The Trump Administration is but a few weeks old, but already a massive change is occurring in the future course of space exploration.
NASA is weighing in, but a lot of the change is being driven by the private sector, some eager to be part of a return to the moon, which had been off the table during the previous administration.
First, NASA announced that it is conducting a feasibility study, on behalf of the Trump administration, of sending an Orion spacecraft launched by a heavy-lift Space Launch System around the moon by 2019.
Then SpaceX’s Elon Musk just announced that two customers have paid to be launched in a crewed version of the Dragon spacecraft around the moon, launched by a Falcon Heavy as early as 2018.
Before you get too excited about the news of what might be a new race to the moon, it should be noted that space missions that have been confidently announced to occur by a certain date have often slipped farther into the future because of unexpected technical and funding problems.
NASA, stodgy and bureaucratic as it is, is not the only organization so afflicted. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy, currently scheduled for a demo flight in the summer of 2017, has suffered a number of delays. SpaceX has also announced that its planned Red Dragon mission to Mars will slip from 2018 to 2020.
Still, we have to ask ourselves what happens if Musk and the as yet unnamed space explorers succeed in pulling off a private mission around the moon.
Should NASA regard the Orion/Space Launch System as redundant, cancel its development, and go entirely commercial? The Space Launch System is far more capable, even in its current form, than the Falcon Heavy. But the SLS is also more expensive to fly, owing to the fact that it is entirely expendable, unlike the SpaceX rocket, which is partly reusable.
Another option, should the Trump administration and Congress care to spend the money, is to continue to develop the Space Launch System and use it along with commercially available rockets as America heads out into deep space, back to the moon, and on to Mars.
If there is one thing that has worked well in the realm of space travel, it is redundancy. The commercial crew program has developed not one, but two spacecraft, the SpaceX Dragon and the Boeing Starliner. The idea is that if one spacecraft has a launch failure that takes it out of commission for a while, the other can take up the slack. The same theory could apply to deep space exploration.
Musk’s commercial rival, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, has also stepped up with an idea called “Blue Moon” which would start delivering robots to the lunar South Pole to start building a moon base in 2020. The idea that this scheme would constitute an “Amazon-like” delivery service is hardly lost on anyone. Blue Moon could fly on a variety of rockets, including the planned New Glenn, which would also serve as a heavy lift rocket alongside the SLS and Falcon Heavy.
Not to be outdone, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace has proposed a space station in lunar orbit, based around one of its inflatable modules. The lunar orbit station would support operations on the moon’s surface as well as voyages beyond, say to Mars.
The new president has indicated that he would like America to go back to the moon and to do so with commercial partners.
The beauty of this approach is that space missions would happen sooner than in the current Journey to Mars program. Indeed, the White House seems keen to make things happen very quickly, as indicated by the idea of a NASA circumlunar mission in two years.
Things seem to be falling into place, thanks as much if not more to the private sector than to government space policy experts, for humans flying beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 45 years. The task ahead is to encourage that process and to not muck things up with bad policy, short sighted budgeting, or political wrangling.
Indeed, NASA had better hurry up and get in the game or else commercial companies will leave it behind in a new race to the moon.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has just published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? He is also published in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill among other publications. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. Follow him on Twitter @MarkWhittington.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Insider.
