Yesterday’s Senate hearing on Artemis: It’s all a game!
Ted Cruz, a typical Congressional porkmeister
The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.
Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.
As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”
It was therefore not surprising that the most newsworthy quote from the hearing was the comments by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine about Starship and how its choice as a manned lunar lander was a bad one, and that it was likely going to the prime reason China will put humans back on the Moon ahead of us.
Jim Bridenstine at yesterday’s hearing
He started by stating bluntly, “”It is highly unlikely that we will land on the moon before China.” He then went on to criticize the decision of NASA, after he had left the agency, to pick Starship as the manned lunar lander.
Instead of buying a moonlander, we’re going to buy a a big rocket. … The architecture is [complicated]. We need to launch Starship. That first Starship is a fueling depot that’s in orbit around the Earth. Then we need … up to dozens of additional Starships to refuel the first Starship. So imagine launching Starship over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, dozens of times, no delays, no explosions to refuel the first Starship. Then once it’s fully refueled, then that Starship has to fuel another Starship that is in fact human rated, which that process hasn’t even started yet.
He then outlined the complexity of launching SLS and Orion and having it rendezvous and dock with that manned Starship in lunar orbit, all of which seemed to him a bad idea. “This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I’m aware of would have selected had they had the choice.”
What was fascinating about Bridenstine’s comments was that while he questioned Starship extensively, he said nothing about the significant questions about SLS and Orion. SLS did have overruns in the past but that’s “behind us. It’s done.” Orion meanwhile was “a shiny object … usable today.” No mention of its questionable heat shield or its as yet untested environmental system that must keep its astronauts alive.
Other witnesses lauded the medical research on ISS, without noting that none of that research produces products for sale on Earth. None mentioned the new commercial sector that is doing the same, but actually providing those products to Americans while making a profit. Over and over both senators and witnesses proclaimed the need to fund NASA, because without NASA nothing would happen at all.
The expected real per launch cost of SLS and Orion
The bottom line is that there will likely be no cancellation of SLS, Orion, or Lunar Gateway in the near future. Congress wants all three, and is willing to throw money at them for years to come to keep them alive. Though Starship might delay things a bit, as Bridenstine claimed, the reason China will get its lunar base built first will be because of SLS, Orion, and Gateway, not Starship. SLS and Orion are inefficient, cumbersome, and too expensive, and Gateway puts our assets not on the Moon but in space. You can’t build a manned lunar base with a rocket and capsule that only launches at best once a year, carrying four people. Nor can you do it building a lunar space station in an orbit that makes landing on the Moon more expensive and difficult.
Yet Congress wants them, and it held this hearing expressly to convince the country that these projects should be funded forever. And unless something dramatic happens, such as Orion failing during its first manned mission next year, or SpaceX leaping ahead with its own manned missions to Mars, we should expect Congress to fund SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway endlessly for many years to come.
There was at least one small hope during this hearing. One witness, Lieutenant General John Shaw, former deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command, made it a point to repeatedly advocate for a wider view outside of funding a government-run NASA program to plant a flag on the Moon.
John Shaw
My bottom line up front for the committee today is that I am an advocate for and a champion of a unified grand space strategy for our nation for the earth-moon system and beyond. Yet such a grand strategy which would unify and synergize our national efforts across civil, commercial, and national security activities in pursuit of common goals, opportunities, and capabilities does not currently exist. And I believe our mission to return Americans to the moon can be a powerful and a central driver as well as a beneficiary of such a strategy.
In his testimony he consistently focused on encouraging many different capabilities by the private sector across a wide spectrum, not on simply funding SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway, noting that by doing so the government would be enabling its goal of establishing a lunar base far more effectively. This is the concept I put forth in December last year. And though a majority of the senators seemed uninterested in this approach, there were more than a few that appeared to agree with it.
Thus, though the boondoggles will go on, it does appear Congress is also willing to shift focus away from them, albeit with some reluctance.
We can only hope that given time and events, this reluctance will eventually fade and be replaced with a more coherent approach, focused not on funding NASA but helping the American people themselves colonize the solar system.
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The problem is politics.
Ted Cruz is a good conservative, but he also seems to feel strongly about serving the people in his home state of Texas. If he believes funding NASA’s Artemis program will mean jobs and/or investment in Texas, he is going to advocate for it.
Unfortunately, voters will vote for their own interests over the overall interests of the country. This is why budgets have been, are, and will continue to be, busted.
Until the advent of Pres. Trump, the US didn’t do show trials, but we have always done Senate hearings. This one was, in essence, a show trial of SpaceX and NewSpace in general put on for the benefit of the Lifer Caucus at NASA, the legacy parasite contractors combine and a few opportunistic ex-officials looking to curry favor with both of the latter. In the fullness of time, I think this farce will be seen as one of the last hurrahs of the ancien regime of American aerospace and its Congressional enablers.
Bridenstine’s choice to prostitute himself in this way was particularly disappointing. Exactly what alternatives to SpaceX’s HLS lander were on offer in 2021, Jimbo? Blue Moon at $6 billion and ALPACA at $10 billion. And how likely were either of those to be ready in time to Beat the Chinese[tm]? The indictment of the SpaceX HLS is farcical – especially anent the refilling required. Blue Origin’s second lander proposal – the one that actually got accepted – also includes refilling as a core aspect of its logistics.
It is not yet flagrantly obvious to the the normative member of the American public, but the American “space program” now consists mainly of what SpaceX does and, secondarily, what the rest of NewSpace does. NASA will continue to keep the lamps twinkling behind the windows of its false-front Potemkin “program” for as long as it can obtain Congressional help, but rather less than a decade hence – perhaps even a half-decade – I expect the jig to be decisively up. By the 2030s, NASA will look increasingly like those post-WW2 Japanese hold-outs that kept turning up over a period of years, each looking more antique and bewildered than the last.
As of today, I can’t reply… this is a test to see if it’s fixed
Yay! My first reply was basically a one-sentence version of Dick Eagleson’s (minus the great writing). What I’m thinking now is… and agreeing with what I imagine are Dick’s sentiments… Who cares? Let Congress splash the water in its playpool. SpaceX is on track to financing its own private space program, using the very outdated and frowned-upon methods of simple capitalism. This explains why Musk has been quite dismissive-by-omission of Artemis lately. SpaceX will fulfill its Artemis obligations then further focus on its own business. Others (Rocket Lab, Stoke, Firefly…) will follow. All good. Ignore the circus and watch the symphony.
F,
Sen. Cruz is early in his third term and is in his mid-50s. At this point, I think we can safely assume he intends to stay in office for as long as he can manage. Should he manage to match, say, former Sen. Richard Shelby in tenure, he would serve three additional terms and complete his sixth term near mid-century when he would be in his late 70s.
Given the advantages of incumbency and his generally good standing with the MAGA-fied Republican Party, it’s hard to see him being primaried out anywhere along this notional career trajectory. Given the rapidly collapsing state of both the TX and national Democratic Party, it is even harder to see any real possibility of his being ousted electorally by a Democratic opponent. The Dems no longer have any significant “bench” in TX from which to draw. The best they ever did against Cruz was putting up the farcical “Beato” O’Rourke – or, as I prefer to call him, the Shanty-Irish… word that rhymes with “mick” and constitutes the first half of the name of a well-known powdered cleaning product. :)
I doubt seriously that Mr. Cruz’s stands on space-related matters are likely to prove crucial in any future runs for re-election. He takes the stands he does on SLS, Orion, Artemis in general and the Gateway because he’s looking out for what he perceives to be the best interests – mainly the continued existence – of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
JSC does a number of things, but mainly it does astronaut training, “controls” manned space missions and “operates” the ISS. ISS is going away in 2030 – if not before – and Gateway, ridiculous and superfluous as it is, is a space station, of sorts, and would give JSC’s ISS cadre something to continue to “operate.” How one would justify JSC’s current ISS “operations” headcount for a “station” that would be occupied, at best, for two weeks every couple of years I will leave as an exercise for Mr. Cruz. Even if he gets his way and Gateway becomes a thing, the question is going to be raised by somebody.
“Controlling” manned space missions looks nearly as problematic, in future, as “operating” Gateway. Right now, manned space missions of US origin consist entirely of twice-yearly jaunts to, and returns from, ISS – ignoring the one-time “3-fer” last year pursuant to Starliner’s failure to thrive. Given that the manned vehicles stay at ISS as lifeboats, I suppose that justifies pretty much full-time “work” for JSC “controllers.” Perhaps the plan is to also exercise this type of “control” over NASA-funded missions to post-ISS commercial LEO destinations. Gateway, by itself, certainly won’t provide any such rationale.
Nor, I suspect, will those LEO destinations once SpaceX starts running regular Starship-based “bus service” to and from them with dedicated lifeboat vehicles replacing Crew Dragons in long-term parking. The same will be even more true of SpaceX-only and – eventually – Blue Origin-only lunar missions. Other than buying tickets for NASA personnel on such routine flights, NASA won’t have anything to either “control” or “operate” unless it can actually establish some kind of NASA lunar surface station with crews there doing reasonably long-term stays – perhaps even the six-month types now standard on ISS.
We shall see. The one thing extant bureaucracies are always very good at it is seeing to their own future existence.
Patrick Underwood,
Thank you for the kind words. Here’s hoping this comment make it through the alligators in the moat too. I have also been having some difficulty making posts.
All: I need to know the specific troubles people are having posting comments. We started using a new spam filter because the old one, while doing a good job, was causing serious memory issues and slowing the website down significant.
If the new spam filter is preventing commenting, I need to know. If you can’t post a comment to tell me, email me using the address listed in the tip jar for donating using Zelle.
Politicians are… not you and me. I’ve always respected Cruz, and Gingrich before him, as intelligent, educated, “based” conservatives. But politicians are not like us. I’m a high-IQ (yes, I know!! believe it or not!!) INTJ, and I surmise there are no, or very few, INTJs in public office anywhere on the planet. Cruz is one of those people you expect to behave rationally. But an INTJ’s idea of “rational” is a very rare, and outnumbered, concept. Rare because communal survival dictates it, sadly. Okay, so much for frustrated, drunken, self-serving philosophizing! Carry on.
Even the quote, from “Bad Moon Rising”, is cringeworthy. They are entirely out of step not only with modern reality, but with the modern electorate.
I wish I could email Sen. Ted Cruz, but I live in N.C. What I think should be done, is this. NASA should offer prizes, and purchase launch flights. How about a $500 million prize, for the first salvage yard in Earth? They could remove old satellites, and old rocket boosters.
$250 million for second place, and $125 million for third place.
And there should be lots of other prizes. I will post them tomorrow.
Ted Cruz… anyone remember the 2016 RNC convention when Trump graciously invited Cruz to speak and Cruz went up and said “vote your conscience” – basically announcing he’s voting for Hillary? That cemented him in my mind as an arrogant, irredeemable slime worm.
”It is highly unlikely that we will land on the moon before China.”
Hey, Jim I got a piece of news for you. We already beat China to the moon over 50 years ago.
So what if China rushes together a program and gets some of it’s people on the moon before we return.
The key at this stage is being able to have a sustainable presence. That’s not going to happen with a NASA rocket that costs $4 billion/launch and will struggle to launch more than a couple of times a year.
Jim can’t “imagine launching Starship over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, dozens of times,”
He probably can’t imagine launching Falcon dozens of times, but I got news for him.
And as Musk said in an interview SpaceX played during last week’s launch countdown, Starship/SH isn’t only the biggest rocket, isn’t only the first fully reusable rocket, but it’s the first rocket designed to be mass produced.
Hey Ted, did you forget SpaceX operates a large facility in Texas? Guess that doesn’t count unless you can shake some dollars out of Musk’s pockets.
PS Politics is still politics so yeah, I’d rather have slimy Ted as a senator than a Dem like Beato.
I think we all agree that the problem with the first race to the moon was that it was nothing but a race and now the top leadership at NASA and Congress want to run the race again to beat China? Who cares? We won. Let us insist that we do more than step on the moon again. Let there be some point to doing all this other than to beat someone there. We did that already. If there is no compelling reason to go to the moon, let us leave it the likes of SpaceX who wants to get to Mars. It might be nice if NASA could defray some of the costs of learning to refuel in orbit or many of the other tasks we need to get a handle on but I think we all probably agree that NASA would not just get in the way, they would get sideways and jam up the whole business so it’s probably best to just terminate NASA involvement in manned spaceflight and let them stick with robot missions and faking climate data.
Not sure SpaceX even wants to be tied down with long term ferry service to the moon. Ok maybe for further Starship testing but, with limited windows (every 26 months), would probably want to concentrate on getting Starships ready to send to Mars once they ace a test landing/takeoff from the moon. Only interest in the moon would be if it somehow assists getting 100 or more Starships loaded with materials and/or people to Mars every two years.
Imagine how pathetic NASA (and it’s money wasting cheerleaders) will appear if Starship can send large numbers of people to Mars every two years for a tiny fraction of what NASA spends to send a few to the moon in the same timeframe not using Starship? And that’s assuming NASA manages to fix the Artimis heatshield and ensure the environmental system is actually safe before adding people (Starliner has entered the chat with it’s faulty thrusters).
Just took a quick break to watch my 4th Falcon9 launch/landing in 6 days (with another currently scheduled for tomorrow).
Here are some more prizes.
The first company to land a spacecraft on the Moon, dig up 100 tons of lunar dirt, and rocks, transport them to the surface of the Earth, and repeat the mission in three weeks, with the same spacecraft, should win a prize of $500 million. The second place company would win $250 million. Third place would get $125 million.
More later on.
Robert Zimmerman,
The specific problem I was – and still am – having was that, even after entering comment text, name, e-mail address and getting a “Success” checkmark from that Cloudflare widget, the “Post Comment” button stayed grayed-out and unresponsive. After saving my comment text to the Windows clipboard and refreshing the tab I still couldn’t post the comment after pasting the text back into the text box and re-entering name and e-mail address and getting a thumbs-up from Cloudflare. I had to close the tab entirely, regenerate it from your home page and then paste everything back in to get the “Post Comment” button to take a click and post the comment. I hope this proves helpful to you and Shane.
Patrick Underwood,
You write pretty well yourself, IMHO.
Anent Myers-Briggs categories, I used to think there was something to them as the “test” is widely used in business. But the more experience I accumulated in business settings, the more I came to notice that businesspeople are perhaps even more inclined than Average Joes to fall for fads, latch onto trendy buzz phrases and otherwise act like impulsive teenagers seeking to be seen as “cool.”
The nearest analogy I now see to Myers-Briggs categories are the astrological signs. And there may well be more people who ascribe significance to those – even in business – than there are those who are devotees of Myers-Briggs. Any given individual can likely find at least a half-dozen M-B categories that fit them as well as whatever category the actual test slots them into. The same is true of astrological signs. Like M-B categories, the descriptions of people born under the various signs are uniformly flattering and nicely elide any potential dysfunctions or personality defects.
There are psychological categorization paradigms that don’t leave out our dark sides, especially for personality types where these predominate. There definitely are narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths and borderline personalities out there and the M-B test does nothing to identify them.
I don’t put much stock in fortune cookies either.
David Ross,
The political class, even Republicans, have always operated in a “reality” significantly different from that of ordinary citizens. Democrat “reality,” of late, has become positively extraterrestrial in its disconnect from everyday life.
That said, it is the various electorates who keep returning these folks to office so there is self-evidently a considerable tolerance by at least a significant fraction of the general public for public figures plainly divorced from reality. My own House representative, for example, is Maxine Waters. ‘Nuff said.
Robert,
Any prizes offered for space activities should originate in the private sector, not from NASA. NASA will have less and less consequential influence over space activities as time goes on and handing it money to fund prizes will simply retard this natural progression and skew space efforts toward goals ginned up by career bureaucrats, not by people who wish to pursue genuinely sustainable projects.
Mitch S.,
Fair point about Sen. Cruz’s ungracious comment in 2016. Definitely not one of his better moments.
I agree that it would be unfortunate, but hardly catastrophic, were the PRC to get people to the Moon before we return. That is especially so given that the PRC is all but certain to collapse well before its 2049 centenary. Any claims it might make on the Moon will become nugatory post-crack-up.
The SLS-Orion stack would be doing miraculously to ever manage even two launches per year. Right now, the plan for its first decade of operation falls well short of even one launch every two years.
Also agree that complaints about the necessity of many Starship launches utterly fail to deal with even what SpaceX is doing now, never mind what it will be capable of a couple of years down the road. The march of events will not be kind to those making such assertions.
Anent SpaceX and TX, the company operates at least three large facilities there – Starbase, McGregor and the Starlink ground terminal plant near Bastrop. That simply reinforces your point, of course.
Curtis,
Agree with you and Mitch S. that US space endeavors should not be driven by some Beat the Chinese[tm] imperative.
NASA actually is helping to “defray some of the costs of learning to refuel in orbit or many of the other tasks we need to get a handle on” via its HLS contract with SpaceX.
NASA will soon have relatively little to do with manned spaceflight as most of those going to the Moon and Mars in coming decades will not have NASA patches on their jackets.
Hello Dick-
Thanks for your note above. As a longtime web guy I would love nothing more than 100% compatibility with everything I do but that’s not reality. This plugin module is from Cloudflare, pretty much one of the biggest anti-bot technology providers around. These plugins have to deal with an extreme amount of variability on the client side, among them:
* browser privacy toggles
* browser plugins
* DNS based blocklists, ISP blocklists, customer firewall IP & Domain blocks & filtering
* browser settings in general
* vpns on the client side
* antivirus and anti-malware software on the client side
There are a lot more factors as well. In my testing environment I use chrome/edge/firefox to test things and those are all using pretty vanilla settings. I also use a separate “consumer” internet connection to view things like an end user.
Since that is a free module we aren’t likely going to get any support for it, but on your end you could try some things such as a different browser, browser with no extensions loaded, not in privacy mode, etc. However, in any event, your specific setup and problems are likely different than mine, and different than other users…
These sorts of issues are extremely difficult to troubleshoot.
Thanks for your detailed comments, I appreciate them.
Dick Eagleson,
While Cruz may not have a concern about facing a potential primary opponent, I believe he DOES have concerns about general elections. His last election had him winning fairly convincingly, but the prior two victories were much closer than one might have expected. Texas is not as strongly “red” as is generally believed.
I would note that I am a regular listener to the “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast. Most of the topics are national in scope, but Cruz often speaks about how his policy position would benefit the people of Texas.
By the way, the podcast is a good one. Even if you do not agree with Cruz politically, he provides a lot of insight into the workings of the Supreme Court and the Senate. His experience as a clerk for the Court, and as a Senator, allows him to share information of great interest.
There is an enormous amount of talent in JSC flight operations, saddled to an organization that seemingly can’t transition away from the way it has always done things. FOD is slowly putting itself out of business as commercial space entities can’t see the value proposition for using FOD, relative to standing up their own flight operations in-house.
The problem is that in-house-developed legacy operations capabilities act as a ball and chain preventing anything but tweaks to the aged ISS operating model. Artemis and other new mission programs all want to meet their schedules by reusing capabilities developed for ISS, meaning FOD has little capital budget to modernize / fix / refactor mission operations for doing business within future-year funding constraints alongside increasing federal IT mandates. And facilities prone to 60-year-old building problems are difficult to revamp while in constant operational use.
I find this article credible
https://spacenews.com/we-led-nasas-human-exploration-program-heres-what-artemis-needs-next/
People can lambast SLS all they want–but the fact remains that it is ahead of Lunar Starship..
Dynetics should have gotten the ALPACA contract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynetics_HLS
They were addressing the mass concerns…
This is why America needs to support in-house work without regard as to what SpaceX does with regards to BEO exploration.
Falcon/Dragon is far ahead of Starship–even with the more recent test that did better than the previous attempts.
Going back to the idea of “beating the Chinese to the moon,” here are a few simple points / questions. OK, perhaps not so simple, but I am not an engineer, and there are a lot of things that I only dimly understand along these lines.
Point one. Isn’t SLS-Orion capable of going to the moon, entering lunar orbit, and then returning to earth, *all without refueling*? And isn’t this pretty much what Artemis II is supposed to do? If so, then this is basically a replay of all of the Apollo missions. Not exactly anything “new.”
Point two: Thinking back half a century — yes, it’s really been that long — we used this ungainly little contrivance called the LEM to carry two astronauts to the surface of the moon and back, along with (later) a lunar rover and some lunar samples on the return trip. (It worked as a pretty good lifeboat, too.) So, OK — inquiring minds want to know — why not carry along a *larger* LEM on the Artemis mission that could carry four or more astronauts? (Or even borrow an original model from a museum, and just send *two* astronauts back to the surface of the moon this time. Right, the female and the black one.)
That way, we “beat the Chinese to the moon” (again), and everybody is happy, even Senator Cruz. Meanwhile, after beating the Chinese, we figure out some more rational, cost effective ways of colonizing the moon on a long term basis with or without Starship. Case closed, and billions and billions saved. At some point, learning to do refueling in orbit is a MUST if we want to send humans to Mars, and as Mitch and others have observed, this is all about *mass producing* hardware — and servicing techniques — that will finally make it possible to colonize the Solar System.
Or — here’s an idea — If a Starship could be put into lunar orbit — with or w/o refueling — to rendezvous with the Orion capsule, why couldn’t it simply carry a 4-person LEM as its payload? Are you telling me that as big and as powerful as Straship is supposed to be, it CAN’T carry that much of a tiny payload to lunar orbit? REALLY? And why use a Starship to land on the moon in the first place? What’s the point of that?
Oh, wait. I forgot. In those fifty plus years, everyone in the aerospace industry has grown more STUPID, not smarter, our technology is not as good, and it is impossible, now, to replicate, what we did back in 1968. Today we can’t build a LEM that holds four people, especially if two of them will be female / people of color. Or, as a NASA functionary once opined, “going back to the moon is just too hard,” and we can’t do it today.
OK engineers, I’m listening.
Booster Bunny,
I don’t think it makes any more sense to describe running Earth-to-Moon passenger and logistics services as “tying down” SpaceX than it would to apply the same description to its Starlink launches. The latter are done to make money and so would be the former.
Mars, as you correctly note, will require Starship activity to peak at 26-month intervals, but that leaves a lot of time in between for doing other applications of Starship including running an Earth-to-Moon passenger and logistics operation.
It’s going to take awhile to get enough depot ships into orbit to support the 1,000-ship armadas Elon eventually wants to be running to Mars every Hohmann transfer window. It’s also going to take a lot of tanker flights to fill them. Ideally, one would like to spread all the launch activity required out as evenly as possible. One would also like to have the depots be in frequent use and not gathering dust and cobwebs – metaphorically – between Martian armada departures. Using these assets to support lunar and cis-lunar activity between Mars expeditions would serve these leveling and staying loose goals.
You are definitely correct about even the fairly near-term absurdity of SLS-Orion-based lunar missions vs. all-Starship – or even all-New Glenn – missions. NASA is the Pony Express in this comparison and SpaceX and Blue are the Morse telegraph.
Robert,
You illustrate one of the potential problems with prizes – they need to have a rational point. What is the rational point of a capability to fetch 100 tons of lunar regolith back to Earth every three weeks? Science can get by with a few pounds – or even ounces – at a time and would place a premium on diversity of acquisition sites rather than mass quantities repeatedly obtained from the same site. Even potential business cases involving lunar regolith, such as He3 mining, make far more sense done in situ with only the extracted/refined end-product transferred back to Earth.
Back to the drawing board my friend.
“Fair point about Sen. Cruz’s ungracious comment in 2016. Definitely not one of his better moments.”
On the other hand, Trump had recently accused Cruz’s father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. So it’s understandable if Cruz was still feeling a little miffed.
I sent Ted Cruz an email, and I emailed Sen. Thom Tillis, and told him about it. Here is the email I sent.
==========================================
Dear Sen. Ted Cruz,
I’m writing to you, about your support for SLS. SLS is not needed. Each launch will cost $4 billion, and will only be launched twice a year at most. Starship is much cheaper, and will have faster turn around. Just going to LEO, and back, it will be able to launch about three times a day, 20 times a week, or about 1,000 times a year.
Going to the Moon, or to Mars, it will be able to carry 100 passengers. Starship is reusable, and can be used over, and over. Going to the Moon, it would take three days to get there. So it could make about 50 trips to the Moon a year. Each trip carrying 100 passengers.
So what NASA should do, and what the US should do, is to purchase launch flights to LEO, the Moon, and beyond. This would save the government money, and would help to establish an Earth to LEO transport industry, and Earth to Moon transport industry.
I also think that the US should have prizes. Just like the X-Prize back in 2004. Below is some prizes that I think the US should have.
1. How about a $500 million prize, for the first salvage yard in Earth? They could remove old satellites, and old rocket boosters.
$250 million for second place, and $125 million for third place. This could handle the orbital debris problem.
2. The first company to land a spacecraft on the Moon, dig up 100 tons of lunar dirt, and rocks, transport them to the surface of the Earth, and repeat the mission in three weeks, with the same spacecraft, should win a prize of $500 million. The second place company would win $250 million. Third place would get $125 million. This can be done for $500 million.
3. The first company to build a space station, capable of producing artificial gravity, that produces 1/6 of Earth’s gravity. Have it occupied for two, and a half year, by four, or more crew members. They will also need to plant, and harvest food crops. Growing eight different crops, and there should be four, or more plants, for each different crop. Should win a prize of $500 million. Second place $250 million, $125 million for third place. There is a company that plans to build space stations. They can build one that can house 10 people, for $100 million.
4. The first company to build a solar power satellite, capable of producing 10 MW of electric power, convert that power into microwaves, and beam that power to a rectenna farm on Earth, where it would then be converted into electric power. Should win a prize of $1 billion. Second place would be $500 million, and $250 million for third place. Both China, and Japan are looking into SPS. Back in 1964, a small unmanned helicopter was powered by microwaves.
I have been a member of the National Space Society since 1987. So I am very knowledgeable about space matters.
One note about Spacex, and Elon Musk. Elon Musk might not be interested in operating a transportation service to the Moon. Musk is more interested in Mars. He plans to build about 100, to 200 Starships a year. I think he should sell Starships to other companies. Companies like Virgin Galactic, Virgin Atlantic, Delta, and other companies. There is talk of using Starship to transport passengers, and cargo from one place on Earth, to another. And it would be cheaper than the Concord.
I would like to hear from you, about my views. I don’t live in Texas, but in N.C.
Bridenstine is mostly correct about how the Starship choice as a manned lunar lander was a bad one, but he is wrong about the reason. Starship is the farthest along of all the lunar lander concepts, but it is way oversized for the mission. That is why it takes so many other launches to refuel it. Blue Origin’s lander does not require nearly as much refueling.
Shaw is right that commercial space should be a major player in this whole lunar mess, as well as in the exploration and utilization of space. Government has done a terrible job of both, but commercial space is beginning to excel, beginning to bring us the benefits of space.
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F is right. The problem is politics. Ted Cruz has suffered from the same problem as Senator Paine in the movie Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
“Unfortunately, voters will vote for their own interests over the overall interests of the country.”
This is why the Senate is not supposed to be elected by We the People but by the state legislatures. The Senate is the more thoughtful, less emotional part of government and is supposed to be more rational than the people of the country. Unfortunately, the Seventeenth Amendment destroyed this special nature of the Senate.
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Milt wrote: “OK engineers, I’m listening.”
There is a lot of interesting commentary by several people.
Starship was designed as a quick way to inexpensively get into space and to Mars. It is not being optimized for specific missions, although the choice of a relatively inefficient fuel like methane over hydrogen allows for other companies to find better efficiencies. We may lament the multiple launches in order to refill propellant tanks in Earth orbit, but that — Earth orbit rendezvous — was the likely choice for going to the Moon in the 1960s, until some lone voice in the wilderness suggested the unthinkable lunar orbit rendezvous. Earth orbit rendezvous was going to require a fair number of launches, too. I really don’t see why everyone is so upset about the multiple launches in order to get around the solar system.
Space is difficult. It always has been and it always will be. Delta-v is not free.
SLS is not the Saturns. It was never intended to perform like Apollo, because it just does not have the lift capacity to carry its own lunar lander. It cannot get an Orion into low lunar orbit, which is why we have the stupid Gateway station in that bizarre orbit around the Moon. SLS was not designed for a mission to return to the Moon. It was not designed for any mission, except to put a certain amount of mass into low Earth orbit. Low cost was not a requirement, so it does not do its job inexpensively. In fact, as a jobs project (kind of like the WPA in the 1930s), low costs are counterproductive.
However, it looks like Starship does have the capacity of a Saturn V, but it does not have the same leftover delta-v to get an Apollo Command-Service module with a Lunar Module into a trans-lunar orbit, like the Saturn V’s third stage (Saturn-IVB) could. Starship was not designed for that mission, either.
It isn’t that the people in the aerospace industry have grown stupid, it is that no one was ever tasked with building a rocket to take us back to the surface of the Moon and return us back safe again. Congress designed the SLS from Shuttle parts, just so that those folks didn’t lose their jobs, so getting to the Moon was not on Congress’s collective mind. Starship was designed to get a lot of men and materiel to Mars, not to the Moon. It may seem like the Moon would be easier, but Mars has an atmosphere that reduces the delta-v needed to land on the surface, and the Moon does not.
NASA’s choice of Starship to land on the Moon was a decision based upon cost, not efficiency. SpaceX believes that they can do the many launches needed for a cost that is less than the other companies thought they could design their landers and get them to the Moon and back off the surface. SpaceX has to make a few changes to its Starship design in order to do this task, and it is so early in the development that they they can build Starship in a way that the changes are easy to make; no severe and expensive retrofitting necessary. Eventually, we will figure out a much more efficient way to get to the Moon, but if we are to Beat the Chinese™, then we are going to have to kluge together some Frankenstein’s monster in order to do it fast rather than do it smart.
So, is Cruz right? Should we spend huge amounts of money and waste precious space resources in order to go to the Moon sooner rather than later, just so we Beat the Chinese™ and so that Cruz can say that his daughters have been to the Moon (in the same way we old fogies say that we have been there)?
After all, we now have a new National Goal that everyone is behind and that we are willing to spend huge amounts of money on just so that we can beat someone to the Moon, but this time without the technological developments that we had in the 1960s and without developing the hardware and methods needed to sustain a lunar base that will be used for generations to come. Do it quick! Do it expensive! Do it without long-term goals in mind!
Isn’t that exactly where we went wrong with Apollo? After we achieved Kennedy’s goal, everyone lost interest, and Nixon chose to put space as yet another domestic jobs program, leaving us with no goal in space and no way for commercial companies to compete with NASA for the benefits to mankind that were promised in the Outer Space Treaty — and no other government was willing to bring us the promised benefits, either.
What the [expletive] does Cruz think he is doing? What benefit will a repeat of the 1960s space race bring us? And once Cruz and his government have given us another Apollo-like victory with a another top-down, marxist-like space project, are we once again going to end up with another [expletive] mediocre manned space program, because everyone has figured out that the NASA project was way too [expletive] expensive for no [expletive] lasting benefit? [Expletive]! Did we learn nothing from history?
At least this time we have a booming commercial space industry that can continue its own plans for sustaining manufacturing and other benefits from space. The government failed to be beneficial, but commercial space companies must bring us benefits, or else we will not support them enough to keep them going. Just like NASA was not supported after Apollo, because NASA had no plan to bring us tangible benefits from space.
Unfortunately, we will have to let government piddle away a bunch more taxpayer money on this Beat the Chinese™ boondoggle, but we will be saved by the commercial space industry, this time. We can save ourselves, but it is too late for NASA, as it is already caught in the tentacles of Congress’s lousy priorities. Yup. F is right. The problem is politics.
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Dick Eagleson,
Thank you for the workaround to the inability to post comments. It worked for me when I had a similar problem.
Meh. Too many folks aren’t paying attention to what Musk says. He says it won’t take that many refueling flights. Folks may not want to believe that, but it is certainly possible to launch a much stripped down HLS that will do the mission, and fulfill what Musk says.
It’s all in the rocket equation. Less mass means less fuel. It adds up fast as everyone seems to realize, but how do you know what the final configuration of HLS to be? Maybe I’m missing something. That fact is, even if Musk won’t do it that way, that you can launch a lot less mass and do the mission. It won’t take anything big for Musk to do differently, so I’m thinking that he already has that in mind, and will demonstrate it at the appropriate time.
Let’s see if this posts. People having trouble posting comments, I see.
This is a pretty harsh indictment of Kathy Lueders, the woman Jim Bridenstine personally selected (in June 2020) to take over as the associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate, which in turns would sure seem to be an indictment of Bridenstine himself for picking her in the first place! And more to the point . . . the implication seems to be that Kathy was only able to sneak this selection of Starship through because there *was* no NASA administrator in place at the time. So, if this is so, how did Jimbo so badly misread Kathy?
Or . . . is this an awkward and self-serving rewriting of history by Bridenstine?
What is driving all of this, beyond the surge in resentment of Elon Musk inside the Beltway, is, as our host Mr. Zimmerman rightly observes, a wrong-headed but all-too predictable mania with “beating China back to the Moon.” Granted, this is what Congress seems to want, and NASA has to answer to Congress, but . . . here is the harsh truth: A crewed lunar lander contracted out in 2021 was going to struggle to reach completion before the end of the decade no matter how simplified it was, even on crash program spending. And Congress, of course, has never showed any sign of being willing to approve that kind of spending. It took Grumman (back when both it and NASA were lean, mean, fast-moving organizations) over 7 years to deliver an operational (and, uh, highly risky) Lunar Module to NASA in the 1960’s with crash program funding. Which, by the way, was about $25 billion in 2024 dollars, which in turn is probably not far off what it would cost NASA to build a simple crewed lunar lander using traditional procurement contracting in the 2020’s.
But no one in NASA or at Starbase had any confidence that an HLS could be ready in 2024 — or 2025, or 2026 — no matter how much midnight oil Elon’s (or Jeff Bezos’s!) engineers burned, and everyone at NASA knew it. They picked it because it was the best option by the best company, and schedule was a less urgent concern.
Richard M: “Or . . . is this an awkward and self-serving rewriting of history by Bridenstine?”
That’s it, in a nutshell. Bridenstine is doing what DC swamp creatures always do, deflect blame for their failures to others, and in doing so try to change the facts to fit their new narrative.
Bridenstine did make a point of saying repeatedly that Starship is needed and will be great for the nation and NASA, but his overall statement clearly tried to pass the blame to others.
Unfortunately, I am compelled to agree with Dick Eagleson. This is not the sort of thing that is going to get Ted Cruz primaried, or cost him the race in a general election.
The answer to such parochial Congressional politics, as always, must be presidential leadership — the willingness to articulate a vision and spend political capital to make it happen. But most presidents simply do not prioritize space policy, or even know much of anything about it. In this respect, Donald Trump is no different from any of his post-LBJ predecessors.
Zero chance. And Jim Bridenstine has to know that as well as anyone. The Source Selection Statement is quite candid about the lack of technical work that had been done on either lander proposal by those bidders.
Mr Zimmerman: Humble typo catch: “….it was likely going to the prime reason China will humans back to the Moon ahead of us. Suggest sticking “take or bring” between will & humans.
Robert: I have emailed Senator Cruz my observations about the whole Artemis mess. I AM a voter in Texas. I got back the standard “Thanks for your interest in this matter” reply. Perhaps I should have included a Venmo for $400,000.
I fully agree with your “X prize” idea. If our host allows it, put all your prize thoughts in an integrated post and I will happily forward it as a Texas voter to both of my Senators (even that useless twit Cornyn). See above for expected result. Anybody got a spare $400 grand lying around?
It is a mess, that is just the way elective politics goes. That is why I agree with Robert on the prize approach and hope that expanding commercial space allows consortiums of the willing and able to start achieving some real things in space.
Greg wrote: “It’s all in the rocket equation. Less mass means less fuel.”
This is a major reason that the Starship is not the best choice for a lunar lander. Its structure is more massive.
I have the impression that people are disappointed that Starship needs any refilling on orbit and are disappointed that SLS does not do the job alone, like the Saturn V did. If this were 1960, I suspect that many here would be disappointed that we weren’t going to use a V2 to get to the Moon and to return from it, too (I might have been among them). Science fiction, back then, made space seem easy, but in reality it is difficult.
It is that darned rocket equation. If only the rocket scientists had written it differently, then we would have an easier time getting around the solar system, and maybe the galaxy, too, as in Asimov’s Foundation series.
I see the future differently than I think most people here see it. I expect that in a couple of decades or so we will have space-based lunar landers that operate from a space station in lunar orbit to the lunar surface. These would have landing gear and other heavy equipment needed for that task. The propellant needed to move all that equipment only needs to be enough to get it to and from lunar orbit. Between lunar orbit and Earth orbit would be other “shuttles” that have no landing gear and minimal heat shielding for aerobraking (aerocapture) into Earth orbit, and they only operate between two space stations, the one in lunar orbit and the other in Earth orbit. This one is light weight (or rather low mass). Both of these types of spacecraft would need continual retanking, and those propellants may have to come from the Earth, depending upon the availability of water at the Moon’s poles.
Then there would be the shuttles from the Earth’s surface to orbit, similar to the one in the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey. These shuttles may have to be fairly heavy, with beefy landing gear and full heat shields for atmospheric reentry, but they would be refilled on Earth and they need only a little propellant to change to their reentry trajectories.
No matter the future methods and infrastructure, we will need tanker rockets just as we have tanker trucks and tanker ships here on Earth, even if only to retank the Earth-orbit to lunar-orbit shuttle. We will need more of these tankers if they can carry 100 tonnes and fewer if they can carry 200 tonnes. And the need for these really increases if there isn’t enough water at the lunar poles.
But for now, we are still fairly primitive in our spacecraft and their operations, we may have taken a step backward to worse than Apollo and the Saturns that lifted it. Hopefully, commercial space will find efficiencies and methods that improve the use, cost, and safety of space travel.
I agree in full, Bob. Alas, there’s no other way to read this. I am very disappointed in Jim Bridenstine this week.
P.S. In case others missed it, Eric Berger tweeted this out on X the other day:
“Jim Bridenstine still hates Starship. He complains about the lunar lander selected for Artemis without offering an alternative, or acknowledging NASA had no exploration funding after spending it all on SLS and Orion.”
https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1963241862409392299
And to Eric’s credit, he pushed back when challenged in the replies:
Scott Thorpe: “The number of launches for Starship to get to the moon is a problem.”
Eric Berger: “It is. But what’s the alternative? It’s still almost certainly the fastest way to get humans to the lunar surface for the United States.”