Aviation Week and Space Technology
09/30/2007
By Frank Morring, Jr., Michael A. Taverna and Neelam Mathews
A Japanese spacecraft arriving at the Moon on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik this week marks the beginning of what may be a lucrative sweepstakes in space for generations to come.
But instead of Cold War-style political prestige, the purse for this space race could be long-term market position as the world’s high-tech economy begins to move off-planet.
With China, India and the U.S. planning to follow Japan’s Selene and her two piggyback “daughters” into lunar orbit by the end of 2008, lunar missions are becoming almost a fad. Those nations are already at work on follow-ons, while Germany and the U.K. are plotting their own lunar-development roles.
All are among the 14 nations working out a “collaborative” human exploration model that will use the expected early deluge of lunar-orbital data to guide the construction of permanent multinational outposts where they can showcase their technologies for terrestrial markets.
An early plan to send a DLR orbiter skimming as low as 45 km. over the lunar surface “shows the competitiveness of German space entities,” says Johann-Dietrich Woerner, chairman of the German space agency DLR.
As usual, the International Space Station (ISS) partnership is under a strain, this time, over NASA’s plans to bail out after 2015. But at the 2007 International Astronautical Congress here Sept. 24-28, the skepticism of previous years over U.S. efforts to return to the Moon has given way to enthusiasm.
Canadian robot manufacturers are slotting their wares into NASA’s latest lunar-surface architecture (AW&ST Sept. 17, p. 32), while the European and Russian space agencies are refining their concept for a joint Crew Space Transportation System to supplement NASA’s Constellation family of piloted lunar-access vehicles. Lunar filling station, power plant and strip mine ideas pepper the papers presented here.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, among the strong turnout by space-agency chiefs this year, reminded the congress that President Bush’s original exploration directive called for international and commercial participation.
Sun Laiyan, Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) chief, says China has yet to decide whether it will send its citizens to the Moon, even though Griffin says it’s his personal belief that the Chinese will get there first this time (AW&ST Sept. 24, p. 31).
Sun says the CNSA is ready to cooperate with anyone “but only as an equal,” and NASA invited CNSA to participate in the series of workshops that produced an initial “framework document” last summer (AW&ST June 11, p. 32). But so far, it’s an arm’s-length relationship.
That marks one extreme of the lunar-exploration “collaboration” taking shape in the NASA-initiated workshops, which took the ISS partnership as their starting point. At the other end are longtime cooperative relationships like those among Canada, the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan and NASA. That may be the starting point, but the emerging approach to lunar exploration will be something very different.
“The ISS model is not the right model for exploration,” says workshop member Graham Gibbs of the Canadian Space Agency. While the basic goals of lunar exploration are fairly well-understood, he says relations among participating nations are much more fluid. Nations will take part in some joint efforts on the lunar surface, eschew others and perhaps do some on their own. “We’re looking at, shall we say, a more nimble partnership arrangement,” Gibbs says.
Piero Messina from ESA’s exploration office in Paris agrees. He stresses that while the ultimate shape of the lunar collaboration won’t be clear for several years, it will be much more open-ended than the tight bilateral and multilateral agreements governing the ISS. “Some of the features of this new cooperative scheme would be flexibility, for example,” he says. “Participating parties in this scheme would retain control over their own elements. I think one of the things that we are looking at quite carefully is how to limit the interdependence among different elements.”
The future of the ISS itself is unknown. NASA told its partners it wants to shift ISS funding to lunar exploration after 2015—but Europe and Japan are eagerly awaiting launch of their long-delayed labs in the next few months.
“We are convinced that we must have something after 2015,” says ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain. “We cannot just say to the scientific communities that in 2015, everything stops.” Dordain declares, “ESA is not ready to pay the share of NASA when NASA has left the space station.”
Anatoly N. Perminov, head of Russia’s Federal Space Agency, says that Russia isn’t ready to assume the burden either. “We are interested in extending this program up to 2020, but in case the U.S., the EU, Canada or any other participants decide to leave, one thing is very obvious—Russia will be not ready to carry on this project alone.”
Perminov says the possibility of a U.S. withdrawal from ISS suggests the need for “more strict rules and conditions for participation from the very beginning” of lunar collaboration to avoid a “situation when some of the participants will try to leave without taking into consideration the interests of other parties.”
One possibility for continuing ISS operations is to allow for new partnership members. Permanov says he first raised the issue at the January 2005 ISS Heads of Agency meeting in Montreal. “This question is still pending,” he tells Aviation Week & Space Technology. “No one says yes. No one says no.”
A potential partner could be India, which has targeted Apr. 9, 2009, to launch its Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter on a Polar Space Launch Vehicle, says M. Annadurai, the project director for the mission at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The ISRO integration facility in Bangalore has received the final two instruments—ESA’s Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer and the NASA-funded S-band mini-synthetic-aperture radar—and expects to start integrating them this month.
The international participation on Chandrayaan-1, which also includes Bulgaria, marks a significant shift for the Indian space effort—forced to go it alone for long stretches since its 1962 start. G. Madhavan Nair, the ISRO chairman, says the agency’s “dream”—so far unapproved by government—is to develop a human spaceflight capability.
Nair says ISRO could put an Indian astronaut in orbit “in about seven or eight years from now.” Using the ISS for scientific research is more remote, he says, but if the need arises, “then we’ll be having a dialogue with the U.S. and others.” The objective, he says, is India’s long-term economic development.
“In the future developments, we are trying to give the thrust to the space exploration, because that brings in a lot of new technologies and fundamental knowledge,” Nair says. “It provides a big thrust to the scientific community in the country, and also brings in the youngsters to pursue space careers.”
Within the next six months, he says, ISRO expects to complete planning for a Chandrayaan-II mission to land and deploy a rover on the Moon. That would put India’s robotic lunar program on par with China, which has an approved program to try for a robotic lunar sample return by 2015-17.
China has shipped its Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter to the launch site for liftoff before the end of this year, and is well along in its plans to begin work on a rover-equipped lunar lander soon after. Targeted for launch in 2012-15, the 4,000-kg. lander would use a Long March CZ-3B launcher to go directly into lunar transfer orbit, states Peng Jing of the China Academy of Space Technology. After several lunar orbits, the lander would touch down using a throttlable descent engine, the final impact cushioned by crushable material in four landing struts. For its nominal 90 days of surface operations, the lander would shift from solar power to a Pu-238 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for heating and other uses during a three-lunar-night stay.
While China, India, Japan and NASA start the robotic reconnaissance of the Moon, ESA continues to stick to its policy of focusing on Mars in line with priorities established by its scientific community. However, the agency must find an extra €350 million ($494 million) or so to compensate for a gross underestimation of mission requirements for its one-year ExoMars rover mission. Due to be launched in 2013, ExoMars is intended as a precursor to a joint NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission, now foreseen around 2018 (see p. 18).
Under a revised “enhanced baseline,” engineers agreed to increase the size of the ExoMars rover and static Geophysical Equipment Package (GEP) to carry an acceptable payload—16.5 kg. for the rover and 20 kg. for the GEP. The change also forced ESA to switch from the Soyuz to a larger launch vehicle—either Ariane 5 or a Russian Proton, in return for use of ESA’s deep-space network.
For the communications relay, Messina says, the current baseline is to rely on the U.S. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt as a possible backup. Other solutions under study include a combined communications relay/carrier or a dedicated relay satellite, which might require an additional launch.
Giovanni Bignami, head of the Italian space agency ASI, says Italy plans to propose a dedicated orbiter and a new 64-meter ground antenna in Sardinia to beef up ESA’s deep-space network. The orbiter, estimated at €150 million, could be funded under the Italian national space program. The antenna, which ASI partly owns, is under construction.
ESA expects to receive binding tenders from industry for ExoMars by the end of October and ask for funding commitments to cover the extra cost in November. A decision on the orbiter might be deferred until the ESA ministerial in November 2008, Messina says.
Although Mars remains Europe’s primary objective, some voices are insisting ESA should not give the Moon short shrift. Therefore, ESA is studying a lunar-lander mission as one of two options for an interim mission, dubbed Next, planned around 2015 between ExoMars and Mars Sample Return. This probe would study surface mobility aspects not envisioned for ExoMars.
However, a competing Mars orbiter mission, intended to validate rendezvous, aerobraking and science networking, is considered more likely to be selected at the November 2008 summit. To make sure Europe remains in the lunar loop, the U.K. and Germany are proposing national orbiter projects that could go forward even if the Mars option is preferred for Next.
Germany is pushing a four-year global stereo/spectral mapping mission to characterize surface composition in unexplored ultraviolet and mid-infrared wavelengths, and to analyze the lunar regolith by radar-sounding. Competing pre-definition Phase O studies have been done by OHB Systems and Astrium. A decision is expected early next year.
Equipped with as many as 12 instruments, the 2-metric-ton spacecraft would be launched in 2012. DLR’s Woerner says he has received “positive signals” from the economics and trade ministry, which is responsible for space in Germany, that money will be available for the €300-400-million mission.
The U.K. is proposing a pair of small orbiter missions. One would include a penetrator network with a surface-science package (AW&ST Aug. 20/27, p. 36). Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., which studied the mission for the U.K.’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, estimates mission cost at about £80 million ($161 million). SSTL business development manager Adam Baker suggests a British mission might carry a hyperspectral sensor, derived from experience with ESA’s Compact High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer, to set it off from other probes.
Both Baker and Woerner insist even small Moon missions would serve an important outreach function in countries where space does not enjoy a high public profile. The U.K. mission received strong support from a parliamentary science-and-technology report on the British space program, issued in July. However, a senior British space official ranks the chances of its going ahead “a tossup.”
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