Here's what NASA's exploration plans would actually look like if the White House got its way.
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If Congress actually cancels the SLS rocket, what happens next?
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Yes. To both. Because that's just how stupid and incompetent the Trump administration is -- destroying and saving at the same time.
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Look, I hate SpaceX because I have an absolutely unsurmountable hatred of you-know-who and I'm unwilling to divorce the two mentally, especially in light of SpaceX staff helping with his rape and pillage of this country. Bias noted, and acknowledged.
HOWEVER, I think it's quite likely that SpaceX could probably develop and deploy solutions to meet the requirements of SLS while having the government pay all the actual workers and non-executive staff of the SLS contractors at their current compensation levels (and allow them to find another job while keeping the pay, IDGAF) and have it come out cheaper than what SLS costs.
Is it good to have all the eggs in one basket controlled by a one-foot-still-in-the-closet-but-mostly-out fascist/right-wing sociopath? No.
Is it WORSE than the current situation? In my mind, not really. The era of NASA operating for science and the good of all is over for the foreseeable future, so spending less money there is probably for the best.
HOWEVER, I think it's quite likely that SpaceX could probably develop and deploy solutions to meet the requirements of SLS while having the government pay all the actual workers and non-executive staff of the SLS contractors at their current compensation levels (and allow them to find another job while keeping the pay, IDGAF) and have it come out cheaper than what SLS costs.
Is it good to have all the eggs in one basket controlled by a one-foot-still-in-the-closet-but-mostly-out fascist/right-wing sociopath? No.
Is it WORSE than the current situation? In my mind, not really. The era of NASA operating for science and the good of all is over for the foreseeable future, so spending less money there is probably for the best.
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I'm gonna go with "The Trump White House can't tell its ass from a hole in the ground, which is why it appears to be shitting all over everything while trying to dig for buried loot."title said:
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Some of us are old enough to remember when COTS was bleeding-edge new and all the usual suspects predicted that we’d pay a lot and get very little in return. Instead, we paid a little and now have a suite of safe and secure launch providers to choose from.
IMHO, we need to run a second round for crew-rated launches, given that Boeing has so thoroughly demonstrated their incompetence, and see if we can develop some competition for SpaceX in that category as well.
And then let’s sit down and create an exploration program based on what the science need, not on what jobs can be delivered. And while we’re at it, I’d like a unicorn and an ice cream cone…
IMHO, we need to run a second round for crew-rated launches, given that Boeing has so thoroughly demonstrated their incompetence, and see if we can develop some competition for SpaceX in that category as well.
And then let’s sit down and create an exploration program based on what the science need, not on what jobs can be delivered. And while we’re at it, I’d like a unicorn and an ice cream cone…
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Normally, I'd be hitting the downvote button on this, but you speak sooth on the issue.
UNDER THE CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES, that seems to be the way to go. There is up and coming competition from BO (which are words that taste very unfamiliar in my mouth, and anyone is free to mock, all things considered), and other new rocket companies have lift capabilities that allow more capacity beyond what SpaceX offers (since the vast majority of its flights are self-serving for Starlink). The landscape is changing, transitioning away from the M/IC (which is no longer a complex, but a "too big to fail" megacorporation that deserves nothing in the way of public funding for public projects) toward private industry willing to do it on a "we assume the costs and liabilities" basis.
Going back to the moon is, well, IMHO at least, pointless, but may serve as proof that humans will not thrive away from an earth-like gravity and biome - the evidence of which is pretty clear in the medical studies published since Skylab documenting long-term exposure to low gravity environments. I think that's a lesson that's being learned, but not yet openly acknowledged by the folks whose business it is to put people into space (for obvious self-interest reasons).
Less pragmatically, I'm kind of appalled to realize I'm HOPING SpaceX RUD's its way out of the market while the Slave Owner In Charge is fucking with our privacy, freedoms and liberties. Quite a contrast considering the past innovations coming from that company.
And that kind of brings me to my point. Until the government is in the hands of sane and rational people (at least as much as it normally was) and no longer being influenced by the fascist 1%'ers, I'm fine walking back the moon plans that were already pretty awful in concept, design and implementation in the first place. If NASA is de-funded entirely, that would be a loss for science. But I don't see this administration having any shits to give about science. So the less money thrown at something that was a dead white elephant from the get-go, the better.
If sanity returns before civilization ends, we can give it another try. It's not like the moon is going anywhere in the meantime.
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If or when China ever gets around to doing something cool in space, don't you think that would set off another Sputnik moment for the USA, and blow budgetary constraints away again?
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I disagree with the framing that canceling programs under this current administration is saving NASA billions of dollars. That money is going to go right into the Military or another part of the government like ICE, not reallocated to another NASA science mission or program.
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A one-size-fits-all approach is rarely cost-effective, and rarely requires "minimal changes". Cargo and crew are vastly different payloads with vastly different requirements.
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From a space exploration point of view (the political PoV is a bad disaster movie), if Artemis and SLS sunset with Artemis III, there will be a long wait between Artemis III and the next US people-on-the-moon landing. That is simply a fact due to the time needed to plan, design, and build the gear for a mission, even if you start with some in-development hardware like Starship.
Could it be cheaper than SLS? Just about anything is cheaper than that. I'm not saying this is a bad move, just being clear about realistic expectations. A human lunar mission is not a weekend camping trip. It will take years to plan and build and will require custom hardware.
Could it be cheaper than SLS? Just about anything is cheaper than that. I'm not saying this is a bad move, just being clear about realistic expectations. A human lunar mission is not a weekend camping trip. It will take years to plan and build and will require custom hardware.
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As the typical acronym definition for COTS is Commercial Off The Shelf, one has to think NASA was being clever with the naming.
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Just playing devil’s advocate here, but so far commercial spacecraft have a much better track record than NASA with respect to human safety.
The original Mercury rockets were repurposed ballistic missiles. They did whatever they had to for Americans to get to space, corners were cut, and people died.
For example, some of the original capsules used a pure oxygen atmosphere. They knew it was dangerous, but did it anyway. It led to the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
Safety culture improved afterwords, but accidents like the Challenger o-ring incident still happened due to pressure to succeed.
What I’m trying to say is that government projects aren’t inherently safer. Pressures still exist to succeed, they are just different. I personally think a combination of commercial / 3rd party impartial safety oversight is the sweet spot (whether that be a NGO or not is up for debate).
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A gift? No, not a gift. A transaction. The shift toward Mars has Musk's fingerprints all over it. It's his lifelong dream to colonize Mars. He didn't spend $300 million getting Trump elected for nothing. Trump is totally transactional. Elon wants to go to Mars, NASA will go to Mars. To hell with the collateral damage to NASA's science and R&D programs. Trump doesn't care. Probably the only reason they didn't outright cancel SLS and Orion is that they couldn't get it past Ted Cruz. And getting to the Moon before China.
Other companies are also interested in contracts? Great. It will lower criticism. I assume one of those companies is Blue Origin. NASA is already funding their Blue Moon lander. Will they continue to fund it?
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I mean, there's no reasonable doubt anymore about the insight that NASA just should stay the fuck out of launching stuff but should just buy that on the market. Accepting this as a self-evident fact is long overdue. SLS is literally the proof for that. An expensive proof, but if it may serve as exactly this it may be worth the billions and billions spent on it.
We are not in the 60ties anymore, this is a thoroughly solved problem. There are other things that NASA should be busy with and spend money on. Things that aren't likely to be solved by profitable companies any time soon. Buy on the market what you can buy, especially when it is comparatively dirt-cheap.
We are not in the 60ties anymore, this is a thoroughly solved problem. There are other things that NASA should be busy with and spend money on. Things that aren't likely to be solved by profitable companies any time soon. Buy on the market what you can buy, especially when it is comparatively dirt-cheap.
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Old Space takes a long time to plan, design, and build.
How much time and money did Boeing spend to barely get Butch and Sunny up to the ISS? At a higher per launch cost relative to SpaceX?
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There are two basic problems with this kind of thinking as I see it.
First, with all credit to the Falcon 9 being a successful product (one that may be outmodded by increasing competition from potentially more efficient offerings from other companies and countries), we have to remember that Starship is not actually operational. It has to demonstrate not just mission capability (which it hasn't actually done), but reliable and cost efficient sustained capability due to how many launches its mission profiles will require. It's certainly possible and achievable, but as flashy as the out-in-the-open and politically-audible development has been, and the excitement and Youtube channels and the rest of it wrapped up in the hype, they are a long way from demonstrating this. Whether you're one to feel like recent years have flown by in a blink or have been agonizingly slow, given all the chaos since around the time Starship development started (I'm a little of both), development has not actually been that fast...
The second is the combination of those aforementioned competitors and allocation of limited resources. Does anyone really want to try to argue that e.g. Rocket Lab couldn't build a Falcon 9 (they have their Neutron project that may be better in many ways and is getting on) or a Starship type product if they had the resources and attention (and weight to draw more of those with experience because of it) and state connections and contracts that have gone SpaceX's way, and at speed if they had a more reckless development cycle? It isn't, in fact, SpaceX or the highway (or rather, SpaceX or "oldspace"). There might be a cost of some time, but SpaceX is not all there is to US commercial space launch even as things are now, let alone everything else about space related work and what reallocation would bring.
The company is a successful first mover and is demonstrating why indeed it can be a bad idea to have all eggs handed to one unprincipled and chaotic basket. I don't think I'm advocating for anything specific here, just saying that if SpaceX as a company disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't actually be that big a deal. The void would be filled very quickly. The bigger problem for commercial space launch and NASA projects in general continues to be congress, and the greater damage and delay is coming from the decimation of NASA's actual science work. It took ~30 years to get the JWST built and up taking pictures. Missions to ice moons and solar probes or even potentially product-yielding research like work on nuclear thermal propulsion are not things that bring near-term profits to companies and generally don't give the billionaire "big genital rocket" excitement either. Nor, I suspect, is it a trivial matter to start those types of projects back up years after interruption. Many seem to forget that the only reason we should care about rockets is that rockets let us put the interesting things up.
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Happily, these changes all sound like exactly what needs to be done to fix our space exploration programs:
* Cancel expensive one-off programs that can't be sustained and do not make future projects easier (SLS, Gateway, MSR)
* Write contracts that specify the objectives (end-to-end delivery of cargo or people to a location) without pointlessly limiting the approaches that can be used to meet them
* Invest R&D into general-use reusable systems instead of bespoke stuff that has to be redesigned from scratch for every program. This is especially timely for Mars, as there are multiple private companies who are all working on projects already (SpaceX, BO, Rocket Lab, Impulse)
This is all great stuff that deserves to be loudly applauded, and it is strictly better than continuing to dump billions into Boeing and Lockmart with terrible results.
If the pointless cutting of already-completed science projects gets fixed, I will be 100% onboard.
* Cancel expensive one-off programs that can't be sustained and do not make future projects easier (SLS, Gateway, MSR)
* Write contracts that specify the objectives (end-to-end delivery of cargo or people to a location) without pointlessly limiting the approaches that can be used to meet them
* Invest R&D into general-use reusable systems instead of bespoke stuff that has to be redesigned from scratch for every program. This is especially timely for Mars, as there are multiple private companies who are all working on projects already (SpaceX, BO, Rocket Lab, Impulse)
This is all great stuff that deserves to be loudly applauded, and it is strictly better than continuing to dump billions into Boeing and Lockmart with terrible results.
If the pointless cutting of already-completed science projects gets fixed, I will be 100% onboard.
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Little or no new hardware would need to be developed. Existing vehicles (Falcon 9/Dragon), in combination with the Starship HLS that is already necessary for Artemis III, could replace SLS and Orion as soon as the Starship HLS is ready for a crewed landing, i.e. by Artemis III, and definitely soon after.
Falcon 9/Dragon (or hypothetically any other LEO capable crew system) could shuttle crew between Earth and LEO. A second Starship could shuttle crew between LEO and the HLS in lunar orbit. The second Starship would not need to launch or reenter with crew, and could therefore initially be a stripped down HLS copy that would circularize into LEO propulsively. For competition/redundancy, other vehicles like Blue Origin's HLS or their planned capsule could be substituted later.
Whereas, Artemis III must be the final flight of SLS Block I. Any further use of SLS would require the long-delayed and overbudget SLS Block IB (or later II), with its still-in-development Exploration Upper Stage, and still-being-built Mobile Launcher 2.
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Personally, I think NASA should get out of the rocket building business and do another round of COTS funding. Get a few more players in game and get some diversity and options. NASA should then spend its money, time, and energy working on the ground breaking scientific advances and exploration that the private industry can't or won't do. Do the sample return, build a new space telescope, keep developing methods for long term space travel and use them for exploration.
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Elon is just trying to fulfil President Obama's vision: /s
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/11/obama-mars-mission-nasa-habitats-space-travel-2030
But seriously, the last 40 years have seen a continual toing-and-froing between Mars and the Moon as NASA’s primary deep space objective. Why would this administration be any different?
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Ah, it's a different Vought.
For a moment I did a double-take and thought that Vought International was running things now. How do I get in touch with The Boys?
For a moment I did a double-take and thought that Vought International was running things now. How do I get in touch with The Boys?
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Like so many things, it depends.
The first was due to the enormous military potential, it made complete sense to approach it as an existential threat. The question is how does that apply here? The prize needs to be shiny enough, and I am not sure moon or Martian consolidation justifies that.
I completely want to see NASA funded, because the technical and scientific challenges are worth investing in. Is SLS the right way to do it? Maybe not. But there arent options on the table here, climate funding won't increase if SLS gets canned. So in isolation it becomes is SLS alone valuable enough to continue? That is a pretty tough answer, at least until Blue Origin becomes a valid competitor in the market. Once that happens? Probably not.
Unrelated, I firmly believe that NASA should get more bang for their buck. Can one of the last people in the room with Trump explain how we are currently getting ripped off by subsidizing Musk?
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Thus, this in the 2025/26 budget proposal:
Artemis III is quite a few years out still. Artemis II is almost certain to slip to next year (which would just be the latest slip of many). Artemis III is waaaaay more ambitious than II, and will of course slip. It's currently scheduled for mid-2027, and I'd be shocked if it flew before late 2028.
Keep in mind that those years will have SpaceX working towards their piece of Artemis III, the human landing system. Starship will need to launch tankers at a fast cadence, do orbital rendezvous and refueling, operate beyond low Earth orbit, have a full life support system for crew, and do landing on and relaunch from the Moon.
With all that really hard stuff achieved in order for Artemis III to fly, doing Artemis IV without SLS or Orion is pretty straightforward in comparison. SLS and Orion just aren't that special. They're old, conservative tech. The only reason they cost an arm and a leg is because of who's making them.
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I guess this will make me the devil's... prosecutor?
Or maybe commercial spacecraft's better track record comes thanks to NASA's experience, not despite it.
The lessons learned from Apollo 1 through Discovery informed the safety culture in today's NASA and that shaped the space agency's management of the commercial cargo and crew programs. The impartial safety oversight you're looking for is already here.*
*If imperfectly implemented, cf Starliner's Crew Flight Test.
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Artemis II has already slipped to next year. It is currently targeting April 2026, but there are noises being made that it could launch in February.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II#Launch_date
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Not sure I agree. Wouldn't Starliner be considered a "commercial spacecraft" ?
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crony capitalism, criminal billionaires, and a convicted sex offender will conspire to turn over rest of space program to said evil billionaire, whilst the rest sit on the sideline and decry said outcome.
That is what happens next.
couldn’t happen to a nicer country.
Still enjoy skipping elections? And I mean each and every election.
That is what happens next.
couldn’t happen to a nicer country.
Still enjoy skipping elections? And I mean each and every election.
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The quiet part has finally been said out loud.
“The extent of an Artemis lunar surface presence would be determined by several factors, including the cost and safety of this transportation program and whether there are meaningful things for astronauts to do on the Moon.”
And one could replace ‘The Moon’ with any other celestial body.
Once the technical tour de force of getting there is over, and the flags, footprints and million dollar rock boxes are done - what happens next and will enough people deem it worth paying for, either through taxes, or by stumping up enough cash to buy a ticket themselves?
I think this is the big unanswered question, especially for any sort of commercial crewed presence beyond cis-lunar space.
“The extent of an Artemis lunar surface presence would be determined by several factors, including the cost and safety of this transportation program and whether there are meaningful things for astronauts to do on the Moon.”
And one could replace ‘The Moon’ with any other celestial body.
Once the technical tour de force of getting there is over, and the flags, footprints and million dollar rock boxes are done - what happens next and will enough people deem it worth paying for, either through taxes, or by stumping up enough cash to buy a ticket themselves?
I think this is the big unanswered question, especially for any sort of commercial crewed presence beyond cis-lunar space.
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Almost all cargo carrying aircraft are near identical twins to passenger carrying aircraft. The same was also true for boats and trains for large parts of their existence. And there is still a large middle area for road vehicles that are made in both passenger and cargo variants. Building a space version of the Boeing 737 would absolutely be a good way to bring costs of both cargo and passenger flights down compared to a constant stream of one off vehicles.
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You're not taking in account that the collective knowledge built within those programs came from the collective failures at the time that lessons were learned of. It's not like many private corporations were able to pioneer space projects back then, so of course what to do now is fairly obvious.
No, the safety isn't inherently better in a specific organizational structure, but we do have ample proof over the years of what corporations will do for profit without regulation. Also we have ample proof where the returns go: taxpayer funded advancements go to the collective knowledge back to the public, and taxpayer funded government contracts go to corporations who then funnel profits to the C-suite and rich investors at an exponentially higher rate, who also then locks any advancements from the base of collective knowledge behind IP laws.
I say if SpaceX or anyone else wants to run a space program, then so be it. Issue corporate bonds and crowdfund projects, or let it come out of Musk's pocket himself.
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