EJ's Space and Rocket Revue! (BREAKING NEWS EDITION) 12/4/24

[rangeG]

I know its a hard topic, but I seriously think, that putting american feet back on the moon is going to unite people similar to Inspiration 4 or DEMO 2. And I say that as a European.

Sorry, if it is not meant to be put here. Just got to the point in the stream. Positivity and not partisanship.

[addickland]

The thing is, if NASA were to officially announce that Mars is the end goal, they would really only have two options:
1, join forces with SpaceX to work within the Starship architecture,
or 2, build their own system based on Orion and a transfer vehicle (maybe a cycler) based on a better execution of Gateway like you talked about.

The thing about option 2 is nobody buys that NASA will put humans on Mars before SpaceX does with Starship, given the headstart and resources SpaceX has by now, so that one is prematurely a dead end (everyone would see it as a race, no way around that, full stop) unless you assume Starship will utterly fail on all fronts, which seems really, really unlikely at this point. I highly doubt NASA will get much political support for developing their own architecture independent from and unreliant on SpaceX, given how hard SpaceX is gunning for that milestone and how much NASA would have to do just to get where Starship is now, because no other company is anywhere close to that, and as you say gateway won't help them get there either, so that one would have to chage radically too. That's not a sub-10 year project, and even if it were, SpaceX is probably a lot fewer years than that away from just staight-up doing it.
At the same time, officially joining SpaceX as a junior partner isn't the most glamorous or politically viable path either given how vertically integrated SpaceX is and how many jobs that type of change would risk. SpaceX would love NASA's astronauts, technical and political support and legal advice, but they wouldn't be reliant on NASA in any way and everyone would know it. Meaning that neither option seems really attractive from NASA's pov if they want to not get into political problems.

So to me, if NASA needs to have a big bold vision to strive for short-term like you suggest, it makes most sense for them to focus on the moon for now. Announce support for SpaceX's Mars ambitions once orbital refueling and life support have been proven to work on Starship, and only then start actually forming and training astronaut crews in accordance with SpaceX, but leave them to shoulder the technical and monetary costs and risks.

So, Jared's task at NASA over the coming year or so should be (imho) to put together a detailed, bold, and all-inclusive plan to build up a major lunar colony (on the order of hundreds of permanent inhabitants at least) over the coming decade. Adapt, improve or (sadly, imo most likely) cancel SLS, orion and especailly gateway and replace them with Starship and Falcon+dragon (for now) to get there and back, but otherwise form a large coalition of companies, NASA divisions and any foreign space agencies who will be looking for a new international space-oriented partnership with the US now that the ISS will soon be retired, to build out all the aspects of a true permanent colony on the Moon.

That would be a big enough vision that NASA would have no shortage of needed projects to start working on immediatly, could utilise SpaceX's rockets (read: HLS Starship) to get all those things to the moon relatively cheaply, without competing with SpaceX in any way on anything major (as they would do if they tried to go for Mars without relying on Starship), and partner with all their old suppliers and international partners to build everything that's needed. So like you said, expand the Artemis program in a concrete way. Give NASA and its divions aggressive but doable targets to hit to build out that lunar base, and make sure that actual construction on the Moon has actually, viably begun by the end of 2028 so it can't be completely cancelled even if politics flips a 180 degrees again. In the meantime it'll also minimize political opposition while maximizing NASA's talents, and make use of both government and commercial programs.

That'd be my suggestion to Jared anyway. Will be interesting to see if he gets approved and what happens if he does.