Recently, NASA selected three commercial partners to build lunar landers that will deliver the “first woman and the next man” to the lunar surface by 2024. The companies are Dynetics, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The contracts are designed along the lines of the Commercial Crew program, in which the companies will own the lunar landers, and NASA would fly on them to the moon’s surface as a customer.
The announcement was met with near-universal acclaim by space advocates for its innovative approach to space travel. Democratic Texas Rep. Bernice Johnson, who is chairwoman of the House Science Committee, and Democratic Oklahoma Rep. Kendra Horn, who is chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, are conspicuous exceptions. They are not happy and have said so.
Johnson stated, “I am troubled that NASA has decided to ignore congressional intent and instead press forward with Human Landing System awards to try to meet an arbitrary 2024 lunar landing deadline, As the Apollo program showed us, getting to the Moon and back safely is hard. The multi-year delays and difficulties experienced by the companies of NASA’s taxpayer-funded Commercial Crew program — a program with the far less ambitious goal of just getting NASA astronauts back to low Earth orbit — make clear to me that we should not be trying to privatize America’s Moon-Mars program, especially when at the end of the day American taxpayers — not the private companies — are going to wind up paying the lion’s share of the costs.”
Horn added, “I was disappointed to see that NASA’s decision on lunar landing systems development starkly contrasts the bipartisan House NASA Authorization bill and the advice of experts on minimizing risk and ensuring the highest likelihood of success in landing humans on the Moon.”
Johnson and Horn are co-sponsors of H.R. 5666, which mandates that the lunar lander be “owned by NASA” and not commercially developed and operated. Their objections have the potential to be damaging to NASA’s lunar landing plans.
H.R. 5666 is what Johnson is referring to when she writes about “congressional intent.” It passed Horn’s subcommittee in January but has yet to be taken up by Johnson’s committee, not to mention, pass the full House. Even if the bill were to pass the House, it would have to be reconciled with a Senate bill and only then signed into law. Partly because of the mandate that the lunar lander be government developed and owned, neither action is considered likely. Thus, calling H.R. 5666 “congressional intent” is presumptuous at best.
Johnson’s objection to the commercial lunar lander approach is rich, all things considered. The commercial crew program was delayed, in part, because Congress chose to underfund it in its initial years. Even with the delays and cost overruns, the commercial crew will garner considerable cost savings over traditional methods of space travel.
The objection is also ill-timed. The first commercial crew flight with astronauts is due to lift off late in May for the International Space Station.
The approach of letting NASA fund and operate the lunar lander in the traditional way is no guarantee of success. The Space Launch System, the heavy-lift rocket Congress mandated after the cancellation of the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration plan, is years behind schedule and billions over budget. Indeed, the General Accounting Office recently noted that engineers are worried the SLS’s fuel tanks may leak, a shocking development nearly a decade into the program.
With due respect to the two congresswomen, the year is 2020, not 1969. NASA has long become partners with the commercial sector, an arrangement that has benefited both. The objections raised by Johnson and Horn make no sense, unless something else is bothering them.
Ars Technica’s Eric Berger suggested that the real intent of H.R. 5666 was to hand the Artemis program to Boeing, a company that has better lobbyists than engineers and managers these days. Boeing is the prime contractor for the troubled Space Launch System.
Not coincidentally, Boeing’s bid for a lunar lander did not make the cut. One could be forgiven for wondering if the desire for pork is overriding the need to commercialize space travel.
Mark Whittington writes frequently about space and politics. He is author of Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? and The Moon, Mars and Beyond.
