Main Engine Cut Off - T+121: Artemis, Blue Moon, Starship, and Politics

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

NASA and the White House released a summary of the FY2020 budget amendment this week, alongside the new name: Project Artemis. I talk through some political fallout, what the future may hold, and the chaos elements that are Blue Moon and Starship. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Heather, Tommy, and six anonymous—and 249 other supporters on Patreon. America to the Moon by 2024, NASA’s FY 2020 Budget Amendment Summary (PDF, 510 KB) Artemis - Main Engine Cut Off NASA Taps 11 American Companies to Advance Human Lunar Landers | NASA Administration Asks For Authority to Shift Money Within NASA to Pay for Moon Program - SpacePolicyOnline.com The uphill battle NASA faces to sell its Moon plan to Congress - The Verge Blue Origin | Blue Moon SpaceX plans to A/B test its Starship rocketship builds | Ars Technica Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon Music by Max Justus

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I really don't know where to start this show tonight. I, this, okay, this is a one person show, so this is my analysis, this is the things I'm thinking, the stuff that I've picked-person show, so this is my analysis, this is the things I'm thinking, the stuff that I've picked apart from the news stories that are going on, or the trends that we're watching, so it's variable based on the things that I'm thinking about. You know, some weeks I'll have two shows in a week, and then it'll be 14 days before I get the next one out, because it's really dependent on what's going on, and things that I think about, and when I have

something useful to say. That is the freedom of this format, it is and things that I think about and when I have something useful to say. That is the freedom of this format. It is the thing that I like about the show, and I hope it's what you like about the show too. So, you know, usually it takes me a couple days to put my thoughts together to be ready to hit record and come out with a fully formed idea at the other end. But every once in a while, and this being one of those weird circumstances, it takes a lot. And this is the third successive night that I've been standing here in front of this microphone trying to do a show about these topics. So we'll see how this one goes. The other two did not pan out. Because I don't know that I have a fully formed thesis yet. But I have a lot of things to think through. So this is going to be one of those shows where we think through some stuff, we talk over some

different ideas, some different bits and pieces. So I've got a whole bunch of links in the show notes for you to read up on if anything that I'm talking about here doesn't make sense to you. Always check those out because those are kind of the source material for a show. So it's always good to look those over before we dive in here. So we're going to be talking all about Artemis. This is the project that officially has a name now. This is the Let's Land Humans on the Moon by 2024 initiative that NASA has announced and Vice President Pence has announced. Jim Bridenstine's been talking up. Officially has a name, Project Artemis, and that is a great name. It is one of those names that is just a really good name for this kind of program. Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. Everyone likes to joke that in many stories, Artemis kills Orion, which is a fun bit of

mythology, I guess. But it's a great name for a program that has, to this point, been hyped as landing the first woman on the moon and next man on the moon. So good name, great name. But let's talk about the policy side of things. So we had heard this announcement of this program after the budget request for this year, uh, came out from the white house. So the, the, but it was almost like the same week. I think it was where the budget request came out and then there was an announcement of this program and

everyone was going, uh, okay, but that wasn't in the budget that you sent over. So what's going on here? Um, and we had heard, okay, there's going to be an amendment to the budget request that would include all of the stuff for project Artemis. That was supposed to be out a month ago. It came out officially this week. So here's what's in it. We'll talk about what's in it. Then I'm going to talk about some reaction to it. And then I'm going to talk about where it goes from here. And when we get onto that end of things, we'll probably be talking about Blue Origin's Blue Moon and SpaceX's Starship and things into the future. Blue Origin's Blue Moon and SpaceX's Starship and things into the future.

So the budget amendment is for $1.6 billion, which is above the $21.1 billion request that was made back a couple months ago at this point. So that's an addition to that budget request, but it does actually touch on some things that are in there. So the long and short of what this $1.6 billion is, it's a billion dollars headed towards the human lander program. That's the thing that would develop whatever the landing architecture is to actually put humans on the lunar surface. There is an adjustment downwards of $321 million for Gateway. So they're stripping $300 million out of Gateway. And that's going from the full mini ISS looking Gateway to something that I going from the full mini-ISS-looking Gateway to something that I've seen referred to as Skinny Gateway, which is just two elements, its propulsion and some sort of habitat element that has a couple docking ports. And that's essentially a spot for

Orion, the crew ascent vehicle, and the lunar lander to meet up in lunar orbit and then head to the surface. So $300 million is coming out of the previous request for Gateway. And then the odds and ends that are left over, a $651 million increase for SLS Orion, as always, $132 million for exploration technology, whatever that entails, and then $90 million for what seems like additional payloads to fly on small lunar landers that are supposed to go towards the poles to figure out some precursor things that we need to know before we send humans to one of the lunar

poles. So those are the main tenants of this budget request, the budget amendment. Now there's a bunch of hot drama, I'm not going to hit the alarm, but there's a bunch of hot drama that came out of that. Notably, the White House amendment request, it was said that it was a net zero in budget requests because they were going to take this $1.6 billion out of the Pell Grants fund. There's a $9 billion surplus in Pell Grants, which are things to fund people going to college and things like that, specifically lower income. So that was the thing that the administration said, we would offset this $1.6 billion from Pell Grants. Now, this is another one of those things that people got really, really heated up about. And I understand that. But

honestly, this is one of those things, just like the cuts to the NASA Earth science missions in the last couple of years, that the administration throws out as a way to say from their end, they're budget neutral, but they know that that cut is never going to make it through Congress. So it's a way of asking for new money without saying that you're asking for new money. You take a thing that is a political no-go and you say, all right, well, that's what we offered. So you figure it out from there. And then you hope that they just give you the extra money regardless, which says a lot about how we got into this budgetary situation that we're in in the US with 20 some trillion in national debt. But that's another story altogether.

So I don't think it's worth getting all worked up over that thing. That's not going to fly through Congress just as the earth science cuts that the Trump administration continues to request every single year. It's been thrown out and roundly rejected by all of Congress each and every year. So they just kind of have it in their template file at this point. Uh, and this Pell Grant thing seems exactly like that. It's, it's something that is a cheap political points to say that you're budget neutral and everybody here knows that that's getting thrown out day one in Congress.

Now that doesn't help sell your program. It does make it a pricklier subject and it gives the program an easy target to attack. But it's one of those things that's interesting. All of a sudden, we're arguing out about where the money should come from, not whether the money should be there. And I find that interesting. Now we're saying, oh, we shouldn't take this out of the Pell Grants, but we're not saying we shouldn't have this money at all. So it's one of those weird tricks to get you arguing about something that's different than, you know, the existence of this $1.6 billion from the ground up. So that's the Pell Grant thing. Let's talk about some of the reaction, both from Congress and in public, about this budget amendment. That's kind of driving me

nuts because there's this certain sense of cognitive dissonance that I can't quite get my head around. So one of them is that, you know, people talk up. Oh, the other thing I should mention before we get into that is that they literally just gave this budget amendment for this year, fiscal year 2020. They did not provide like a five year funding level for this program. They didn't provide out year funding, projected levels like is typically asked for on these things. But, you know, in the history of space programs like this, that's the moment that these programs die. Whenever you come to Congress and say,

here's our grand plan, it's five to 10 years, and it costs $50 billion, everyone's gonna say, nope, we're not doing that. Even though when you divide it out, it's not that bad, right? For the budgets of the US, when you divide a big program out, it's not that bad. bad. For the budgets of the US, when you divide a big program out, it's not that bad. But those are the things that kill a program. So the budget amendment here is literally just for this year. And I'll talk about why I actually do think that's a good play in a second. But some of the reactions to this, to get into that, is NASA didn't request enough, and also Democrats won't give them anything because this is a Trump administration push. So there's these two thoughts that people keep saying right next to each other

that $1.6 billion is too small for this kind of program. It needed to be $5 billion. Also, Democrats don't have any willingness to give any on this front because it's a Trump administration initiative. And I'm struggling to figure out what do you want if you hold both of those positions? Do you think that NASA should have went in with $5 billion? Do you think they should have went in with something small and incremental and eventually see what they can do, see how the reaction is to this very small budget request rather than going in with a $5 billion thing that's going to get tossed out immediately? So I'm a little bit perplexed by by that and then the other flip side of that coin is that

um nasa needs to do things in new and different ways with less costly methods of contracting and acquisition you know fixed price and public private partnerships but also this program should still cost 40 billion dollars and that's another thing that i think people keep saying they say these things in different threads or different articles or something. And I'm not sure... It smacks of all of these reactions that fight against each other because the public at large kind of rejects this program. We can't have all of these conflicting thoughts and yet still support the program. I think it really shows that deep down inside,

people don't want this program. People don't support a program like this because it kind of shows that everyone's just trying to come up with something to criticize the program for and not trying to say, okay, well, that was maybe an interesting tactic. It's fighting on all ends of it. And when that happens, I think you have to take that as a sign as general pushback against this plan overall, not specifically because of who's proposing it or what's actually being proposed, but just there's not an appetite for this kind of program right now if we're able to say all of these different things at the same time from the same people. This isn't even two people arguing. Pretty much everybody's saying both of these things or all four of these things that I just mentioned. So it's a little bit of a, you got to get your head around this weird cognitive dissonance state that we're in. But I do think, you know, the existence of that is meaningful to notice. Now, here's the part that

I would, if you want to say, okay, we'll do something different. If you're going to criticize people criticizing this, do something different. Here's what I think if I'm NASA and strategically, I'm looking at the game plan here to get from where we are now to lunar landing in 2024, or even, you know, 2026 or 2028. I think this all applies. I do think this is the right way to start on the first year. For many of these reasons, you know, you don't have a lot of congressional support. Uh, we're in a very, very messy political year. We're in a messy political era and we're even in the messiest year of that political era. We're going into a presidential election year, um, with Congress divided and one of the most controversial presidents up for reelection.

This is literally the most messy year ever to propose something like this. And there's been all these talks of Congress not actually passing a budget this year and just going off of what's called continuing resolutions, which is just continue with whatever the funding was you had last year because we couldn't make up our minds. That's been floated as a way to get through the entire year leading up to the next election. So this is a horribly messy environment to propose this kind of program. So when you're tasked with that, if you want to pivot from the current NASA plan to a lunar landing, you want to pivot away from Gateway towards a lunar landing, I do think it's a valid strategy to say, all right, let's start

small. Let's see if we can get a lunar lander program established because that is the baseline here. If you can't get a lander program started, it doesn't matter if you're not working on spacesuits. It doesn't matter if you're not working on life support systems. It doesn't matter if you're working on lunar habitats or drilling mechanisms or anything else that would be in this kind of architecture. You can't do any of that if you don't have a lander program going. So what they can do is peel off that lander program and say, we're going to try to get a billion dollars for this lander program, and we're going to try to de-scope the gateway. Those two things are the key elements of this budget amendment. If we can't get a lander program going, all bets are off. If we can't de-scope gateway, all bets are off. So let's

start there, and we'll throw in some extra SLS Orion funding to make sure that we secure the votes from the people that care about SLS Orion. And we'll throw in some extra money for the science program landers so that those people are in and try to play to some of those constituents, whatever exploration technology is that might just be, you know, money going in the right districts. But if we can't get these two things done, de-scope gateway, get a lander program going, all bets are off for this program. So I do think there's some validity in that strategy. I do think that's a viable route forward, or maybe not viable route forward. But when you're looking at where you are now and where you need to get, I do think that is the right foot to start with. That is the first thing that I would

do too. Because, you know Because really, if there is no appetite for even a lunar lander program, there's no appetite for anything else that would be a follow-on to a lunar lander program. For a while, I've said that I don't think NASA needs more money. I think they need more focus. And with those two statements, we need a lander, we don't need Gateway, that is a little bit of focus that's at least directionally correct. I'm very, very down about the state implementation or the actual policy or the actual congressional hearings are going to go your way, I do think that is the right direction. I want to get into some budgetary side of things and new ways of contracting and what else is out there that NASA could leverage and or what would be the alternatives to this

kind of NASA program. But before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who makes this show possible. uh program but before we do that i want to say a huge thank you to everyone who makes this show possible there are 289 of you supporting this show over at patreon.com slash miko and there are 40 executive producers who made this episode possible thanks to chris pat matt george brad ryan jameson nadim peter donald lee jasper chris warren bob russell john moritz joel jan david grant mike david mince eunice rob tim dodd the everyday astronaut frank ruey julian Also, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Heather, Tommy, and six anonymous executive

producers. Thank you all so much for supporting the show every single month. You make this thing possible. This is a little independent operation. It's just me doing all this, and you make it possible to produce the show, to upgrade hardware, and do all the things that I need to keep the show running. And if you are over on Patreon, if you're a $3 a month or more supporter, you get access every single weekend. I do a little show with all the headlines of the week running through the big stories, the little stories. It's a really great way to stay up on Space News. So check that out.

And a quick note for anyone who is on Patreon, I've gotten a couple of notes recently of the Patreon feed not working anymore. So there was like this weird gap in headlines. If you do have that, if you haven't seen headlines in a couple of weeks, head into Patreon, go to patreon.com slash Miko and copy your URL again to the RSS feed, drop that in your podcast player and you should get all the episodes that seemed like there was something going on with those feed URLs. So give it a refresh if you haven't seen headlines in a couple of weeks. And sorry about that weird little thing that was going on.

But it does seem if you refresh that URL, everything is fine. So anyway, help support the show over there, patreon.com slash Miko. And thank you all so much for keeping this thing running. All right. So the thing that makes the positioning of this year really interesting and the thing that's going to make the next couple of years so ridiculously exciting and unpredictable, you know, I sound kind of down about the state of politics right now, and I am very much so. And I think NASA is only one piece of that. I don't have a lot of hope in our political system right now because there's just so much of a mess involved

here. There's so many people arguing about so many things that I'm not sure how productive any NASA-led program or anything like that could be in the next couple of years. But it does come at an interesting time. Just last week, Blue Origin had an announcement. Jeff Bezos got on stage and officially unveiled the Blue Moon lunar lander. We had heard about it before. It had been referenced for a couple of years, but they officially unveiled it. They put a page on their website and gave us some details. Not a lot of details, but some details. The biggest details that you need to know is that there's two versions of the lander. There's the first one they're working on, which is a smaller relative to both of them.

A lunar lander that can land about three and a half tons on the lunar surface. And then a stretch tank version that can land about six and a half tons. That one is big enough to land an ascent vehicle on the surface. And they specifically said, you know, this could play a part in the 2024 landing based on our timescale, based on the performance and all of that. The other really exciting part of it is that they announced the BE-7 engine, which is the thing that the lander is built on, and that is going to hot fire this summer. So they are well into development on some very key portions of this lander.

And that's always a big deal. When you see an engine and when you start to see some tankage, that's when things get real. So we don't have a ton of like timelines or anything like that. But we do know three and a half tons, six and a half tons engines firing this summer. And, you know, they're developing this thing on their own dime. You know, they're working on this. Now, they'll working on this. Now, they'll take part in a NASA program if there's an opportunity there.

And they would certainly dive in because Blue Origin isn't working with NASA on commercial cargo to the ISS, commercial crew to the ISS. So if they want to get in a big NASA program, I think Blue Moon is the thing that they would do that with. You know, that's where they would really dive in. And that's where they have a lot of potential to dive in if there is a program there. But also, outside of that, they are developing this regardless of NASA. It might take a little longer if they don't get additional funding or whatever it is. It might take longer if they do work with NASA, in all honesty.

But they're doing this on their own. And for NASA, when they're playing this political game, to know that you have certain partners that are doing things that are relevant to your architecture, and they're doing it on their own, that helps you on the budgetary side of things. You might, if you go that route, you might not need to request as much money down the line because you know that they're putting in their own. Maybe they have a little more control over the design at that point, but that's okay. If you're worried about getting budget, if you're worried about timelines, it's good to have partners like that working on these architectures. So that's where Blue Origin's at.

They're still developing New Glenn. They're working on Blue Moon. They're both officially announced at this point, so they can start speaking a little more freely about it. But they don't share a ton of their plans until they're ready to really share those plans. And then there's the other side of the coin. That's SpaceX.

They've been working on Starship. They've been welding together this thing down in South Texas. And now they've got another one set up in Florida. They have two teams welding together some Starship vehicles that are prototypes. And man, is this interesting? I said this to somebody the other day. I have no idea what they're doing day to day, but I love watching it. It's so weird. It's so random. They clearly have, you know, a direction and a goal and they're working on it every single day. But it's hard to even understand what they're doing right now. They're literally welding together metal outside in fields in Texas and Florida, and then strapping engines to the bottom and see what happens. That's kind of the vibe we're getting right now. But they're doing this all, you know, for themselves. They don't have, you know, they've got plans in the future to fly

customers with this, but they're just working on this program on their own regard in the same way that Blue Origin is just working on Blue Moon. Nobody's asking them to do this stuff. So these are the elements, the chaos elements to all of this environment that we're in right now that make things very unpredictable. And when you see how much momentum, you know, SpaceX has with these two Starship prototypes and the little hopper thing that's supposed to take another hop pretty soon, and they've got Raptor engines coming off their production line heading out to Texas.

They're really ramping up production, it sounds like, on those as well over the next year. So when you see that happening, and then you see the world's richest man standing in front of a very plausible lunar lander and says, our engine is pretty much ready, we're hotfiring it in a couple months. You know, those things, that momentum, that's a huge game-changing element to all of this. So I'm very hopeful about both of those programs. And I think, you know, it would be weird to me if you talked to me in five years and one or both of those didn't work. It would be very strange to me to find ourselves in a world in five years where at least one of those, if not both, didn't pan out. That's a weird, like, double negative. But TLDR, I'm pretty sure one, if not both of these are going to work.

I'm pretty sure one, if not both of these are going to work. They're working off of massive resources. Blue Origin specifically has access to plenty of cash. SpaceX has been doing a lot of fundraising. They're about to launch their first Starlink launch. And that's kind of a linchpin to all this. But they all have their own momentum. They're all working on their own tech tree, pretty much. They're working their way through their architecture.

So this whole NASA thing, Artemis, this smacks of the last time that we will ever see a NASA program in this traditional way in history. It sounds, maybe that's a little exaggeratory, but to me, it feels a lot like this is the last gasp of the traditional way of doing things. Because we kind of have these five to 10 year cycles on these NASA programs. Things are going to get messy with the presidential race. Who knows what's going to happen out of that? But, you know, we do have these five to 10 year cycles. And if you're asking me, the next time we come around to a program like this, things are going to be massively different. They are right now. You know, they are massively different today than they were the last time we had this debate back in 2009, pretty much,

10 years ago. And they do say that politics is kind of a trailing indicator of society, that there is this like 10-year lag between the things that politicians are saying, the things that the Supreme Court is ruling on, legislation that gets passed, that those things are 10 years behind public opinion, public support, the way that the public thinks about things. And this does kind of smack of that, you know, where if we had this, we all 10 years ago saw this momentum, we saw the direction things were heading, but it wasn't yet there. You know, SpaceX was just on the cusp of flying some missions. And we heard about Blue Origin working on some things. And we were on the cusp and we all knew it.

So we couldn't, you know, confidently go in that direction. But now 10 years later, we clearly see the future at this point. And there's going to be weird things that happen. There's going to be these chaos elements that get injected every now and then. But 5, 10 years down the line, I can't see a NASA program being pushed in the same way. I just don't think it's viable in the future. The future is going to be too different than what we're living in right now. And history does tend to repeat itself and we go through these cycles. But how many times do we try a program like this before it's the last time? I'm guessing,

you know, three to four, whatever we're at right now. And that's not to say that NASA won't ever try one of these programs again, or Boeing and Lockheed wouldn't have a contract in the future. But it is to say that the next time we do this, things are going to look really different. And I might sound like I'm writing off Artemis right now, and I think I am. I just, I feel like the writing's on the wall already, just seeing the last two weeks. Maybe I'm just depressed about the weird arguments that's been happening lately and the weird politicking that's happening, but we're at this crossroads, and we've been at it for a couple of years. We're still in the midst of it, but man,

it feels like that moment when things are just all hell's about to break loose in the space industry, and I have no idea which way it's going to go, but I don't have a lot of hope in the politicking that's happening here, and I do have a lot of hope in the chaos theory element of this all, in the chaos theory that there's multiple people that have a lot of resources that are trying to develop infrastructure in space. So if Artemis doesn't work out, I think, you know, right now I would be very supportive of, if we're really going to stick to the ISS till 2030, I would love to see what I think would be an easier political win than even the moon. You know, I was supportive of the moon thing because I thought it was an easier political win than the Mars thing.

And it is. And I think they played their cards probably a little wrong over the last couple of years. I do think NASA had a chance to do something really interesting at the moon, but it just doesn't seem like they're playing the cards right at this point. So an even easier political win, if we can't pull off the moon, would be to go all in on the ISS. Let's turn the ISS into the first transport hub in space. Let's start working on propellant depots. Let's start working on things that use something like Jonathan Goff from Altius Machines. He's got this idea of the three-burn departure that could really take you anywhere in the

solar system from the ISS orbit. There's ways to turn that into a transport hub. And I think if we can't do the moon thing, and we're still on the ISS for another 12 years or 11 years, let's make that the first transport hub. And that's a piece of infrastructure that's there. Embrace the sunk cost fallacy there and start building out some infrastructure. While there are people like Blue Origin, like SpaceX, like Altius working on smaller size of things, Rocket Lab, all these interesting companies that are changing the way that we're approaching this stuff. There are people building out infrastructure. NASA doesn't have to do it all alone.

And, you know, I have no idea where this is going to go. This is what I'm saying. I don't know that I have an end to this episode. I might ramble for another three hours about this. But man, do I love the chaos. And is it going to be a couple of interesting years? So we'll see how the next couple of weeks go. There's going to be a lot of comment on this budget. I do think in the grand scheme of things, this is the right budget request for NASA, for Artemis. I do think it is the piece that they need to get right or else all bets are off. So, you know, I'm maybe a little bit more up on the budget amendment than

most people, but I'm pretty down on the state of politics and space politics these days. So sorry to leave it on a sour note, I guess. But, you know, that's where we're at today. So we got a we got an episode coming up of Off Nominal where I feel like we're gonna be talking about this, but maybe Jake can talk me into into some senses so always check that out over at off nominal dot space should be a pretty good episode coming up uh next week but until then thank you all so much for listening thank you all so much for the support if you've got any questions or thoughts send them to me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or head over to patreon.com slash miko to support the show there thank you all so much

for listening and i will talk to you next week Bye.