The doubts
the hardware will have to be different compared to Apollo.
“We are procuring it in a way we haven’t done before,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told an audience at the Florida Institute of Technology in May. “Instead of NASA purchasing, owning, and operating the systems that we have done traditionally, in many cases, we’re going to be able to buy services from commercial companies with customers that aren’t NASA.”
To date, his agency has already awarded a contract to Maxar, a Colorado-based company, for the component of Gateway that will provide power and propulsion. Ultimately, astronauts will arrive at Gateway before entering a lunar lander for descent to the surface. It’s also planned to function as a command center for all lunar missions, either crewed or robotic.
Because NASA is purchasing use on the hardware rather than owning it outright – much like government officials fly on commercial flights rather than aircraft built specifically for them – companies could turn around and use the hardware for other purposes, possibly driving down costs in the long run.
“If you take that model five steps further and there really is a substantial deposit of lunar ice on the south pole and that gets converted into rocket fuel, then it becomes financially feasible for commercial entities to sell that ice in fuel form to NASA for missions heading out farther into space,” said Howard McCurdy, a space policy expert at American University.
“But there are a lot of assumptions behind that,” he said, including that infrastructure would already be in place for such commercial activities.
Despite NASA’s emphasis on bringing commercial space companies into the lunar program with different contracting mechanisms, McCurdy believes the industry still needs cash infusions to survive the challenges of spaceflight and is not yet ready to voyage on its own.
“The market is so undeveloped for space transportation, particularly beyond low-Earth orbit, that some outside infusion of money is needed in every case,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be government money, but somebody is putting up the money. Jeff Bezos is putting up his own money as outside support. The companies themselves usually don’t have enough cash on hand or access to capital to do this themselves.”
There’s historical precedent here, according to McCurdy: The First Transcontinental Railroad, despite being built by private companies, was dependent on support from the federal government in the mid-1800s.
The short-term cost, many believed, would be outweighed by the long-term gain. The same was true of the Apollo program.
The speed
When President John F. Kennedy made his famous moon speech in 1962, he initiated an end-of-the-decade goal. But as of today, NASA has only five years to achieve the same with a different generation of workers, technologies and levels of experience. The agency is moving fast to make it happen.
“This is faster. We’ve done things this fast, but maybe not of this complexity,” said Mark Wiese, manager of the logistics element of Gateway, which is based at Kennedy Space Center. “We’ve got the ability and expertise to go this fast, and actually it’s helping us focus to make sure the government looks back at high-risk areas to use our expertise and help enable commercial industry as well.”
Wiese met with with contractors at KSC this past week to relay more information to private companies on how they can submit their proposals for the logistics element of Gateway, which would launch on a commercial rocket in 2024 just before humans begin their trek.
But moving at that speed – also uncertain of whether or not Congress will approve the budget increase of $4 to $6 billion a year for NASA – means something has to give. As spaceflight engineers refer to it: the triangle of time, cost, and risk.
“Apollo was short on time, high on cost,” McCurdy said. “So if you try to constrain both the time and cost parameter, then the risk parameter goes through the roof.”
And while the risk parameter doesn’t strictly mean risk to human lives, it does also mean risk to schedules and hardware. Just one delay in the Artemis program, such as with the debut launch of SLS in late 2020 or mid-2021, could translate to a slip in the 2024 moon goal.
Despite the inertia behind NASA’s plans and advancements made by commercial spaceflight companies in the last few years, however, some believe not much as changed since Apollo – including NASA’s former chief historian.
“Ninety-plus percent of the NASA budget, including during Apollo, has always been spent on contracts of some sort or another,” said Roger Launius, now with Launius Historical Services. “And I don’t see what’s changed.”
He said the commercial spaceflight industry is more advanced and accomplished now, but that doesn’t answer the question of how NASA would operate differently moving forward.
“There’s still going to be NASA there, looking over your shoulder because they have to,” he said. “You can’t let them loose to do whatever they want.”
And beyond that, Launius said he’s skeptical Congress will appropriate the dollars for the missions, especially in a divided political climate. He noted three previous attempts, all under different administrations since the late 1980s that also proposed missions to the moon or Mars, but none of them got off the ground.
“I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “I’d love to see us go.”