Trevor Mahlmann
Nearly two years ago, then-Vice President Mike Pence delivered the most important space policy speech of his tenure. At a National Space Council meeting at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Pence outlined the Trump administration’s plans to land humans on the Moon by 2024.
“We need to redouble our efforts here in Huntsville and throughout this entire program,” Pence said with engineers leading the development of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. “We need to accelerate the SLS program to meet this goal. But know this: the president has instructed NASA and administrator Jim Bridenstine to achieve this goal in any way necessary.”
At the time, NASA engineers at Marshall told Pence that they were confident the SLS rocket would make its debut flight in 2020, and set up a schedule to allow astronauts to the moon in 2024. single rocket or contractor. The moon was the goal – not the means to it.
“If our current contractors are unable to meet this goal, we will find a solution,” Pence said in Huntsville. “If American industry can provide critical commercial services without government development, we will buy them. And if commercial rockets are the only way to bring American astronauts to the Moon in the next five years, then they will be commercial rockets. . “
Two years have come and gone since then. The vice president’s ambitious 2024 goal to land on the moon fell out of reach. Pence left office. And of course, the SLS rocket did not launch in 2020. Now it is virtually certain that it will not be launched before 2022. What comes next?
Any resources needed
What has to do with the Space Launch System rocket is one of the biggest questions about the space policy that the Biden administration, which has not yet named its main leaders, will have to face in the coming months. It’s true that the big rocket that NASA spent a decade and developed nearly $ 20 billion is getting closer to launch. However, there are no guarantees as to when the SLS will be ready.
From Pence’s speech, it’s clear that he spent time on knowledge of NASA’s issues, was frustrated and then tried to pay attention. This rocket was originally scheduled to launch in 2016, and he was fed up with delays. Pence felt the country could do better. As one senior astronaut who was not a supporter of the Trump administration told Ars: “He’s the first vice president to give a chance – over space in 20 years.”
The reality, however, is that the White House without extraordinary effort cannot correlate a program like the SLS rocket, which enjoys broad support in Congress and supports work across the country. And the Trump administration never did.
When the pressure hit, the White House, along with NASA, Congress, and the big contractors like Boeing building the SLS rocket, spent about $ 2.5 billion each year to keep it going. And although the SLS was not launched in 2020, it did reach a test stand in Mississippi in preparation for a major static fire test earlier this month. The aim was to set fire to the four main engines of the rocket for four to eight minutes, indicating that it was ready for launch. Unfortunately, the nuclear phase of the rocket fired only 67.2 seconds, and now NASA is considering whether to test the rocket again before sending it to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After the test on January 16 and after a news conference to discuss its preliminary results, Ars spoke to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. He acknowledged that things were not going according to plan, but said the SLS program was moving forward. “We’re close,” he said. “We’re so close.”
When Pence drew up the Moon Plan in 2019, it fell to Bridenstine to plow together the plan to bring people to the lunar surface within five years. Within days of Pence’s speech, Bridenstine seemed to be doing exactly that. He appeared before Congress and said NASA was studying the possibility of using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which was already flying, to do the job. But very soon, influential members of Congress told him to fend it off. Despite Pence’s discussion about finding other contractors, the House and Senate had none of it. For most of the rest of his tenure, Bridenstine only talked about SLS launching people to the moon. The “commercial rocket” uprising was over.
Only after the big nuclear test of January and with less than four days in his tenure as NASA administrator, Bridenstine faltered slightly about this position. “NASA needs to go back and see what the options are to go to the Moon as soon as possible,” he said. “And I think the SLS rocket is going to be the option when we talk about sending people to the moon.”
Opportunity costs
The SLS rocket may be close, but the NASA cost is high to fly it. Although the agency does need a large, powerful rocket to send people and many loads into deep space, it may not need one based on technologies from the space age era, which is now almost 50 years old, as the SLS booster is not.
In this way, NASA misses the revolution in a launch led by SpaceX, but soon followed by Blue Origin in the United States and other space agencies around the world. As China, Europe, Japan and others look to their next generation of rockets, they are all being reused and the potential for many launches instead of a few.
Speaking of why his Blue Origin rocket business was designed for reuse from the start, Jeff Bezos made this remark in 2016. ‘Right now, the things you do in space must be incredibly important and because access to the space is so expensive. “If you can do it any other way, you will do it,” Bezos said. That’s why you get very few launches. It changes if you can dramatically reduce access costs, and the only way to do that is reusability. “
By spending the past decade developing a large, expensive single-use rocket, NASA has largely ignored technologies that could potentially enable a more sustainable space transportation system. Until recently, the space agency did not invest in reusable spacecraft to move cargo between the earth and the moon, harvest water sources from the moon and asteroids, and store and transfer propellants into space. These technologies – coupled with low-cost launches – are likely to be the breakthroughs that will facilitate space travel in the 21st century. Instead, Congress told NASA to look back rather than look forward.
After this month’s aborted static rocket test, the future of the SLS rocket is uncertain. No one is sure how Biden’s government will proceed or what the congressional response may be. However, we can make assumptions.
If the SLS rocket fails catastrophically during the test phase, which is unlikely or does not succeed with the first test launch in a year or so, the program will become much more vulnerable to cancellation. This may seem unfair, but given the linear nature of the SLS rocket design and development program, it does not really undergo a “test” campaign, but rather a “validation” campaign.
The second thing that would probably accelerate the end of the SLS rocket is the successful launch of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle on a Super Heavy rocket. This launch system has a greater lifting capacity than SLS, is completely reusable and can probably be operated at a tenth of the cost – or much less. This could happen before the end of 2021, but the ambitious Starship program still has to tackle significant technical challenges.
The fact that the lunar landing target of 2024 is no longer achievable may be large in the Biden administration’s calculation regarding SLS. If the big rocket is no longer needed soon for a landing in 2024, what’s the harm in waiting for cheaper commercial rockets to come together? More likely, however, the Biden government will continue to fund the SLS rocket, but may try to delay or stop funding for an improvement – the Exploration Upper Stage developed by Boeing – which will cost billions of dollars more .
We will have to get some answers to these questions in the coming months.