Fifty-six years ago, President John F. Kennedy went to Rice University in Houston and proclaimed, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Fast forward to 2018, and it seems that NASA is taking that line too much to heart. The space agency wants to return to the moon the hard way, and the plan does not sit well with a number of outside experts.
NASA’s return to the moon program would involve spending most of a decade building a space station in cislunar space called the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, which astronauts would occupy periodically. The LOP-G would serve as a “reusable command module,” according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Astronauts would fly to the lunar space station on an Orion spacecraft launched from the super-heavy and super-expensive Space Launch System. They would then travel the rest of the way to the moon in a reusable lunar lander. The first moon boots are due to hit the lunar soil in 2028, a decade hence.
Two prominent people in the space program’s history are pushing back against the lunar gateway concept. Mike Griffin, who headed NASA during the last effort to return to the moon, labeled it “a stupid architecture” during a recent meeting of the National Space Council Users’ Advisory Group. Apollo moonwalker Buzz Aldrin also expressed his opposition to the idea.
Griffin is not entirely opposed to the Gateway. He suggested, according to Ars Technica, that “Gateway is useful when, but not before, we are manufacturing propellant on the moon and shipping it up to a depot in lunar orbit.” In other words, we should go to the moon first, then build the Gateway and not the other way around.
In The New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin, space visionary, aerospace engineer, and president of the Mars Society, recently proposed a plan called “Moon Direct” to get astronauts to the moon. The plan would use primarily off-the-shelf commercial hardware and a spacecraft called the Lunar Excursion Vehicle to set up an Earth-moon transportation system and a base from which lunar water could be mined and refined into rocket fuel. No lunar orbit Gateway, at least at first, would be necessary. Moon Direct would save a great deal of time and money in the effort to get people back to the moon.
The lunar gateway is really a holdover from the Barack Obama administration, when NASA was attempting an asteroid retrieval mission that was subsequently canceled. Why the space agency is clinging to a plan that would take a decade and many billions of dollars before the first people return to the moon is open to conjecture. The more cynical might suggest that it provides a lot of fat contracts for aerospace companies. Bureaucratic inertia is another possibility.
Speaking of expensive technology that some suggest is getting in the way of going back to the moon, Stephen Jurczyk, NASA’s associate administrator, suggested to Business Insider that the space agency would ditch the Space Launch System the moment a commercial provider such as SpaceX or Blue Origin had developed a launch vehicle with similar capabilities. On the other hand, NASA Administrator Bridenstine offered a tweet contradicting Jurczyk, reaffirming the central role the SLS has in the return to the moon and denying that it would ever be retired.
Nevertheless, such a decision to retire the Space Launch System could mean that NASA would have spent about $20 billion on a rocket that will fly, at most, two or three times before a SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket or a Blue Origin New Glenn renders it obsolete. The United States may want to consider ending the SLS now and pouring the savings into something like Zubrin’s Moon Direct scheme, not because it would be hard, but because it would be easy.
Mark Whittington is author of Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? and The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
