Back To The Journey To Nowhere (Update)
AIA’s Mike French on House NASA Authorization Act
“The space policy community should be smiling. After record marks last month, we now have bipartisan, bicameral support across Congress and the Executive Branch to return to the Moon this decade and go on to Mars. On the eve of an anticipated strong budget request, I’m looking forward to working as a community to secure and fund this consensus.”
Commercial Spaceflight Federation statement on House Space Subcommittee Draft NASA Authorization Bill
“As written, the NASA Authorization bill would not create a sustainable space exploration architecture and would instead set NASA up for failure by eliminating commercial participation and competition in key programs. As NASA and the White House have repeatedly stated, any sustainable space exploration effort must bring together the best of government and commercial industry to achieve a safe and affordable 21st century space enterprise. We look forward to working with members of the House Space Subcommittee to address a number of concerns with the bill.”
Letter to Congress From The Commercial Spaceflight Federation Regarding The NASA Authorization Bill
“This Committee should withdraw this bill and engage in a fully transparent process to seek NASA, industry, academic, and public input in a meaningful way. This legislation was apparently drafted with no input from critical stakeholders, the public, or even Members of the Committee, and should be reconsidered.”
Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Statement Regarding H.R. 5666
“However the path to executing this goal – including meaningful activity at the Moon – remains a topic of significant discussion, and this bill is helping to spark a robust exchange about the best way to achieve that bipartisan vision.”
Keith’s note: Vice President Pence put his authority on the line last Spring when he directed NASA to do the Artemis return to the Moon effort by 2024 “by any means necessary”. His direction had the implied, implicit backing of the President. And Pence entrusted NASA to make it happen. Jim Bridenstine took that ball and, to his credit, ran long and strong with it.
Now Congress, in a bipartisan action in the House with new NASA Authorization legislation, delays human landings, deletes hardware and puts a new item in the critical path, and deletes any useful use of capabilities on the lunar surface once we return with humans. Exploration and utilization is now Flags and Footprints 2.0. This action by Congress seeks to kick Pence and Bridenstine in the knees and remove any urgency or sense of purpose. While the 2024 date did have a few people wondering if it was doable, NASA’s push to try and make it happen has been admirable – and refreshing – at least in my personal opinion.
The exact means whereby NASA would accomplish this 2024 goal has been lacking and is overdue for delivery. A rebooting of HEOMD management led to a rethinking of the overall game plan thus delaying things further. Congress has expressed doubts too. A new federal budget is due to be dropped by the White House soon wherein their plans for NASA will be revealed. Now this proposed legislation seeks to impose its own, downsized architecture upon NASA, undermine presidential directives, and negate a series of high-level procurements NASA has already put into motion.
Are there other ways to accomplish this 2024 goal? Of course there are. But that is not what this legislation does. It eviscerates the goal itself and shoves it off into an increasingly distant and uncertain future.
There is some discontent on the part of Users Advisory Group (UAG) members to the language in the NASA Authorization bill. Some of that discontent is in the process of being conveyed up to Pence. The bill’s mark-up is scheduled 29 January and some NASA briefings to UAG members and others over NASA’s Artemis architecture issues. There is also a big FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference event here in DC this coming week and NASA will pause to mourn the people lost in the exploration of space. Lots of things happening in simultaneity.
Will Pence say something? Will Jim Bridenstine? I will be watching to see what, if anything bubbles up into the public arena. I am not sure that being optimistic is a useful place to be.
Most of the UAG is composed of big aerospace representatives and political appointees who will still make money anyway or not be affected by any change in course. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation has made their stance clear about this bill which “would not create a sustainable space exploration architecture and would instead set NASA up for failure by eliminating commercial participation and competition in key programs.”. Yet AIA’s statement and lack of any response from the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration or any other of the big aerospace industry groups suggests that they are fine with whatever happens since their corporate members and supporters will do OK. AIA’s Mike French sits inside his bubble inside the Beltway and suggests that everyone is “smiling”. In his world that is an expected opinion to promote since big aerospace will get more money to do less exploration. But who cares. The money must flow.
Keith’s update : Coalition for Deep Space Exploration has issued a statement. It is wimpy and takes no stance whatsoever – since their member companies stand to benefit the most from the way this bill is written.
Authorization acts do not necessarily affect reality since they have no teeth when it comes to actual funding. Agencies ignore these authorization acts when they can and embrace them when they need to. NASA has often operated just fine for years without an authorization act governing their activities. But these authorization bills do reflect congressional thinking that can affect appropriations. And they also reflect the impact of corporate lobbyists on that thinking.
Up until Friday afternoon NASA was embarked on a plan to swiftly return to the Moon – with some urgency, And once NASA returned it had plans to make the most of a renewed human and robotic presence on the lunar surface. Indeed, Jim Bridenstine openly talked of extracting lunar ice. That is not flags and footprints folks. That’s advanced exploration and utilization of another world.
Now the House, bolstered by some aerospace company lobbying, wants to pull back from that urgency and turn the Artemis program into a long-term, level-of-effort endeavour where all of the aerospace companies get guaranteed income while taking forever to actually accomplish the end goal. The lunar landings will now be glorified stunts, and the goal of landing humans on Mars has been replaced with a goal of simply orbiting Mars.
We went to the moon in less than a decade half a century ago – inspiring a generation in the process since it happened in a time scale they could grasp in their daily lives. Half a century later it will take us much, much longer to just do a pale imitation of that earlier effort. Where is the inspiration in that? We used to actually do great things in space. Now our national goal in space is to delay doing mediocre things as long as possible.
When I was growing up in the mid-1960s as a young boy we were all told that we’d be on the Moon by the “end of this decade”. My young life was pegged against the regular progress made toward that goal which we as a nation achieved. Jim Bridenstine has been telling young boys and girls and their parents of a similar goal. After more than a decade of development there will be a landing of men and women on the Moon in their immediate future. Now after mere months that 4 years is 8 years unless it changes again. We used to be able to set goals and meet them. Now everything is up for negotiation. Its hard to pin your hopes on something that is constantly changing.
Jim Bridenstine opened his initial presentations about going back to the Moon with a cautionary note that this is not another “Lucy and the Football” effort – one wherein everything is set up – only to have the ball taken away and the goal posts moved. NASA has been through this sort of policy stop-and-go pivoting whiplash far too many times in the half century since we dared to walk on another world.
Alas, in less than 2 years NASA is once again being denied access to the ball that was supposed to be in play. Sitting on the sidelines on the journey to nowhere is now what we aspire to instead. Sad.
More space policy news
Orion, now Artemus, has always been a Congressional jobs making program, never about actually getting to the goal.
The Chinese, Indians, or SpaceX will get there long before NASA ever gets close.
NASA’s “We’re going to Mars” will never even get to the Moon let alone the Red Planet. Congress will see to that.
One thing about this that I can’t quite figure out: The Artemis timeline gave Boeing a lot of leverage to negotiate a pretty bulletproof contract to keep SLS core production up and running no matter what. They were in a good position to institutionalize SLS’s use for at least a decade.
The new bill, while it would secure their EUS R&D funding and possibly get them a shot at the HLS contract, likely pushes off any sense of urgency about spinning up production as soon as possible. This is extremely bad for Boeing, because even a partial Starship success will pants them long before they can turn MAF into an untouchable jobs machine.
Another thing that doesn’t quite make sense: If this is a Democratic exercise in taking Republican scalps (and it certainly appears to be), why would they be feeding the same pork to the same red states? Maybe the need to slap at Trump overrides the more prosaic business of doling out pork to your friends and choking it off to your enemies, but that seems very un-Pelosi-like.
They are offering the prospect of pork to get Republican votes in the Senate. That will make it more difficult for President Trump to ignore it.
But it’s less, and more uncertain, pork than if Artemis continued as currently planned.
True, but that depends on President Trump being re-elected. If he isn’t the new President will be looking for the reset button. Perhaps with this authorization he will just go with it instead of doing anything to upset the flow of pork. Note that it has all the right talking points – Bipartisan, Exploration, Moon, Mars, to make it easy for them to get their NASA photo-op while still claiming he killed President Trump’s program.
If the goal is to provide a new president the reset button, why not wait until he/she can put his own imprimatur on the program? Meanwhile, if we take as a given that the purpose of the space program is to shovel pork at the constituents of the party in power, this doesn’t do that.
If we assume that backing things off to 2028 is only a small change, since we weren’t going to get anything much before 2026 anyway, then this could be interpreted as just giving Trump the finger rhetorically rather than substantively. But forbidding lunar water ISRU work, and effectively forbidding the use of commercial ferries for the HLS components, are real and substantively harmful changes.
Maybe Boeing has decided that getting control of HLS is more important than a clean pipeline of SLS work. That’s effectively swapping an uncertain SLS production rate for twice the SLS production rate for however many missions they can get authorized. That’s a pretty straightforward algebra problem for when one beats the other, and the language in the bill does say that they’re to do as many lunar missions as necessary.
The lunar water prohibition is the biggest red flag here. It’s also the easiest thing to get fixed in markup, though.
They may just not believe Starship could possibly be a success. It wouldn’t be the first time an incumbent got steamrolled by a disruptor due to unmerited confidence that nobody knew the business better than to them…look at Ed Colligan’s “they’re not going to just walk in” dismissal of the iPhone.
That’s a good point. It may also be that Boeing thinks that the best way to strangle Starship in the cradle is to deny it a decent BEO manifest. Since that manifest would be about 90% lunar missions, getting them shut out for the rest of decade might look like a pretty good idea, even if it makes the SLS production pipeline a bit squirrelly.
A confirmation of this hypothesis would be if Boeing starts going after CLPS.
…and sure enough, the CLPS section (333) has this in it:
This jibes pretty well with a “kill ’em early” strategy.
Sounds like Jeff and Elon need to spend more money buying congresscritters. Maybe Jeff’s friends at NGIS could hold some seminars…
If this bill passed they should just remove the going to Moon farce and just let them spin their wheels waiting on Boeing to deliver EUS and whatever other SLS block needed for Mars. Why waste the engineers time on a short detour to lunar surface which will only drag out given other NASA owned spacecraft like Orion. Moon 2028 under this bill will need a miracle to pull off before 2035 which means Mars orbit is 20240. And what is the point of Mars orbit given no experience base for 600 days contious microgravity on a crew and without isru tech which was deleted then Mars surface is off limits. This truly is a journey to nowhere and will spend billions getting there.
I believe your prediction of NASA getting to Mars in 20240 (sic) is probably reasonable. By then I hope SpaceX (or whoever) will be at Alpha Centauri …
By 20240? You could get the the Centauri worlds in that time at only 50 km/s. I really hope someone can get there faster than that. Of course, a spacecraft which is still working after 18,000 years would be pretty impressive…
“Why waste the engineers time on a short detour to lunar surface…”
Because you need enough pork flowing to keep the engineers (and more importantly the techs) employed and semi-competent at building SLS cores. If you look at this only as a jobs program, it makes perfect sense.
Called it.
This U.S. House of Representatives was never, ever, going to vote to fund a program to make Donald Trump look good. However, that does not mean that momentum will stop or that someone on the list won’t get it done before the pre-Artimus LOP-G planned lunar landing.
Look, ever since Artimus we’ve been sitting in this forum bemoaning the flags and footprints turn that LOP-G had headed towards when the President tried to put a Lunar landing on the 2024 calendar…even while praising the new energy that Artimus injected into space exploration in general.
Is it really about whether or not Trump looks good? Where was the money going to come from?
While I appreciate the renewed emphasis toward boots on the Moon that this Moon rush we call “Artimus” has instigated, I find it very difficult to believe that the “Moon by 2024” thing was ever seen in Trump’s eyes, or this House of Representative’s view, as anything but an attempt to make a moon landing part of Trump’s legacy.
Another thought if Moon isn’t until 2028(assuming the agency owning and designing the vehicle could even hold to that date) what are they going to do in the interim? How many SLS/Orion replays of Apollo 8 at $2B a pop can the public stomach waiting on a moon mission to arrive? Even if you toss in an Apollo 9 lander test in Leo and Apollo 10 dress rehearsal it still is pretty boring at one flight a year.
Here we go again… Lucy is about to take the ball away – again… 🙁
What Matthew Black said….
The authorization bill may still go through changes as it gets marked up by the Senate and perhaps further WH input, but I don’t have the loss of hope that Keith commiserates ;-). The way I read it, Artemis 3 is still on track for 2024 if NASA pushes for that date. The only additional requirement placed by the bill is that the Lunar Gateway (or Mars Gateway if the bill passes) shall not be required for the lunar lander. So the gateway can be furbished with a lander, but NASA needs to have a direct way of landing on the Moon without the Gateway (presumably because it’s a capability needed for Mars). The lander also has to belong to the US. Other than that, everything else can stay the same. I don’t mean to be flip about the requirement, it will mean adjustments and technical solutions, but the bill doesn’t really change the near term goals. The casting aside of in-situ resources exploration, non-Mars related exploration of the Moon and Permanent Lunar outpost is not a ban – just a separate cost request. In four years, if we land on the Moon, the 2024 Congress can choose a new direction. Also, in the current proposal, commercial landers and logistics suppliers are all allowed. So that growth is not stumped. I agree, I wish it directly supported NASA’s current 2024 trajectory, and contractor influence is more than apparent – but it has enough to keep the current trajectory intact, while adding a directive to keep Mars in NASA’s sights. Constellation 2.0!
All true, but I’ll be slightly more cynical. The bill in question says that lunar activities will have to funded by a different part of NASA’s budget. It does not authorize increased funding for other parts of NASA’s budget to cover that. So that would be a problem for the Artemis program.
I would tie the next three astrophysics decadal (30 years) to the Gateway at L2
This proposal kills any Lunar lander that uses Gateway
The next really big space telescopes will need human tended assembly togather with robots
Extremely large space telescope lend themselves to in space repair
This telescope industry at L2 could be a future customer of Lunar sourced consumables
The Gateway is your knowledge base as a Mars Transit vehicle
The bill is correct in direct Lunar landing
But I would like to see a all commercial services effort without SLS but congress is not going to kill that program right away
I and two other folks would want a EUS thats a very large ULA ACES
IE you want to salvage something from big badly thought out programs
This may be a good chance to see how serious President Trump is about this idea of a lunar landing by 2024. This is really Authorization bill has just been introduced, not voted on, even in committee, or even discussed in committee. It’s also the House Authorization bill, and it will have to be reconciled with the Senate Authorization bill. And the Senate bill (also still to be voted on, I believe) is more friendly to the idea of a 2024 lunar landing. (Note that “more friendly” in this case means lukewarm as opposed to hostile…) That means there is plenty of time and room for the administration to express an opinion or perhaps try to twist an arm or two. I expect the administration will expend very little political capital on this. But it will be interesting to see if it’s very little or none at all.
Yea!!!! More money for illegals and pork!! Country is a joke as usual!
To paraphrase the famous letter from Lincoln to McLellan:
If the Congress isn’t going to use NASA, we would like to borrow it for a time
We can get back to the Moon in ~6 years starting from the moment when we decide to pay for results rather than effort, and leave the design of the mission up to those doing it. Would probably take under $10B, which is a tiny fraction on what we’ve spent on any one of the “On to the Moon! No, on to Mars!” pivots of the last 20 years.
But Congress has never been willing to spend even 5% of the budget on “we’ll just buy results”, because they’ve been far more interested in who gets the money than on what, if anything, taxpayers get for it.
The long pole in a Lunar return is what it has been for decades — the lander. The one thing which was promising about recent efforts is that, at last, we were getting some progress on a lander. The lander is difficult and not something likely to be developed commercially. Capsules, rocket stages, docking/berthing hardware are now all available, and the lunar ascent stage, while requiring a very tight mass budget, is small enough that there’s a lot of folks who could do it.
“The lander is difficult and not something likely to be developed commercially.”
Why ? Particularly when one (at least) of the commercial players has a particular interest on landing on Mars. So I’d imagine that a Lunar lander would be of interest.
Blue Origin (or Mr. Bezos) is interested in landing on the Moon. Mr. Musk is interested in Mars, but the technology involved in that is quite different from landing on the Moon. The existence of even a thin atmosphere is enough to change things substantially. Mr. Musk might pay for a lunar lander, but I’m not sure his heart is in it. In any case, neither would really be a “commercial” lander, any more than a sloop like the Gjøa or a ship like the Endurance were commercial vessels. They were privately owned, not government ships, but they were not sailing for money. I don’t think there is any commercial (i.e. financial) interest in lunar landers, unless NASA serves as an anchor tenant.
But Blue Origin started Blue Moon well before Artemis, so they are definitely spending their own money on this. They’d like to get NASA money but I think they’ll go alone if necessary.
As for SpaceX, I think they have made many recent remarks about using Starship as lunar lander, and in fact NASA already selected Starship as a possible cargo lander, so I don’t think we need to doubt its application on the Moon.
Overall I think we have at least two commercial players who will build lunar lander even without NASA funding.
My point was that spending their own money does not make Blue Origin or SpaceX lunar efforts “commercial.” That implies a business transaction, and with goods and/or services exchanged for money. It’s possible for something to be non-government and non-commercial. The Keck telescope in Hawai’i is privately funded (mostly) but it is not a commercial operation. Similarly, the lunar operations Blue Origin or SpaceX are considering seem to be either NASA-funded or private but not commercial.
Also, technically, NASA has not selected Starship for anything. They have qualified SpaceX to bid on future contracts, to use Starship to land robotic payloads as part of CLPS. That’s slightly different from a selection.
Space X could have the Starship land on the moon and return as a precursor to Mars. I know it is under development, but it is certainly faster and more certain than anything by NASA and congress.
To match your paraphrased Lincoln quote, I’ll add another. He once said that he used to want a general who knew how to fight, but now he simply wanted a general who _would_ fight. I’m starting to feel the same way about NASA. I don’t want experts who accomplish very little. I want someone who actually gets things done.
What can us normal people do to help change this? I am so distraught about this.
The #1 thing needed is for voters who are in districts with Republican representatives *and* NASA centers or Boeing/Lockheed plants to start visiting (no, not writing) your Congressperson to let them know that this is NOT OK.
Visiting is better than writing, but not practical for everyone. As I understand it, congressmen (or their staff) weigh constituents’ input based on how much effort it required. Upvoting a tweet is somewhere around zero weight, visiting in person is pretty high on the scale, and writing (yourself, not just signing a form letter a lobbyist put together) is somewhere in between.
I also think people outside the affected districts can make a difference. There are plenty of congressmen who just go along with what the committees do, because they don’t think anyone in their districts cares. Making them realize that some voters in their districts actually do care could help.
Write your congressman. Most of them don’t care about the space program, except for the rah-rah, mother and apple pie words. They let things like this pass because none of their constituents care enough for it to affect their votes. Letting them know that this isn’t exactly true, and that their are voters who care (other than those whose jobs are involved) might get the more apathetic congressmen to actually lift a finger.
The 2024 goal was foolish. The goals must match the funding available. Commercial input will help if private dollars are being spent.
Boeing truly is a lobbying powerhouse. They must have hooks in a majority of congresspeople. Because what this bill attempts, is to hand the entire program–booster, spacecraft, lander–to Boeing. Despite their widely trumpeted ability to overcharge, delay, and screw up every job they take on, across multiple divisions.
Verily, the Boeing lobbying team is earning those huge bonuses.
I sure wish the politicians would leave the Space Program alone… Although they are both a blessing and a curse. They want that big rocket but they don’t want to use it necessarily, It’s just so much B.S. How much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ have we spent almost going somewhere since we last went somewhere? It happens so often on both sides of the aisle.So frustrating!!! It’s definitely has the fingerprints of aerospace lobbyists all over it, stretch the program out til another one is thought up…Repeat…
No bucks…..No Buck Rogers..
Plenty of bucks have been thrown around the last 15 years.
Keith Cowing said, “When I was growing up in the mid-1960s as a young boy we were all told that we’d be on the Moon by the end of this decade…(This is another)…Lucy and the Football effort – one wherein everything is set up – only to have the ball taken away and the goal posts moved. NASA has been through this sort of policy stop-and-go pivoting whiplash far too many times in the half century since we dared to walk on another world.”
Absolutely correct! I was between 11th and 12th grade in High School when we landed on the moon. Then I was very enthusiastic about our future. Now, not so much. I am 67 years old and except for Space X there are no credible plans for manned spaceflight out of low earth orbit. That is where we have been since 1973 under both democratic and republican administrations.
Space X is the only hope we have for real advancement. NASA, congress, and the president are stuck in the mud and unwilling to get out. Even if Chinese astronauts landed on the moon tomorrow, I do not think we would be capable of changing our half century plus of corruption and incompetence. I wish this was not so, but over half a century of experience indicates that it is.