What the 2020 election means for the moon may not seem all that critical at the moment, what with the pandemic pressing down, police violence raging unabated, and the Supreme Court set to roll back the clock to 1950. But the thing about the future is … it would be really nice if we could all have one. And advances in science, including space science, will be a big factor in what that future might be like.
Over the last half-dozen changes in White House residents—and really, since its inception—NASA has been a political football, with goals that are redefined every four to eight years. Both White House administrations and NASA administrators long ago adopted the idea that one way to maintain support for an agency—whose goals were always going to seem like “pie in the sky” to some Americans—was to turn every program into a jobs program, chopping projects into pieces and distributing them to key congressional districts to lock down necessary votes.
As a strategy for producing a persistent agency which has sailed on through the decades, that’s worked. It has also turned into a very good source of information about our own planet while providing a fantastic set of STEM careers and technological advances. However, as a platform to constantly promote new challenges and propel the nation forward with projects that capture the imagination and lift the human spirit … it’s a very mixed bag.
And with the most consequential election in several generations on the line this Tuesday, it’s not surprising that those consequences could literally reach into the heavens.
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Every incoming administration has felt the urge to put its own stamp on NASA, and many seem to start with the same assumption—the agency is old, stodgy, and engaged in the wrong goals. With a fresh hand at the tiller, a cleaning out of old programs, and a decisive new goal, NASA can once again wave the banner of progress and take the nation to the moon. Or to Mars. Or … something.
As an example, during the 2008 campaign Barack Obama pledged to delay NASA’s new human-carrying rocket, the Constellation program, to free up money for educational programs. Other Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) objected, mostly because with the end of the shuttle, a lack of any crew-rated rocket would leave NASA absolutely dependent on Russia for getting astronauts to the International Space Station.
An independent commission was also set up to look into the badly over-budget and behind schedule Constellation, and give recommendations on how to get it back on track. The commission came up with three options. Obama went with none of them. Along with scrapping plans to return to the moon in favor of moving on to Mars, Obama ended the Constellation program in favor of a new heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). SLS reused some bits from Constellation, some bits from the shuttle, and little new technology. That dependence on existing technology was supposed to make the craft easier to build and keep costs under control.
SLS was supposed to see first flight by 2015. Instead, it’s had an unending series of setbacks, delays, and redesigns. In 2020, SLS still hasn’t flown, and after numerous revisions. dropped capabilities, and a scaling back of goals, it’s not completely sure that it ever will.
But there were plenty of Obama-era programs at NASA that went pretty darn well. The Kepler telescope was launched to look for planets outside the Solar System. Juno entered orbit around Jupiter and began the return of spectacular photos and data. A whole new squadron of probes arrived around Mars to both sample its surface and analyze it from above. Many of these systems got their start before Obama took office, but his administration provided the resources and political support to see them through.
One thing that surprised many, including Republicans, was that Obama’s team supported an expanded use of public-private partnerships in space. That included doubling down on the 2005 Commercial Cargo program with the Commercial Crew Program. It was that program, first signed in 2011, that finally saw Americans flying into space on an American rocket again in 2020—almost a decade after the last shuttle was grounded.
When Donald Trump came in, it wasn’t surprising that he moved the pointer from Mars back to the moon. After all, if Obama wanted Mars, then Trump had to aim somewhere else. Where he aimed was an a deadline that made even the most enthusiastic workers at NASA gulp—putting humans back on the moon by 2024. A redo of 1969 may have seemed like a gimme. However, considering that the plan to do this included a rocket that had never flown, landers that hadn’t been developed, and a moon-orbiting space station that was nothing more than a sketch, a pretty good argument could be made that it was at least as ambitious as Apollo, and on a tighter timeline.
As might be expected, that timeline is still looking very tight. However, NASA has leaned heavily into the partnerships with private space companies that started under George W. Bush and Obama to select a series of possible contenders for parts of the system. The plan now is for a handful of missions that would be very similar to those conducted under Apollo, followed up by a more ambitious lunar program that would use landers from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, or a craft from SLS prime contractor Dynetics, or a genuinely massive lander from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
But with the election at hand … what happens now? Will any of those plans move forward, or is NASA about to get yet another do-over?
As Reuters reports, a Joe Biden administration would very likely call for a delay in the Artemis program—the plan to return to the moon. However, that doesn’t mean it’s about to kill SLS, pull back support for the lunar landers being offered up by private companies, or reset the pointer for Mars.
Instead, Biden is likely to start with a decision that seems both boring and utterly necessary: Extending funding for the International Space Station (ISS). Trump has already announced that he was pulling the plug on the station in 2025, with no replacement in sight. It was a decision that makes no sense, as the ISS has proven itself as an invaluable platform for experimentation in microgravity and evaluating the effects of space on the human body. Any administration that is serious about going anywhere in space, needs something like ISS to test out new technologies. After all, it’s much nicer to find out about problems with Earth just a few hundred miles away, rather than hundreds of thousands … or millions.
Another goal that lacks the pizzazz of planting a flag anywhere, but comes with the benefit of saving lives and scoring critical science, is a reestablishment of NASA’s Earth science program. Expanding Earth science was a critical drive under Obama. However, Trump seems to have regarded those sneaky satellites as just another way to prove that the climate crisis was not a Chinese hoax. Biden will add support to both the analysis of data from existing satellites, and the launch of new systems to monitor the warming world and provide good coverage of weather events.
On the big goals—back to the moon! On to Mars!—Biden’s team is undecided. They’re also not set on whether they will keep or scrap the SLS. NASA is now scrambling to complete critical tests of the system before the end of the year, a fact that is not completely unrelated to an expected change of hands on the national tiller.
And honestly, indecision … is probably the best decision. Right now, both SpaceX and Blue Origin seem poised on the brink. The Superheavy/StarShip system that Musk’s crew is building in Texas could completely revolutionize the whole idea of human spaceflight, providing a system that could extend across the solar system. But it’s also hugely ambitious and risky. It simply may not work. Meanwhile, Bezos’ Blue Origin is assembling their New Glenn heavy lift rocket in a massive factory right on the doorstep of Kennedy Space Center. They’ve been notably more secretive and significantly slower about putting that system together than SpaceX, but their patient progress may pay off when the new system is hauled out into the sunshine next year. And finally, Boeing and other traditional players in the market are getting desperate about the possibility of being left on the sidelines. They not only have their own new rockets on the way—along with Boeing’s contract to deliver astronauts to the ISS—they’re kicking out new designs and looking at plans that are decidedly more radical than anything they’ve produced over recent decades.
What NASA most needs from Biden is steadiness and a breather from changes made because they make good fodder for press conferences. It sounds like they’re going to get what they need.