PASADENA >> Five days of collaboration, late-night brain somersaults and strategy clashes culminated Friday in two Caltech presentations that demystified how a potential asteroid-landing mission is a steppingstone toward getting astronauts on Mars.
The 2015 Caltech Space Challenge selected 32 international students, divided them into two teams and asked them to design a mission where astronauts would land on an asteroid both to mine for resources and to demonstrate how the raw materials could be used.
The idea behind the thought exercise is people eventually will have to launch fewer things into space because the items would already be there to be picked up during a stop at a space gas station.
Team Voyager produced the winning concept design, but Bill Tandy, project manager of Team Explorer, said he left the week-long experience as a winner.
“It was really great working with very smart people,” said Tandy, from the University of Colorado Boulder. “I learned so much about science and astronauts and vehicles and launching and trajectory and teamwork. Really great educational opportunity.”
Graduate and undergraduate students from 14 countries, including India, Germany and Brazil, arrived at Caltech on March 22. They were selected from a pool of 220 applicants from 104 worldwide universities to participate in Caltech’s third Space Challenge.
Many came from American schools such as Caltech, UCLA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, but international schools such as the University of Strathclyde, the Technical University of Madrid and Ecole Polytechnique were also represented.
In theory the exercise would enable students one day to pitch their mission concept to NASA, which is planning an Asteroid Redirect Mission for the mid-2020s. The teams focused on extracting resources from an asteroid that has been put in lunar orbit, but on Wednesday, NASA announced it would go for Plan B. It will put a boulder from an asteroid into lunar orbit.
“It doesn’t really change anything that they’ve done,” said Hayden Burgoyne, co-lead organizer of this year’s biennial event. “All they really have to do is change out the pictures. They still have the same asteroid materials they can demonstrate for resource utilization. It’s still the same spacecraft.”
The boulders NASA has proposed to pluck from space are up to 16 feet wide, Burgoyne said. The asteroids could have been slightly bigger, but choosing a big rock allows NASA to pick a choice piece of asteroid for experimentation and resource extraction purposes, Burgoyne said.
Team Explorer proposed to start with a cargo mission in August 2024 using a Falcon Heavy and then in March 2025, they would use Orion and the Space Launch System — both of which are still being perfected — to send astronauts who will “return as heroes.”
Their goal was to bring 220 pounds of material back to Earth for scientific examination. During their proposed 22-day manned mission, astronauts would grow eight heads of lettuce using both water brought from Earth and water from the asteroid to examine the possibility of becoming Earth-independent.
Team Voyager set their mission between March 30, 2024, and October 16, 2024. The 39-day crewed mission would devote 22 days for science inquiry and 17 days for travel using Orion and the SLS. Astronauts would examine water content, its form (liquid, gas, solid), perform chemical analysis and execute elemental analysis.
The asteroid, they said, would function like the International Space Station — a stomping ground for people from all nations. The group said they wanted to introduce a new way for space agencies to operate.
Rather than mission control operating as the brain while astronauts functioned as limbs, they said agencies should train astronauts how to handle different situations. This would be better, considering the time delay in beaming data from Earth to space and back again. An on-site “habitat” would function as primary mission control, and the one on Earth would be a secondary mission control that would interject only when their colleagues in space went astray, Team Voyager said.
Craig Elder, a competition juror with expertise in spacecraft program management, said the students had fantastic, well thought out ideas, especially considering they had only five days of research and development. Yet he said the students could’ve let their imaginations roam further.
“The rate at which technology is improving is such that many of the things that they viewed as limiting factors, I don’t believe they will be limiting factors even in five years let alone 10,” he said. “It’s a very exciting time in space as well as for mankind, and I feel that if anything, they didn’t go far away enough.”
