Eight Reasons NASA Needs To Stick With Its Plan If It Wants To Get Back To The Moon (Or Beyond) - Forbes

NASA’s plan to return U.S. astronauts to the Moon, dubbed Artemis, is under a lot of political pressure. The Trump Administration wants to see results faster. Communities with a stake in the human spaceflight program want assurances they will be involved. Traditional and non-traditional suppliers want a slice of the pie.

And that’s before we even get to the scientific community, whose needs are the main reason for funding Artemis. When so many interests are engaged, you have to worry that decision-making might be distorted by politics.

That’s one reason why NASA needs to stick with the plan it has laid out for returning to the Moon, and then making it the jumping-off point for a human mission to Mars. But there are many other reasons too. In fact, eight of them are listed below.

The current plan involves constructing an evolvable super-rocket called the Space Launch System, and then wedding it to a 27-ton crew vehicle called Orion. Boeing, the rocket builder, and Lockheed Martin, the vehicle integrator, both contribute to my think tank. So I have heard an earful over the years about why the companies are executing their parts of the program the way they are.

An artist's rendering of the Space Launch System as it jettisons its solid rocket boosters.

NASA

The plan driving Artemis is dictated mainly by the laws of physics and the engineering tradeoffs that current technology demands. You can’t expect most taxpayers to understand such arcana. But if you distill the arguments down to their most basic, the case for sticking with the current approach is compelling. Here are eight reasons for doing so.

1. NASA has spent two decades and $25 billion on canceled programs. The agency has taken too long figuring out what should follow the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle ceased operation eight years ago and U.S. astronauts now ride to the International Space Station on Russian rockets. Meanwhile, it has been nearly half a century since Americans walked on the Moon and Mars isn’t getting any closer. NASA is running out of time to sustain a human exploration program worthy of the name.

2. The requirements for a new heavy launch system have been studied to death. The Shuttle was designed for carrying astronauts into low-earth orbit, but it was always understood that if humans were going any deeper into the solar system, a new heavy launch vehicle would be needed. At least five architecture studies have been conducted by NASA since 1989, and they all came to the same conclusion: the space agency needed a rocket that could lift 70-100 metric tons, and that could evolve to 130 tons—which is what the Space Launch System is designed to do.

3. Delays are part of the business—everybody encounters them. Much of the uncertainty surrounding the current NASA program focuses on the Space Launch System, which is running over two years late. However, every new launch vehicle that NASA develops encounters delays. Apollo’s Saturn V rocket had its first launch two years later than planned, and the Space Shuttle was four years late. The same thing happens with commercial launch vehicles: SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 debuted two years late, and Falcon Heavy five years late.

4. Development costs are not high compared with past programs. Vice President Pence has observed that NASA’s human exploration program is lagging because it was under-funded by previous administrations, and he is right. Unlike the surge in funding associated with Apollo’s Saturn V rocket, the Space Launch System’s budget profile has been a much lower, flatter line since its inception in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, the Space Launch System has been developed for less than a third of the cost of the similarly-sized Saturn V. The Orion crew vehicle has cost less than half of the Apollo crew vehicle’s price-tag.

5. NASA needed to rebuild the national space industrial base. When you haven’t sent astronauts to the Moon or anywhere else beyond low-earth orbit in over four decades, it’s a safe bet that some parts of the relevant manufacturing base will have decayed. The Space Launch System and Orion are unusual systems with unique requirements. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there would be hiccups in standing up a reconstituted work force and tooling that has never been used before for current purposes. After years of effort and many millions of dollars in spending, the revitalized human spaceflight industrial base is now operating as planned across the nation.

6. Boeing and Lockheed have extensive expertise in human spaceflight. The system integrators currently associated with Artemis have unique qualifications in the area of human spaceflight. For instance, Boeing and its corporate antecedents comprise the only company that has been involved in every human spaceflight effort ever undertaken by NASA, including Apollo’s Saturn V rocket, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Boeing even built lunar rovers, the first electric vehicles in space. Such credentials are vital to understanding the demands of human spaceflight.

7. Potential rival suppliers lack necessary qualifications. Commercial space companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX want to be involved in Artemis. However, these companies have no experience with the rigors of human spaceflight, and their involvement in developing heavy launch vehicles is in its infancy. Although NASA’s administrator threatened in March that he might turn to these non-traditional suppliers as a way of speeding up the human exploration effort, the experience and technology they bring to the table is too problematic to afford a practical alternative to incumbent companies.

8. Some of the claims rival suppliers make are suspect. It is easy to understand why the Trump Administration would like to see human exploration efforts advance faster, but hard to see how new market entrants could make a useful contribution given their lack of relevant experience. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has talked about sending humans to Mars within five years but effective shielding against potentially lethal ionizing radiation for such a mission doesn’t exist. More generally, SpaceX did not pioneer reusability of launch systems, the Space Shuttle did. Similarly, Falcon Heavy is not the “world’s most powerful rocket” as claimed: Saturn V and the Space Shuttle had much more lift, and the Space Launch System will be more powerful still.

Musk can be forgiven his optimism because he is a hardcore space enthusiast with a longstanding vision of mankind’s future in the cosmos. Jeff Bezos, creator of Blue Origin, shares a similar vision, and has spent billions of his own dollars pursuing it. But that doesn’t mean either entrepreneur is postured to supplant or supplement the industry team currently executing Artemis. Since the year began SpaceX has seen its lightweight “Starship” prototype toppled by a wind gust, and its crewed version of the Dragon space capsule explode during testing of an emergency abort system. Human spaceflight is challenging enough without taking unnecessary risks. If NASA sticks with its plan, it will make it to the Moon and probably beyond. If it changes the plan once again, Americans may never get back.

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