Trump administration left Biden with rocket dilemma

Almost two years ago then-Vice President Mike Pence gave the most influential 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 program,” Pence said, speaking to the engineers responsible for the development of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. “We need to accelerate the SLS program to achieve this goal. But know this: The President has asked NASA and Administrator Jim Bridenstine to achieve this goal by any means necessary.”

At the time, Marshall’s NASA engineers told Pence they were confident the SLS rocket would make its first flight in 2020, setting a timeline to allow astronauts to return to the moon by 2024. Even thus, Pence maintained that he was not committed to any single rocket or contractor. The Moon was the goal – not the way to get there.

“If our current contractors can’t achieve this, we’ll find the ones who will,” Pence said in Huntsville. “If American industry can provide essential commercial services without government development, then we will buy them. And if commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets will do it. will be. “

Two years have passed since. The vice president’s ambitious 2024 goal of landing on the moon has become out of reach. Pence has left office. And of course, the SLS rocket didn’t launch in 2020. Now it’s almost certain not to be launched until 2022. So what happens next?

All the necessary means

What to do with the space launch system rocket is one of the biggest space policy questions facing the Biden administration – which has yet to name its key leaders – in the months to come. It’s true that the big rocket that NASA spent a decade and nearly $ 20 billion developing is getting closer to launch. However, there is no guarantee when the SLS will be ready.

From Pence’s speech, it’s clear he spent time learning about NASA’s issues, was frustrated, and sought to resolve them. This rocket was originally scheduled for launch in 2016 and he was fed up with the delays. The nation, Pence thought, could do better. As a veteran astronaut who was not a fan of the Trump administration told Ars, “He’s the first vice president to give an sh – to space in 20 years.

However, the reality is that without extraordinary effort, the White House cannot implement a program like the SLS rocket, which has broad support in Congress and supports jobs across the country. And the Trump administration never did.

When things came to fruition, the White House accompanied NASA, Congress, and big contractors like Boeing to build the SLS rocket, spending around $ 2.5 billion annually to maintain it. And while the SLS didn’t launch in 2020, it hit a test bed in Mississippi in preparation for a large static fire test earlier this month. The goal was to ignite the rocket’s four main engines for four to eight minutes, showing that it was ready for launch. Unfortunately, the center stage of the rocket only fired for 67.2 seconds, and NASA is now wondering if it should retest the rocket’s fire before sending it to its launch pad at Kennedy Space. Center in Florida.

After the Jan. 16 test and after a press conference to discuss his preliminary results, Ars spoke with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. He acknowledged that things had not gone as planned, but said the SLS program was making progress. “We are close,” he says. “We are so close.”

When Pence presented the plan for the Moon in 2019, it was Bridenstine’s responsibility to prepare the plan to bring humans to the lunar surface in five years. Within days of Pence’s speech, Bridenstine appeared to be doing just that. He appeared before Congress and said NASA was studying the possibility of using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket – already in flight – to do the job. But very soon influential members of Congress told him to take down. Despite Pence’s talk about finding other entrepreneurs, the House and Senate did not have one. For most of the remainder of his tenure, Bridenstine spoke only of the SLS that launched humans to the moon. The “commercial rocket” insurgency was over.

It wasn’t until after the big base-phase test in January, and with less than four days left in his tenure as a NASA administrator, that Bridenstine hesitated slightly on this position. “NASA needs to go back and look at what the options are to get to the moon as quickly as possible,” he said. “And I think the SLS rocket will be that option, if we’re talking about sending humans to the moon.”

Opportunity costs

The SLS rocket may be near, but the opportunity costs of piloting it are high for NASA. While the agency needs a large, powerful rocket to send humans and a lot of cargo into deep space, it may not need one based on era-era technology. the space shuttle, now almost 50 years old, as the SLS booster.

In moving in this direction, NASA is missing out on 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’re all considering the reuse and potential of many launches instead of a few.

When discussing why his rocket company Blue Origin was designed to be reused from the start, Jeff Bezos made this comment in 2016. “Right now the things you do in space have to be extremely important, and because access to space is so expensive, if you can do it another way, you will, ”Bezos said. This is why you get very few launches. This changes if you can drastically reduce the cost of access, and the only way to do that is reusability. “

By spending the entire last decade developing an expensive large rocket that could be used once, NASA largely ignored technologies that could enable a more sustainable space transportation system. Until recently, the space agency had not invested in reusable space tugs to move cargo between Earth and the Moon, harvest water resources from the Moon and asteroids, and store and transfer propellant into the ‘space. These technologies, along with low-cost launches, are likely to be the breakthroughs that facilitate space travel in the 21st century. Instead, Congress told NASA to look back rather than forward.

After this month’s aborted static fire test, the future of the SLS rocket is uncertain. No one is sure how the Biden administration will proceed or how Congress will react. However, we can make some assumptions.

If the SLS rocket fails catastrophically during the testing phase, which is unlikely, or fails on its first test launch in about a year, 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 is not really the subject of a “test” campaign but rather a “validation” campaign.

The second thing that would likely hasten the end of the SLS rocket would be the successful launch of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle on a Super Heavy rocket. This launching system has a larger lift capacity than SLS, is fully reusable, and could possibly run at a tenth the cost – or much less. It may happen before the end of 2021, but the ambitious Starship program still faces significant technical challenges.

The fact that the 2024 moon landing target is no longer achievable may loom large in the Biden administration’s calculation regarding SLS. If the big rocket is no longer needed soon for a landing in 2024, then what’s the harm in waiting for cheaper commercial rockets to arrive? It is more likely, however, that the Biden administration will continue to fund the SLS rocket but could attempt to slow down or stop funding for an improvement – the upper phase of exploration being developed by Boeing – which will cost billion dollars more.

We should get answers to these questions in the coming months.