There is an interesting piece on Ars Technica today. First, some background — as many of you know, the U.S. is, in some way, headed back to the moon. The program of record, known as Artemis, uses the Space Launch System from Boeing, the Orion capsule from Lockheed Martin, and a lander known as the Human Lander System, which is based on the Starship from SpaceX.
The problem is that the HLS is behind schedule, and this falls squarely at the feet of people like Ted Cruz, and previous Congresses. And that means that, potentially, we might not beat China to the Moon.
Which brings me to the Ars Technica article, that I mentioned earlier. Eric Berger, who has done extensive reporting in the space industry, lays out how and why China is ahead in the lunar race
The fundamental problem is that NASA, at the direction of Congress, was spending all of its exploration funds developing Orion, the SLS rocket, and ground systems for some future mission. This made the big contractors happy, but their cost-plus contracts gobbled up so much funding that NASA had no money to spend on payloads or things to actually fly on this hardware.
In short, Congress has fallen in love with traditional cost-plus contract models, and doesn’t want to give them up. So, how do we solve this?
Ars can now report, based on government sources, that Blue Origin has begun preliminary work on a modified version of the Mark 1 lander—leveraging learnings from Mark 2 crew development—that could be part of an architecture to land humans on the Moon this decade. NASA has not formally requested Blue Origin to work on this technology, but according to a space agency official, the company recognizes the urgency of the need.
There is another issue that has to be discussed, though, beyond the first lunar mission. Yes, it’s important to beat the Chinese to the Moon, but we also need to understand why beating the Chinese to the lunar surface, so we can determine what happens after that first mission.
So, why are the Chinese interested in going to the Moon? It’s soft power, but it’s not soft power in the sense of flags and footprints. Rather, it’s soft power in terms of economic control and power. China has said that it wants to see a $50 Trillion earth moon economic zone by 2050. Thats much more than 1 or 2 visits every other year, which is what the current Artemis Architecture is giving us. To do that, our space enterprise must bring the cost of operations down, and provide value going to the moon for individuals and companies, not just countries.
This is where the Evolvable Lunar Architecture report comes in. This is a NASA report from 2015, that details how you can lower the costs for Earth-lunar activity. But to do that, we need to have an off-ramp for the Space Launch System, and move beyond space as a place for defense contractors.
(Full disclosure, I am actively involved in this world, as I make my living in space policy.)
