Richard M: I very much like the idea of proposing upgraded Dragons (and even Starliners if it ever gets certified) as quick initial replacements for Orion. Easy to sell to Congress critters, and proven to work.

And most important, privately owned and operated. NASA would immediately be doing what I propose, enhancing the entire aerospace industry instead of simply funding a going-nowhere boondoggle.

But the disadvantages and limitations of having F9-Dragon ops bottlenecking both the scale and frequency of lunar missions cannot be remedied.

I don’t disagree!

But this is as much an assessment of how long I think it will take for NASA to reconcile itself to a crew vehicle with no conventional launch abort system, and a pretty rad landing profile, as much as it is how long I suspect it will take for SpaceX to get a crew vehicle developed and ready to fly. No matter how much of the Augean Stables Jared manages to hose out, NASA has a difficult political environment to navigate where safety issues are concerned. So, it seems the *easiest* way to get the support needed to liquidate SLS *and* Orion as soon as possible, because so many people in the agency as well as up on the Hill will be able to more easily buy into an architecture (on an interim basis) that’s already flown five dozen astronauts to and from low Earth orbit without a hitch. So maybe you do the first few lunar missions this way — I mean, for NASA. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be private missions using a purely Starship architecture happening at the same time.

But the idea, in the end, is, as you say, to take full advantage of the full carrying capacity of Starship, wherein you can ship 40 people (or more) at a time rather than just 4. It is only in this way that we are going to be able to build and sustain permanently manned bases on the Moon, let alone start economically developing it. At some point, NASA and other government space agencies are going to have to buy into that.

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/III.4.1.7_Returning_from_Space.pdf

Calculations show that using aerobraking, instead of conventional rocket engines, is almost ten times more efficient.
…
Basically, the vehicle dives into the atmosphere, and then “bounces” out. In the process it loses so much energy that it is captured into orbit. This atmospheric encounter now leaves the vehicle on an elliptical orbit around the planet. Because periapsis is within the atmosphere, the vehicle would re-enter if it took no other actions. Finally, it completes a single burn, much smaller than the ∆V needed without the aerobraking to put the vehicle into a circular parking orbit well above the atmosphere.

What you say could be true for certain values of “interim.” I know that you and I disagree about how soon Starship will be able to launch with crew aboard and the disagreement is not temporally small. But the disadvantages and limitations of having F9-Dragon ops bottlenecking both the scale and frequency of lunar missions cannot be remedied. A Starship type capable of ferrying large crews from Earth’s surface to lunar orbit rendezvous with an HLS lander and back again can easily be pursued in parallel with all the other Starship work SpaceX already has on its plate. An even more capable such ship will be needed for crewed Earth-to-Mars expeditions and Elon wants the first of those to depart in 2029. I suspect that aspirational schedule to slip at least one cycle, but a Moon-capable version is certainly doable by the late 2020s and that’s about as soon as Artemis 3 seems likely to be possible even if SLS-Orion were to remain in the picture.

Please don’t underestimate the advantage of aerobraking. Mars Climate Orbiter was intended to aerobrake at Mars, reducing the need for propellant. The spacecraft did not need any fins to control it during the braking maneuvers and heating was not a problem (Wikipedia shows that four passes were needed to reduce its orbit to nearly circular).

The steel of Starship should allow it to get into thicker atmosphere, and maybe slow it into the proper orbit in one pass. Fins may not be necessary, and any needed attitude adjustments might be able to be made with thrusters.

Our discussions of what to use and how to use it is, of course, short-term. In a couple of decades we should have even better and more efficient and effective spacecraft transporting men and materiel to and from orbit, to and from the Moon, and most likely to other useful orbital locations, perhaps geostationary or one or more Lagrange points.

Falcon and Dragon won’t serve – unless one never wishes to send more than 4 – 7 people at a time to the Moon. The car-to-the-airport analogy breaks down because no airliner is operated on the basis of carrying only the maximum occupancy of a single car.

I think Falcon and Dragon *can* be valuable as part of an *interim* solution to replacing what Orion and SLS are supposed to do — if you use them in an Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) architecture. In this scheme, they only take NASA astronauts up to LEO, then transfer to an HLS Starship dedicated exclusively to taking crew between Earth orbit and lunar orbit and then back to Earth orbit; a separate HLS handles the part of the trip between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. The Dragon simply brings them back to the Earth once their mission is done. Done this way, you don’t even need aerobraking — there would be enough delta-v, with adequate refueling, to simply propulsively enter LEO. You’d have to upgrade the Dragon for longer quiescent stays, or dock it to a space station; but that is a minor matter — and far easier than somehow trying to upgrade Dragon for trips to lunar orbit.

In the *long term*, of course, Starship could and would rack up enough operational success that NASA and other national space agencies could finally reconcile themselves to using Starship for first and last mile delivery of people, so to speak, and that would certainly open up the number of NASA staff who can be transported far beyond 4 at a time. Private astronauts, of course, don’t have to wait on such considerations!

(The political downside of this scheme is that it gives all the NASA business to SpaceX. But there is no reason you couldn’t do this like Commercial Crew and compete it out to Blue Origin as a second cislunar transport provider. Before long, of course, the bulk of the business for both companies would be commercial/private anyway, which is the way it’s supposed to be working for Commercial Crew, too.)

Mexico is no aerospace powerhouse and its prospects are iffy at best. And I couldn’t find any posts on Secret Projects Forum that say otherwise. The only Latin American country that approaches being an aerospace powerhouse is Brazil – and it’s nearly all aero and very little space.

I have no idea why you imagine work to be hard to find in northern AL. The shot at Trump seems gratuitous given that he’s not even in office yet. It’s also unclear to me what the “all this” is that Trump is supposedly failing to stop.

You have a proclivity toward making gnomic statements that seem to assume the rest of us can read your mind. We can’t. You need to explain yourself clearly – if you can.

Bezos does have political reach in AL. He could certainly be very helpful in maintaining the northern AL employment base if SLS is canceled and, especially, if MSFC is also closed down. But I don’t anticipate anymore lawfare from him. The lawfare all happened early on Biden’s watch when Musk was disfavored by the regime and that OldSpace doofus was still CEO at Blue. In the new administration, Musk will be something resembling The Hand of the King from Game of Thrones. Bezos has already moved to swing with the times.

Space Command is coming to Huntsville. Trump’s last effort at moving it out of CO was very late in his first term and was countermanded by his successor. Circumstances have changed to say the least. And Trump is a master dealmaker. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something like what schwit suggested – moving the Department of the Interior from DC to Colorado Springs – actually occurs. Scattering the surviving federal agencies – post DOGE’s weeding – out of DC and into the rest of the country seems to be part of the incoming administration’s plans. Personally, I’d prefer that the DOI get moved to Cheyenne, WY or Fargo, ND but CO could certainly be tossed some kind of agency relocation bone to reduce political resistance to moving Space Command to AL.

NASA can be cut a lot while American space efforts are actually improved because there is a flourishing private space sector in the U.S. Comparisons to Putin and Russia are pointless as there is no such private space alternative there. “Libertarian logic” holds that private sector efforts will, in general, prove to be cheaper and available sooner than state-based equivalents. For some reason you still seem to labor under the misapprehension that without government space efforts there would be no space efforts. Wrong – in spades.

David Eastman,

It would be nice to think the OldSpace dinosaurs could pivot from failing at things they at least have some experience doing to succeeding at things with which they are far less familiar, but I see no realistic basis for such hopes. There are new and vigorous companies already doing the things OldSpace would simply generate new failures by trying. OldSpace has no future and needs to die. That would simultaneously eliminate it as a sink for wasted taxpayer funds and end its dysfunctional political influence.

Ray Van Dune & Milt,

I see suboptimality. Your HLS+ notion pointlessly lands and relaunches the mass of an TPS and flap system that is unneeded for lunar landings and takeoffs. It would also carry landing engines and landing legs on its trips between LEO and lunar orbit and back which simply increases the mass that has to be aerobraked.

An aerobrakeable shuttle to travel only between LEO and lunar orbit but never land anywhere might be useful, but would still need some way to get people from Earth’s surface to LEO.

Falcon and Dragon won’t serve – unless one never wishes to send more than 4 – 7 people at a time to the Moon. The car-to-the-airport analogy breaks down because no airliner is operated on the basis of carrying only the maximum occupancy of a single car. Rather, the passengers arrive in a multitude of cars and adequately fill a single airliner so that its operation can be profitable. It is not possible to launch a suitable multitude of Falcons and Dragons over a brief enough interval to, say, fill a LEO-to-lunar-orbit or LEO-to-lunar-surface vehicle that might be able to carry 50 – 100 people.

The only economical and speedy way to get large numbers of people into space at a single whack is to launch them in Starships. That being the case, they might as well stay aboard all the way to lunar orbit after retanking in LEO. A single transfer from such a vehicle to a dedicated lander will be enough of a logistics challenge that one should not wish to require such an evolution to be done twice on a single trip if it can be avoided – a strike against the potential space-only LEO-to-lunar-orbit-and-back shuttle concept even if based on Starship. Just build Starships that can carry large passenger loads from Earth to lunar orbit and return to Earth directly.

I should also point out that the HLS+ concept appears to presuppose no refilling infrastructure anywhere but LEO. That seems unlikely. A lunar economy will quickly include metal smelting, a by-product of which will be copious oxygen. This can be yeeted to lunar orbit by SpinLaunch-type centrifuges and used to keep propellant depots in lunar orbit filled. LCH4 may still have to come from Earth until Mars and/or Titan can take over the resupply job, but the vast majority of methalox mass is oxygen and that is sourceable from the lunar surface.

mkent,

The only way Boeing could crank out an SLS core stage every 8 months is to turn Michoud into a 24/7/365 3-shift operation. As the NASA OIG has already noted anent the low-quality work on the EUS, Boeing hasn’t even got enough suitable workers to do the work it already has. And there are other SLS parts – boosters and Orion capsules to cite two – that can’t be produced at the same cadence so the whole idea is a non-starter.

SLS should simply be shut down. The extant hardware can go to the same rocket gardens where the leftover Saturn 5 stuff went. LC-39B should be leased to whoever can make best future use of it – most likely SpaceX. Ditto the VAB. If no one can make practical future use of the VAB it should be razed or turned into a museum.

The specialized equipment and personnel contributing to legacy aerospace’s high overheads are bugs, not features – artifacts of cost-plus acquisition. SpaceX uses extant tech everywhere it can and only custom-builds what it needs and can’t do without. And it doesn’t do even that with a cost-plus mindset. The OldSpace primes should die, their pricey equipment be scrapped and their pricey personnel be fired.

Gateway has no useful purpose. Our foreign collaborators on it would happily forego the whole thing in exchange for work needed to build a lunar surface settlement.

There will need to be at least one lunar-orbit space station before long, but it will need to be a large rotating facility to provide a 1-G R&R locus for long-term lunar employees.

How did that work out?

By libertarian logic, the money Khrushchev threw behind R-7 was foolish, with Putin’s cuts were brilliant.

Uh-huh.

In a typical Western, the black hat railroad businessman who tries to rip off Ma and Pa Kettle–gets thwarted by the white hat sheriff (government).

There a true libertarian has to believe the railroad man is the hero and the white hat is the villain… which likely explains Trump’s wonderful quote about Libertarians getting 5% of the vote.

You have little chance of controlling the budget if you can not control the number of personnel.

As for SLS, Yes it needs canceled. Maybe use the rocket that is close to finished. Sell off all the rest of the materials unfinished or not. If a private company wants to keep building it then its up to them.
As for Orion, use what is close to finished and turn the rest of everything private.

End the stupid idea of having multiple launch providers. If some private company builds it and provides it without government cash then good for them. NASA can buy it or rent it all they want.

NASA should kick the Russians and their modules off the space station. If need be replace them with private modules as soon as possible.

As for ANY base on the Moon.
Any base on the Moon just for science should be stopped. It would take little more to expand it into something working towards permanency.
Think of it like the Antarctic base. It started very small and is now up to several thousand personnel.
Plan on expanding any Moon base instead of just throwing it all away.
It doesn’t have to be perfect but instead it could just be functional until it could be expand and upgraded.

Why throw away Hubble when it could be upgraded and saved? Get serious about it

A large part of old NASA was funded by and for the military. The military is moving toward a more private enterprise/contractor system.

Agreed. Right now, Artemis is still, in its essence, a rerun of Apollo.

It’s worse than that. Even with the potential 8 month SLS delivery (which M. Kent had said Boeing had plans for frankly does not inspire confidence in me given Boeing’s woes of late) you’re at far lower rates than Apollo for example Apollo 7-12 occur in a period of 13 months, Apollo 14-17 cover ~24 months (I ignored Apollo 13 there was, of course, a stop to figure out WHY we nearly blew up a service module).

SLS may have initially been a way to get a more complete exploration under way but here nearly 20 years later it is just a jobs program to keep the old aerospace industry across the country fed and still breathing. It adds little or nothing to the process of space exploration or technology as it exists (other than the bits and bobs for the lunar lander which is really SpaceX cleverly getting NASA to fund Starship for Mars :-) ).

I would see 4 rough phases to exploring/exploiting tho moon

1) Preliminary exploration and a small base (likely at south pole) to explore whether long term habitation (i.e. 6 month+) is even feasible. In particular issues such as safety of lunar soil (i.e. Airlocks in and out) need to be resolved as lunar soil is fine and tends to have elements that react in presence of O2 and water. This was a major nuisance in the later Apollo work.

2) If 1 is found feasible move to a base with permanent occupation much like current Antarctic bases with regular resupply from earth. Start working on developing lunar resources for the construction of housing and materials for construction of various scientific projects. Also initial explore possibility of commercial value. Given the delta V to get anything back from the lunar surface this seems unlikely. Also work on growing food (plant and animal) to help reduce/remove support costs.

3) Build (using preferably locally sourced materials due to cost to get from Earth) scientific remote bases, Likely a Radio telescope of the Arecibo type and large (say 30 M) Optical/UV/IR scope on the far side of the moon. These may want to be remote and unmanned perhaps using lunar orbiting satellites for data/control links.

4) Look at exploitation of any resources found feasible and at more permanent residences. This can also serve as a learning testbed for Mars or other human colonies in the system as we need understanding of whether we can grow food and raise food animals in low gravity situations (and ultimately safely raise additional humans).

Big issue is this is a 20-30 year process. Our system works in 2 and 4 year fits and starts and right now it isn’t even doing that well. On top of that there is the ridiculous opposition to colonization driven out of the eco left. Like you can do anything to harm a large section of vacuum bathed in hard radiation on a regular basis. They just don’t like Mankind (Particularly western Mankind) to succeed.

Ps. Re my comment: “That will require “aerobraking” off Earth’s atmosphere, which will probably require a Starship with fins rather than the finless HLS.” – I do not however assume that these “fins” would need the heavy, complex, and problematic hinging mechanisms, which seem intended to more accurately control a reentry to landing on Earth. Rather, presumably fixed fins would function simply improve aerobraking drag. This is only a qualitative design guess on my part, of course!

“Interesting comment from a senior NASA official yesterday suggesting DOGE would not be such a bad thing, and that the agency would benefit from losing some bureaucracy. “We’re in a space race and running in molasses.” Chatham House rules so I’m not naming the person.”

https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1866152612623741433

Regarding Orion heatshield, apparently the first Orion capsule returned from Earth orbit (2014) used a build technique used by Apollo which (apparently) minimized outgassing cracks and voids. It appeared to work fine. For reasons of cost and “manufacturability”, the build technique was changed to the segmented heatshield used in the more stressing uncrewed circum-lunar mission of 2022. This build technique resulted in the problems recently discussed by NASA.

The boys at NASA Spaceflight have a good discussion of this in the first 16 minutes of this long report video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb2WW8gZ0qU&t=998s

Junius: An excellent point, one in which I made in my policy paper Capitalism in Space. Come back later today to read Part 2 of this essay.

The VSE did not have colonization in its text. It did have exploration bases which is what Constellation tried to do.

No where in the Vision for Space Exploration is the word “settle” used. Explore obviously, but not settle. Also, neither is “permanent” used.

Anyway, it is not clear how W would have even thought we could settle the entire solar system. You mean Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Mercury? Seems likely beyond what Cheney would advise him.

1) Cancel Orion immediately. The heatshield problems on Orion are far more serious than the thruster problems on Starliner, and NASA sent that capsule back unmanned. There’s no point to an unmanned Orion.

2) Cancel SLS after flight #3. The real expense for SLS going forward begins at flight #4. That SLS is early enough in production to actually save production costs, and that’s on top of saving the expense of the EUS and the billion-dollar tower.

3) Use the now unallocated SLSs to launch the Gateway. NASA is having trouble getting the weight of the PPE/HALO down to the capability of the Falcon Heavy. SLS would have no problem with it. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m pretty sure SLS could launch I-Hab, ESPRIT, and the airlock using a Dragon XL as the tug. If not, shift I-Hab to the PPE/HALO flight.

4) Contract SpaceX for a Falcon / Dragon-based solution to get crew to and from the Gateway (it would almost certainly involve distributed launch). That would give SpaceX more time to work out the development issues with the many versions of Starship they need to build. It would also provide a dissimilar redundancy to Starship.

5) As I mentioned in a previous comment, Starship is really too big for Gateway, so don’t send it there. Use Gateway for Blue Moon missions to explore many sites on the moon: equatorial, north polar, south polar, and far side. Blue Moon can then be repaired and refurbished at the Gateway between missions.

Keeping Gateway keeps our international partnerships intact, provides lunar infrastructure for maintenance of lunar assets, and allows for some Mars analog missions to be tried out in lunar orbit.

6) Use the Starship lander for direct missions to build and supply a base. Serious tonnage would be a great help in that endeavor, and that is certainly something that Starship could supply.

This architecture keeps the best of Artemis and gets rid of the worst — much better than throwing the baby out with the bath water. IMO, of course.

1) Boeing has plans to increase the production rate of the SLS core stage to one every eight months. That doesn’t change your overall point. It’s just an FYI.

2) Good on you for including the cancellation of Orion. There seems to be a hate-on for SLS all over the internet right now, but while SLS is too cussed expensive for what it does, it does work. That’s more than we can say about Orion right now, and Orion’s been in development for six years longer than SLS.

3) A word about costs in the aerospace industry: NASA and every major aerospace prime have a lot of specialized equipment requiring a lot of specialized personnel to operate. This results in a very high overhead cost.

The Space Shuttle program cost about $3.5 billion / year for five missions per year. That broke down to about $3 billion / year in overhead cost plus about $100 million / mission. Cutting the flight rate by one mission per year only saved $100 million, not the $700 million people expected.

Likewise when the Space Shuttle program was cancelled, NASA didn’t save $3.5 billion / year, only about $1.5 billion / year. Instead, the Space Station program cost increased by about $1 billion / year, as did the EELV program. NASA’s internal overhead cost merely shifted from the Space Shuttle program to the Space Station program, and the overhead cost in the space industry shifted to the EELV program.

You can’t just get rid of that cost. You’ll break things all over the aerospace industry — things important to civil aviation, civil space, and national defense. You have to do what Tory Bruno did at ULA and wind it down. You have to figure out what you need and can’t do without, what you can safely get rid of, and what you need but can substitute with a less expensive alternative.

My wild guess is that if you cancel SLS then some other program at NASA will increase in cost by $1 billion the very next year. It might even be Starship. That doesn’t mean don’t do it. That means it’s going to take a skilled administrator several years to wind it down intelligently.

4) I know people are out for blood — SLS’s blood — but cancelling the program immediately won’t save much, if any, money. The SLS for Artemis II is already at the Cape being stacked. It would probably cost more to disassemble it and dispose of it than to launch it at this point. The SLS for Artemis III isn’t far behind. The engines, the solid rocket boosters, and the upper stage are all complete, and the major sections of the core stage are almost complete and ready for assembly.

5) Cancelling the Lunar Gateway won’t save much American money, and it would greatly upset our international partners. Only the first two modules of the Gateway (HALO and the PPE) are being paid for by the American taxpayers, and they’re almost done. The others are being paid for by Europe (I-Hab and ESPRIT), Canada (the robot arm), Japan (various components), and the UAE (the airlock).

6) The Gateway itself isn’t tied to any particular orbit, and its engine is both refuelable and sized to move it among NRHO and Lagrange orbits.

Heh. That was more points than I started with. I think I’ll leave it at that.

Ray Van Dune has it exactly right:

“So I think the way forward is an ‘HLS+’ that can not only land and launch from the lunar surface, but can fly to the moon from LEO, and return to LEO, refilling from tankers / depots as required. [With depots on the moon, too.]

This HLS+ would never land on Earth. Astronauts would ferry up to it (in LEO) in Falcon / Dragons, and return to Earth’s surface the same way, hopefully making the human-rating of HLS+ significantly more feasible.”

And unless your spacecraft is coated with Carvorite, there is no reason to want — or spend billions on — a vehicle that can both ascend / descend through the earth’s atmosphere *and* fly through the vacuum of space, and everyone from Arthur C. Clarke to G. Harry Stine* has been talking about this forever. It is no longer even “rocket science.”

* https://www.amazon.com/Halfway-Anywhere-Achieving-Americas-Destiny/dp/0871318059

Pushing the halfway to anywhere analogy, What NASA is doing is like trying to design a vehicle that will get your from your front doorstep in New jersey to Paris all in one hop. In the real world (where cost and efficiency matter), people use their cars (or Uber) to get them to the airport, and then they board a 787 to fly the rest of the way. Ditto for the return trip.

Most of the land managed by Interior is west of the Mississippi and much of that surrounds Colorado.

The most challenging new capability will be that of returning from the moon to LEO. That will require “aerobraking” off Earth’s atmosphere, which will probably require a Starship with fins rather than the finless HLS.

Aerobraking is more akin to the technique that has been used by several Mars probes to slow from interplanetary to Mars orbital speeds. The specific amount of heat-shielding required is an engineering question, but is probably less than what is required to reenter from LEO to Earth’s surface, and certainly much less than a capsule free-falling from the moon, like Apollo or Orion!.

So I think the way forward is an “HLS+” that can not only land and launch from the lunar surface, but can fly to the moon from LEO, and return to LEO, refilling from tankers / depots as required.

This HLS+ would never land on Earth. Astronauts would ferry up to it (in LEO) in Falcon / Dragons, and return to Earth’s surface the same way, hopefully making the human-rating of HLS+ significantly more feasible.

Of course this is not to mention all the boosters, tankers, depots and supply ships that would support this undertaking. Going beyond “footprints & flags” is a complex and expensive proposition! But if we don’t achieve it, we will probably have a great view of the Chinese doing so!

What I’d really like to see, is to get the more heavily government associated corporations and agencies out of rocket building and even payloads as much as possible, and get them focused on technologies, missions, and engineering. Don’t expect companies used to milking the taxpayer teat for funds to actually deliver a complete rocket, lander, or capsule, they never will. But get them to engineer ground breaking life support systems, centrifugal life support wheels, etc. That gives them funds and things to do, and the products might actually expand our technological and engineering base and drive us forward.

That looks to end January.

I fear Elon will be an even bigger target soon…and there will come a time when “but SLS” won’t fly (pun intended) any more than “but COVID!”

Over at my other haunt–Secret Projects Forum–there is talk about how Mexico is really becoming yet more of a powerhouse in aerospace–even as folks in North Alabama look for work–despite voting for Trump who was supposed to stop all this.

But where people lament MSFC, judicial enforced redistricting in my state looks to be a bigger thorn in coming days –and be sure they will reach out to the disposed.

Remember, Bezos still has deep pockets and political reach into Alabama–and he and his lawfare may find favor with Britt and Tubby once they no longer have SLS…and Alabama was promised Space Command before.

Fool me once…shame on you
Fool me twice…shame on me…

(That’s how it goes, Dubya)

Agreed. Right now, Artemis is still, in its essence, a rerun of Apollo.

The objective should be something more ambitious and more fruitful than just a 6 to 13 day lunar sortie every year for 4 government employees to pick some rocks and leave some instruments and plant some flags.