Can Tito not afford two F9 launches?

I agree that “design by PowerPoint” is not a good way to go. They are almost a year into their idea, and they need to present a preliminary design review soon (his schedule shows it will be next November) to identify all the holes, how they are going to plug them, how they will finance it (finding this funding is the point of the” PowerPoint” design), what hardware they need, when the not-yet-available hardware will have to be tested in order for it to be used (plus backup plans in case it does not become available), how much the project will cost and weigh, etc.. All of these must be realistic and achievable.

It seems that Tito is losing confidence that commercial space hardware will be ready in time, so he is looking for another source of hardware. Unfortunately, he still depends upon hardware that is in development. He mentioned in one of the links that there is another, though longer flight, opportunity in 2021. It uses a flyby of Venus. He may need to state that as his fallback option, complete with a plan for succeeding at that mission.

I support his inspirational effort to show that it can be done. This is part of the private, commercial space effort to bring to life the promise of the odyssey that we saw in Kubrick and Clark’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” These are exciting times in space, the excitement that I had hoped to join when I first got into the business.

It does not matter that it has little practical value, it is inspirational and something for the rest of us to aspire to.

And then there’s the whole radiation/microgravity/consumables/ECLSS thingy…yadda yadda, minor details. Which is too bad ’cause I was really hoping this would work. Maybe SpaceX can pull it off on their own with the 2021 Moon/Venus/Mars flyby window. IMHO that would be spectacular.

I get what you’re say, and yes, powerpoint plans are not often well thought out. As in never. My point is that you yourself said that these sorts of plan keep coming back, and I say they keep rising from the dead because you end up with folks who just blurt out “that’s stupid”, then walk off. There is no education as to WHY the plan has faults.

It would be more productive to show the holes, make it clear in a calm but firm way that the deficiencies exist. Not just for Dennis Tito, but for the next person to come along. It may save Tito and/or the next contender some time, and possibly align people’s thoughts better towards a real plan. That’s all I’m trying to get across.

First of all, you do not need one back up mass of atmosphere in case they get a hole. If it’s not explosive decompression that kills them instantly, then it’s a hole they can patch before it drains them too much. Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. Liquified gas is highly compressed in any case.

What you do need is about 8kg of consumables (O2, H2O and food) per day per person which includes packaging. So two people for 501 days is 8016kg or about 8m3 of space or about a quarter of all the space in an Orion & Cygnus combo. That’s without recycling. They might be a little more generous.

It cost fuel to move mass so to keep cost down you want less mass. Orion, Cygnus, crew, consumables, and departure stage would be about 30mt requiring about 150mt of fuel (about $300m to get fuel to LEO.)

Tito is figuring about $1b total cost but using SLS & Orion (if ready in time) will likely cost more although NASA might pick up the tab.

Dragon with a porch and consumables might only be 15mt costing only $200m for fuel (including some extra fuel for course corrections.)

How much mass do you think they will need to drive around Mars in their motor home?

All that food and atmosphere plus at least one back up mass of atmosphere in case they get a hole.

Water enough for a normal life.

If you can move that you can just as easily move something two, three, of four times the size.

Just add more fuel or dock with more robot fuel vehicles as you go.

Tito’s timing has always been tight, and NASA does not do fast very well. Apollo was successful, but at a price that many thought excessive. There aremany unknowns and risks involved. It is one thing for the private sector to take risks, but bureaucracies (and let’s face it, NASA is one) do not do risk very well. NASA has become very averse to losing crews, and I don’t blame them.

With the recent realization that a regular trip to Mars will expose the crew to the limit of NASA’s allowed radiation exposure, I seriously doubt that NASA would sanction an even longer voyage with even more exposure.

Not only is Tito barking up the wrong tree, but that tree is likely to fall on him unexpectedly.

The problem is congress doesn’t need convincing to spend pork. All Tito has to provide is a straw and congress will grasp it. The only thing that will kill SLS is an operational FH. Even then it will require embarrassing SLS supporters that don’t know shame.

Orion is being positioned as a long range option. The fact they intend to add Cygnus to their configuration exposes that lie. You can’t get around the need for volume. But Cygnus only doubles the volume. It’s advantage is low mass but loses that once you add operational components.

I don’t know why ILC Dover doesn’t offer price and specs to bid for this opportunity? They could come up with a Dragon porch that could go up in one launch with crew. That’s got to be less than $200m and all that would remain would be an earth departure stage (or refuel the upper stage that got them to orbit.)

The audience I want to reach is not Tito, but Congress. Tito was talking to Congress. I don’t want him to succeed in convincing them to finance any of this. It is for this reason I will be discussing this at length tonight on John Batchelor.

I right on board with what you’ve written. I shouldn’t be very difficult to identify EVERY hole in this plan, log it on a spreadsheet or a rebuttal report, and directly request that Tito and Company explicitly address every pitfall, deficiency, and undefined assumption. If it’s wrong, why should we not directly tell him what’s wrong with it? If he’s serious, he’ll answer the questions. If he’s just fiddling around, that will become immediately apparent.

Just reading the report and declaring it to be sophmoric (even if it is) doesn’t do much. And Tito or someone like him will just rewarm bad ideas and present them again. And if USGov decides to run with a bad plan when we knew it was a bad plan and didn’t tackle it to reality, we bear some responsibility for that.

I am totally in favor of pushing these visionary ideas, as long as they are grounded in some reality. It is for this reason that I have been a big advocate of both SpaceX and Scaled Composites. These two companies don’t offer us “engineering by PowerPoint.” They come up with smart ideas and then build them.

Tito’s group deserves some harsh criticism. They very clearly are completely ignorant of the challenges an interplanetary flight entails, and should be ashamed of that ignorance. Instead, they appear to be proud of it. After their sixty day study you would have thought their proposal this week would have dealt with some of the basic engineering and medical issues. It did not.

What worries me most is that some members of Congress might run with this proposal, in order to justify pork, and thus steal needed cash from other much more worthwhile and much more likely-to-succeed projects (such as the commercial crew program). Sierra Nevada is building its mini-shuttle, and should they complete it and fly it, it will change manned space. Similarly, having them as well as Boeing and SpaceX providing us manned capabilities would be priceless. To lose this possibility so that Dennis Tito and some Congressmen can make believe they are sending two people to Mars would be beyond tragic.

I agree. We threaten to navel-gaze ourselves into inaction.

The “Inspiration Mars” plan should be picked up by the community, and honestly analyzed for holes. And heaven knows, there are a whole constellation of holes in his mission profile. But let’s quantify them, list them out, and send them back to Tito’s staff and encourage them to plan out how those holes get filled. One thing that I see in space advocacy and private space discussion is a preponderance of rock-throwing, and little else.

That needs to change, and it shouldn’t be all that hard.

I believe even the Sundancer is overkill, but it’s the best option I see. Zubrin had a better idea using a Dragon with an inflated porch.

The medical issues are not trivial, but the point is to demonstrate they are not showstoppers either. Which is to say, let them worry about recovery after they get back, not figure everything out before they go. Trying to do that, they will never go. This is not to say we don’t include things that we can, but there is a time issue.

We have a cost opportunity but that’s easy to blow by over analysing it. As long as the crew understands their risks, it’s their choice in taking them.

If Tito is serious, he’s got some serious rethinking to do.

Something using spin gravity. Which is needed for so many things.
It keeps plants growing correctly, humans healthier, adds to the general cleanliness of the environment, far far more science experiments could be done in low gravity than in free fall.
And quite frankly I don’t think one group is designing anything for this other than possibly Bigalow.

Until we build something even close to this all the dreaming is just that. Dreaming.

As much as I deride NASA even they know that a mission to Mars is not even close to a dream.

If this guy was serious he would be investing in launching the largest habitation possible from Bigalow and assembling it in orbit.

They could even design and build it with a plan to integrate it into an eventual mission to Mars.