Part 2 of 2: De-emphasize a fast Moon landing and build a real American space industry instead
In part one yesterday of this two-part essay, I described the likelihood that Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointment to be NASA’s next administrator, will push to cancel NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule, deeming them too expensive, too unsafe, and too cumbersome to use for any viable effort to colonize the solar system.
I then described how the Artemis lunar landings could still be done, more or less as planned, by replacing SLS with Starship/Superheavy, and Orion with Starship. Such a change would entail some delay, but it could be done.
This plan however I think is short-sighted. The Artemis lunar landings as proposed are really nothing more than another Apollo-like plant-the-flag-on-the-Moon stunt. As designed they do little to establish a permanent sustainable human presence on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.
Isaacman however has another option that can create a permanent sustainable American presence in space, and that option is staring us all in the face.
And now for something entire different
Capitalism in space: 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.
This reshaped program should begin with those four space stations already under construction. All together they involve practically every major or minor aerospace company.
- Vast hopes to launch its Haven-1 single module station in 2025 and have it quickly occupied for 30 days by a four person crew. It will then follow with a full size multi-module station, Haven-2, having nine modules total. It is so far the only station being built with no NASA funding, financed entirely with private capital. It will use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules for transportation.
- Axiom’s station will first be attached to ISS, but once enough modules are in place it will then be undocked and fly free. The company has already flown three commercial tourist trips to ISS, with a fourth planned in the spring of 2025.
- Starlab, being built by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, will be a two module station that the European Space Agency hopes to use as its main orbital platform.
- Orbital Reef is a project being led by Blue Origin, using its New Glenn rocket. Most of the work however so far has been done by its partner, Sierra Space, which is building expandable habitable modules for the station but which it is also making available for sale to others.
It seems to me that the best thing Isaacman can do in the near term is to use the money saved on SLS and Orion to promote the development of these and other stations. This would not only foster many different aerospace companies, both new and old, it would spread the wealth to many states and congressional districts, making politicians happy, but do so in a logical manner that would not raise the cost of these projects.
Like NASA’s on-going commercial deals to ferry crew and cargo to ISS, these additional space station contracts should all be fixed-price, with NASA also demanding that the companies commit some of their own capital. After all, in the end they will own the orbiting facility. They should take on some of the risk.
Isaacman’s own thinking aligns with this approach, as he noted in a tweet he posted on October 18, 2024:
The bottom line is, [the older big space] companies have faced little competition for decades — and without that competitive pressure, they have become so bloated that they can’t take on a fixed-price project without hemorrhaging cash. Meanwhile, cost-plus contracts are designed to drag on for years at great expense to taxpayers.
The government has been conditioned to think this is the only way, though I give NASA a lot of credit for having the foresight to create the Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew programs. … NASA does seem to truly recognize the value of fixed-price contracts and getting the best service for the lowest price.
At first glance I know this space station policy suggestion sounds like a boring continuation of NASA’s overall unproductive ISS program. It is most definitively not. ISS was NASA owned and operated. Thus efficiency was never a high priority, and profit was in fact discouraged by NASA aggressively. For this reason ISS never produced any viable or salable products during its entire lifespan. Researchers could do research, but they were not allowed to produce products they could actually sell for profit.
The new stations are all private owned. The companies running them will be glad to take NASA’s business, but they — not NASA — will decide what else happens on their stations. If other customers wish to use a module for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals for sale back on Earth, the companies will surely sell them rental space. On ISS NASA blocked such commercial enterprises. On these private stations commercial enterprise will be their main function.
Furthermore, these space station companies will be in competition with each other for this business, the best thing possible for driving costs down and promoting innovation.
Even more important, these stations will not be built by NASA, which will give Isaacman the justification to significantly reduce the staffing and bureaucracy at NASA. If private companies are doing all the work, there is no reason to have many of NASA centers scattered across the country. Many can easily be eliminated and the entire space industry would not notice. With a renewed private space industry scattered in many of the same states and locations, politicians in Congress who only care about jobs won’t mind either, In fact, it is likely that many of the laid off NASA employees will quickly get jobs at these new companies.
Artist rendition of the proposed Nyx cargo capsule
being built by the French startup The Exploration
Company
These multiple space stations will also create more business opportunities for the many old and new rocket and cargo capsule companies in both the U.S. and Europe. All four stations will need ferrying services, and the competition to provide this service will not only spur growth but require efficiency.
As I have already noted, all this new business will please politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, because it will generate jobs and prosperity in areas they represent. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the politicians from both parties in southern Texas what they think of SpaceX. You won’t find anyone complaining. Instead, you will hear enthusiastic support.
Nor should Isaacman limit NASA’s program to just these four stations. For example, other companies are already flying or plan to fly independent returnable capsules and spacecraft on which zero gravity manufacturing for profit is planned. One company, Varda, has already proved the concept with its first capsule. Encourage these Earth orbit businesses, and soon NASA will be irrelevant, because the profits from the products produced in space will overwhelm NASA’s entire budget.
In this context, if NASA should decide to end its Lunar Gateway project, the agency could still hand everything that has been built to the companies involved. Maxar and Northrop Grumman and the other Gateway partners could then quickly develop and launch their own station, thus enhancing the competition in Earth orbit. The agency could also hold onto this project, but if so it should aggressively rethink its purpose and location, and do so with these private companies as well as the international partners involved.
As for SpaceX’s Starship, Musk has always been designing it for Mars settlement. To do that however he has to learn how to engineer the spaceship’s interior properly for interplanetary travel. Thus, flying some Starships as space stations — for profit — is a perfect way to mix development with operations, something that SpaceX has always made a standard operating procedure.
Along these same lines, getting the lunar variant of Starship to the Moon will require it to be refueled once in orbit, and that refueling will require many additional Starship launches. In other words, SpaceX needs to create a Starship refueling operation in Earth orbit for landing Starship on the Moon. Why not expand that operation to provide refueling service to other stations and spacecraft in Earth orbit — not just Starship? SpaceX thus will not only be developing this technology for its own uses as well as Artemis, but it do so while making money at the same time.
This shift of focus to Earth orbit would also likely find great favor with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin. Unlike Musk, Bezos’s reason for developing his space company is not to settle the solar system but to protect the Earth by shifting heavy manufacturing into space where it can do less environmental harm. His New Glenn rocket and Orbital Reef station both have this goal in mind, and a policy shift for the next few years towards developing such capabilities would be exactly in line with his own goals. How better to enlist his support.
The Eventual Future
My policy suggestion above does not preclude the present Artemis program to land on the Moon. It simply shifts the emphasis from trying to get there fast and in a manner that accomplishes nothing but repeat the Apollo landings. Instead, it proposes surrounding that Artemis lunar program with a far more capable aerospace industry able to quickly improvise the new technologies needed to build a base on the Moon successfully.
The Oklahoma land rush, about to be
re-enacted in space
You want to colonize the solar system? You will need real interplanetary spaceships to do it, and building and operating functioning and reliable space stations is exactly what you need to do first. Support these stations and NASA will fuel the innovation and new designs that will make the colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids quickly practical.
You want to generate profits to pay for this exploration? Every one of those space stations is focused on making money from space. Not only are they gathering customers who want to fly on those stations, they are gathering businesses that want to use the weightless environment to create products to sell on Earth for profit. These profits will quickly be pumped back to create new space-related services, such as orbiting astronomy telescopes far superior to Hubble or Webb, or asteroid mining missions using the stations as manufacturing and processing hubs.
And in the end, these near Earth capabilities will make getting back to the Moon not only easier, they will make building bases there far more likely. Without much difficulty this tortoise-like space station effort will soon swamp China’s Apollo-like lunar program. And the knowledge gained from this will further fuel the knowledge required to build the more difficult bases on Mars.
Isaacman need only lay out a more relaxed Artemis program of lunar missions, tied not to China’s schedule, but to the development in Earth orbit of the technologies needed to make those landings and the establishment of a viable lunar base practical. The lunar program could still be the centerpiece of the program, inspiring it forward, but not on the present schedule that makes no sense.
Nullifying the Outer Space Treaty
Homesteaders heading west after the
Homestead Act of 1862
There is one more advantage to focusing initially on encouraging commercial operations in Earth orbit. The limits on private property in the Outer Space Treaty will not apply. The treaty forbids nations from claiming any territory on planets or asteroids, which prevents any nation like the U.S. from establishing its legal framework and property rights on any base it establishes.
The treaty’s limitations on private property do not apply however on any orbiting space object, from satellites to space stations. Instead, American law would automatically continue so that the ownership and investment rights of the station owners would be protected. So would the investments of the station’s customers from America, Europe, India, Japan, or any one of the other members of the Artemis Alliance. The Outer Space Treaty would thus be nullified, without any political or diplomatic struggle in the United Nations.
This nullification more than anything else could have profound positive consequences for the future of the solar system. It would establish property rights in space widely, among many commercial and international players. Such players will not want to give up those rights when they finally begin establishing operations on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. And there will now be a lot of them, wielding a lot of political clout. Such clout would make changing the Outer Space Treaty far easier at that time.
Imagine: America would actually be doing something to extend its values of freedom, private property, competition, and the rule of law throughout the solar system. What a concept!
Of course, there is some risk involved in shifting away from the Moon initially, as I propose. It risks ceding that lunar territory to China, which will likely get there first, and then try to lay claim to it.
I don’t think this is a serious problem. If NASA works to encourage the growth of the largest possible profitable American space industry in Earth orbit, it will also create the foundation for a wave of settlement moving outward to the planets that will easily overwhelm the government-controlled programs of authoritarian nations like China.
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
In the end, give freedom the reins, and it will outrun everything. Let China have a few short moments of glory. It won’t last long as the freedom-loving capitalist west pours outward to dominate the future.
One Final thought
My proposal above is intended not so much as a specific plan, but a detailed suggestion for rethinking America’s space goals along better lines. There are innumerable variations possible.
My main point however is to let freedom and the American people do the work, not NASA or the government. The last thing Americans need is another “space program.” What we need is a chaotic, free space industry of many companies and individuals following their own individual dreams in space (while making money), and with NASA and the government simply on the sidelines providing support and aid.
Let freedom ring, and all things will quickly become possible.
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Your proposal sounds great. I think the American people will buy it. Congress-critters not so much. Pork is the meat of choice and they can’t see sharing what they have to enjoy steak later.
Joe: As I note in the essay, furthering growth in many different private space companies will feed jobs into congressional districts. It is essentially that this point be made over and over again in discussing these changes with Congress.
Reminding Congress also of the wealth SpaceX is bringing to Brownsville is thus also essential.
I like the concept, but I can’t see getting past “We can’t let the ChiComs steal the moon!” in either the public sphere or congress. There are too many people who will beat the drum of national security, national prestige, etc., even if they don’t mean it and it’s just a weapon to beat the Trump administration with and get time in front of cameras sounding like a patriot.
The compromise, which is probably the best we can hope for, is to spend more on NASA, waste and all, so that we can direct our actual focus to something like the plan you envision here, while putting in the effort to “fix” Artemis and get boots on the moon again, while hopefully spending the majority of the Artemis program actually developing the lunar cargo missions, etc, and boots on the ground is just the publicly exciting fringe benefit that actually accomplishes nothing but making the public and politicians happy.
People need distinct goals to focus on.
Unlike Musk, who has Mars on the brain, Bezos would seem perfect for your suggestion–but he is slow, and that won’t change no matter how many throats in MSFC Jared chokes out of existence. Such disillusionment helps NOBODY.
Indeed, one of the criticisms libertarians made against NASA is that it never finishes anything.
A new Administration comes in, destroys everything the previous one did, sets up a new goal, only for that to be dashed come the next political swing.
Your suggestion is just more of the same.
The carrot won’t work–that’s why I prefer the stick…the stick being a law forcing all virology research be done off planet….gain-of function or no.
This also means only the pointy-head Fauci types get Ebolapox, or whatever. It is therefore constitutional in that it is a defense against enemies both foreign and domestic (Wuhan, Fauci).
That would likely force the hand of Big Farms.
They took the king’s money (taxes) and now they will match to our drumbeat.
In the same way Trump will use coercion to force NATO to help find things, Big Pharma will be on, say, VAST whether they like it or not either.
There is likely to be lots of money to be made in space manufacturing—but that is likely never going to happen unless forced–because an-all consuming profit motive was what destroyed Boeing.
Musk on the other hand–is a true believer, with a zeal for space equal to or greater than the zeal Greens have in wanting us to live like a third world nation.
Musk, like Soros, is a rare example of a true believer who can afford to entertain his wishes… Neither one of them wears the evil gub’ment hat you go on about. Both through wealth impose their worldviews same as FAA or EPA.
They are *also* sticks –it is just that Musk, unlike Gates or Soros., is a force of good. Musk is an example of how one man’s vision can change the world, because he doesn’t need votes from either stockholders or politicos.
And NASA should be likewise.
NASA should be therefore be permanently assigned 1% for space through eliminating all foreign aid—needing an unanimous vote from Congress for any cuts…. NASA Chief Administrator needs be a lifetime appointment like the Supreme Court. (Mike Griffin my choice). This way you have consistency same as Elon has at SpaceX.
Elon doesn’t have to listen to stockholders, and likewise NASA won’t have to answer to politicians.
Orion is just not a long-term solution – it cannot go ANYWHERE except the vicinity of the Moon, and as long as there is any doubt about its systems, I think SpaceX can replace it with the “HLS+”, and should. It is at minimum a dead-end, and possibly a dangerous one!
As for delay, Orion’s untested environmental systems and compromised heat-shield are just as likely to add delay to the program as adding the “+” to HLS (aerobraking).
So I’m not sure why we have to assume delay, and cannot in parallel invest in LEO infrastructure as you counsel. An HLS+, even the first one to land, can deliver a down payment on a lunar base, such as a rover and a cache of supplies.
Robert – Your comment to Joe makes a good point. If the USA can truly promote “commercial space” then numerous interesting things can happen as free people make their own decisions.
As I mentioned in one of my posts, SpaceX advantage is that they have brought the cost of entering space down significantly and with Starship that cost may continue to decline. This might enable private consortiums to undertake missions to the moon, Mars, asteroids or wherever as free people decide they want to go for science, industry or the thrill of exploration. Just think that may take a little longer to develop than the 5 years we have to 2030.
If I were Isaacman I would try to find some way to get some funds to Stoke as it has the only other completely reusable concept (but smaller than Starship) as far as I know. This would bring true competition to commercial space.
In part 1, Robert wrote: “When he does try to cancel both [SLS and Orion] however the politics will require him to offer something instead that will satisfy all the power-brokers in DC who have skin in the game for SLS/Orion, from elected officials to big space companies to the bureaucrats at NASA. Isaacman is going to have to propose a new design for the Artemis program that these people will accept.”
This may have been Obama’s mistake. In his not-invented-here mentality, he had cancelled Bush’s Constellation project without providing a rocket or capsule to continue manned space exploration by America. Congress revolted.
Trump did not make the same mistake. He cancelled Obama’s ill-conceived, unpopular, forgotten Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) and replaced it with a relatively popular return to the Moon. Unfortunately, the program that was inadequate to redirect an asteroid is also inadequate to return to the surface of the Moon.
Robert’s proposal in this second part of his essay puts the onus to returning to the Moon onto free market companies, who can choose to go or not, and if they do choose to go back to the lunar surface, it would be for reasons that make them money, not for costly political reasons.
America was made through free market capitalist activities; it is what happens when a people’s freedoms are protected, not rejected. Areas that the settlers chose were chosen for economic advantage, and the profits made in these areas helped to fund expansion of those areas and additional settlements in other profit-laden areas, expanding the Unite States from coast to coast, not on the government’s dime but only at the cost and choice of We the People. As it should be.
Expansion into space should be done the same way. When we let government run the space program, all we got was what government wanted, and not always that (Constellation, ARM, and Artemis are good examples) but always at great expense. Russia had limited results from its own space program, largely because it, too, was government-run. China’s government space program is also directing its activities only where the Chinese government want, not where its people want.
Now that We the People are beginning to run things in space, we are starting to get what we want — including space manufacturing and profit — and not at taxpayer expense but at our own. Using our own money means that we have great incentive (a large carrot) to avoid wasting our money. Government has no such incentive.
Freedom allows us to choose where to invest, where we think the best areas are, what we think we want most. So far, government has been making these choices for us, and we have been dissatisfied with the government’s results.
_______________
David Eastman wrote: “I like the concept, but I can’t see getting past “We can’t let the ChiComs steal the moon!” in either the public sphere or congress. There are too many people who will beat the drum of national security, national prestige, etc., even if they don’t mean it and it’s just a weapon to beat the Trump administration with and get time in front of cameras sounding like a patriot.”
In another thread, Doubting Thomas showed us how SpaceX could return us to the Moon this decade for only a few billion dollars and 55 Starship launches (maybe fewer, if Starship can lift more that 100 tonnes per launch). Why not hire them to do that? It could get the ball rolling for lunar colonization or it could merely claim the Moon for America or the free world or anyone but the communists.
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/why-orions-heat-shield-problems-give-jared-isaacman-the-perfect-justification-to-cancel-all-of-sls-orion/#comment-1535436
Free market capitalism would hold many carrots for expansion on and near the Moon, using lunar material for space manufacturing, and even for expanding into areas in the solar system that today we don’t see as useful. After all, when Louis and Clark explored the Louisiana Purchase, they though the prairies would not make good farmland. Free market capitalist settlers disagreed, and were right.
I think we need to be more pro-active wrt returning to the moon in order to do a lot of the commercial space development you propose Bob. The reason is because the in order to ever scale off planet activity in a really big way we NEED to develop In Situ resource extraction and exploitation from a more reasonable gravity well than Mother Gaia has., snd that is Luna (and Ceres I expect).
So to this end I would propose a MODIFICATION of the outer space treaty, not an outright abandonment. And this would be to allow private property and developmental rights for the next 100 years or so, so that private enterprise can profitably pursue these vital innovations. But after 100 years it’s up for review to ensure that ALL on Earth can share the benefits not just the early movers.
The analogy to me is land ownership in Hawaii which all went yo just s few large enterprises 100+ years ago, and who own it all to this day to ENORMOUS benefit even though they no longer run sugar cane and pineapple plantations and such.
Let the free market make a wickedly obscene profit, to foster and stimulate the rapid development of these resources, but not in perpetuity. That is my thinking.
The cycle of killing the other guy’s program has to end.
Mr. Z once again is guilty of letting Ayn Rand do his thinking for him.
First, he attacked China’s SLS type CZ-9 as flags and footprints. Apparently they read his ideas–and took him more seriously than Mr. Z’s critics over here do–and they are pushing for reusability too with not one but TWO Starship clones backed by a national effort (GASP! HORRORS!)
–but he still calls their campaign “flags and footprints” and has no problem ceding regolith to China (why do you hate America Mr. Z :) )
I remember the late, non-lamented John McCain on some panel or other as he rolled his eyes at someone in NASA wanting real funding. Worse, one of the privatize-everything gnord talked about how America didn’t need to respond to one socialist space effort (China’s with another “socialist” effort of our own–as if Von Braun wore Che Guevara shirts–actually that was the “Whitey on the Moon” marxists.
McCain, being the idiot he always was, thought that was a “good point.”
If only I had been there come acquisition time and said–while he pushed for USN funding–about how we don’t need to respond to one nation’s nationally funded military with one of our own–and leave America’s skies to the Civil Air Patrol.
I wonder what McCain’s response to that would have been….
Edward wrote, “This may have been Obama’s mistake. In his not-invented-here mentality, he had cancelled Bush’s Constellation project without providing a rocket or capsule to continue manned space exploration by America. Congress revolted.”
There was no maybe about it, and I wrote about it at the time, in detail. See:
July 14, 2010: You’ve got to play the game
Edward & Robert – There have been some great threads here in the last few days.
Ray Van Dune & Milt observations and suggestions about aerobraking and a modified Starship somewhere between the finless HLS and the large, finned baseline Starship model seem very useful to me. I think it could be possible to reduce my notional 44 out of 55 launches for lunar orbit refueling to 10 launches for a single lunar tanker refueling or perhaps to zero (no LO tanker required) depending on how much fuel is left in the crew lander tank for lunar ascent and TEI.
Starship (unlike Orion) can retain integrated propulsion and thermal protection system which allows an initial aerobrake maneuver into an eccentric orbit to be circularized into an orbit for crew debarkation aboard a Crew Dragon. Also, the size of Starship allows sufficient consumables to let the returning crew wait in comfort for the taxi ride home.
Another cause of our lack of returning to the moon, besides cost, is erosion of risk tolerance. While the Apollo fathers of NASA and NAA initially calculated that chance of safe return was about 99%, I think Apollo 13 showed that it was lower. With the loss of Challenger and Columbia, NASA became an organization that could not say out loud that they were taking substantial risks (even when they were).
The architectures that have been discussed in these threads let us actually begin to think about a “Lunar Exploration Guild” that could be privately funded and could say that they (and the volunteer crew) were willing to take some risk to kick start American manned space exploration age.
A few thoughts about the richest men in the USA: Musk ($241 B), Bezos ($161 B), Zuckerburg ($134 B), Bill Gates ($134 B), L Page ($123 B)
University Endowments: Havard ($49 B), Yale ($40 B), Stanford ($36 B), Princeton ($34 B), MIT ($23 B).
It seems like these illustrious Americans and universities could scrap together $2 or $3 billion to fund, as patriots, a return to the moon for their nation. A Give-Send-Go page would allow the entire nation to actively (if only symbolically) participate. I donated to St Jude’s to get my Inspiration 4 patch.
Bloody TPS… maybe transpiration cooling.
One thing to be cautious of in ceding any ground to China is that for a few years now, more libertarian minded folks used the cudgel “killing SLS is not killing Artemis” against me
This very article above makes that phrase ring false.
Some years ago Gene Hallman pushed for Birmingham/Jefferson County to fund a domed stadium. I am glad it failed–but some of the funds would have gone to the McWane Science Center as part of MAPS.
An opposition group called RAPS got it killed (probably for the best, as I detest sports more and more)–but what I remember from these chamber of commerce types were promises they made to the community about the things they would back if MAPS got killed.
Promises that were never kept.
Instead, while China supports spaceflight at a national level–folks here want to BRAC NASA Centers.
Disgusting
Doubting Thomas wrote, ” the Apollo fathers of NASA and NAA initially calculated that chance of safe return was about 99%”.
This is incorrect. For Apollo 8 they considered the chances of safe return to be 50-50. This number I got from many people during interviews when I was writing Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8.
Robert- Yes but. The original discussion between 2 senior NASA execs and 2 North American Aviation executives back in 1962 as Apollo began set the overall P(Astronauts survive) at 99%. Survival NOT mission success. See Angle of Attack book about NAA work on Apollo CSM.
The fact that NASA leadership were willing to depart from their mission stairstep approach to throw the Hail Mary pass of Apollo 8 compared to today shows the pickle we are in as a nation.
Doubting Thomas: If I understand you, the 99% was the survival goal that was set in 1962 as the Apollo lunar program began to gear up.
The 50-50 number however what NASA actually thought the odds were for Apollo 8.
As you say, that Americans were willing to fly Apollo 8 that number illustrates “the pickle we are in” today. It seems we blanch at such risks, no matter the righteousness or nobility of the cause.
Several issues to address.
LEO is a bit of a shooting gallery of space debris. I suspect one reason for Lunar Gateway was to move crewed operations somewhere clean, even if the expense was great. Expanding operations in LEO without a clear plan to deal with this or clean it up is risky, and would get worse the more successful it got.
We’ve seen from China’s expansion into the Pacific that they clearly don’t give a crap about international law or territorial restrictions on themselves. A Chinese base with a single howitzer type cannon could effectively block all landings by other powers due to the low gravity giving it unlimited range. While China’s collapse seems inevitable in the next 5-10 years due to demographics and Xi having absolute control while entering the Biden phase of life, whatever replaces him isn’t going to be pretty, either.
If the US government needs to have a human plant a flag at the lunar south pole by a certain date, why not just have NASA contract for that service? It works for cargo and astronaut delivery to the space station.
Then bidders on that service contract can decide on the best way to accomplish it.
Robert – Yes you have my point about setting risk structure in the early days of Apollo and the choices made, in 1968, when we truly WANTED to achieve a goal, when we approached the finish line and needed an extra push.
Kent N. – First, I do not think that Gateway was in any way developed due to LEO debris. It is a result of physics and politics.
Available launch vehicles can’t send people to the surface of the Moon in a single launch. Artemis original architecture uses multiple separately launched components to conduct Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR).
NASA could have the elements meet up at the orbit where the gateway is situated; but if docked with Gateway they can stay there longer by drawing on its resources. Gateway is a politically engineered project too. NASA was ensuring that the current set of contractors in politically important congressional districts and in allied nations, continue to receive USG funding while the current goat rope that is Artemis flailed around trying to get organized to go to the moon.
Read Eric Berger’s 2018 article:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/former-nasa-administrator-says-lunar-glateway-is-a-stupid-architecture/
To your point about China’s methods and intentions, find and read Martin Cadin’s 1967 novel “No Mans World. Written while NASA was reeling from the Apollo 1 fire and published BEFORE Apollo 8 took its Hail Mary Pass to leapfrog numerous stair step mission objectives it was written by Cadin as an American “call to arms” if we lost the Moon Race to the Russians.
It seems like Amazon has reprinted the book, which is great! I read the book in the public library in 1968 (age 13) and bought, out of print, for $85 in 2010 when I was so frustrated at NASA Artemis pace.
https://www.amazon.com/No-Mans-World-Novel-Space/dp/B0006BQ4Q2
Seems like the architecture of Artemis and its predecessors completely overlooked the possibility of in-space transfer of crew, propellants, and other consumables. This in turn obviated the need to effectively reuse vehicles.
Once you master reuse, refill, and transfer, you can quit the money-burning game of using giant rockets to get flags and footprints, and then throwing everything away except a small crew landing in a little capsule at the end. That game is what is unsustainable in the minds of the public!
And where do you refill? Anywhere you need to!
Mission architectures become open-ended, and this allows us to respond to and commercially exploit space opportunities.
Ray –
” Once you master reuse, refill, and transfer, you can quit the money-burning game of using giant rockets to get flags and footprints, and then throwing everything away except a small crew landing in a little capsule at the end. That game is what is unsustainable in the minds of the public!”
Truer words have never been spoken. SpaceX has finally started to do what we have known since about 1903 with the theoretical writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
NASA needs to be disbanded. Aeronautics research can go back to universities as can robot probes. A coordination body can oversee the funding for each. NASA aeronautics has been unimpressive for a long time with ideas being recycled every 30 years or so.
Human spaceflight also merely needs for government to get out of the way. Minimal safety oversight. The aim of aeronautical regulation is to prevent damage to people and things on the ground and damage to other airspace users by your actions. This seems to have been long forgotten. Aviation safety isn’t due to regulation it is because humans have figured out, after 121 years, how to do aviation.
Mission to the Moon (possible base) vs only a LEO and other Earth centered free-market space industry
This is a quick off the top of my head set of differences between the two approaches. What does each get you in the end?
Moon Landing and possible Moon base
Heavy lift development and deployment (others besides Starship and Super Heavy)
Flush out the best/most efficient overall design for travel to and from the Moon – apply to other worlds?
Design and flush out specific Moon landing and return technologies – human controlled and automated
Moon Lagrange point occupation esp. L1 and L2 to avoid any exclusive claims by PRC or others
Fully flesh-out one or many far side of the moon and pole communications systems
Learn to deal with the Moon regolith in the following ways:
Spacesuit design
Habitat portal passage (Human and cargo)
Suit scrub and cleaning
Regolith as a building material
Regolith filtering research in ventilation
Apply these designs and knowledge for/to other worlds
Actual search for water – not a remote search
Allows many US free enterprise companies to develop Moon base designs
Allows many US free enterprise companies to develop Moon manufacturing designs
Long-term research into Moon-gravity effects on human physiology
Create the state-of-the-art universe astronomical observation stations (plural)
Earth (LEO and other orbit) exploitation with flights and space stations
Allows many US free enterprise companies to develop space station designs
Allows many US free enterprise companies to develop rocket designs
Allows US free enterprise to develop and deploy manufacturing in space stations
Develop the space tourism market
Space suit design – but not designs and procedures to deal with the Moon or other environs
Research no (very low), and low gravity effects on human physiology – LEO allows a wider range of actual and artificial gravity to be explored
Research methods of creating micro and macro artificial gravity
Create state-of-the-art astronomical observation satellites (plural)
These are goals NOT exclusive. I think that choosing one over the other is a poor choice and will not happen anyhow. If free enterprise Capitalism in Space is permitted by the US and others the LEO development will occur naturally. The more costly and longer-term Moon goals are a much greater step that a will require a greater forcing function – some type of profit potential or a government funded program.
If we apply Mr Z’s model of Capitalism in Space to the longer-term Moon mission many of the costly design and development issues such as dealing with regolith or countering long-term low gravity can start to be dealt with. Let those who make the best suit cleaning design patent and profit. Remember that all the free market companies today are standing on the shoulders of prior government projects. We do not have to repeat the past -ie only NASA, but we may need to provide a bit more funding to get our desired results in the harder areas.
Robert,
You were correct. Your recommendation was not quite what I expected, but it follows along the lines that you have advocated for more than a decade.
Ellie In Space did a video that focuses on what Jared Isaacman said at a Space Force conference, and his comments were also along the lines of increasing commercial space. This will undoubtedly be his focus for NASA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8CPP-zRKxE (22 minutes)
Thank you for the link. That was a good essay about how Obama did it wrong. Hopefully Isaacman and Trump will do better. It came out a couple of years before I started reading your site, so this is the first I read it. My takeaways from your essay:
“First, it appears that the Obama administration didn’t include any of the other players in their discussions when they were developing their proposals. … Then, when these players did begin to scream and howl, the Obama administration refused to consider any of their concerns.”
That explains Congress’s revolt against Obama’s actions.
“Then there is the Obama administration’s new space policy, … to focus on (inspiring kids, international cooperation, and outreach to the Muslim community) have so little to do with space exploration and ‘going where no one has gone before’ that they are almost laughable.”
If he hadn’t been serious, we would have laughed. Instead, we were appalled. No wonder Obama’s actions set NASA adrift for a decade.
“Worse, none of these goals do anything to serve the needs of Congress, which funds the program and therefore has to be convinced to go along. … Instead, [the Obama administration] refused to play the game, doing nothing to address Congress’s political concerns.”
We might not like the politics of space, but NASA, is Congress’s toy. They proved this by playing rocket scientist and designing SLS as they wanted it to be. Unfortunately, they asked for technical capabilities and ignored economical necessities. Even the technical capabilities fell short of being able to accomplish any real exploration in space. SLS-Orion was poorly thought out, because it had no goal to define its requirements. That is why it is failing so tragically today. SLS could have been good, if only it had goals and was economical from its inception. Its lack of reusability would have still been a problem, though.
“Unfortunately, the consequence of this incompetence is that Congress is now trying to micromanage the American space program, a situation that in itself can do nothing but harm in the long run.”
That was prescient. Here we are, downrange and living in the future, what was then the long run, and SLS has done great harm. It has prevented us from performing real manned space-exploration, and after spending tremendous resources (money, time, experienced-manpower) we still cannot reach any reasonable goal we set for it, no matter the cost we are willing to pay.
“All these issues illustrate once again why it is always a very dangerous thing to let the government become involved in anything you do. Though there are rare cases where government can help, most of the time its presence creates numerous vested interests that will fight factional wars over everything, thereby making it very difficult for anything to be accomplished.”
This just goes to show how hard it is to say anything original. You said it before I started to say it:
When we let government be in charge, all we get is what government wants. When We the People take charge, we get what we want.
One of the advantages of We the People doing what we want was phrased rather well:
’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.
Not only do We the People have far more ideas about what to do in space, we also have far more funding available, if only government will stop removing our freedom to explore, invest, and innovate as we wish.
___________________
Doubting Thomas wrote: :University Endowments: Havard ($49 B), Yale ($40 B), Stanford ($36 B), Princeton ($34 B), MIT ($23 B). It seems like these illustrious Americans and universities could scrap together $2 or $3 billion to fund, as patriots, a return to the moon for their nation.”
Unfortunately, these endowments are limited in what they can fund, usually scholarships, but perhaps some of the money is earmarked for research.
The Give-Send-Go idea to “allow the entire nation to actively (if only symbolically) participate” could find a suitable project or two for the rest of us.
___________________
Kent Nebergall wrote: “LEO is a bit of a shooting gallery of space debris. I suspect one reason for Lunar Gateway was to move crewed operations somewhere clean, even if the expense was great.”
Although Gateway was proposed before Artemis — to be used as a gateway to the rest of the solar system — its use for Artemis is to make up for the inability of Orion-SLS to get the Orion capsule into a low lunar orbit and then back to Earth. Orion-SLS most definitely cannot take a lander for descent to the surface and return to Orion. Artemis may look like Apollo, but it is not Apollo. SLS, in any of its iterations or block numbers, is less capable than the Saturn V. However, Orion could get to Gateway’s orbit around the Moon, and if we can get a lander there as well, Gateway can be used as a way station on the way to and from the surface.
Artemis is a kludge.
Chris: Reread my essay again. I do not propose cancelling the goal of going to the Moon. I propose using it as an inspirational goal that private enterprise can focus on, beginning for a start in low Earth orbit. To quote:
I strongly suspect our dumb legislators (and Trump) will require that inspirational goal for their photo ops. Give it to them (and industry) but untie it from the present schedule that is chained to SLS/Orion. Tie it instead to what can be learned and then applied to it by the first stage of low Earth orbit development.
Edward, in commenting on my 2010 essay, “That was prescient.”
All I ever do is apply common sense and my knowledge about history, technology, and politics to anticipate what will happen. It ain’t hard, but it does require that you don’t let yourself get bogged down with emotions or partisan passions. I want humanity to explore and colonize the solar system, but my wants must be put aside when analyzing what is happening and then suggesting a better course.
Regular readers will notice that the percentage of my predictions that turn out right is very very high. Keep that in mind and reread the essay above again. I am betting that Isaacman and Trump are going to do some variation of this proposal, even if they never read one word I have written.
Hi Bob,
I think we generally agree.
My point in the LEO vs Moon Shot comparison is that I think the orbital work will get done and done quickly IFF the US and other governments stay out of the way and adopt a Capitalism in Space attitude. There’s a lot of money to be made here by just allowing free markets to take their course. Nothing can stop it.
I don’t want Artemis at all.
The Moon work however is a harder slog requiring a better sell to to bring companies to overcome the many hurdles (regolith, a landing-return process, heavy lift, …etc) that the Moon presents. No one one company can do all this.
Companies will rightly ask “show me the profit on the Moon vs LEO to get me to take that big leap.”
Believe it or not here is where government funding can help. Our LEO capabilities stand on the shoulders of fully government funding long ago. I don’t want NASA to be the keeper of all that is a Moon shot, but only a bigger set of funding can overcome a problem like regolith. Then allow independent companies to capitalize on the Moon.
I see it as a port being dredged and built to allow commerce, or an interstate highway system …etc. It’s too big to handle for any one company but with some funding to private companies the Moon can be opened up. Without it, the Moon and further space exploration will be delayed, not ended, but delayed.
In Bob’s book, GENESIS, he relates (p. 7-8) the story of Susan Borman demanding a candid assessment of Apollo 8’s chances from Chris Kraft one night, late in 1968, and receiving the answer, “fifty-fifty.” That story has been documented by others as well, mostly recently Jeffrey Kluger’s APOLLO 8. And Bob is right (of course) that a similarly pessimistic assessment of Apollo 8’s chances was held by the astronauts themselves, and much of senior NASA management, right up to the end.
NASA in fact had found the whole project of probabilistic risk assessment for Apollo fraught with difficulty, and early estimates were quite gruesome. At one point, in fact, NASA contracted with General Electric Co. in Daytona Beach, Fla., to do a “full numerical PRA” to assess the likelihood of success in landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. The GE study indicated the chance of success was “less than 5 percent.” When NASA Administrator James Webb was presented with the results, he felt that if made public, “the numbers could do irreparable harm, and he disbanded the effort.” And that was the end of NASA attempts to quantify LOC or LOM in Apollo. (Harry W. Jones,”NASA’s Understanding of Risk in Apollo and Shuttle,” p. 2 (2018))
After that, NASA constrained itself to an approach of qualitative failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to identify worst-case scenarios. But the discomfort with the high risks of Apollo remained, and many in NASA management were never comfortable with the risks they were running — indeed, *had* to run, if they were going to make Kennedy’s deadline. In fact , there were those like Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft who thought that Apollo should be ended after Apollo 11. “I put up my back and said, ‘We must stop,’” Gilruth said. “There are so many chances for us losing a crew. We just know that we’re going to do that if we keep going.” (Eric Berger and Lee Hutchinson, “The Greatest Leap, part 5: Saving the crew of Apollo 13,” Ars Technica, April 11, 2020)
NASA ran 6 more lunar missions after Apollo 11 and didn’t lose a crew. But they came awfully darned close on several occasions. The brilliance and dedication of NASA engineers and astronauts made it look safer than it ought to have been, But so did some luck, too.
Robert,
You had an opportunity to claim clairvoyance, but instead you reduced it to mere insight.
____________
Chris,
You wrote: “My point in the LEO vs Moon Shot comparison is that I think the orbital work will get done and done quickly IFF the US and other governments stay out of the way and adopt a Capitalism in Space attitude. There’s a lot of money to be made here by just allowing free markets to take their course. Nothing can stop it.”
We already have evidence of this. Vast has not yet put its Haven-1 space station into orbit, yet it is already working on its next generation space station, Haven-2.
“Believe it or not here is where government funding can help. … It’s too big to handle for any one company but with some funding to private companies the Moon can be opened up.”
I disagree with you on this one. Going to Mars seemed like a task too big for any one company to handle, yet here is SpaceX with a plan and a spacecraft that can make it happen without government help or cooperation between companies.
Twenty-two years ago, I would have thought many of the things that SpaceX has done would be impossible or improbable. Dragon and Crew Dragon would be improbable, because NASA had a monopoly on U.S. manned spaceflight. Economically reusing a booster seemed rather tricky, but SpaceX used the propulsive reentry trick to make it work, and ignored the usual engineering insistence that every launch vehicle eek out the maximum possible capability resulting in lower cost and rapid launch cadence. Iridium and Globalstar showed us that large constellations of communication satellites just aren’t economical, so Starlink was definitely impossible, twenty years ago.
And Starship is pure magic from its original construction in the virtually open outdoors, to its flip maneuver just before landing, to the chopstick catch of the booster. Even at the top of the arc of the Starship landing tests, they flipped-over a 100 ton vehicle in four or five seconds without it tumbling out of control. A hundred tons spun up to 3 rpm, or so, then stopped again, all in five seconds. Even today I cannot believe what we have seen. Which are we going to believe, what SpaceX tells us happened or our lying eyes? Those are just really, really good cgi videos, because no one can do that in real life. No one. It’s like Penn and Teller’s Fool Us television show, but we are the ones being fooled by the magic.
You know, Chris, I have changed my mind. You are right. There are just some things that are too big for any one company to handle without some cgi, or magic, or something.
Hi Edward,
That Starship IS some good CGI…and we never did land on the Moon, all a movie set. I jest.
I consider the Moon landing the greatest achievement of civilization. In my opinion, nothing comes close. The task required far too many leaps in a wide range of sciences and engineering as well as a tremendous amount of imagination to think through all the steps to get there “…in this decade”
Why did we go?
There was certainly no money to be made going there. However, money was being spent in gobs to get there.
Why?
Perhaps the embarrassment of Sputnik, to show off our technological prowess, and/or to prove that overall, the American free, and free-enterprise system could out do the Soviet system. But there was no money to be made going to the Moon in the late ’60s. And right now I can’t think of a profit potential for going back; especially with the hurdles required to get there and set up shop safely.
The thing that allowed us to get the the Moon was an outside forcing function upon the natural progress of technology in the 50-60’s. We had to beat the Soviets, and save the world. These programs provided much of the ground work technology that allows us get to LEO today “stand(s) on the shoulders of fully government funding long ago”.
Has SpaceX provided the “magic CGI” that allows them to put 100 tonnes up and reuse the ship that does it or put 127 Falcons up this year? Absolutely! That, and 40-50+ years of technological advancement, some great imagination and DRIVE from Musk. This is still set upon the shoulders of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo developments. Note the 40-50 year part.
– perhaps we were waiting for Musk to be born AND government to get out of the way
My point is that without the forcing function of profit and/or an outside goal driven and funded in some way by something there is no way we will make timely progress to get to the Moon and beyond. “Without it, the Moon and further space exploration that does not have a profit will be delayed, not ended, but delayed.”
Apollo 17 – December 1972
James Burke
“The Other Side of the Moon” (1979)
https://youtu.be/puWbQ1b-ljU
57:19
“Neil Armstrong had just landed on the Moon but had not yet made his one small step. In spite of what had seemed like a flawless landing the tension here was difficult to describe…. none of us in the news media knew how close that landing had come to disaster, because we had not been told.”
“It is now clear for instance that the machines were at all times not perfectly built, and on one occasion fatally so. That the idea of going to the Moon in the first place was not Kennedys, and that at all times the Apollo missions were in political jeopardy depending on the incumbent Presidents priorities. That, throughout, NASA had to fight to survive at all, and that the systematic scientific exploration of the Moon by geologically trained astronauts happened late in the Program…”
I don’t “like” this idea/plan, but it seems far more reasonable than “to Mars, as fast as possible”.
As much as I would like to retire on the moon, infrastructure and logistics are things. For fiction readers, Mackey Chandler’s _April_ series takes place in an environment much like this.
Chris,
“But there was no money to be made going to the Moon in the late ’60s. And right now I can’t think of a profit potential for going back; especially with the hurdles required to get there and set up shop safely.”
Space manufacturing is going to need material for the manufacturing. We can spend a lot of money fighting the Earth’s gravity, or we can spend much less money fighting the lower lunar gravity. Saving money — improved efficiency of resource use — increases the profits, and the profits are the reward for finding the increased efficiency. The resulting lower prices benefits the consumer.
You do not need to think of any profit potential or think of any product to produce. That task is up to those who are planning to start lunar industries.
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/ispace-signs-agreement-with-lunar-mining-startup/
“perhaps we were waiting for Musk to be born AND government to get out of the way”
I think it was mostly the government getting out of the way part. We had plenty of people who wanted to make commercial space projects and innovate new ideas. However, government pretty much created its own monopoly in the early 1960s and kept it. Robert Truax had wanted to start his own launch company in the very early 1980s, but Congress declared that all U.S. satellite and deep space probe launches would be on the Space Shuttle. Truax could not find investors. Government was the problem since the beginning of the space age. Most commercial space industries were locked out, because government controlled the (expensive) launches.
The other aspect is that government was also practically the only customer, too. This is called a monopsony. What a weird thing to have the same entity be both the monopoly and the monopsony. What this means is that except for the communication satellite operators and the cost-plus contractors, Americans were locked out of the space industry, including its benefits. The result is that for half a century, Americans wondered why we were wasting good money in space. NASA’s response was that there were many spinoff benefits to space and started publishing a magazine called Spinoffs. Unfortunately, it quickly became an engineering magazine, and you had to be an engineer to subscribe. So much for showing the public the benefits of the government spending your money on government-controlled space.
The Outer Space Treaty was intended to make sure that space was used for the benefit of all mankind by keeping it from becoming private property. Surprisingly, for the past two-thirds of a century space has been of very little benefit for any of mankind, despite the benevolent governments of the world keeping tight control over its use.
Wait. What? Was I really surprised? And are governments really so benevolent? Canada has recently turned very much against its own populace. The equality-minded marxist countries have turned out to oppress their people, keeping them in poverty — but at least most of the non-leadership in the population are equally poor, accomplishing most of the goal of equality. Even in the U.S., the corrupt bureaucrats who run the daily operations of government now use their government positions and government resources to benefit one political party over all others. And with governments in control of space, all we earthlings ever got was what the various governments wanted or what they wanted us to have.
For two-thirds of a century we were distracted by government promises, most of which didn’t come true. We thought that we would see a sudden expansion of space activity after “putting our toe in the water” by landing on the Moon. Instead, we were teased with the short-lived Skylab, then with the anemic Space Shuttle, and lately with the expensive ISS; few people can see the benefits coming from there.
Fortunately, these days We the People have regained much of the freedom to use space for our own needs, not the limited needs of the government. Two-thirds of a century of disappointed expectations is being followed by the kinds of space operations we had expected would begin in the early 1960s.
Now that We the People are beginning to take charge, we are beginning to see plans and operations that bring us what we have wanted, not what the governments have wanted. We are seeing astonishing innovations work miracles. Launch costs are falling faster than government launchers can match. Private citizens are going into space, both suborbital and orbital. So far, every one of the private orbital spaceflights has been for testing or experimentation, not (yet) for mere enjoyment (tourism). Instead of having one space station at a time producing only a limited amount of science, we see four independent space stations being built to produce manufacturing and exploration as well as science. Scores of companies are already sending small satellites into orbit in order to do business in space. This is what is happening now that government is beginning to get out of the way.
From an earlier comment from Chris:
“I don’t want NASA to be the keeper of all that is a Moon shot, but only a bigger set of funding can overcome a problem like regolith.”
NASA spent almost a billion dollars over the course of a decade on a space suit design to overcome this problem and came up short. They now have a contract with a startup company to spend less money and solve the problem in less time.
But the big money is not at NASA. A previous NASA administrator knew this four years ago:
’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.