Freedom: What Trump’s election will mean for America’s space policy
The resounding landslide victory by Donald Trump and the Republicans yesterday is going have enormous consequences across the entire federal government. As a space historian and journalist who has been following, studying, and reporting on space policy for decades, this essay will be my attempt to elucidate what that landslide will mean for NASA, its Artemis program, and the entire American aerospace industry.
The absurd cost of each SLS launch
The Artemis Program
Since 2011 I have said over and over that the government-designed and owned SLS, Orion, and later proposed Lunar Gateway space station were all badly conceived. They all cost too much and don’t do the job. Fitting them together to create a long term presence in space is difficult at best and mostly impractical. Their cost and cumbersome design has meant the program to get back to the Moon, as first proposed by George Bush Jr. in 2004, is now more than a decade behind schedule and many billions over budget. Worse, under the present program as currently contrived that manned lunar landing will likely be delayed five more years, at a minimum.
For example, at present SLS is underpowered. It can’t get astronauts to and from the Moon, as the Saturn-5 rocket did in the 1960s. For the first manned lunar landing mission, Artemis-4, SLS will simply launch four astronauts in Orion to lunar orbit, where Orion will rendezvous and dock with the lunar lander version of Starship. That Starship in turn will require refueling in Earth orbit, using a proposed fuel depot that has been filled by multiple earlier Starship launches.
Once Starship is docked to Orion the crew will transfer to Starship to get up and down from the Moon, and then return to Earth in Orion.
You think that’s complicated? Later lunar missions will require Orion and Starship to dock with the Lunar Gateway station to do these crew transfers. To do this however will require that Gateway be built, launched, and assembled in lunar orbit, something that has never been done before.
Under a new Trump administration, working with advice directly from Elon Musk, I predict that the entire Artemis program will be drastically restructured. SLS and Orion will be eliminated completely. Starship can do the job for all, and do it cheaper, quicker, more simply, and with much greater capabilities. For example, while each SLS launch is expected to cost about $4 billion, Starship launches will cost far less than $50 million, and maybe far less. For the same money NASA will be able to fly dozens more missions, and do so fast.
Whether Lunar Gateway will remain is unclear. It has its uses but of a limited kind. Right now SpaceX has the contract to use its Falcon Heavy to launch the station’s two main modules, so Musk might thus advise keeping the station, but reshape it to use commercial rockets, such as Starship, Falcon Heavies, and possibly New Glenn (once operational), for resupply and crew ferrying. Most certainly it will be separated from the lunar base project. Crews might go to both, but missions to the lunar surface will no longer be required to dock with Gateway first.
If this happens the U.S. will likely return to the Moon much faster, and for a much lower cost. And the change will enliven America’s entire aerospace industry. The jobs lost in the federal government and NASA by eliminating Orion and SLS will be overwhelmed by the new jobs created in hundreds of new space companies providing service and product to each other and NASA.
Deregulation
During Trump’s first term he imposed a complete halt to the issuance of new regulations by the federal bureaucracy. Though he left the staffing of most agencies alone, in certain cases, such as the EPA, he aggressively worked to reduce its power and staffing.
Expect Trump’s anti-regulation hammer to strike with much greater force in his second administration. In regards to space, expect the immediate elimination of the FAA’s Part 450 regulations that it imposed in 2021, supposedly to “streamline” things. Instead, it has choked off all new development, and slowed the efforts of already established companies significantly. I expect Trump to cancel it quickly, based on advice from Musk, who has been directly impacted by its absurd rules and also has good inside knowledge of how it has impacted everyone else in the rocket business.
Similarly, expect Trump to neuter the efforts of the FCC to expand its regulatory authority into areas where it has no statutory authority, such as regulating the de-orbiting of satellites. This regulatory mission creep will stop, accompanied quite possible with major staffing cuts.
The result, if done successfully, will be an end to the regulatory burdens that since 2021 have shut down new rocket companies in the U.S. This in turn might help renew investment in such companies, something that dried up in the past three years, partly because of rocket failures but just as much because investors saw these new rocket companies hindered so much by those regulations that success had become questionable if not impossible.
Freedom to go to Mars or anywhere
By eliminating the ability of the administrative state to obstruct new development, expect SpaceX to quickly fly many Starship/Superheavy test flights, at least one every two months, so that it can get that rocket to operationality by the end of next year. The company will then proceed with Musk’s plan to fly one or more Starships to Mars in the first launch window in 2026, and to follow with more Starships in every subsequent launch window every two years hence.
Finally the only thing stopping Musk from his dream of dying on Mars will engineering problems. He will be able to function like all Americans once did, freely and following his own dreams.
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
Or to put it more grandly, Trump’s space policy will essentially get the government out of the way of everybody, thus allowing Americans and private enterprise to step up to do the task, in its own way and as it wishes. Though this resurgence will begin with SpaceX dominating the field, others will quickly rise to the challenge, and we shall see a cornucopia of new private space missions, some to the Moon, some to the asteroids, some to Mars, and some to Venus.
Nor am I talking through my hat. Private companies are already developing and even building missions to all these places. The freedom that Trump will create will energize all these projects.
This new birth of freedom will also help the four commercial space stations presently under development. Every one of these stations will provide infrastructure needed for all those interplanetary projects. They will thus suddenly have more customers then they will know what to do with, which will in turn further their own success.
Or to put it another way freedom will mean that demand will exceed supply, the ideal situation for promoting fast and exuberant growth.
As always, freedom works. It raises all boats, and makes everyone prosper. And this fact is likely what Trump’s space policy will bring to America, more than anything else.
Hardly the actions of a tyrant, I’d say.
Readers!
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In 1905, an aerospace engineer might have a career building and flying dozens of aircraft designs, many of them of his own design and manufacture. In the 50s-late 70s, high powered aerospace firms, like Lockheed Martin skunk-works managed a similar pace, even though powered largely by defense spending. Now an aerospace engineer might go for a 30 year career and never see the thing he works on be completed. Generations before project completion clearly exceeds some sort of timeout limit for the propagation, not to mention the experimentation and production of human skill and knowledge. Design and development requires experiment and iteration.
As an aerospace engineer, I’ve been trapped like a fly in bureaucratic amber for most of my career. From the late 70s, picking up serious speed in the 80s and 90s, the functional parts of our aerospace industry died, leaving behind some zombie simulacra that only apes the form.
Related:
WINNING (REMEMBER TO BE HUMBLE)
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/winning-remember-to-be-humble
Buh bye Bill Nelson. His teeth are clacking as fast as they can.
Your assessment is very astute. Not to mention the accelerated development of private space stations and orbital astronomy (one of your favs) that will benefit from the heavy-lift capabilities of Starship.
I only wonder how many flights of Starship will it take before someone gets the chance (and has the stones) to ride it to orbit and back. The flip maneuver required for ship catching will be quite the gut-wrencher. But they’re already making mods to flight 6 to see if they can make space on the sides for extendable catching pins (they have to be retracted for re-entry).
But, we shall soon see. As SpaceX says, “excitement guaranteed”!
I am so relieved. My last worry concerning the election is the House, still undecided at this moment.
SO looking forward to an administration in which Musk is fully involved and appreciated. That dude is a Hero.
I wonder if a Space Elevator could be built on the moon using conventional materials?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump (under Musk’s influence) wants to dump Artemis completely. He would then subsidize Musk’s Mars plan instead. That would be ideal, but it is not likely to happen. Congress will not let him and it would not be worth the considerable political capital needed to change that. Some form of Artemis will likely fly, at least to the gateway. If she is wiling to work with Trump…a big if admittedly….I would love to see Lori Garver control the FAA or NASA. She is a Democrat and a likely DEI supporter. That would stand in the way.
Block 2 will have more reach. Trump didn’t kill SLS in his first outing–but he was running for re-election then.
At least Starship won’t be interfered with anymore.
“aggressively worked to reduce its power and staffing.”
“What would you say you do here?”
– The two Bobs in Office Space
https://t.ly/aw_hE
“I am so relieved.”
Patrick Underwood, my sister texted me the exact same sentiment.
pzatchok:
No atmosphere = no drag + no turbulence.
Low gravity helps as well.
There is no reason why not to build elevators to L1 or L2 and use them for logistics to and from the lunar surface.
(Begging the question of having a reason to have logistics to and from the Moon, which should be the real problem to solve here.)
Musk advising Trump to cancel SLS makes perfect sense – but I suspect that Musk will stay completely away from space policy. I doubt there can be the appearance of a man running the most successful space company and also running space-related government and bureaucracy. I would appreciate Me Zimmerman’s thoughts on this.
The last thing we need is lefty media headlines such as “Trump rewards henchman Musk with billions using dollars eviscerated from social services”. This accusation may happen anyway.
I think the first thing to go will be $1 billion for an SLS launch gantry. I could see programs either being scrapped or given over to SpaceX and other New Space companies, including Blue Origin and Rocket Lab. All the intellectual property protected by contracts and high prices of the legacy space contractors will be fair game, because it’s under NASA contract. Most of it is obsolete or designed to spend money anyway.
NASA’s robotic exploration program can actually thrive in a new system. Currently, we get decadal competitions for a few slots from many excellent ideas. Now they can all be funded, equipment mass produced, and fleets of vehicles sent across the solar system. Laser communications can break the DSN choke point, and doubly so with Starlink-like relays around every major planet. NASA engineers who spend decades working on probes that never fly can finally realize their dreams of building flight hardware. Many large telescopes can be funded across spectra, with updated hardware designed with mass production in mind. Astronomy and engineering will thrive.
Kent Nebergall: See my 2011 essay which I link to in this essay. Everything you say I suggested fourteen years ago. No one listened.
Musk and the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
Who remembers the Grace Commission Report, (aka Presidents Private Sector Survey on Cost Control) Executive Order 12369?
I would put forth the Proposition:
The Federal Government never gets smaller and it’s not going to suddenly get smaller over the next 4 years.
A few “dumb” questions.
First, if, as Robert suggests, “SLS is underpowered and it can’t get astronauts to and from the Moon, as the Saturn-5 rocket did in the 1960s and 70s,” why on earth was it *designed* with this limitation? Why, for example, couldn’t it have had an upper stage to do the same job as the less powerful Saturn-5 stack? I’m sorry, this doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Or, as was talked about back in the 1950s, why wasn’t Artemis / SLS designed so that its crew (lifted into orbit by something like the present Dragon — or even a special purpose Space Shuttle retained for this specific type of mission), would transfer into a capsule / trans lunar craft. The latter, preferably a reusable, stack would make the flight to and from the moon with an improved, on-board lunar lander / ascent vehicle? Could not the Apollo concept — which did, after all, “work” — have been scaled up and parts of it designed for reuse? Why, exactly, not?
Finally, if the math and engineering behind such a venture demands refueling in orbit, so be it, but, again, the whole Artemis thing, as NASA has laid it out, would make Rube Goldberg blush, not to mention being exorbitantly expensive. And this, we are to believe, was the only alternative that could be come up with by the “best and the brightest” of our engineers? Really?
So, for those with the technical knowledge — which is certainly not me — what would a “rational,” cost effective program to return to the moon look like? (And how quickly can our country formulate one?) Again, it appears to me that the people who “planned” Artemis / SLS actually never had any real intention of going back to the moon other than pulling off the most expensive DEI exercise in human history. Just saying.
Indeed, in the four year window that we now appear to have, how much *can* be done to turn NASA around and get on with the exploration and utilization of the Solar System?
Milt
PS — The United States has had the capacity to do work in orbit since the Gemini missions, let alone everything that has been learned from our experience with the ISS / Hubble servicing missions. This is not “new,” and if it is still rocket science, it is at least *established* rocket science.
Can SpaceX. et al., take this experience and run with it?
What do we want for America’s aerospace? “Fweedom!”
Sorry couldn’t resist.
Wayne, I’ll take that bet.
Milton: “I Could Set the Building on Fire”
https://youtu.be/V09fnmAUDVQ
2:07
SLS is best for hydrogen NTRs for the occasional Ice Giant Interstellar probe. Elon would likely advise against killing it in that a political rival in the DNC could champion it, so that’s one less stone thrown at Vance four years from now.
To pzatchok…I think a lunar elevator could certainly be made using current materials, if memory serves.
The Federal Government never gets smaller and it’s not going to suddenly get smaller over the next 4 years.
I will be happy with a halt (which would probably be a “pause”) to the growth.
I wonder if a Space Elevator could be built on the moon using conventional materials?
There is something weird about the length. The top of a moon space elevator ends up somewhere undesirable. I don’t remember where or why; something about where moon “geo”-stationary orbit is. IIRC, a rotovator is build-able, but of dubious value. Because the moon has no atmosphere, railguns are easier – even if you can only use them during the day.
I think all sensible people in the industry, or who follow it, agree that SLS and Orion need to go out to pasture. They are strangling NASA’s effort to return to the Moon, not enabling it!
Now, Eric Berger raised a point in his essay at Ars Technica today about Elon’s involvement in NASA reform: He has a rather obvious conflict of interest. There may be legal ways around this, but politically, of course, it’s a consideration Trump has to think about.
But there’s a way around that, I think. Take a page from other commercial human spaceflight programs NASA has initiated over the past 15 years — Commercial Resupply Services, Commercial Crew, Human Landing Systems — and come up with a competed commercial program to replace what SLS and Orion are supposed to do, i.e., transport crew from Earth to lunar orbit and back to Earth. We could call it “Cislunar Transportation Services.” NASA sets minimum basic requirements of what it needs but lets the contractors figure out how to do it, as cost effectively and reliably as they can, and they can recoup development costs by selling the services to other customers, too. Award contracts to at least two (2) bidders. We know who those would almost certainly end up being: SpaceX and Blue Origin. They already have most of the pieces required! And this reduces the conflict of interest concerns with Elon, since his company won’t be the only one benefiting from this change of direction. It also provides the redundancy, and maybe almost a hint of price competition, that NASA’s other commercial programs have benefited (or tried to benefit!) from.
And this allows you to wind down the Lunar Gateway, Exploration Upper Stage, Mobile Launcher 2….
As for the SLS rockets already built? Homer Hickam has proposed using what’s already built for just sending big cargo to the Moon. I’d just as soon put them in rocket gardens, but perhaps Homer’s idea would be a compromise that eases the wind down of SLS for the centers and contractors in question….which are, after all, mostly located in red states and districts. Something to think about, at any rate.
Milt,
Because the Space Launch System was not designed with ANY mission in mind!
To understand how this happened….You have to go back to 2010, when Barack Obama had cancelled Project Constellation. The Senate threw a conniption over that summer, and a Gang of Four senators, led by Bill Nelson, came up with a way of salvaging the parts of Constellation that most involved NASA centers and contractors in their states. They couldn’t save the Moon program as such, but they cobbled together the votes to force Obama to keep Orion, and required NASA to come up with a new megarocket to replace Ares I and Ares V. That rocket became the SLS.
But there was no mission for SLS and Orion. The idea was, NASA would develop these vehicles, and THEN come up with missions for them to execute. Congress really did not care what they were used for, so long as workforces and contractor revenue streams (and thus, campaign donations) were insured. It was an ugly but typical political story, and you can read all about it in Lori Garver’s recent memoir.
Anyway, that left NASA to try to come up with something for Orion and SLS to do. Obama had made it clear that the Moon was out of bounds – that was Bush’s thing, and he wanted nothing to do with it. An initial proposal was the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which evolved into an idea of bringing a small asteroid back to cislunar space and sending a crew out in an Orion out to grab it, study it, sample it. Congress was utterly unenthused about this, however. The idea of a cislunar space station was floated, perhaps as a basis for a Mars orbit mission….eventually, this would mutate into the Lunar Gateway. But it was left to Donald Trump, urged on by Mike Pence, to decide in 2017 that Orion and SLS would be repurposed to go back to the lunar surface. But these vehicles, at least in their initial versions, were rather less than ideal for the task, and worse, they were (of course) way behind schedule and over budget. Public exploration by Trump’s NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine of ditching SLS in favor of Falcon Heavy triggered a ferocious threat of retaliation by the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby (R-Ala), so that idea died quickly. And NASA has therefore been left ever since with the challenging task of trying to figure out how to make a Moon program work with SLS and Orion.
Obviously, this is very different from how Apollo did things. But like Apollo, all of this was very much driven by political considerations. Only this time, the political considerations center on jobs and shareholder earnings, rather than a mission.
Richard M wrote, “It was an ugly but typical political story, and you can read all about it in Lori Garver’s recent memoir.”
And if you were reading Behind the Black in 2010, you would have been able to read about it then, rather than wait fourteen years for Garver’s memoir. See for example:
2010:
This NASA bill is nothing more than pork
Rebuilding the American space program — the right way
2011:
NASA stalls, Texas lawmakers fume
Catching up with the future of the U.S. space program
I could go on, but there’s no point. For decades it has seemed I was shouting into the wind. The result has been the entire SLS debacle that achieved nothing — and was clearly going to achieve nothing from day one.
I wish they would dump FAA’s Part 450. When the Administration gave AST the task of getting a new rule out in a few months, I knew it would be a disaster. New rules at FAA take five years from go-ahead to completion, if you want a “good” rule. Rush it, and you get a very, very bad rule. Especially when FAA writ large had (and probably still has) major TDS. For one minor example, when I got there, each line of business head office had official photographs of Obama, the Secretary of Transportation, the Administrator of the FAA, and the Associate Administrator of that line of business gracing the walls. That custom wasn’t followed when Trump was President. I have no doubt that there was a subconscious rebellion against “streamlining” the regulation. Though I was AST’s Chief Engineer, I was not very involved in that rulemaking. But I could tell the Administration how it could be done right…
Space space elevator would be a very complicated project.
We’ve discussed this extensively in a prior thread that I lack the time to locate.
So I copied this from Wikipedia;
“There are two points in space where an elevator’s docking port could maintain a stable, lunar-synchronous position: the Earth-Moon Lagrange points L1 and L2. The 0.055 eccentricity of the lunar orbit means that these points are not fixed relative to the lunar surface : the L1 is 56,315 km +/- 3,183 km away from the Earth-facing side of the Moon (at the lunar equator) and L2 is 62,851 km +/- 3,539 km from the center of the Moon’s far side, in the opposite direction. At these points, the effect of the Moon’s gravity and the effect of the centrifugal force resulting from the elevator system’s synchronous, rigid body rotation cancel each other out. The Lagrangian points L1 and L2 are points of unstable gravitational equilibrium, meaning that small inertial adjustments will be needed to ensure any object positioned there can remain stationary relative to the lunar surface.
Both of these positions are substantially farther up than the 36,000 km from Earth to geostationary orbit. Furthermore, the weight of the limb of the cable system extending down to the Moon would have to be balanced by the cable extending further up, and the Moon’s slow rotation means the upper limb would have to be much longer than for an Earth-based system, or be topped by a much more massive counterweight. To suspend a kilogram of cable or payload just above the surface of the Moon would require 1,000 kg of counterweight, 26,000 km beyond L1. (A smaller counterweight on a longer cable, e.g., 100 kg at a distance of 230,000 km — more than halfway to Earth — would have the same balancing effect.) Without the Earth’s gravity to attract it, an L2 cable’s lowest kilogram would require 1,000 kg of counterweight at a distance of 120,000 km from the Moon. The average Earth-Moon distance is 384,400 km.”
There you have it, a elevator to lunar surface would be impractical and extend halfway to the earth due to its slow 28 day rotation rate. you could literally use the moon, because one side always faces the earth, as the anchor for a cable extending to near geosynchronous orbit.
A much shorter elevator in low lunar orbit traveling at a high rate of speed to allow centrifugal force to counterbalance the weight of the cable is doable if it’s other end is connected to a pivot point at the lunar pole.
(One can visualize a futuristic rotating habitable ring with ribbons for elevators down to both poles)
Another idea for a shorter cable is to have the cable rotate from a central mass in stable orbit so the bottom of the cable for a short time has a matching velocity with the surface. (Will work on the moon/earth/other planets). The purpose of which is the cargo would leap off / and up to the cable, attach itself then simply ride the cable back up into space without moving as it rotates. Picture a star configuration of thousands of cables in a continuous rotation… The point at which you leave the cable determines your destination. If you leave with the Apex of velocity you can be thrown anywhere in the solar system. If you uncouple in the reverse direction, counter rotation, you lose velocity and enter orbital space. for every action there’s an opposite equal reaction which may make stable rotational speeds problematic. This problem can be overcome by having an overwhelming amount of mass to anchor too, and continuous Ion drives are considered enough to overcome velocity loss.
There’s a lot of controversy over what would thrust an elevator for weeks towards the counter balance on the cable 26,000 miles or more away? Rockets would burn up the cable, mechanical drive is too slow and will wear out the cable and run out of battery power long before you reach your destination. (The batteries will be too heavy anyway.) Solar driven power source is even heavier and it only works when the cable is in Sun light. Extra air food and water it’s also a consideration.
The answer is rather obvious and the technology has been around for a very long time. Put an insulator between two layers of the ribbon cable so that one side to be a different polarity than the other side. Now you have a positive negative DC contacts if you like analog… or better yet, charge the cable with AC alternating current and you have an electric propulsion no different than an electric motor. Now the space elevator becomes a electric catapult / mag lift / Rail gun and accelerates continuously from the moon. (Or in a few hours, outside of earths atmosphere) to get to its destination in a few days rather than weeks depending on acceleration forces the passengers can tolerate. (elevator return is simple, no orbital velocity means it drops straight down, heating minimal, and will only need a parachute to return to earth)
Suddenly the future looks promising.
A lunar elevator might be good for payloads only.
Now what I would like to see are fly-by rotovator skyhooks.
These would be backspun, so as to pick-up or drop off items at lower velocity. I think Rutan believed that his craft would not need heat shields as part of a single stage to tether.
Now, one way to speed ascent might be to have two space elevators cross over each other in the shape of the letter X.
The tops of each tether go to huge solar statites that hold them taut.
By having each statite tack towards or away from each other, the intersection of the two cables can rise of fall quickly. A slower form of the superluminal scissors:)
At that intersection point, you could have a flying windlass with a third tether pointing straight down between the other two.
As the cables move apart, the windlass spins one way—and spins another way as the statites move towards each other.
With simple Archimedean infrastructure, you can lift or drop payloads quickly–no need for an elevator car to spend weeks trundling up and down a single tether.
Thank you, Richard M and Robert. I now have a much better perspective on this, but it makes my head hurt. (to Robert, it’s no fun being a Cassandra.) Sadly, this is yet another example of how the Obama Administration dropped the ball and failed to live up to expectations, whether it was navigating through the 2008 financial crisis, shepherding the Arab Spring in more positive directions, or managing to set back American manned space flight by at least a decade. “Hope and Change,” indeed.
On the subject of better ways of going back to the moon, I stumbled on these videos, and they provide ample food for thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWv4fDxYIk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_kfWNazLg
From this perspective, Starship is like the original Model T. Make ’em fast, sell ’em cheap to whoever has an idea about how to use them, and then let the customer modify them as necessary to do the job, meanwhile creating a whole new industrial base around this basic product. Hummm. Isn’t this really the story — at least in a material sense — of how capitalism and free enterprise work in our country?
Milt asked: “First, if, as Robert suggests, “SLS is underpowered and it can’t get astronauts to and from the Moon, as the Saturn-5 rocket did in the 1960s and 70s,” why on earth was it *designed* with this limitation? Why, for example, couldn’t it have had an upper stage to do the same job as the less powerful Saturn-5 stack? I’m sorry, this doesn’t seem to make any sense. Or, as was talked about back in the 1950s, why wasn’t Artemis / SLS designed so that its crew (lifted into orbit by something like the present Dragon — or even a special purpose Space Shuttle retained for this specific type of mission), would transfer into a capsule / trans lunar craft. The latter, preferably a reusable, stack would make the flight to and from the moon with an improved, on-board lunar lander / ascent vehicle? Could not the Apollo concept — which did, after all, “work” — have been scaled up and parts of it designed for reuse? Why, exactly, not? … And this, we are to believe, was the only alternative that could be come up with by the “best and the brightest” of our engineers? Really?”
SLS was designed only as a heavy lift vehicle, not to perform any specific mission, as Richard M noted, with historical context. Without a specific mission, the engineers had no goal to guide the vehicle design. All it does is take a specific load into low Earth orbit. SLS would take Orion to orbit to dock with ISS,* and deep space probes were expected to be payloads, but their weight and range would be limited by SLS’s capability.
It was only after the SLS design was frozen that it was selected to return man to the Moon. Or I should have said the first woman and the first person of color to the Moon, Artemis’s declared mission.
Congress set SLS’s requirements and specified certain aspects of its design. NASA and its engineers were trapped into those specifications and requirements, and they were not sufficient to repeat an Apollo mission. Even at its eventual maximum payload capacity (the third iteration), SLS can only lift less than 90% of the Saturn V, and Saturn could only perform minimal manned lunar missions, not sustainable ones, as Artemis is assigned to do.
That 90% amount does not even allow enough propellant for Orion to enter low lunar orbit and propell it back to Earth, much less take a lunar lander with it. This is why the Gateway lunar space station is in such a bizarre orbit, getting there and back again is all that Orion can perform, and that is still without a lander.
To scale up the Apollo concept would require a complete redesign of SLS, and NASA did not have authorization or budget to design another launch vehicle. Congress designed SLS in a way that kept the Space Shuttle engineers and technicians employed (oh, look: SLS has a mission after all), and a redesigned rocket would lose those jobs.
I cannot tell you why NASA’s engineers did not revert to the unused early 1960s Apollo concept of refueling (retanking) in low Earth orbit. On the other hand, how much would developing that capability have cost NASA, a decade ago? Is NASA even charged with getting back to the Moon in an economical way? I don’t remember cost cutting as part of the assignment.
“Why, for example, couldn’t it have had an upper stage to do the same job as the less powerful Saturn-5 stack?”
It is difficult for an upper stage to make up for an underperforming first stage. As the upper stage gets heavier, the first stage underperforms more, until at some point the first stage has no acceleration at launch time. Many people believe that more is always better, but more upper stage makes the first stage performance worse.
Starship is battling this problem right now, during development. The third version of Starship will be larger and heavier. The solution comes from more thrust from the Raptor engines, but once thrust is maximized, the performances from Starship and its first stage, Super Heavy, will be difficult to improve. The engine’s efficiency (specific impulse, related to the thrust from a pound of propellant) will not improve much, so the launch profile will have to change to maximize the tradeoffs between aerodynamic drag and gravity drag (the fight with gravity, the cost of having to hold the rocket up in a gravity field).
“what would a “rational,” cost effective program to return to the moon look like? (And how quickly can our country formulate one?)”
SpaceX is putting together a program for going to Mars in a reasonable, rational, economical way, allowing for any productivity on Mars to be economical to be bought by earthlings. We spend billions of dollars on rovers that take days or weeks to travel a kilometer and only take a few samples and measurements each day. For a similar cost, humans on the ground could do more exploration far faster, making manned Mars exploration more affordable than robotic exploration. If man can explore Mars so cost effectively, manned exploration of the Moon can be even more cost effective. SpaceX is already contracted to land man on the Moon, and Blue origin has another contract to do the same. We could be back on the Moon before the end of the decade, by the end of Trump’s second term, and President Trump could repeat Nixon’s famous phone call to the lunar explorers, except that this time the president making the call would have played a significant part in making it come true.
“Indeed, in the four year window that we now appear to have, how much *can* be done to turn NASA around and get on with the exploration and utilization of the Solar System?”
NASA is a governmental organization, which makes it a political organization. From the early 1960s to a decade or two ago, we had expected NASA to open up exploration of the solar system and manned presence from Venus to Jupiter or even to Saturn. However, with government in charge, all we got was what government wanted. Now that We the People are starting to do our own space projects and form our own space programs, we are starting to get what we had wanted ever since Disney and von Braun showed us in the 1950s. It has taken two-thirds of a century, but we are finally catching up to the future — and without depending upon NASA or a turnaround there.
“Can SpaceX. et al., take this [six decades of NASA’s orbital manned] experience and run with it?”
This is exactly what is happening this decade. I expected this decade to be exciting, and we are getting scores or hundreds of new companies being founded to utilize space. SpaceX already launches private citizens to space completely independent of NASA or other government agencies; Axiom already contracts with SpaceX to take private citizens to the ISS and is building its own space station modules; privately designed, built, and owned space suits are already being tested in orbit; one company has already tested space manufacturing; and we anticipate commercial space stations in the next two years, with even more in the few years following. As Robert wrote: “Every one of these stations will provide infrastructure needed for all those interplanetary projects. They will thus suddenly have more customers then they will know what to do with, which will in turn further their own success. Or to put it another way freedom will mean that demand will exceed supply, the ideal situation for promoting fast and exuberant growth.” Commercial space companies are already taking the NASA experience and running with it.
Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, and those scores or hundreds of commercial space satellite operators show what happens when we have the freedom that Robert wrote about in this post. A big boom happened during Trump’s first term as president, a big expansion occurred during the reign of freedom, but that boom faded during Biden’s term, with a small expansion and many companies reconsidering or reforming their plans or business models. Even the plans for constellations of communication satellites were affected by the reduced freedom, with initial launches delayed, and Starlink’s expansion was slowed from its plan, not by manufacturing limits but by regulators delaying launches.
With freedom, We the People can do much more than government agencies, even more than NASA. ’There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by the 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
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* In historical context, at that time, 2010, the Space Shuttle was scheduled to stop flying and the only replacement for America to send its astronauts to the ISS was NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Commercial manned spacecraft were not yet on contract, the government was still waiting to see whether unmanned commercial resupply spacecraft could be made to work. If so, then NASA would ask commercial space companies to do a manned transport spacecraft, and Orion could be used on other missions.
At that time, commercially operated spacecraft were limited almost exclusively to communication and observation satellites. Navigating and docking to manned space stations were way outside the experience of commercial companies, and many people thought commercial companies could not accomplish these maneuvers, not even Boeing. Manned spacecraft were even farther outside the experience of commercial companies. The past five years showed that the upstart startup commercial companies are much more competent than had been thought, at that time.
Edward —
Thank you and, again, Richard. You have provided a very thought provoking, well argued look at more of our “hidden history” that no one seems to want to talk about*. Someone — Robert? Edward? Richard? — needs to do a book on this, lol.
*Plus, hidden in the details, none of what NASA / Congress was conjuring up was ever supposed to be reusable or manufactured at scale, thus making an already untenable situation even worse. What, for example, would have been the actual price, as Edward suggested, of using the SLS to send each Orion capsule to the ISS compared to the cost of continuing to use the Space Shuttle? Did that comparison ever see the light of day? Likewise, per other comments, why was the concept of an *improved* Shuttle given such short shrift? The design of other aircraft evolved, so why not the Shuttle? (Should we look at Dreamchaser as a “small improved Shuttle”?)
Beyond that, one week after the election, it truly feels *different*, and I hope that the history that you are describing becomes widely known and understood by both the American public and its designated decision makers in Congress. Our nation’s failure in this respect seems every bit as egregious as all of the other lost opportunities and squandered resources that have characterized the “leadership” of this nation over the last few decades. And, as disturbingly, most of our media backed away from chronicling these failures with the unhappy results that we have experienced.
Now we are hearing that FEMA did not help people with Trump signs on their lawns after the recent hurricanes. All the claims that Biden would be the president of all the people of the United States have been proven wrong. It is additional evidence that the Biden administration was punishing Musk for forsaking the Democrat Party.
Punishing enemies is not being president but being vengeful.
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The discussion of the space elevator was fun, but when discussing these, keep in mind that they are not stable like solid structures on Earth. Even skyscrapers sway in the wind, and the much-taller space elevators would have many forces acting upon them, causing them to move in difficult to predict and difficult to control ways.
A space elevator going from the Moon’s surface to Earth-Moon L1 or L2 points would move around, relative to the actual (moving) Lagrange points in space, not only because of the eccentricity of the Moon’s orbit but because of the forces of the Earth, the Sun, and the Coriolis forces of the elevator cars moving up and down the structure (or cable).
If a structure is used, rather than a cable, no matter how stiff we can make the structure, its great length will mean that it moves similar to a cable (or a string), and accelerating the cars due to the Coriolis effect would not be through the stiffness of the structure but through the tension, similar to the behavior of a space elevator made of a cable, which would accelerate the cars in a way similar to a bow and arrow.
In addition, the length of the elevator and any counterweight on its top end would make the whole thing act like a pendulum. A structure that acts like a cable drawn tight in tension will also have a natural frequency and harmonics like a violin string.
Conceptual drawings of space elevators show cables or structures as perfectly straight, but when the Space Shuttle performed a couple of tests of tethers, the reality was that, despite being taught from tension, they were somewhat twisty and curvy.
For similar reasons, Mark Sizer‘s suggested rotovator would also have similar instabilities, vibrations, and twists and curves.
These problems do not make space elevators impossible, just difficult to control and subject to possible catastrophic motions, behaviors, and stresses if allowed to get out of control. End-control problems may make the rotovator impossible, however. Getting the rotovator’s ends to the right location and the right velocity may be too difficult.
However, the very heavy satellite traffic in Earth orbit make them pretty much impossible from the Earth to any orbit. Every satellite in Earth orbit crosses the equator twice per orbit (or is on the equator all the time), and since a space elevator would necessarily be stretching above the equator, there is some small chance that each satellite collides with the elevator during each orbit. With the large number of satellites now in orbit, it is pretty much guaranteed that some satellite will collide with the elevator sometime during the elevator’s lifetime. Live satellites may be able to maneuver out of the way, but dead satellites and space debris do not have that ability.
If we continue to deorbit lunar satellites at the ends of their lives, don’t overpopulate lunar orbit, and continue to avoid orbital debris in lunar orbit, a lunar space elevator may continue to be feasible.
Eric Berger just tweeted this:
“To be clear we are *far* from anything being settled, but based on what I’m hearing it seems at least 50-50 that NASA’s Space Launch System rocket will be canceled. Not Block 1B. Not Block 2. All of it. There are other ways to get Orion to the Moon.”
https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1856522880143745133
Call in the EMTs for the hyperventilating breaking out at MSFC and Michoud.
Richard M: Just remember, you heard this prediction first, here.
Bob,
That’s why I keep coming back to your blog!
Milt,
“What, for example, would have been the actual price, as Edward suggested, of using the SLS to send each Orion capsule to the ISS compared to the cost of continuing to use the Space Shuttle?”
I’m not sure that Congress thought of it that way. Congress stopped being cost-conscious a quarter century ago (Democrats somewhat before then). I do not recall that Congress had required or specified any maximum cost for the Space Launch System or a cost for a single launch, and I don’t recall a requirement for the frequency at which it would launch. It was many years after Congress demanded NASA create SLS that any mention of cost and cadence were mentioned, and those were announced by NASA after analyzing the system’s apparent performance. SLS became as disappointing as the Space Shuttle had become.
The Space Shuttle had been intended to give inexpensive and frequent access to space. Men and materiel would be launched with each mission, and those were supposed to be around 64 launches per year at a cost of around $3 billion per year ($50 million per launch, around the cost of a Falcon flight or around a quarter of a Dragon flight, maybe half, after inflation). The Space Shuttle was intended to fly independently or to go to Skylab and any subsequent space station(s). Instead, the Shuttle was only able to launch six times in a good year ($500 million per launch), and it took two decades to build a space station for it to go to. (After 135 flights, the estimate was that we spent around $200 billion on the Shuttle, so on average each flight was more than $1 billion.)
The private sector is much more cost-conscious. SpaceX set itself a stretch goal that even NASA has trouble reaching, and NASA has deep pockets and elite rocket scientists but a reluctant Congress. SpaceX chose to make a variation on Robert Zubrin’s proposal for sending men to Mars (which may have cost around $10 billion in 1990s dollars, but NASA’s proposal would cost 15 to 50 times as much). With a goal of colonizing Mars rather than merely making incremental explorations, as Apollo did on the Moon, SpaceX designed a very large, very powerful rocket and spacecraft. Starship could be modified for other missions, such as taking payloads to low Earth orbit. Either way, cost effectiveness was a primary concern. SpaceX has spent around $6 billion so far in developing Starship and has said it is spending about $2 billion per year. SpaceX could send its own first unmanned mission to Mars for around the $10 billion that Zubrin thought his first mission could cost.
Meanwhile, SLS’s first manned Orion mission is about to cost around $4 billion (maybe more, due to expected delays), which is about the same as Boeing is charging to send six manned missions to ISS and about the same as SpaceX charged to send around ten manned missions to ISS. The price charged by the commercial companies includes development of their spacecraft, but the SLS cost does not.
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Today I heard that FEMA passed over Trump supporters for several years, not only after the recent hurricanes. The government playing political favorites has spread much farther into the federal government than we thought.
Government agencies that have taken sides in American politics:
FEMA: Refusing to help people who belong to the “wrong” political party. Spending all the emergency funds on bringing and settling illegal aliens into the country.
IRS: Lois Lerner, et al, refusing certain groups from tax-free status based upon suspected political leanings;
FBI: Using political opposition research (dossier) as an excuse to spy on a political opponent. Entrapping innocent people into pondering kidnapping the Michigan Governor. Investigating as terrorists parents who speak at school board meetings. Michael Flynning General Michael Flynn. Warning news media and social media that any suspicion of Hunter Biden is untrue despite knowing that it is true.
DOJ (Department of (In)Justice): Selectively prosecuting Republicans and not Democrats (e.g. prosecuting Trump for non-crimes yet not prosecuting Hillary Clinton despite listing multiple federal felonies, including serious national security violations and obstruction of justice).
Homeland Security: Telling social media and press what is “true” to report and what to stifle. Publicly abortive attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board. (if there is Official Disinformation, there must necessarily exist Official Truths.)
National security agencies (all): spying on President Trump.
Marines: literally backing up Biden during his Independence Hall speech, with a NAZI-like red & black backdrop, as he accuses Republicans of being fascists.
Congressional Police: Inviting Trump supporters into the Capitol Building for tours just so that the same police can then use them for target practice, then arresting the survivors for trespassing, parading, or other minor offenses that they didn’t do.
FAA, FCC, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (Department of Interior): Hampering SpaceX from testing Starship to punish the Democrats’ political foe, Elon Musk.
New York State: Prosecuting President Trump for crimes not committed.
Georgia State: Prosecuting President Trump for crimes not committed.
This is what the Democrats think freedom looks like. Let Go Brandon!