sparked significant controversy by asserting that it was fairest to see these seats distributed to the nations which had contributed the most to the program--after all, more astronauts from the the “Big Four” of France, Britain, Italy, and Germany had flown to Spacelab and Freedom over the years than from any smaller country, and that had been accepted as “fair” at the time. If the “fair share” of such small nations out of a total of two seats happened to round to zero, that was not necessarily “unfair”. The United Kingdom, though less directly than the French, had backed this position--part of the long campaign to rebuild British influence based on cultural “soft power” rather than the long-lost “hard power” of empire. However, several smaller joined together at ESA ministerial meetings to suggest that for the sake of “fairness” the chance to land on the moon should be distributed with some degree of chance for the smaller nations--perhaps with some kind of random drawing. However, this proposal failed to find substantial institutional support. Instead, a German-lead initiative was selected finally: the seats would simply be drawn from the existing rotation order, officially blind to national origin and the historic nature of the first landings, and focused instead on the scientific capability of the candidates for the seat. However officially nation-blind the selection was, though, it was still French pilot Jules Lessard who would be ESA’s first moonwalker, sparking grumbles in ESA’s member community that would take several years to settle down.
By the time Artemis 4 landed at Oceanus Procellarum, Valente’s crew had been training together for almost a year, undergoing checkout in the Block V Apollo, the Artemis lunar lander, and the variety of surface hardware they would use on the moon, as well as taking long “field trips” for applied geological training. For Phillip Whitt, this meant that his journey to the moon began with a homecoming, as their training site in the Orocopia Mountains was quite close to his boyhood home of Riverside, California. While the training schedule was crammed, as the operations and scientific program directors each vied to secure more of the crew’s limited time for their training, they were able to take a break for their duties to watch as Hunt and his crew made their launch and then landing on the surface. Hunt’s crew would offer Valente’s one more benefit: experience. As Artemis 4 broke records and racked up more time on the lunar surface than all previous lunar missions combined, ground controllers generated hundreds of pages of notes on revisions to equipment, procedures, and mission planning, all aimed at smoothing future missions, and particularly Artemis 5. Some of these changes were less formal than others--the success of the coffeemaker brought by Artemis 4 MSO Ed Keeler in maintaining crew morale was enough that a similar system was added to the official list of standard equipment for all future flights, and was dutifully included among the supplies of surface experiment packages, food, water, spare clothes, and more which were loaded into Artemis 5’s cargo/habitat module as it was prepared for launch in late November 2000. In honor of the British naval explorer and astronomer William Henry Smyth, for whom Mare Smythii was named, Valente’s crew voted to name their future home-away-from-home on the lunar surface Adventure, after the ship in which Smyth accompanied the Beagle on its famous journeys.
Adventure’s launch on a Saturn H03 was picture perfect in spite of weather delays, and the module separated from its Pegasus third stage and charted a course for the Moon. On December 3, the module’s computer fired its engines, and began its descent to the surface. As with Janus before it, the light-lag of communications with the moon meant that the responsibility for the landing would lie exclusively with these onboard computers--a nerve-wracking moment even with the long experience with the Aardvark system. Though no crew were aboard, any failure of the landing would scrub the entire Artemis 5 mission until another habitat could be prepared and launched. Fortunately, the contingency plans wouldn’t be needed, as Adventures’s computer gently dropped the twenty-ton lander with pinpoint precision onto the basalt surface of Mare Smythii. As the beacon from Adventure echoed the news of its touchdown back to Earth via the Mesyat system, the mission control room once again erupted into cheers. The break from training that monitoring Adventure’s launch, cruise, and landing had offered was a welcome one, but their attention was quickly returned to the training left for the all-too-short months ahead of their launch.
Finally, in June 2000, the next pair of lunar-bound Saturn Heavies rolled to the pads at Kennedy Space Center, one bearing a fully-fueled Pegasus departure stage, the other the crew’s Atlantis command module and their lander Calypso, named at the lobbying of Lessard for the ship of modern hydrologist Jacques Cousteau, still in service after almost 40 years exploring the ocean depths. The launch preparations were as smooth as could be hoped given the complexities of readying the twin massive rockets for near-simultaneous launch, and July 1 saw first one, than the other of the two massive rockets thunder into the skies over Florida, bearing the Artemis 5 crew on to orbit. Once on orbit, the crew began routine operations: Atlantis was detached from the launch shroud, and Valente and Whitt flipped their ship end-for-end to dock at the port on top of the Calypso. Once they completed the maneuver by extracting Calypso from the shroud as well, the Artemis 5 crew made rendezvous with the Pegasus launched only hours before them and conducted the docking of the payload stack with their departure stage. After verifying that all systems were nominal, the Pegasus’ RL-10 engine cluster lit, pushing the massive stack up and out of Earth’s embrace on the long trajectory to EML-2.
Leaving Atlantis behind at L-2, the crew finally descended to join Adventure on the plains of Mare Smythii below. The beacon issues which had complicated the descent of Artemis 4 aboard the Galileo had since been resolved, and using onboard radar, ground tracking, and the beacon on Adventure, Valente and Whitt put their craft down on the lunar surface right on target just southeast of Peek Crater in Smythii’s northern reaches, and only a kilometer away from their habitat (the distance picked to minimize effects of dust and debris stirred up by their landing, based on lessons learned on Artemis 4’s inspections of their own habitat and the Apollo 12 site). The occasion of stepping foot on the lunar surface, following in the footsteps of personal hero Alan Shepard, was one which rather overcame Valente. As he descended the ladder to take the mission’s first ceremonial steps off the ladder, he mused over the crew’s radio link about the scenery surrounding him. “It’s amazing here,” he said. “Simply marvelous. Marvelous doings, and marvelous sights.” The official first words on the surface were the more sober ones approved by the Public Affairs Office, and regarded as much less memorable than the simple commentary on the stark beauty surrounding him. It was also upstaged by the speech of Lessard, the next crewman down the ladder: “History will remember me as “the first Frenchman to walk on the Moon”, but I follow in the footsteps of another Frenchman, Jules Verne. He wrote the story of a voyage to the Moon that has inspired so many people. We will always remember that reality is the goal of the imagination.” [2]
Unlike Ed Keeler at Procellarum, Artemis 5’s MSO Beverly McDowell was faced not with a previously visited site of relatively minor geological interest, but instead a sprawling area littered with diverse geological features. At only 1-2 billion years old, the basalts of Smythii held answers about potential lunar volcanism half the age of features which had been examined on Apollo, and thus the potential for answering questions about the mechanics of this volcanic past, and why it had stopped. As the crew worked to lower equipment off the deck of Calypso and prepare the rover for their ride to Adventure, she was faced with twin opposition: time and distance. The mission’s two short weeks seemed like barely enough time to conduct a first sweep of the sites on Smythii, but the main limitation on how extensive the crew’s exploration could be wasn’t the time available, but rather the distances separating different types of features (given the east-west division of materials in the mare’s floor) and how far the crew could explore with their open-cockpit rovers on any single day. The mare stretched over nearly 300 kilometers, and while the landing site at Peek Crater had been selected since the relatively-recent crater could offer a pre-made drill core of the lava flows of the mare, traverses of more than a few hours still posed risks, meaning that sites beyond 40-odd kilometers were likely beyond access, and even some within that range posed risks.
Still, while the limits of their equipment meant that any exploration of the Mare on Artemis 5 however in-depth, would simply be a beginning, the crew took this as a challenge to simply make sure that the small portions they could reach, such as Peek crater and the Eratosthenian-age basaltic materials of the Mare floor surrounding it, were explored in-depth. However, after completing their first week on the surface, McDowell spent much of the lunar noon while the crew was restricted to the Adventure to minimize stress on their suit cooling systems lobbying Valente, walking him through samples she’d already begun analysis on in their cramped geology lab space as Valente replaced seals and otherwise serviced the the crew’s spacesuits. According to mission plans, the Artemis 5 crew was to follow similar procedures to Artemis 4: one pair would make traverses on the rover, while the other would stand by at base carrying out more local site-surveys, ready to drive out and retrieve the other pair if assistance was required. However, contingencies for extended traverses had been discussed,in which both pairs would go on a traverse, allowing the rescue team to already be present in the case of an incident, and thus allowing the teams to traverse further from the sortie’s landing site than would otherwise be the case--another few hours further, in fact, which would in turn allow her to gain access to portions of the Imbrian-era basalts characterizing the western part of the Mare. Although plans for extended traverses had discussed before launch, implementation had been officially left up to the authority of the Flight Director in Houston and the Commander on the surface, in that order, to judge conditions on the ground in real-time. Now among the rugged grey hills of the lunar surface, McDowell found Valente more receptive to adding such a traverse.
After talking through the contingencies, Valente relented--he would help support the plan to Houston. With the geology backroom already lobbying ground control, the support of the Commander was enough to persuade the Flight Director in Houston. Finally, the extended-duration “road trip” of nearly 40 km was added to the mission plan for the second week of the crew’s stay. However, safety remained the utmost priority--if anything, anything at all, was to show signs of going wrong, both pairs and their rovers would have to return home immediately, and the explorations at the remote site would have to be kept to under two hours. It was enough to make McDowell laugh, citing an old geology joke: you always make the most interesting discovery on the very last possible day of the dig, in the most remote location, just as you lose the light. With the lunar day drawing to a close and the mission counting down its final few days, it was an apt comparison as, for the first time, an entire Artemis crew abandoned their landing site and drove off in convoy across the lunar surface.
The drive took several hours, as Valente and Whitt each steered one of the two rovers around boulders, up and down hills, and charted courses across untouched lunar plains. The whole time, as the pilots focused on the drive, McDowell and Lessard indulged in the primary pastime of passengers on uncounted road-trips: watching the scenery. Using the rover’s tie-ins to the Mesyat network as a relay, the two used their cameras and trained eyes to record whatever they could of the terrain they drove through on their way east in the direction of Doyle Crater. Despite the extended drive, the rovers performed flawlessly, and the crew’s arrival at Doyle was trouble-free. With minutes counting down until the end of Houston’s imposed deadline, the entire crew set to work with hammers, drills, and other tools to sample the site on the other side of the geological divide of the mare. “Those two hours at Doyle were some of the busiest of my entire career,” McDowell would later remark. “I don’t think there was a single minute I didn’t have a tool or a sample bag in my hand, and I was narrating the video feed from my suit camera every step. The whole landing was busy, but Doyle was a whole other story.”
Finally, though, the time ran out, and loading their precious samples into the rovers, they set back along their own tire tracks to retrace the drive back home. However, the traverse back wouldn’t prove as smooth as the one on the way out: less than half-an-hour from the safety of Adventure, one of the electric wheel motors of Valente’s rover seized climbing a particularly regolith-heavy hill. Fortunately, with the assistance of the other rover, they were able to pull the rover free, and it was able to complete the traverse dragging the dead wheel in the dirt without needing to abandon the tools, samples, drill cores, and more to enable the four crew to return home on one rover. Still, the crew as a whole breathed a sigh of relief as the landers hove into sight, and the remainder of the mission was spent in much less intensive exploration finishing up tasks within a few kilometers of the Artemis 5 site--with one rover already partially impaired, the contingency rescue plans were no longer feasible. As they finally shut down the habitat on Adventure and prepared it for its time joining Janus as a stationary science platform, then packed their samples and gear aboard the Calypso, McDowell in particular wished that they could have stayed longer--for all their explorations, they had barely reached past the surface of what was available at the mare.
Still, their time was up, and the Calypso made a trouble-free ascent to rendezvous with the Atlantis command module at L2 ahead of the crew’s safe return to Earth. Artemis 5 had proven the extensive scientific capacity of the Artemis system, but it had also shown just how many mysteries such a sortie landing could leave behind when faced with such a diverse site. As NASA higher-ups lobbied for extensions and additional flights of the Artemis series with the incoming President Richards, the example of Artemis 5 would be a powerful one.
[1] Since no partial-gravity studies in space have actually taken place in real life, these figures are largely an invention of the authors, based on some real studies in large rotating rooms on Earth.
[2] Freedom expeditions work a bit like ISS crews: two Expedition crews are on-orbit at a time. The “senior” expedition has their number assigned to the combined crew. When Expedition N’s time is about to complete, a new Expedition (which will eventually be Expedition N+2) launches, and then the Expedition N crew hands off to the already-present Expedition N+1 crew before returning home. Lather, rinse, and repeat every three months or so.
[3] Thanks to the Brainbin for his assistance with this speech, and thanks also to MaskedPickle, who assisted with this translation of the “actual” speech, delivered in French (ironically, one of the few times Lessard spoke in his native language during the mission): L'histoire me retiendra comme « le premier Français à marcher sur la Lune », mais je ne fais que suivre les pas d'un autre Français, Jules Verne. Il a écrit l'histoire d'un voyage sur la lune et en a inspiré beaucoup. Nous nous souviendrons pour toujours que la réalité est le but de l'imagination. As you’ll see, there’s a bit of a pun here, as “story” and “history” are the same word in French. Also, worth noting that the “approved” ESA text had “European” in place of the first “Frenchman”. Sadly, it appears Lessard was “overcome with emotion” on the surface and “spoke from the heart,” as the official French story went.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part IV: Post #6
As debates on the ground raged about the future plans for what was to follow Artemis and Freedom, the primary day-to-day focus in space remained maintaining and operating America’s existing space program. If NASA’s post-Freedom station plans remained obscure, and whether there would even be a post-Artemis program entirely opaque, that--in the eyes of many within NASA’s Operations and Science Directorates--made ensuring that the already-approved missions made the best of the resources they had all the more important. In particular, it was important that as much data as possible, with as much supporting information as possible, was collected and returned by each individual mission in order to make the best arguments possible in favor of continuing Artemis sorties and Freedom station operations. Less optimistically, if either program was terminated without a successor, then collecting so much data would at least ensure the maximum amount of raw data would be available later. Secondly, though not any less importantly, it was critical that both programs continued operating safely, keeping any possible ammunition out of the hands of those who would see either or both programs cancelled. Despite the steady stream of Freedom support flights and Artemis Saturn Heavies departing from Kennedy, careful, conscientious care continued to be a necessity in preparing and stacking each mission.
For Freedom, this was little more than a continuation of long-standing mission objectives. Upon completion of construction in 1993, its crews had transitioned from work crews putting together the world’s largest orbital laboratory into scientists and technicians focusing on the scientific potential of their station, running experiments in a wide variety of disciplines and carrying out the regular maintenance necessary to keep it functioning to its fullest potential. Between monitoring experiments and keeping up with the usual array of computer glitches, malfunctioning sensors, and mechanical headaches, the ten-person crew’s schedules aboard the station were no less packed than that of any of the assembly crews. However, unlike the days when modules had flown to station with clockwork regularity, and with “routine, boring” station ops like those that had filled the last two decades falling into the shadow cast by the Artemis missions, Freedom’s operations had faded out of the public limelight. The streams of data flowing through NASA’s communication networks or extracted from experiments returned by Europe’s Minotaur capsules went little noticed by public or press.
That was not, however, to say that the station had stopped producing scientific data, or that it had remained static even after the completion of construction in 1993. The station’s ongoing centrifuge experiments were perhaps the most noted by fans of classic science fiction, for whom a great disappointment in Freedom’s design was its lack of a large rotating section for crew habitation in full or partial gravity. It was also a prime focus for advocates for space colonization, for whom breakthroughs in crop growth and animal development in partial gravity like that of the Moon or of Mars would be critical in answering the question as to whether these worlds could ever really be new homes for humanity. The centrifuge laboratory had been in near-constant use in the decade since its installation in 1990, with the initial round of rat testing focusing on quantifying the relationship between (pseudo-)gravitational force and health impacts. With the effects of partial gravity at least partially explored, the next round of experiments, between 1994 and 1996, had largely been focused on exploring the relationship between spin rates, adaptation periods, and Coriolis sickness to determine minimum parameters for any crew-scale centrifuge which might be utilized on trips to Mars or (in the more distant future) on even longer-ranged manned missions.
The results were promising in some ways: adaptation between microgravity and spin gravity tests had shown that rats adapted to spin gravity could accommodate intermittent periods in microgravity with minimal physiological issues beyond the basic risks of space sickness, meaning that future spacecraft could, at least in theory, incorporate both spun and de-spun sections for different purposes without introducing any special physiological problems or requiring prolonged periods of adaptation between the one and the other. Less fortunately, a third of Earth gravity appeared to be the minimum sustainable level for extended occupation (on the order of years) without introducing adaptation difficulties upon return to Earth gravity levels, and the maximum spin rate that rats showed capable of easy adaptation to was just over 4 RPM [1]. Simple calculations thus showed a minimum centrifuge size of roughly 18m in radius--while no concern for a traditional “Von Braun wheel” or the kinds of orbital platforms O’Niell’s Lunar Society envisioned as work sites for L-5-based power stations for their lunar tube colonies, this was quite large compared to the size of a spacecraft or near-term space stations. While engineers digested these results, the lab continued with studies of long-term space adaptation, with the breeding of the first litter of rat pups in orbit, which were allowed to grow to maturity in the centrifuge, with the intention that after living a natural life of several years, they could be returned to Earth for detailed autopsy and determination of the effects of whole-life occupation of partial gravity.
Not all of Freedom’s experiments were aimed solely at the enabling of future spaceflight and space development, with physics, basic biology, and Earth observations also receiving considerable attention. For instance, one of the noted effects of microgravity which artificial gravity was intended to counteract was accelerated decay of human bones, similar to the effects of age-related osteoporosis seen on-planet. This meant that crews aboard the station served as a useful test group for accelerated trials of drugs aimed at treating the condition on Earth, helping to improve the lives of millions of senior citizens by reducing the risk of fractures and other injuries. As with their predecessors on Skylab and Spacelab, astronauts aboard Freedom also had a battery of instruments ranging from handheld cameras to sea-scattering radar to direct towards the Earth below, and with relaxing in the Cupola to watch the Earth go by being a popular pastime, they were often able to make use of them. Despite the low inclination of Freedom’s orbit, chosen in part due to the relatively low scientific utility of Skylab and Spacelab’s Earth observations compared to the costs imposed by their high-inclination orbits, these observations were often of some utility, with astronauts capturing short-lived phenomena that might have been missed by a robotic platform, or supplementing other experimental platforms with their intense focus on the seas and tropics the station most often traveled over.
The station’s position above Earth’s atmosphere also allowed a unique opportunity to sample interplanetary particles and cosmic rays, something which space physicists were eager to explore given results from the previous decades. Early trials of rocket and balloon-lofted particle detectors in the 1970s and 1980s had revealed higher-than-expected levels of anti-protons in cosmic rays, leading to proposals to base a detector in space to conduct continuous measurements of the cosmic ray flux, rather than the brief glimpses that could be obtained from Earth-based tests. Initially, the focus was on an experiment launched on a dedicated platform or to Spacelab, but Freedom’s announcement and further analysis showed that a station-mounted module would, for the same cost, be larger, more sensitive, and longer-lived due to the station’s assumption of support duties such as power supply, data handling, and orbital maintenance that would otherwise have to be handled by the experiment. Additionally, a station-mounted facility could be upgraded over its lifetime with modified or new detectors, allowing the same basic experiment to change in response to its own discoveries. By the time Freedom was beginning to launch, the Particle Astrophysics Magnet Facility, or Astromag, had been approved, with work already underway. In 1996, the first portions of Astromag reached orbit mounted in the external cargo bay of a routine resupply Aardvark. Though not particularly massive, the facility was bulky, consisting of three modules--a central Core Facility module, housing the cryogenic systems and electromagnet ring which provided the main fields for the facility, and up two replaceable experiment modules which could mount to either side of the core facility. Each was sized to be carried within the external cargo bay of an Aardvark Block II, and to be assembled onto the station using the twin CanadArms. The modular design not only facilitated ease of assembly, but also would allow changing out the experiments to conduct further studies of other particles in the future. The first experiment modules arrived in 1997, and the station began work examining interstellar antimatter and cosmic rays, continuing its role as a prime scientific research platform.
However routine the station’s day-to-day operations were, the challenges of spaceflight were never absent. While day-to-day struggles with the vagaries of microgravity plumbing, radiation-hardened electronics, and long-duration spaceflight were familiar to station crews, just days into the new millenium, the station’s Freedom Expedition 45 crew and ground controllers would encounter their first major engineering problem since the completion of the station’s construction in 1993. As the station’s experiment loadout had evolved over its lifespan, the load on its onboard power systems had increased--and with it, the amounts of waste heat that required ejection into space using the station’s radiator modules. To maintain a stable condition, both radiators aboard station required their ammonia-based coolant loops to be functioning at full capacity. However, just as the Freedom Expedition 47 crew was preparing to fly to the station to allow the Freedom 45 crew to return home and handoff command to the Freedom 46 crew [3], the pump module on the S1 truss developed a serious leak, requiring the entire starboard cooling loop to be shut down. To compensate, the station’s power use had to be temporarily minimized to prevent excessive heat loading, and some of the higher-power experiments like AstroMag and the centrifuge module had to be disabled to eliminate their power draw.
While a spare pump module was already onboard the station, brought up during construction to prepare for just such an occurrence, the situation was complicated by the planned arrival of the Freedom 47 crew. The stress of supporting 15 people for the short handover period instead of the standard 10 was one that ground controllers hoped to avoid while they sorted out the situation. Instead, the launch of the new crew was postponed, while the Expedition 45 crew handed off the station’s problems to the five members of Expedition 46, and returned home. For the first time since declaration of Initial Operational Capacity a decade before, Space Station Freedom was only home to five astronauts, reducing the load on the station’s thermal management systems. The Expedition 46 crew began their solo operation of the station by carrying out a set of EVAs aimed at the removal of the failed pump module and its replacement with the spare unit. However, while the removal of the module was successful, the installation and connection of the new module proved more difficult than anticipated. After two extended EVAs failed to resolve the task, the station’s ground controllers were forced to quickly improvise alternate tools to solve the problem. However, they required components not present onboard, and training that differed from the standard changeout procedure. Thus, once the tools were prepared, the “go” was given for the Expedition 47 crew, who had received quick training on the revised procedures, to launch to Freedom, carrying with them the new toolkit. With the added hands and tools, the repair process was finally completed in an EVA on January 28 and the station’s systems and experiments could be brought back to full power.
Unfortunately, the failed pump module couldn’t be returned to Earth for inspection--bringing the ammonia-contaminated pump unit into the airlock for internal return aboard a Minotaur posed health risks, and would throw off the station’s downmass schedule. Instead, it would have to simply be disposed of in the bay of a deorbiting Aardvark, and a new spare module would have to be launched in case a similar issue recurred. Though a dramatic illustration of the benefits of the modular system design of the American Freedom, compared to the more integrated design of the Russian Mir station, the pump repair incident overall stressed that while Freedom was a mature scientific platform, its age brought not just familiarity, but its own risks as it continued its scientific duties.
Unlike Freedom, the Exploration Office was still pushing forward into unbroken ground. Despite accumulating more crew time on the surface than the entire Apollo program, Artemis 4 had only been one flight. Everything about it, from its landing site in the relatively-flat and uninteresting Oceanus Procellarum to its crew operations schedules and restrictions on rover traverses had been set up to provide a trial run for unproven hardware in one of the Moon’s less challenging geological areas. While the mission had been a spectacular success from its high public profile to its visitation and engineering evaluation of the Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 landing sites to the discovery of new geological features like the so-called “KREEP” at even a previously-visited site, the ambitions of Artemis’ scientific advisors were only whetted by the mission. Artemis 5, which was already in preparation when Hunt, Keeler, Duncan, and Seleznev landed on the moon, would be their first chance to branch out, and deploy the extensive scientific capability of an Artemis sortie to a previously uncharacterized site--one which could be selected for scientific value, not engineering concerns. The list of possibilities considered was extensive, but the final selection for the second site was Mare Smythii, on the lunar limb between the near and farside of the moon, which was selected as the mission’s primary landing site in June 1999, barely a month after Artemis 4’s crew had returned from the moon.
The mare showed several interesting geological features that lead to its selection. First, its floor was dark, consisting largely of basalt theorized to be from two eras of lunar history. Second, many of the craters which littered the mare showed cracked floors, indications of potential magma uplift beneath the floor of the mare. Third, and recently reconfirmed by the work of the European GRIMALDI probe studying the variations of the lunar gravitational field, a large mass concentration--one of the infamous “lunar mascons”--was situated within the mare. Landing a crew for two weeks of fieldwork at Smythii offered the chance to compile data aimed at answering questions about the history of the Moon and Earth that could cause such a variety of features. For astronomers and astrophysicists, it also offered their first taste of the advantages of farside instruments, as Smythii’s limb location meant that telescopes erected at the site would be out of view of Earth for part of the month, and protected from Earthshine and Earth-generated radio noise. This was also attractive to the operations team, as a landing at Smythii could allow a first trial to be made of the L-2-based Mesyat communications array before farside or lunar polar missions were attempted. Additionally, the mare offered a large selection of relatively flat terrain, and images from the LRP and LIO could surely be used to isolate at least one landing site free of rocks and boulders. Though a step up in difficulty from the Artemis 4 landing site, Smythii was reckoned to pose only a minor navigational challenge for the unmanned cargo lander preceding the crew.
The crew assigned to the mission was already into advanced training by the time the decision was finalized on where they would be landing. Unlike Don Hunt, the commander was not a member of the 1977 astronaut class of “twenty freaking new guys”. Instead, the post went to one of the stars of the next generations of astronauts. The commander of Artemis 5 would be Chris Valente, a member of the 1983 Astronaut Group 10 who had flown to Spacelab and previously commanded Freedom Expedition 7, as well as serving as commander of the Apollo crew vehicle in the Artemis 3 “orbital relay race,” where he had flown “safety spotter” duties as Jack Bailey had put the Artemis lander through its paces. Now, it was Valente’s turn to fly the lander, and his mission wouldn’t be swerves back and forth in LEO, but rather two weeks of intensive scientific exploration of one of the most geologically interesting sites on the lunar surface. As his second-in-command, he had one of the astronaut corps’ few geology-trained flight scientists, Beverly McDowell, herself a veteran of two flights to Freedom who neatly met the recommendation from the surface science team that at least one member of each crew be a trained geologist and the unstated policy that NASA was, for public affairs purposes, aiming to ensure at least one woman was in each crew that flew to the Moon. They would be joined by pilot Phillip Whitt on his second flight, with the fourth seat on this flight held by the first astronaut to be flown on Artemis by the European Space Administration.
The selection of Europe’s first moonwalker had, naturally, been the subject of some debate. Traditionally, seats to Spacelab and then to Freedom had been distributed among the members of ESA’s astronaut corps with some eye to ensuring a “fair” distribution of seats between large contributors like France, the UK, Germany, and Italy, as well as smaller members like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. However, while the reliability of ESA’s standing seat-per-flight since Spacelab had allowed assurance that nations would eventually see one of their astronauts fly, the fact that only two European seats were available on the initial Artemis missions meant that the exact opposite would be true: many of the consortium’s members would never see one of their citizens walk on the moon. Thus, the distribution of these seats became a hotly debated topic--one that hinged largely on a definition of what was “fair”.
France, in particular, sparked significant controversy by asserting that it was fairest to see these seats distributed to the nations which had contributed the most to the program--after all, more astronauts from the the “Big Four” of France, Britain, Italy, and Germany had flown to Spacelab and Freedom over the years than from any smaller country, and that had been accepted as “fair” at the time. If the “fair share” of such small nations out of a total of two seats happened to round to zero, that was not necessarily “unfair”. The United Kingdom, though less directly than the French, had backed this position--part of the long campaign to rebuild British influence based on cultural “soft power” rather than the long-lost “hard power” of empire. However, several smaller joined together at ESA ministerial meetings to suggest that for the sake of “fairness” the chance to land on the moon should be distributed with some degree of chance for the smaller nations--perhaps with some kind of random drawing. However, this proposal failed to find substantial institutional support. Instead, a German-lead initiative was selected finally: the seats would simply be drawn from the existing rotation order, officially blind to national origin and the historic nature of the first landings, and focused instead on the scientific capability of the candidates for the seat. However officially nation-blind the selection was, though, it was still French pilot Jules Lessard who would be ESA’s first moonwalker, sparking grumbles in ESA’s member community that would take several years to settle down.
By the time Artemis 4 landed at Oceanus Procellarum, Valente’s crew had been training together for almost a year, undergoing checkout in the Block V Apollo, the Artemis lunar lander, and the variety of surface hardware they would use on the moon, as well as taking long “field trips” for applied geological training. For Phillip Whitt, this meant that his journey to the moon began with a homecoming, as their training site in the Orocopia Mountains was quite close to his boyhood home of Riverside, California. While the training schedule was crammed, as the operations and scientific program directors each vied to secure more of the crew’s limited time for their training, they were able to take a break for their duties to watch as Hunt and his crew made their launch and then landing on the surface. Hunt’s crew would offer Valente’s one more benefit: experience. As Artemis 4 broke records and racked up more time on the lunar surface than all previous lunar missions combined, ground controllers generated hundreds of pages of notes on revisions to equipment, procedures, and mission planning, all aimed at smoothing future missions, and particularly Artemis 5. Some of these changes were less formal than others--the success of the coffeemaker brought by Artemis 4 MSO Ed Keeler in maintaining crew morale was enough that a similar system was added to the official list of standard equipment for all future flights, and was dutifully included among the supplies of surface experiment packages, food, water, spare clothes, and more which were loaded into Artemis 5’s cargo/habitat module as it was prepared for launch in late November 2000. In honor of the British naval explorer and astronomer William Henry Smyth, for whom Mare Smythii was named, Valente’s crew voted to name their future home-away-from-home on the lunar surface Adventure, after the ship in which Smyth accompanied the Beagle on its famous journeys.
Adventure’s launch on a Saturn H03 was picture perfect in spite of weather delays, and the module separated from its Pegasus third stage and charted a course for the Moon. On December 3, the module’s computer fired its engines, and began its descent to the surface. As with Janus before it, the light-lag of communications with the moon meant that the responsibility for the landing would lie exclusively with these onboard computers--a nerve-wracking moment even with the long experience with the Aardvark system. Though no crew were aboard, any failure of the landing would scrub the entire Artemis 5 mission until another habitat could be prepared and launched. Fortunately, the contingency plans wouldn’t be needed, as Adventures’s computer gently dropped the twenty-ton lander with pinpoint precision onto the basalt surface of Mare Smythii. As the beacon from Adventure echoed the news of its touchdown back to Earth via the Mesyat system, the mission control room once again erupted into cheers. The break from training that monitoring Adventure’s launch, cruise, and landing had offered was a welcome one, but their attention was quickly returned to the training left for the all-too-short months ahead of their launch.
Finally, in June 2000, the next pair of lunar-bound Saturn Heavies rolled to the pads at Kennedy Space Center, one bearing a fully-fueled Pegasus departure stage, the other the crew’s Atlantis command module and their lander Calypso, named at the lobbying of Lessard for the ship of modern hydrologist Jacques Cousteau, still in service after almost 40 years exploring the ocean depths. The launch preparations were as smooth as could be hoped given the complexities of readying the twin massive rockets for near-simultaneous launch, and July 1 saw first one, than the other of the two massive rockets thunder into the skies over Florida, bearing the Artemis 5 crew on to orbit. Once on orbit, the crew began routine operations: Atlantis was detached from the launch shroud, and Valente and Whitt flipped their ship end-for-end to dock at the port on top of the Calypso. Once they completed the maneuver by extracting Calypso from the shroud as well, the Artemis 5 crew made rendezvous with the Pegasus launched only hours before them and conducted the docking of the payload stack with their departure stage. After verifying that all systems were nominal, the Pegasus’ RL-10 engine cluster lit, pushing the massive stack up and out of Earth’s embrace on the long trajectory to EML-2.
Leaving Atlantis behind at L-2, the crew finally descended to join Adventure on the plains of Mare Smythii below. The beacon issues which had complicated the descent of Artemis 4 aboard the Galileo had since been resolved, and using onboard radar, ground tracking, and the beacon on Adventure, Valente and Whitt put their craft down on the lunar surface right on target just southeast of Peek Crater in Smythii’s northern reaches, and only a kilometer away from their habitat (the distance picked to minimize effects of dust and debris stirred up by their landing, based on lessons learned on Artemis 4’s inspections of their own habitat and the Apollo 12 site). The occasion of stepping foot on the lunar surface, following in the footsteps of personal hero Alan Shepard, was one which rather overcame Valente. As he descended the ladder to take the mission’s first ceremonial steps off the ladder, he mused over the crew’s radio link about the scenery surrounding him. “It’s amazing here,” he said. “Simply marvelous. Marvelous doings, and marvelous sights.” The official first words on the surface were the more sober ones approved by the Public Affairs Office, and regarded as much less memorable than the simple commentary on the stark beauty surrounding him. It was also upstaged by the speech of Lessard, the next crewman down the ladder: “History will remember me as “the first Frenchman to walk on the Moon”, but I follow in the footsteps of another Frenchman, Jules Verne. He wrote the story of a voyage to the Moon that has inspired so many people. We will always remember that reality is the goal of the imagination.” [2]
Unlike Ed Keeler at Procellarum, Artemis 5’s MSO Beverly McDowell was faced not with a previously visited site of relatively minor geological interest, but instead a sprawling area littered with diverse geological features. At only 1-2 billion years old, the basalts of Smythii held answers about potential lunar volcanism half the age of features which had been examined on Apollo, and thus the potential for answering questions about the mechanics of this volcanic past, and why it had stopped. As the crew worked to lower equipment off the deck of Calypso and prepare the rover for their ride to Adventure, she was faced with twin opposition: time and distance. The mission’s two short weeks seemed like barely enough time to conduct a first sweep of the sites on Smythii, but the main limitation on how extensive the crew’s exploration could be wasn’t the time available, but rather the distances separating different types of features (given the east-west division of materials in the mare’s floor) and how far the crew could explore with their open-cockpit rovers on any single day. The mare stretched over nearly 300 kilometers, and while the landing site at Peek Crater had been selected since the relatively-recent crater could offer a pre-made drill core of the lava flows of the mare, traverses of more than a few hours still posed risks, meaning that sites beyond 40-odd kilometers were likely beyond access, and even some within that range posed risks.
Still, while the limits of their equipment meant that any exploration of the Mare on Artemis 5 however in-depth, would simply be a beginning, the crew took this as a challenge to simply make sure that the small portions they could reach, such as Peek crater and the Eratosthenian-age basaltic materials of the Mare floor surrounding it, were explored in-depth. However, after completing their first week on the surface, McDowell spent much of the lunar noon while the crew was restricted to the Adventure to minimize stress on their suit cooling systems lobbying Valente, walking him through samples she’d already begun analysis on in their cramped geology lab space as Valente replaced seals and otherwise serviced the the crew’s spacesuits. According to mission plans, the Artemis 5 crew was to follow similar procedures to Artemis 4: one pair would make traverses on the rover, while the other would stand by at base carrying out more local site-surveys, ready to drive out and retrieve the other pair if assistance was required. However, contingencies for extended traverses had been discussed,in which both pairs would go on a traverse, allowing the rescue team to already be present in the case of an incident, and thus allowing the teams to traverse further from the sortie’s landing site than would otherwise be the case--another few hours further, in fact, which would in turn allow her to gain access to portions of the Imbrian-era basalts characterizing the western part of the Mare. Although plans for extended traverses had discussed before launch, implementation had been officially left up to the authority of the Flight Director in Houston and the Commander on the surface, in that order, to judge conditions on the ground in real-time. Now among the rugged grey hills of the lunar surface, McDowell found Valente more receptive to adding such a traverse.
After talking through the contingencies, Valente relented--he would help support the plan to Houston. With the geology backroom already lobbying ground control, the support of the Commander was enough to persuade the Flight Director in Houston. Finally, the extended-duration “road trip” of nearly 40 km was added to the mission plan for the second week of the crew’s stay. However, safety remained the utmost priority--if anything, anything at all, was to show signs of going wrong, both pairs and their rovers would have to return home immediately, and the explorations at the remote site would have to be kept to under two hours. It was enough to make McDowell laugh, citing an old geology joke: you always make the most interesting discovery on the very last possible day of the dig, in the most remote location, just as you lose the light. With the lunar day drawing to a close and the mission counting down its final few days, it was an apt comparison as, for the first time, an entire Artemis crew abandoned their landing site and drove off in convoy across the lunar surface.
The drive took several hours, as Valente and Whitt each steered one of the two rovers around boulders, up and down hills, and charted courses across untouched lunar plains. The whole time, as the pilots focused on the drive, McDowell and Lessard indulged in the primary pastime of passengers on uncounted road-trips: watching the scenery. Using the rover’s tie-ins to the Mesyat network as a relay, the two used their cameras and trained eyes to record whatever they could of the terrain they drove through on their way east in the direction of Doyle Crater. Despite the extended drive, the rovers performed flawlessly, and the crew’s arrival at Doyle was trouble-free. With minutes counting down until the end of Houston’s imposed deadline, the entire crew set to work with hammers, drills, and other tools to sample the site on the other side of the geological divide of the mare. “Those two hours at Doyle were some of the busiest of my entire career,” McDowell would later remark. “I don’t think there was a single minute I didn’t have a tool or a sample bag in my hand, and I was narrating the video feed from my suit camera every step. The whole landing was busy, but Doyle was a whole other story.”
Finally, though, the time ran out, and loading their precious samples into the rovers, they set back along their own tire tracks to retrace the drive back home. However, the traverse back wouldn’t prove as smooth as the one on the way out: less than half-an-hour from the safety of Adventure, one of the electric wheel motors of Valente’s rover seized climbing a particularly regolith-heavy hill. Fortunately, with the assistance of the other rover, they were able to pull the rover free, and it was able to complete the traverse dragging the dead wheel in the dirt without needing to abandon the tools, samples, drill cores, and more to enable the four crew to return home on one rover. Still, the crew as a whole breathed a sigh of relief as the landers hove into sight, and the remainder of the mission was spent in much less intensive exploration finishing up tasks within a few kilometers of the Artemis 5 site--with one rover already partially impaired, the contingency rescue plans were no longer feasible. As they finally shut down the habitat on Adventure and prepared it for its time joining Janus as a stationary science platform, then packed their samples and gear aboard the Calypso, McDowell in particular wished that they could have stayed longer--for all their explorations, they had barely reached past the surface of what was available at the mare.
Still, their time was up, and the Calypso made a trouble-free ascent to rendezvous with the Atlantis command module at L2 ahead of the crew’s safe return to Earth. Artemis 5 had proven the extensive scientific capacity of the Artemis system, but it had also shown just how many mysteries such a sortie landing could leave behind when faced with such a diverse site. As NASA higher-ups lobbied for extensions and additional flights of the Artemis series with the incoming President Richards, the example of Artemis 5 would be a powerful one.
[1] Since no partial-gravity studies in space have actually taken place in real life, these figures are largely an invention of the authors, based on some real studies in large rotating rooms on Earth.
[2] Freedom expeditions work a bit like ISS crews: two Expedition crews are on-orbit at a time. The “senior” expedition has their number assigned to the combined crew. When Expedition N’s time is about to complete, a new Expedition (which will eventually be Expedition N+2) launches, and then the Expedition N crew hands off to the already-present Expedition N+1 crew before returning home. Lather, rinse, and repeat every three months or so.
[3] Thanks to the Brainbin for his assistance with this speech, and thanks also to MaskedPickle, who assisted with this translation of the “actual” speech, delivered in French (ironically, one of the few times Lessard spoke in his native language during the mission): L'histoire me retiendra comme « le premier Français à marcher sur la Lune », mais je ne fais que suivre les pas d'un autre Français, Jules Verne. Il a écrit l'histoire d'un voyage sur la lune et en a inspiré beaucoup. Nous nous souviendrons pour toujours que la réalité est le but de l'imagination. As you’ll see, there’s a bit of a pun here, as “story” and “history” are the same word in French. Also, worth noting that the “approved” ESA text had “European” in place of the first “Frenchman”. Sadly, it appears Lessard was “overcome with emotion” on the surface and “spoke from the heart,” as the official French story went.
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Great new Chapter.
Finding it interesting reading about Freedom Station that with the focus on Artemis and the Moon the station has kind of become a back water that isn't really that interesting anymore. Just the focus on the science that can be done in Earth Orbit.
Loved the description of Artemis-V mission. Also how even with a open lunar rover and a range of even 40km you have a very limited area to cover. A pressurized rover with a range of 1000km really opens up the area that you can explore. Each mission is still just sampling a small area of the lunar surface.
Great job.
Finding it interesting reading about Freedom Station that with the focus on Artemis and the Moon the station has kind of become a back water that isn't really that interesting anymore. Just the focus on the science that can be done in Earth Orbit.
Loved the description of Artemis-V mission. Also how even with a open lunar rover and a range of even 40km you have a very limited area to cover. A pressurized rover with a range of 1000km really opens up the area that you can explore. Each mission is still just sampling a small area of the lunar surface.
Great job.