Thread by @CJHandmer

Lord give me strength.

434 pages, almost no content. Who wrote it? How long did it take? It reads like the Codex Seraphinianus.

But first, would you like a NASA STI?

No time to thoroughly review now, but here's a quick summary. Zero mentions of Starship. Three of SpaceX (all image credits). Zero entry of methane. One mention of direct entry.

One mention of Delta V. Zero mentions of mass fraction.

Zero attempts at cost estimates or cost/benefit analysis.

Schedule and budget is explicitly excluded as out of scope.

Zero mention of productivity or workforce development.

Okay let's do this.

What is the "Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate"? An organization within NASA whose mission is to develop systems for (human space) exploration.

Why have they spent years dumping 434 pages of wishlists and requirements formulation processes into this document? Most of this document is repetitive self-referential and circular definitions all but explicitly outlining NASA's strategy to diffuse responsibility for making (or avoiding making) any decision under any circumstances. I'll be focusing on the actual material.

You could be forgiven for thinking "Great, NASA has an org who is meant to design, research, test and build space exploration systems" but that's not what they do, evidently. Where are the real world trade offs and data on long term life support? Where is the delta V map? Where is the pork chop plot for launch windows to and from Mars? Not here. Hard to believe you can write 434 pages on "Moon to Mars architecture strategy development" and not have any hard technical information or constraint->architecture down select. But they did it!

This is the "executive summary".

I fed it into Claude to find out if it contained any useful information. It does not. The executive summary should contains sentences like "We found the best unifying principle for architecture selection was upmass capacity and cost improvement trajectory." Or "It is now clear that building intermediate orbital destinations adds numerous requirements with little to no benefit." Or "NASA has been thinking about this problem since 1958 and we now have a definitive answer."

Instead, we get this badly written word salad.

"This version of the ADD, developed to support NASA's 2023 Architecture Concept Review, incorporates several key updates to support the continued evolution of the architecture". WTF?

Who actually reads this stuff? If you work at NASA as a customer for this endless bureaucratic paperwork generation, please reach out and tell me what this document told you that you didn't already know.

It's not like this is the first ever work on Mars architecture development, not that you'd know that from the total lack of citations of previous work. Where is the compare/contrast with Constellation, SDI, Mars Direct, SpaceX's plan, etc?

Here are some diagrams of the development process. This is basically a map of about 10000 separate emails punted between five different desks in the DC area, but there's no evidence that this sort of decision making process can actually converge, let alone converge on anything sensible.

Charitably interpreted, these org charts summarize a bewildering thicket of rules about who is allowed to talk to who else when about what, to reduce negative externalities including, apparently, the creation of any kind of official document containing certain statements of obvious common sense.

Such statements could include: "SLS is nonsense, Orion doesn't work properly, Gateway is a huge waste of time and money." But because these statements would be perceived as politically controversial, instead we're treated to this spectacle of dozens of people performing some very odd rituals for years to somehow derive an alternative set of facts about spaceflight. Some parallel reality where things that are obviously true are false and vice versa.

Unfortunately for this approach, physics is the law and it does not care about political expediency, it just gently pushes your rocket, and your hopes and dreams, down into the ocean.

You would think 17 dead astronauts are sufficient for NASA to have learned this lesson. You would think...

Here is a fascinating artifact showing exactly how the process of specious demand generation actually works in practice.

What does the US public care about in space? Not all that much, but basically that astronauts go do cool stuff in space. The popularity of recent Starship launches speaks to this - it's a very simple message. SpaceX builds a gigantic, capable rocket, and then you use it to transport people and stuff from place to place in outer space, very cool!

But the ESDMD at NASA has spent billions of dollars of public money and decades developing a bunch of systems that were obsolete on day one, so now they need to make it look intentional. How?

Well, first, let's divide the system up functionally on the vertical axis, and then divide the mission itself up into 4 or 5 segments horizontally. Then we slot SLS, Orion, and HLS into the top left corner, plus a few other afterthoughts into various other places.

This sort of chart is pretty explicit about excluding any kind of approach that "just does the thing".

"Human Lunar Return" is code for "don't let the Chinese beat us back to the Moon" so it's meant to be some expedient stripped down Apollo 2.0, which ideally would be quick and cheap to make the point, before the serious stuff gets going. Of course, as we know, nothing about SLS and Orion can actually get humans back to the Lunar surface, and if we continue on this course we're giving the Moon to the communists, ironically because SLS and Orion are the US's own version of corrupt corporate welfare, which is communism by any other name. The appropriation of public wealth for a government project that serves only a handful of insiders with no accountability.

Then, almost as an afterthought, we have "foundational exploration" which is code for "SLS and Orion and HLS are useless for anything other than flags and footsteps, so now we get to build all the systems all over again to make them a bit better." And "Sustained lunar evolution" is the same again, but by this point NASA is out of ideas for how to make this work, even as Starship has publicly stated it can deliver cargo to the Moon in 100 T increments for (checks notes) 5 years.

"Humans to Mars" is an afterthought in this chart, and unfortunately nothing else in the document really gives it much thought.

Here's some more chart crimes.

These exist to show how this office at NASA is trying to think about some kind of post hoc justification for what they want to do.

Don't think too much about how much these charts cost the taxpayer, and how poorly the teams behind them have spent the public purse on systems everyone can see can't work.

This chart shows how justifications for poor architectural choices are manufactured.

Why go to the Moon? Science and prestige. So far so good.

What foundational capabilities are needed? Long duration microgravity systems. Why? Last time I checked you can fly to the Moon in 3 days. The Moon has partial gravity. So why do we need long duration microgravity systems? A mystery.

"Low Earth Orbit assets and infrastructure". Again, why do we need this to go to the Moon. SLS is supposedly (it isn't) the only rocket that can launch humans to the Moon in a single launch, so why do we need any LEO assets at all? We don't. Why is it in this chart?

"Where should systems be?" Answer: The south pole, and also, not the south pole. Very specific.

"How will we get there?" Lunar microgravity staging operations in NRHO.

And now we see the answer. Apparently it's vital that we go to the Moon to do science and beat China, but not so vital that anyone on the inside has the guts to say that building another giant expensive time consuming space station, this time around the Moon, is a bad idea. We didn't need Gateway to go to the Moon during Apollo. We don't need it now. NASA has never publicly justified its existence in terms of the Lunar mission exploration.

The real reason Gateway exists is to give NASA's space station people something to do, and to make SLS's continuing failure less obvious. For newer readers, I've written a few blogs on SLS, but it and Orion are not powerful enough to actually reach the Moon, and Gateway is about as close as they can get. Rather than can SLS, Orion and Gateway as three brothers in development failure, they've instead become some trinity of self-justifying failure.

"When will we achieve lunar objectives?" "Multi decadal campaign. Annual cadence of missions. Economic sphere." This is code for approximately never. The current approach cannot succeed. Slow is fake.

Tell me why notionally annual sorties to the Moon costing $10b each on SLS makes sense in a world where SpaceX launches rockets every other day?

Now we look at the same chart, but for Mars. Here, the confusion deepens since we have two different ways of exploring the architecture derivation, that don't give the same answer.

In 2016, SpaceX announced their approach to Mars. The question isn't "how do we get humans to Mars and back?" which then leads to a bunch of awkward "when?" and "why?" charts like these. The question is "how do we build a self-sustaining city on Mars?" Not as some long term afterthought of a $1t flags and footprints mission (this document is primarily concerned with surface stays of just 10-50 days) but as the primary goal.

Once you articulate the problem this way, the when and why is straight forward. We need to build technology that maximizes our time weighted future expectation value of soft-landed mass on Mars. That's all. Ship as much stuff there as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible.

There's no need to spend months debating the supposed benefits of a 2 person crew vs a 6 person crew. All of that is downstream of our cargo capacity per year.

If you want to see how the sausage is made, look no further than this paragraph.

No, it's not an example in the CIA's well-known manual for how to disrupt the productivity of organizations, though you could be forgiven for thinking so. In this single paragraph, we see laid bare NASA's inability to make decisions and their eagerness to devolve decision making capacity to as many people as possible.

Importantly, at no point is there a discussion of reducing these design trades to actual numbers. For example, in deciding between ISRU return propellant production vs launch from Earth, I think it's pretty easy to translate that to a lower bound cost increment. Then it's easy to ask option A vs option B, how does this affect cost, risk, and schedule? It is an engineering decision. Instead, the use of ISRU is so exciting we're going to have to involve the planetary protection people. Heaven help us!

Let's contrast this with Starship. Starship is designed to land 100 T on Mars. Starship needs about 1200 T of prop to fly back to Earth, and perhaps somewhat less to fly back to LMO. So if we're doing Earth supply of return propellant, it will cost us 12 Starships' worth of cargo to deliver, or perhaps 8 or 9 if we use some Mars Orbit Rendezvous. If each tanker launch to Mars costs $20m, then Earth prop supply will cost ~$240m per returned Starship.

If SpaceX can build and deliver an ISRU plant with, say, just 3 Starships then the ambivalent cost point is $180m for ISRU hardware, assuming a single flight. If we're amortizing ISRU development cost over multiple return Starship flights, and an ISRU plant at this scale costs $20m to build, then ISRU enables 3x more return mass for the same price.

This tweet isn't the last word on the subject, but the previous two paragraphs contain more insight on this subject than the entire 434 page report. Yikes!

"The decision space ontology is used to build the decision space model."

This is not comparative literature!

I'll take a break from criticizing the stylistics of this web of confusion to get consequentialist for a moment. If NASA was making good decisions, I wouldn't care that much how they got made. If NASA is making bad decisions, I think we're authorized to critique the process a bit. If NASA is making decisions with decision space models like the diagram below, it's not exactly a surprise that they can decide to publish a 434 page document on how they're making decisions which doesn't contain any decisions.

In other words, it is conspicuously obvious that developing decision space ontologies is useless. Stop doing it.

Here are some diagrams on mission class selection.

This is one of many great religious arguments in human space flight. Option A results in 1.5 years near Mars, option B results in 1.5 years flying home. Given that the whole point of the exercise is to put people on Mars, you may be surprised to learn that NASA's conventional wisdom is that option B is better, because it has a slightly shorter overall duration.

Also, coincidentally, missions which involve most of the crew spending most of their time in a modular microgravity deep space transportation hab (ie space station with engines) are extremely popular with the dominant NASA space station constituency. Remember the diagram which somehow put long duration microgravity habitats for Lunar exploration on the critical path, despite the Moon being very close to Earth?

Again, if we're going to Mars to explore, what is the value of forcing the crew to spend twice as long in deep space?

Look at Starship! No Mars orbiting habitat. No fetishization of deep space habitation. Starship is designed to get from point A to point B as quickly and cheaply as possible.

I've included a launch window diagram I made a few years ago, so you can see for yourself when it's easy to get to and from Mars. No such diagram appears in this entire report.

Here's a diagram of CPNT for the Lunar exploration phase. CPNT stands for communication position navigation timing. From this diagram you could be forgiven for thinking that CPNT is really complicated on the Moon. But this diagram is an org chart. Each acronym represents a constituency that needs to be pacified before you can have permission to beam radio waves to and from the Moon.

Is Lunar CPNT really hard?

Well the Soviets managed it in the 1970s. The Chinese seem to be doing okay with their far side assets right now. Starlink satellites could quite easily manage everything lunar assets (which are mostly stationary anyway) could possibly want.

I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if we need to spend $10b on a new constellation of radar dishes and DSN upgrades and Lunar orbiting atomic clocks to drive a few rovers around.

The SLS overview!

"With its unprecedented power and capabilities, SLS is the only launch vehicle that can send Orion, astronauts, and payloads directly to the Moon on a single launch."

This is an obvious lie, published in March 2024, funded by your tax dollars.

The SLS does not have unprecedented power and capabilities, there are several other rockets flying today with better performance, which is why NASA launched Europa Clipper on Falcon Heavy. Starship is far more powerful. The SLS cannot launch any astronauts or payload directly to the Moon. Artemis cannot launch humans to the Moon on a single launch, SLS or no. Orion cannot transport astronauts until its heat shield, which may be unfixable, is fixed. A lie!

"Humans will be transported safely, and different payloads will be delivered efficiently and effectively, to enable a variety of complex missions in cislunar and deep space."

The SLS costs over $4b per launch. Even if it was safe and effective (it is not) it cannot be efficient. This is another publicly funded and obvious (and therefore stupid) lie.

NASA's mission to explore the universe and perform valuable science is grievously undermined by its continued transparent falsehoods about the (in)capacity of its horrendously mismanaged flagship launch system.

Shame!

The Orion spacecraft has cost over $20b and 20 years to develop and lacks the ability to dock with other spacecraft. It also is so heavy the SLS can't launch it to the low lunar orbit necessary to go to the Moon, and also its heat shield doesn't work properly. It is another blight on the face of US space exploration capacity and it should be canceled immediately, and as much funding as possible clawed back from the profiteering contractors who sold this turkey to the US taxpayer.

^Not what the report says, obviously.

Are you ready for the sole mention of the SpaceX Starship?

Here it is! It's the old render of the Lunar Starship.

What is it? It's the way we get humans to the lunar surface. It seems big. Does it need SLS, Orion, or Gateway to get there? No. That's funny, could it transport humans to the Moon from Earth? Obviously yes, don't ask. Does it also cost the US taxpayer $100b and 20 years to develop? Don't be silly, it's being built on a fixed price contract. Has it been test launched yet? Well, SpaceX has flown 6 Starship test flights in the last two years, not that you'd learn that from the report.

Some open questions. I will answer them here.

1) Use Starship.
2) Use Starship.
3) Delete Gateway, use Starship.
4) What crew in cislunar space? Just go direct. In Starship.
5) What sets the 2 km EVA limit? Why not 1.9 km or 2.1 km? The report does not address. Could be important.
6) How to power during the lunar night? There's one obvious approach - beam it up from Earth. AFAIK, NASA's never looked into it, perhaps because it's >1000x cheaper than the next best option?
7) Tell fewer conspicuous lies.

Going to take a break.

Here's a chart on how to get to Mars and back. Most of the focus seems to be on low TRL nuclear or electric propulsion, though there is a sketch of a "definitely not a Starship" chemical option, which is by far the cheapest.

It's also telling that nowhere here do we address Mars ascent, which is by far the hardest part of the whole mission sequence. How do you get back? NTP, NEP, SEP can't do launch off a planet, only chemical can. Even Mars Direct de-emphasizes this part.

There's also a chart on the Blue lander, toward which I bear no ill will! May it fly straight and true, and inexpensively.

This chart explains the spectrum of options between the faster and longer missions. The ironic thing is that the longer missions are more capable, because there's an exponential mass penalty for rushing home too soon (not explained in this report). This chart also gives a date: 2040 for the first mission. Remember, slow is fake.

In my opinion, "strategy" is a code word for "no serious work being done". The only people qualified to actually do strategy don't call it that, they're too busy executing. "Strategy" is what PowerPoint slinging 22 year old McKinsey flacks pontificate about while downsizing your department.

Anyway, this chart purports to be about key Mars architecture decisions but it doesn't actually make any decisions, it just splinters the trade space into about 50 separate "strategy" pieces.

For example, Crew Support contains an EVA strategy, no doubt to decide how to build space suits. We'd better figure this one out, given that both NASA's internal space suit development "strategy" for Artemis, as well as their two contractors Collins and Axiom, have burned well over a billion dollars and still don't have even a single functional prototype for astronauts to use on the Moon in a year or two. How much more strategy do we need here?

Here's a diagram summarizing NASA's work on the Mars hardware. To be fair Congress has never consistently funded any human Mars exploration development, but the heritage and status info is correct: the only real world testing on any of this stuff is the HIAD inflatable heat shield tests run about 6 years ago, with inconclusive results. For the rest, it's some sketches and a few calculations, not much more than Kerbal space program.

Landing heavy stuff on Mars is really hard. A blunt body capsule, like that in the top picture, has a high terminal velocity and low altitude, significantly restricting payload and landing sites. It's also doubtful that supersonic parachutes can scale much beyond their current size for the 1 T rovers.

Starship uses a lifting body design, which enables higher cargo capacity with less complexity, lower terminal velocity, and integral retropropulsion. It's not addressed in this report.

Here's a diagram summarizing NASA's work on the Mars hardware. To be fair Congress has never consistently funded any human Mars exploration development, but the heritage and status info is correct: the only real world testing on any of this stuff is the HIAD inflatable heat shield tests run about 6 years ago, with inconclusive results. For the rest, it's some sketches and a few calculations, not much more than Kerbal space program.

Landing heavy stuff on Mars is really hard. A blunt body capsule, like that in the top picture, has a high terminal velocity and low altitude, significantly restricting payload and landing sites. It's also doubtful that supersonic parachutes can scale much beyond their current size for the 1 T rovers.

Starship uses a lifting body design, which enables higher cargo capacity with less complexity, lower terminal velocity, and integral retropropulsion. It's not addressed in this report.

Some more charts with conceptual development of Earth Mars deep space transporters.

These are basically some new high performance nuclear or electric drive combined with a space station, as we saw in The Martian.

They derive from a model of exploration that calls for progressively deeper staging. That is, a system architecture in which every constituency gets a participation trophy.

First, we spend billions building some custom one off deep space hab in LEO. Then we launch all the stuff we need on Mars to it and bolt it all together. Propellant, landers, rovers, to whatever. Then the whole behemoth flies to Mars, parking in Mars orbit, while the landers sortie to the surface to gather rocks etc, then launch back up and the whole stack flies back to Earth.

Then, 4 years later, do it all over again. How do we expand this model if we want to transport 1000 T of stuff to Mars? Either spend many billions more building bigger better deep space transports in orbit, or start again from scratch.

Contrast this to the SpaceX approach. Question all requirements. Delete unnecessary parts and processes. Orbital assets are complicated and extremely expensive, so instead let's mass produce Starships on Earth in a giant factory. We'll churn out thousands every year. Each one can carry 100 T, and more later as we get smarter about the manufacturing process. Each Starship flies the whole way all the way to the surface, and if configured and fueled can fly all the way back again. Why have a layover in Dallas if we can fly direct?

Do we need 8 types of orbital module and a space rated GW nuclear reactor? No - just one unified design. And if we want to ship 1000 T, or a million T, just speed up the factory and launch more.

In 20 years when people are flying back and forth from Mars all the time, does that create a forcing function for better propulsion tech? Yes, but it will have to compete with all chemical, which will be highly advanced by then.

Note that if you ask the right question: How do I get a million tonnes of stuff on Mars? The answer is far more obvious. No need for 434 pages of architecture definitions and strategy requirements. Just a mass conveyor belt with compact cargo envelope requirements. If it fits, it ships.

A summary of Earth launch systems. Here, the merest hint of Starship as a "commercial super heavy lift conceptual designs in development".

Starship has launched six times, SLS once. Currently SLS is launching about 50x less often, but at much more than 50x the price.

The writing is on the wall.

I saw a post pointing out that SpaceX is now an effective razor for seriousness. Any space conference without them is not serious. Any architectural study without them is not serious.

This document will be studied by sociologists and historians for decades as an example of a dying agency struggling against forces they evidently do not understand, forces which could be their only path to salvation.

Look back from 2500 AD. "Why did NASA spill so much ink talking about SLS and Orion, even 8 years after their own contractor SpaceX had unveiled a far superior architecture and then proceeded to execute it 100x faster?"
"Well you see, son, back then there were members of Congress and the Senate who thought they could overcome physics by writing laws, and their allies in NASA thought if they LARPed hard enough, SLS would magically work."
"What finally stopped the pantomime?"
"Sometimes organizations and processes progress one death at a time. At this point in history nearly all the people clinging to power were very old and we still hadn't invented immortality."
Etc.

The pre-Starship Mars architectures are bad memes and they have already been selected against. You can't BS technical ambitious people, and that's why thousands of them now work in South Texas making the Starship fly.

That's it. I'm not doing any more.

Let me know when NASA publishes the version that refers to reality.