Pence Gives Boeing's Super Rocket Thumbs Up, Directs NASA To Accelerate Moon Work - Forbes

The National Space Council held its fifth meeting Tuesday at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and chairman Mike Pence used the occasion to press for an accelerated return of U.S. astronauts to the Moon. The plan had been to land Americans near the Moon’s south pole in 2028—56 years after the last Apollo Moon walk—but Pence wants that mission accomplished four years sooner.

All the pieces of an integrated Moon mission will need to come together faster than previously planned. That includes the rocket being built by Boeing, the space capsule being built by Lockheed Martin, and a lunar lander not yet contracted. Critics are questioning how this can all happen, but supporters point out that Americans first landed on the Moon only 98 months after President Kennedy proclaimed that goal—at a time when the available technology was much less advanced.

There isn’t much mystery about why Pence has lit a fire under NASA, the nation’s civilian space agency, to move faster. China has begun sending missions to the Moon, and might even land its own astronauts there ahead of the U.S. That would be a huge blow to U.S. prestige, and would signal that America is no longer preeminent in space. The Pentagon was already worried about the strides China and Russia are making in negating U.S. military advantages in space, and now at least one of them seems to be catching up in civil space too.

Pence made it clear that, like the president, he is not a patient person. Any company that cannot keep up with the accelerated pace of Moon work risks being left behind. In Boeing’s case, that might mean seeing its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket supplanted by commercial rockets. However, the immediate effect of the Vice President’s remarks was to confirm that SLS remains the centerpiece of U.S. deep space exploration efforts, which under Trump and Pence are supposed to first return U.S. astronauts to the Moon, and then reach onward to Mars.

An artist's conception of the Space Launch System shortly after liftoff.

NASA

Boeing, a contributor to my think tank, is prime contractor on what will be the most powerful rocket ever built. The basic concept is build a rocket capable of lifting 77 tons to low earth orbit, and then evolve it in steps to much bigger payloads that can one day carry astronauts to and from the Red Planet. Nobody has ever tried to do this before, but NASA’s architectural studies over the last 30 years have consistently indicated that a rocket even bigger than the Saturn V used in the Apollo missions will be needed. There is little commercial or military demand for such a rocket, so NASA needed to develop one.

This could have been done decades ago, but there was no political consensus concerning the future of NASA’s human exploration program once the Moon race was won. The Space Shuttle was an impressive achievement, but it was only designed to reach low earth orbit. A Bush administration effort to go further was canceled by the Obama administration, at which point Congress directed that any technology acquired for use in that earlier effort be applied to a follow-on program.

So the baseline version of the Space Launch System will use engines and solid fuel boosters from the previous program, and it will carry the Orion space capsule begun during the Bush years. But the core first stage must be built anew by Boeing, and in the rocket’s second iteration Boeing will also provide an “exploration upper stage” more powerful than the second stage on the initial version. These two stages will remain central to the rocket design throughout its subsequent iterations. (I am trying to avoid using NASA’s confusing technical terminology to describe the various versions of SLS.)

The scale of the SLS first stage is unprecedented, as are the industrial challenges.

NASA

The problem that NASA and Boeing faced in constructing the world’s biggest rocket was that the industrial skills and supply chain needed to do the work had withered as a result of neglect during the Obama years. After Boeing was awarded the rocket contract in 2012, everything had to be rebuilt. Most of the later deviations from schedule were traceable to industrial issues. For instance, three months were lost when a subcontractor delivered defective tubes; nine months were lost when a robotic welding tool (the biggest in the world) had to be disassembled to fix a misalignment; five months were lost when a different welding tool, newly delivered, malfunctioned.

These are the kinds of issues that crop up when you are trying to build a system to unprecedented scale and precision using new tools and workers. Other sources of delay included a funding shortfall early in the program and a damaging tornado. The end result was over two years of schedule slippage, but NASA consistently awarded Boeing high marks for the quality of its work. When asked by the space agency’s inspector general why the contractor on a program that was behind schedule kept being rated as “excellent,” managers responded that “SLS is the largest launch system in the history of space flight…and represents a national investment in a long-term commitment to deep space exploration.” Managers viewed the delays as first-time challenges in starting up production of a unique system that were unlikely to recur.

That didn’t stop NASA administrator James Bridenstine from investigating commercial alternatives to SLS, but as he reported yesterday there were no attractive options available. The Space Launch System really is unique, as are the missions it will support. So SLS remains the centerpiece of NASA’s human spaceflight program. The message from Vice President Pence on Tuesday, though, is that further delays will not be tolerated. Come hell or high water, the Trump administration wants American astronauts back on the Moon before Chinese astronauts get there.

Boeing had already launched inquiries into how the pace might be picked up before Pence issued what amounted to an ultimatum Tuesday, but SLS isn’t the only piece of the Moon campaign that will need to move faster. Little work has been done on the lunar lander that is essential for getting astronauts from orbit around the Moon to its surface. The new timeline for going to the Moon is so challenging that for the time being the goal of getting to Mars has receded.

It will return to the fore once the Moon work is further advanced, because sending humans to Mars has been a common aspiration in popular culture for several generations. For the time being, though, NASA’s human exploration program is all about the Moon, and Boeing’s super-rocket remains the critical enabler of the mission. The only viable alternatives to SLS that have progressed beyond the PowerPoint stage seem to be under development in China and Russia.

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