Congress: Let’s throw some more astronaut lives away so we can preen for the camera!
Jared Isaacman
Here we go again: As I noted yesterday, the hearing this week of Jared Isaacman, Donald Trump’s nomination to become NASA’s next administrator, revealed almost nothing about what Isaacman plans to do once confirmed by the Senate. He very carefully kept his options open, even while he strongly endorsed getting Americans on the Moon as fast as possible in order to beat the Chinese there. When pressed by senators from both parties to commit to continuing the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway projects to make that happen, Isaacman picked his words most cautiously. He noted that at the moment that plan seemed the best for getting to the Moon first. He also noted repeatedly that this same plan is years behind schedule and overbudget.
Like any smart businessman, Isaacman knows he cannot make any final decisions about SLS, Orion, or Gateway until he takes office and can aggressively dig into the facts, as administrator. He also knew he could not say so directly during this hearing, for to do so would antagonize senators from both parties who want those programs continued because of the money it pours into their states. So he played it coy, and the senators accepted that coyness in order to make believe they were getting what they want.
But what do these senators want? It appears our politicians (including possibly Trump) want NASA to launch humans to the Moon using SLS and Orion and do so as quickly as possible, despite knowing that both have real engineering issues of great concern. Instead, our elected officials want politics to determine the lunar flight schedule, instead of engineering, the same attitude that killed astronauts on Apollo 1 in 1967, on Challenger in 1986, and on Columbia in 2003. The engineering data then said unequivocally that things were not safe and that disaster was almost guaranteed, but NASA and Congress demanded the flights go on anyway, to serve the needs of politics.
With SLS and Orion it is now the same foolishness all over again. The SLS rocket itself has made just one successful launch. We know very little about its overall reliability. Using it again — with humans on board as NASA presently plans on the Artemis-2 mission in the spring of 2026 — carries incredible uncertainties. To give some perspective, NASA demanded that SpaceX fly at least seven problem-free launches of the final iteration of its Falcon 9 before it would approve the rocket for manned flights.
Yet that same agency wants to fly humans around the Moon on only the second flight of its own rocket.
In addition, NASA’s inspector general has found [pdf] that the more powerful SLS upper stage that Boeing is building for the manned lunar landing on Artemis-3 has its own numerous technical problems. And considering Boeing’s recent track record, we should have little faith it will be able to fix these problems sufficiently before launch.
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”
The situation with the Orion capsule however is far worse. The version intended to carry humans on that Artemis-2 flight has been tested in space only once, and during that flight in November 2022 had problems in a number of areas. The worst problem was the capsule’s heat shield upon return. Large chunks broke off as it burned its way through the atmosphere. To fix it would require a major redesign that would delay the next launch by at least one year. To avoid that delay (and keep these senators happy) NASA has decided NOT to engineer this real fix before the next flight, but to improvise a return flight profile it thinks will mitigate the problem.
In other words, Artemis-2 will put humans in a capsule, fly them around the moon, and bring them back to Earth at high speed using a heat shield that remains very questionable.
Nor is this the only concern. The capsule’s environmental system — the systems that will keep the astronauts alive — has never flown on Orion at all. On Artemis-2 NASA proposes using four human beings as guinea pigs for testing those systems for the first time in space.
Based on these basic engineering realities, putting humans on this launch system at this point in its development is a very foolish act. If a private company attempted to fly people under these circumstances I suspect politicians would want them arrested.
The estimated real per launch cost of SLS and Orion
The entire system needs more unmanned testing and development and engineering fixes before allowing humans to use it in space. SLS and Orion however are both too expensive and cumbersome to allow for that kind of testing program. The delays that would engender would likely prevent a manned lunar landing using SLS and Orion until 2030, at the very very earliest.
And we can’t have that! There are senators and congressmen who need photo-ops in front of NASA centers, taking credit for planting the American flag on the Moon again, in another one-time dead-end stunt no different than the Apollo landings.
A better plan
In a long two-part essay I wrote in December 2024 (see here and here), I proposed strongly that America stop trying to duplicate such a Moon-landing stunt.
I think Isaacman should shift the gears of Artemis entirely, and put a manned Moon landing on the back burner. Let China do its one or two lunar landing stunts, comparable to Apollo but incapable of doing much else.
The primary goal of Artemis should therefore not be to land humans on the Moon, but to first create a multi-faceted American space industry focused on competition and free enterprise, doing many different things. Such a goal would result in the kind of robust capabilities that would allow Americans and American industry to dominate the solar system for centuries.
Isaacman should therefore focus on the using all the remaining assets of Artemis — as well as the fleet of space stations that private American companies are presently building to replace the ISS — to build a sustainable real space-faring industry in Earth orbit that will quickly expand outward naturally to the Moon and beyond.
The risks inherent in SLS and Orion were only part of my reasoning for de-emphasizing a quick lunar landing. It seemed to me that fostering a wide-ranging competitive private sector making money in space can only make getting back to the Moon and Mars easier, faster, cheaper, and with more capability. It might take longer to begin with, but in the long run it will make America dominant in space for centuries to come.
Now I think those risks have become paramount. If Isaacman and Trump do not have the courage to change course — despite the expected howls from the narrow-minded members of Congress — they will be playing dice with the lives of astronauts on their way to the Moon. And I am almost certain they will end up killing someone by doing so.
The entire Artemis program needs to be reshaped, regardless whether one rejects my proposal above. As it presently stands, it simply is not ready for prime time.
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China may have some auspicious dates by which it wants to put its people on the moon; but there is nothing anyone can do to affect what country got to the moon first. The game now is sustainability. This might be a secret inside China. We need to fund some kind of N2 prize to be given to the country that gets to the moon second. The US would not be eligible. N3 too.
I’d been reflecting on this….decision to launch crew on just the second SLS launch. And the decision to launch crew on the very first Block 1B SLS. NASA of course claims they can have greater confidence in doing this because so much of SLS is Shuttle heritage (or Delta heritage), and they have greater insight into it, yadda yadda yadda…but we all know the real reason, which is that it is such an expensive program while being so hardware poor that they cannot undertake a more rigorous flight testing campaign without pushing back crewed flights into the 2030’s, and Congress will not stand for that.
I went back and looked at Apollo. With Apollo, NASA took on loads of risk, not least because the technology was so immature (the program was initiated only four years after humanity’s first orbital flight!). And it is impressive to realize that even in their hell-for-leather hurry, NASA still conducted 16 test flights of Saturn rockets (Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V) before they stuck any humans on top of one.
Likewise with the Apollo command module, which had a very rigorous flight test campaign, working from boilerplates right up to flight standard units.
Think about how many Falcon 9’s flew before the first crewed Dragon launched on top of one. (Answer: 84! 28 of which were Block 5!)) Think about how many Starships will have flown before SpaceX or NASA puts an astronaut on one. That is how you do it.
Great post, Bob.
”…the more powerful SLS upper stage that Boeing is building for the manned lunar landing on Artemis-3…”
I’ve corrected you on this before. Artemis-3 will use the same ICPS upper stage that flew successfully on Artemis-1. It is a man-rated version of the DCSS that has flown successfully on 45 Delta IVs.
”…NASA demanded that SpaceX fly at least seven problem-free launches of the final iteration of its Falcon 9 before it would approve the rocket for manned flights.”
Here I think you’re confusing things. The Crew Demo 2 mission didn’t fly until the 31st Falcon 9 Full Thrust Block 5 flight and the 85th Falcon 9 flight overall. While I think this is the sort of thing you’d like to see for manned flights to the moon, it wasn’t a NASA requirement. It worked out that way because the Falcon 9 already existed.
Where the seven successful flights came into play was for certification for EELV flights for the DoD. The DoD allows the contractor to choose from several different flight requirements for certification. Among them are flying seven successful flights with minimal DoD oversight or flying two successful missions with DoD personnel embedded in the design process. ULA chose the latter while SpaceX chose the former. It was SpaceX’s choice. They chose it because they didn’t want the government embedded within their design teams.
With SLS it’s different still. First, it’s NASA not DoD. Second, with SLS NASA isn’t overseeing a contractor conducting a flight of a contractor-owned rocket, it is itself conducting a flight of a rocket owned and operated by the government. Because of that they decided that one, not two, flights was sufficient.
”It seemed to me that fostering a wide-ranging competitive private sector making money in space can only make getting back to the Moon and Mars easier, faster, cheaper, and with more capability.”
This isn’t an “or” question. We can do both. NASA (and to a lesser extent DoD) fostered the cubesat revolution that is now expanding space access throughout the entire free world. NASA is now driving similar access to the moon with its CLPS program. It is also driving manned access to space through its ISS, Commercial Cargo, Commercial Crew, and Commercial Destinations programs.
Like the “moon or Mars” question, we shouldn’t have to choose one or the other. We can choose to beat the Chinese back to the moon *and* open up the entire solar system to the entire free world. In fact, I think we should do both.
Seemed obvious to me that Starliner needed another unmanned flight. Seems obvious Orion does too.
To play devil’s advocate – I remember reading a piece somewhere that the heat shield underperformance was due to the wrong porosity of the applied material. To fix it, they would modify application methods and they could use ultrasound or similar to non destructively test it before flight. You could also argue that chunks coming off are not ideal, but the shield did its job. (assumption: temperatures in the vehicle were normal.)
Why there was no life support on the last flight with instrumented human analogs (dummies!) in-place to verify “we would have lived!” is beyond even devil’s advocating. All prior programs were flown unmanned, presumably with functioning life support. No way should it be tested with souls on board.
Yup, I agree with getting fundamentally corrupt and incompetent institutions out of the way, and sparing a bankrupt nation billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. Let capitalism do its thing in economic force for profit. Space X will almost certainly test its hardware on the moon before blasting off its CEO to Mars. Others will go for adventure, prestige, and mainly profit.
Apollo 8 was the third S-V test flight. Going to the moon carrying people is not that much of a stretch, providing they can solve the reentry problem. Cheers –
This is correct, but it does not end the conversation. Effectively, NASA is saying, “We have complete control of the development process of SLS, giving us thorough insight into the vehicle and its systems. So, trust us.”
But that cannot block questions about just how trustworthy NASA’s human rating process for SLS actually is. And it has been a concern among some people both within NASA, as well as ASAP, right from the beginning. This would be true of any design NASA came up with, but it is only aggravated by the fact that the launch cadence is so low that achievement of adequate competency by ground systems teams is going to be a struggle for NASA, to say nothing of the workmanship issues, as I noted in one of the other threads this week (the Defense Contract Management Agency has issued more than 70 Level I and II Corrective Action Requests to Boeing, a disturbingly high number).
NASA’s overall trajectory in the history of its HSF programs highlights a troubling trend. Mercury and Gemini both flew on modifications of rockets (Redstone, Atlas, Titan II) which already had considerable flight records, along with further flight tests of the human rated versions. With Apollo, there were, again, 16 flight tests of Saturn rockets before Wally Schirra and his Apollo 7 crew launched on one. With Shuttle, this paradigm was abandoned, and crew launched on the very first Shuttle orbital flight, with the STS-1 crew having more than one narrow shave with a Loss of Crew event….and of course we know where that pathway led by January 1986.
The agency-level probability risk assessment for SLS/Orion remains only 1:75. (HEOMD reports suggested it is better than this; but a directorate assessment is never going to be as reliable as an agency one. They have a vested interest in their vehicles.) That is basically right in the range of what Shuttle ended up being (1 in 90 LOC at the end, 1in 67 LOC in flight), rather than Commercial Crew (1 in 274, and 1 in 295). And that is frankly troubling.
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “The risks inherent in SLS and Orion were only part of my reasoning for de-emphasizing a quick lunar landing. It seemed to me that fostering a wide-ranging competitive private sector making money in space can only make getting back to the Moon and Mars easier, faster, cheaper, and with more capability. It might take longer to begin with, but in the long run it will make America dominant in space for centuries to come.”
At the moment, we are still dominant in space, with several countries trying to catch up to us and many more countries trying to enter the field.
However, concentrating on the basic tenets of the United States, free market capitalism and entrepreneurialism, can prove how effective and efficient this economic strategy is, and we can do it without taxpayer funding. American capitalism can supply far more funding for activities in space than the government is willing to do, and this private funding-for-profit will finally bring us the benefits from space that Americans have yearned for since the 1950s, when Disney and Von Braun started advocating for the manned exploration and expansion into space.
‘ There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by commercial space marketplace] than there is inside of NASA.’ — paraphrased from an interview with NASA Administrator Bridenstine on the Ben Shapiro radio show on Monday 3 August 2020.
We can assure that America remains dominant in space just by letting Americans work in space.
America was founded by settlers, who spent their own money and did their own work to create settlements across the continent. Now we have the same opportunity to settle outer space. I suspect that the Outer Space Treaty had been written specifically to prevent the United States from using its vast resources to create settlements throughout space. We have the tradition and the temperament to do it.
We don’t have to be first, we just have to be persistent and methodical. This is how we won the Space Race to the Moon; we weren’t first in space or first to the Moon, but we eventually were the first to put man on the Moon. Many American companies are already working to commercially explore space and also to utilize its resources. At this point, they are mainly learning how best to do it, but soon all that new knowledge will begin to pay off in benefits for we earthlings. Government was relatively stingy with generating benefits.
There’s significant foreign policy value in returning to the Moon ASAP. Fostering a wide-ranging, competitive private space sector is good for the long-term but won’t be ready to land crew on the Moon in about three years unless that is SpaceX and SpaceX alone..
That has long been the problem. Bridenstein’s two principles (urgency and sustainability) have always been in conflict with urgency always pushing to use the more developed SLS whereas SLS has never (and will never) be sustainable.
But there is one approach that is both urgent and sustainable. Artemis 3 cannot be done without the HLS lander. That is probably the time limiting factor. But, once the Starship HLS lander is ready to do its part, then there will be a Starship capable of transporting crew in deep space. So, at that point, a Cislunar Starship could transport crew from LEO to NRHO. The only leg that SLS would be needed would be from Earth to LEO. But that can be done now and safely using F9-Dragon.
So, the urgent and sustainable solution would be to launch crew on Dragon to LEO, dock with a fully fueled Cislunar Starship, take them to NRHO. There, dock and transfer them to a fueled HLS lander. Go down to the Moon and conduct the mission. Ascend and dock with the Cislunar Starship. Transfer crew. Propulsively return to LEO. Crew transfers to Dragon and they re-enter and land in the ocean.
Later, as Starship demonstrates a record of launching Starlinks safely and demonstrating engine out capability, larger numbers of passengers could go to the Moon while SpaceX is also transporting passengers to Mars.
Here is an excellent video illustrating this concept:
DevelopSpace.info/alternative
Really, all that needs to be done is to ask SpaceX if this is possible or NASA putting out an RFI asking if anyone knows of a more cost-effective, sustainable, but near-term solution to SLS-Orion-Gateway and something like this architecture will be placed on the table.
At some point, SpaceX will be in a position to conduct a lunar landing mission independent of NASA.
Mission motto: “Hold My Beer…”
Does Congress think that Orion is safe enough?
NASA has said that their revised reentry trajectory is safe, and I haven’t heard of any objections from ASAP, whose job is to prevent unsafe conditions for missions (so it must be safe, right? Right?).
Since Congresscritters are more interested in politics than in technology, engineering, space, exploration, daleks, or the efficient use of resources, they may not realize the hazards of sending a crew around the Moon on a life support system that has yet to be flight-tested in any way, shape, or form. Their goal is American prestige: showing the world that we can do in two and a half decades with existing hardware and decades of experience what we had once done better, in less than a decade, without any experience (and using slide rules, to boot) more than half a century ago. Look at the progress we have made.
Of course, Congress expects us to do it with the rocket that they designed a decade and a half ago (with no mission in mind), even though it is less capable than the Saturn V that they tried to recreate, which was barely able to do the job in the first place.
*Sigh*
Why can’t a Lunar Lander be sent to the moon unmanned by a falcon heavy?
Can’t the Dragon engines be used to land the craft? I bet with enough fuel they could make lunar orbit.
Musk did launch a car around the Sun.
They cold turn the service trunk into a cargo container and a lander.
Say what you wish–I would feel much better riding SLS than Starship
.
Jeff Wright,
To each his own. I’d advise having someone on the ground photograph the liftoff of your SLS-Orion. A poster-size print would make a nice display at your funeral and then a nice keepsake for your heirs.
pzatchok,
Falcon Heavy can’t send a lander to the Moon because there is no lander to send. Even a dinky hypergol lunar lander isn’t exactly something you can whip up from scratch over a long weekend – even if you start with a Crew Dragon as a base.
Ray Van Dune,
You are correct, good sir, and the day of all-SpaceX lunar missions may be closer than most think. On his most recent episode, Felix over at the What About It? YouTube channel had a photo of some ship header tank hardware glimpsed through a window at the Starfactory that had “V3” written on it. That seems to indicate SpaceX is already bending metal for a Version 3 Starship with even more tankage than the already lengthened Version 2 and six RaptorVac 3s instead of three RaptorVac 2s. My best guess is that this would most likely be a tanker prototype needed for the on-orbit propellant transfer testing. Given that metal is already being bent, such a beast could conceivably fly later this year.
DougSpace,
Your concept of the “missing link” to an all-SpaceX Earth-Moon mission architecture being a Starship capable of launching from Earth, refilling, and making the LEO-to-lunar-orbit journey – and back – is spot on. It would basically be a Starship with a subset of the innards of the HLS version – no elevator or airlocks required.
But introducing Dragon into the mix is an unsustainable and unnecessary sideshow. Just launch the crew on the “missing link” and eliminate a lot of superfluous fuss and bother. The initial version of “missing link” could be configured to carry just four crew if that would save time, but later versions could easily be fitted out to carry far more as could corresponding later versions of HLS.
Richard M & John,
SLS and Orion being what they are, the choice, if they are used, is pretty much between safety – at the cost of an additional unmanned test flight and the possible cost of not re-arriving on the Moon before the PRC gets there – or taking what we all regard as excessive risks with astronauts’ lives in order to have at least some possibility of “Beating the Chinese” [tm].
A third possibility is to make what would have been Artemis 2 an unmanned test flight to test NASA’s revised Orion Earth re-entry profile and also test the Orion ECLSS. If everything checked out adequately, then Artemis 3 could still be the first lunar landing mission but would also be the first SLS-Orion crewed mission.
We could even make the current Artemis 2 crew the Artemis 3 crew. The crew would, I’m sure, be delighted. The Dems would even get their “first woman and first person of color” thing. By sending the three American crew down to the lunar surface in HLS, instead of the currently-planned two, we could allow Jared to be spared the choice of whether it would be the woman or the person of color who accompanied him. Leaving the Canadian aboard Orion would still allow a Japanese to later become the first non-American and non-Chinese to walk on the Moon.
If everything did not check out, then we would have dodged a bullet.
A fourth possibility, of course, is none of the above but an entirely Starship-based Earth-Moon logistics architecture that would be far safer, straightforwardly scalable and sustainable and could even be ready in time to “Beat the Chinese” [tm]. This would include the “missing link” referenced in my reply to DougSpace.
Jared Isaacman has had his hearing and now looks like a safe bet to be confirmed in three or four weeks. He managed to stay noncommittal anent SLS-Orion. Once in office, we can hope he and Elon have some serious talks about our fourth option. It could even be combined with the third option and pursued in parallel.
If the schedule looks doable, I think a lot of potential political opposition could be shorted to ground if Elon agreed to add development of the “missing link” Starship to SpaceX’s extant NASA commitments on the basis of an unfunded Space Act Agreement. Elon has been conspicuously funding other efforts for the good of the nation lately. I think he’d go for this one too.
Edward,
Agree about your – and mkent’s – broad vision of The Way Forward for the US in space. Which is why I see no virtue in Mr. Zimmerman’s notion of de-emphasizing lunar efforts. DougSpace is entirely correct that there are geopolitical considerations involved as well as technical and economic ones. The US shouldn’t be pulling back in any way in space. Throttles to the firewall, say I.
One of Jared’s jobs as Administrator will be to ‘splain things to Congress. If, as I hope is the case, he finds current plans needlessly risky, my hope – my expectation, really – is that he will rearrange things to be both less risky and still allow for “Beating the Chinese” [tm]. I outlined such alternatives in a previous section of this comment.