National Space Council Meeting On Tuesday
NASA Television to Broadcast Fifth Meeting of the National Space Council
“NASA Television and the agency’s website will provide live coverage of the fifth meeting of the National Space Council starting at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, March 26. The meeting will focus on the Trump Administration’s Moon, Mars and beyond plans, and be held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.”
Popcorn ready.
Wow! is the only thing I can say after listening to Mike Pence’s opening speech. This should at least shake things up. If I was working on SLS I would be worried about my job.
Can nine women have a baby in one month?
What precise changes to NASA processes will be necessary to land Americans on the Moon in five years?
Step 1: don’t rely on SLS.
Step 2: rely on multiple providers of commercially procured launch vehicles so that you have dissimilar backups.
Step 3: build multiple copies of all hardware needed so that a failure won’t cripple the program.
Pay SpaceX to send a Dragon2 without crew around the Moon ASAP as part of an expansion of CCP into CCP 2.0. The already have a preflown Dragon2 at the Cape, and a Falcon Heavy. It will demonstrate that all that is needed is the lander. Have a fly off between Blue Origin and SpaceX to see who builds one faster.
You forgot developing on orbit fuel transfer. I think any sort of landing would require at least two Falcon Heavy launches, the lunar vehicle (or vehicles) and one or more tankers/upper stages. And look at launch scheduling and how close in time the multiple launches need to be. (Which might result in another slap to SLS, converting LC-39B for use by a Falcon Heavy…)
The Apollo LEM had a mass of 36,000 lbs fully fueled. Falcon Heavy is able to send 37,000 lbs to the Moon, so it could send it there without any refueling.
And with modern materials you could probably eliminate a few thousand pounds from it. For example, the electronics in it weighed over a thousand pounds, but would probably weight under ten pounds using more integrated circuits. New structural materials are lighter and stronger.
With twin launches of FH you could easily send the Dragon2 and LEM to the Moon. And imagine seeing four boosters landing at the Cape within minutes of each other. ?
The Apollo _LEM_ had a mass of 36,000 lbs (agg… I just used pounds mass…) but the LEM could not get into lunar orbit on its own, and it couldn’t leave orbit and return the astronauts to Earth. That required the CSM as well, and that’s another 63,000 lbs. A single Falcon Heavy can’t get all that onto a transfer orbit to the Moon. Two Falcon Heavy launches, fuel transfer (or docking with an upper stage), Dragon 2 and a 2010s lunar lander rather than a 1960s one? It strikes me as viable, but it’s close enough that someone would have to look at the numbers.
It would be marginal and would required leveraging modern technology to make a new lander much lighter. But I believe SpaceX would be up to it. SpaceX would also likely think out of the box and find a way to add a decent/ascent module to the Dragon2 and it’s service module to reduce weight even more.
But it’s academic as Elon Musk say on Twitter he will give it a shot with the Starship/Super Heavy.
With a five year deadline, I really think minimizing hardware development is essential. Using an existing launch vehicle might require two launches (or three or four), but that’s probably better than the schedule risk for developing a new one. But it’s Mr. Musk’s company, so he can do it however he likes.
As far as how to use the existing hardware, you realize we’re repeating the Apollo mission mode debate, don’t you? Earth orbit rendezvous versus a direct landing. You are quite correct that technology has improved since Apollo, but I don’t think it’s improved enough to support a direct landing/ascent vehicle launched on a Falcon Heavy. At least, I think that would involve a whole lot of development risk, while I think on orbit fuel transfer or docking would be relatively easy implement.
The important part is that things have changed since Apollo. It would be a mistake to just go with lunar orbit rendezvous because that’s what they settled on in 1962. But I have a suspicion someone will say revisiting the mission mode is a waste of time and we obviously should do it the way Apollo did.
Offer a $10 billion dollar X prize. Anything else would require structural changes in a fifty year old bureaucracy. Or tearing it down and starting over from scratch. I can’t see either of those options, plus the time to get to the Moon, happening in a five year timeframe.
Four Falcon Heavy launches, two of them modified upper stages to push the payloads of the other two to an appropriate lunar orbit, and maybe a Falcon 9 launch to ferry the crew to LEO if you don’t want to pay and wait for Falcon Heavy to become human-rated for launch. It could be done, probably well within $10 billion.
$10 billion was just my guess at “substantially less than NASA would spend on SLS/Orion/LOP-G/etc. in five years.” If someone can do it for $1 billion and laughed all the way to the bank, NASA would still be saving money.
I definitely think that would be enough to get SpaceX or Blue Origin to take a crack at it (and not just them). Even if it took them $5 billion to do it, they’d double their investment doing so – they could probably find borrowers willing to back them at that profit margin.
What precise changes to current NASA processes will be necessary to land Americans on the Moon in five years?
Bypass them entirely. Go back to the original Commercial Cargo COTS model, where the contractors could cherry-pick useful NASA expertise but NASA could *not* burrow into and control the contractors’ development processes.
No other way it can happen.
Absolutely. We’ve seen how commercial crew has been delayed by NASA oversight.