NASA goes back to the future with Artemis

Source: NASA

We should’ve been on Mars by now.

With the success and exhilaration of the Space Race of the 1960s came plans by NASA to land humanity on the red planet by the end of the twentieth century at the latest (by means of the Space Shuttle program) but those hopes were quickly quashed; the US had already reached the moon, and Congress put a swift end to any further deep space missions as public support waned. Since then, no humans have made it past Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Apollo missions remain a rose-tinted memory, embedded in the pages of history as one of mankind’s greatest achievements, rather than a first stepping stone for missions to come that would venture further.

Over 50 years after the first moon landing, NASA now wants to relive its Apollo glory days with Artemis: the new lunar program. NASA aims to put the first woman and person of color on the moon by 2025, with long-term goals of sustaining human presence on the moon and even sending missions to Mars. . The uncrewed test launch, Artemis I (a lunar flyby), finally launched on November 16th, 2022 (after several scrubs following an initial attempt on August 29th), with a crewed flyby and landing to follow in 2024 and 2025. But while her twin brother Apollo was pushed by a governmental agenda, Artemis has been bogged down by political obligations, which has led to a technological standstill, delays, and a compromised mission.

Understanding Artemis requires a look back into one of NASA’s most extensive programs: the Space Shuttle (read my post here). Despite its initial aspirations of being part of a bigger program that would ferry humans between Earth, LEO, the moon, and one day even Mars, reduced congressional funding resulted in a program focusing merely on LEO. This also led NASA to seek additional funding from agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office which, in return, demanded to use it for the launch of spy satellites; this influenced the vehicle’s design, making it bigger and bulkier than initially planned.

If NASA needed to get its funding back, it had to win back the support of both Congress and the public; the Space Shuttle program was one big PR initiative. But the design flaws due to its necessary versatility caused massive delays between missions and costs of $450 million per launch (1.6 billion including maintenance, buildings, wages, etc). In addition, the program was marred by a pattern of neglect of safety in favor of quick turnovers to dazzle Congress and the public, leading to the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

Given that the Space Shuttle program was expensive, tragic, unreliable, and unambitious – as well as continuing 15 years past its planned life – it seems surprising that Congress funded it at all. The reason has nothing to do with the program’s achievements. Essentially, Space Shuttle was a job machine. NASA worked with several private companies (and many more subcontractors) including the United Space Alliance (consisting of Lockheed Martin and Rockwell, the latter replaced by Boeing in 1996). These companies ate up a significant part of the budget: up to 90%. And, as explained here, while that seems counterproductive, it’s no secret that those companies spend millions on lobbying for congressional support in exchange for programs such as these. Congressional funding goes through NASA to the contractors, who create jobs and corporate growth, which is what voters want. What goes around comes around.

At the beginnings of the Space Shuttle program in the early 1970s, the technology was still new and relatively cutting-edge. But as the money flow described above settled nicely throughout the next few decades, there was no need to change anything about the program’s aims; actual space exploration was really an afterthought, as long as it kept the jobs. Therefore, while the world – and its technology – evolved, NASA’s program stayed largely the same.

However, after the second deadly mission failure (2003’s Columbia disaster), NASA realized something had to change, and proposed the Constellation program as the Shuttle’s successor. Its goals included reaching the moon by 2020, and eventually Mars. It would have consisted of a crew capsule, Orion, as well as a lunar lander and two new launch vehicles: the Ares I and V. But when President Obama took office in 2009, his administration found the program ‘behind schedule, and lacking in innovation’; that was after NASA spent $8 billion on Constellation with plans to spend $100 billion by 2020. In 2011, Constellation was officially canceled, coinciding with the end of the Space Shuttle program and creating a vacuum in the industry, and – more importantly to some – its contracts.

The desperate state of affairs meant that NASA needed something – anything – to work on, and fast, before unemployment struck. The answer to this, established by Congress in 2010, was the Space Launch System (SLS), a 111-meter-tall rocket intended as the shuttle’s successor, with the first launch planned for 2016. Consisting of mixed and matched elements from the shuttles, Constellation, and other canceled missions, there were initially no definitive plans for its use.

Thrown together from old, proven technology that employees could sink their teeth into immediately, the SLS required little to no innovation; once again, scientific purpose was secondary. And, as shown here, Congress explicitly demanded NASA ‘extend or modify’ existing contracts from the Shuttle and Constellation projects.

That is what earned the project the nickname ‘Senate Launch System’, and it’s not hard to see why. Most glaringly, despite Constellation (a novel project) being declared unimaginative, Congress threw its support behind this ‘Frankenstein rocket’ (as described by space advocacy NGO Space Frontier Foundation) in order to keep its jobs and contracts going.

Looking at the vehicle, that is more than clear. The core stage is designed by Boeing. The boosters are partially reused shuttle boosters (which were the culprit behind Challenger) designed by ATK Orbital, now a part of Northrop Grumman. The upper stage is also designed by Boeing. The Orion Spaceship sitting on top is a remnant of Constellation, and is designed by Lockheed Martin. And the RS-25 engines, designed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are the same – yes, the exact same ones, reused – installed on the Space Shuttles. Not a single company listed here did not work for the Congress-friendly Shuttle program.

If a decision had been made to design something new and functional with current technology, many of these contracts would have gone into limbo, with the money going to whoever could actually make the best rocket instead of the companies who reliably supply the voters. As stated by aerospace engineer and technology analyst Rand Simberg, ‘even if it never actually flies, SLS may still meet its primary mission requirement: delivering federal funding to the states and districts of those in Congress with a particular interest in NASA's budget’.

Though the above prediction was made in 2011, its accuracy is almost spooky. For one, officials sure took their time in deciding what to actually do with the thing; the Artemis program and its lunar goal was only established in 2017. Not that it mattered; the very first test launch rocket (now named Artemis I) blew by its initial 2016 launch date, finally lifting off on November 16th, 2022 after over 16 delays. It has now taken twelve years between SLS’s beginnings and its test launch; there were eight years between President Kennedy announcing the Apollo program and boots on the moon.

These delays and ever-increasing costs may be at least partially due to the vehicle itself, but they are more than welcome to NASA’s contractors. Their cost-plus contracts allow them to profit more with growing costs; in addition, NASA handed out $234 million in award fees to Boeing, its lead contractor (who are paid billions for their work), scoring the company as ‘excellent’ and ‘very good’ despite the cost overruns and delays. And yet, in its 2010 authorization, Congress insisted that keeping these companies on board saves the taxpayer termination liabilities that would have resulted from cutting them off; as stated by the Competitive Space Task Force in 2011, Congress assumes that ‘the lowest-cost approach for the future is to continue the high-cost approach in which we’ve been engaged for the past half century’.

The numbers support this theory. In March 2022, NASA inspector general Paul Martin announced to Congress that the first four Artemis launches would cost $4.1 billion – per launch – compared to the $500 million estimate of 2012. That means one launch is roughly 17% of NASA’s $24 billion budget for 2022. And though a moon rocket will be expensive any way you cut it, Congress seems to have no problem with downsizing elsewhere, such as healthcare; why would they support a machine like this without something to gain?

The discrepancy is made even more obvious by newer private space companies such as SpaceX, who in 2021 won a NASA contract worth $2.9 billion to develop a Human Landing System (to chauffeur astronauts from the Orion spacecraft to the lunar surface and back) for future Artemis missions. SpaceX’s design is simply a variant of its Starship rocket, currently in development. The two-stage Starship, which will be the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, is estimated to have a launch cost of only $10 million when the program is fully operational. But its biggest asset by far is its full reusability.

As both stages – booster and ship – can land and be refueled, mission turnaround time is shortened, launch costs are cut, and the vehicle can travel sustainably to Mars and beyond, like an airplane. In addition, the ship can dock with and refuel from another ship in orbit, meaning it can bring a full payload of 150 tons to its destination without compromising for lack of propellant; this payload is vital for establishing a lunar base, for example. Though Starship, like SLS, has yet to reach orbit, it has succeeded in landing itself, showing that technology like that can exist. But since it is politics, not science, that shapes Artemis, that’s pretty much irrelevant.

Therefore, it is clear that the fully expendable SLS is merely a mechanism that provides the cheapest way of funneling the money into jobs and contracted companies. The money doesn’t actually go into the rocket; if it did, it would be a completely different beast. Instead, it travels through the rocket into the pockets of the corporations.

Creating jobs is undoubtedly a good thing; technically, democracy is working as it should here, with lawmakers voted into office by the population representing the needs of the people. But the approach seems lazy; instead of having their contractors create new and groundbreaking technologies to bring the field ahead (subsequently expanding it), officials decided to avoid this extra effort by having them halfheartedly recreate the past, because that’s the way they’ve always done it.

So why bother including the goal to go to the moon at all? With other countries such as Russia and especially China reaching impressive levels of spaceflight prowess, the US and its superiority complex can’t keep cowering in LEO forever. When the lunar program was established in 2017 by President Trump, Vice President Pence stated the goal was ‘to settle that frontier with American leadership, courage, and values’. That may sound slightly alarming to those not from the US, and with good reason; it’s a not-so-subtle way to make a mostly scientific venture interesting to politicians and voters who don’t care about space (of which there are a fair few). Stoking the fire in a similar fashion, NASA director Bill Nelson recently commented that ‘we must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying: “It’s ours now and you stay out”’; this creates an issue for a country to unite behind politically, and space is once again a mere mechanism.

People in the 1970s, starry-eyed from the Apollo program and surrounded by the cutting-edge entertainment of Star Wars and Trek, probably figured we’d have a few centuries of planet-hopping ahead of us before political antics got in the way. But here we are, half a century later, still confined to our cradle. Returning humans to the moon would provide unprecedented scientific insights, and establishing a base there could be the jumping-off point for going to Mars and even beyond the solar system – which should have happened 20 years ago with Constellation. However, with a program like Artemis that is rooted in nostalgia, politics, and concepts of the past, this may take some time. Still, that’s not to say it won’t be spectacular; in fact, even if it is driven by politics, the simple, beautiful sight of a modern-day moon launch – and one day, people on the moon – could fuel a new surge in spaceflight that brings us further than ever before. And even if that is all it does, it will have been worth it.

Like planting a tree, the best time to send a rocket to Mars was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.