Main Engine Cut Off - T+137: Artemis Politics, United Lander Alliance

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

Artemis and international politics were on display on the first day of IAC 2019, followed by strange-yet-politically-minded partnerships on the second day.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 295 other supporters.Pence calls for American-led cooperation in space exploration - SpaceNews.comBlue Origin | Blue Origin Announces National Team for NASA’s Artemis Human Landing SystemBlue Origin teams up with Lockheed Martin and more for human lunar lander design - The VergeLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, freshly back from the International Astronautical Congress. I was there all last week. It was a crazy week filled with a lot of space, a lot of good meetings, a lot of good meetups, a lot of good connections, a lot of interesting news. If you are on the Patreon, if you're supporting Main Engine Cutoff, you probably heard my daily updates from IAC

where I was increasingly tired, they got increasingly short because the news and my energy levels were both dropping. But we're going to be telling a whole bunch of ISC stories on the next episode of Off Nominal, so I'll save you the at-length stories because I am only one half of those stories.

So check out the Off Nominal feed. If you're not listening to Off Nominal, it's a really fun show. I recommend going to check that out, offnominal.space. We'll be talking about that soon, so I'll leave those stories for another day. But there were a couple of news items that came out of ISE that I want to talk about a little bit more in depth. And obviously, there's going to be about 20 shows that are coming out of ISE. But this one, I want to talk about Artemis. I want to talk about politics. I want to talk about

Blue Moon. So I want to dive in with the first day of ISC, Monday, was kind of politics day there. There was the opening ceremonies, which were kind of weird. Then Bridenstine talked for a little, Mike Pence, the vice president, spoke for 20 minutes or so. And then later on, there was a panel of all of the heads of the space agencies across the world, except for China. And the head of Roscosmos wasn't there because he's not allowed in the country. A bunch of other storylines that we don't need to touch on here. except for China. And the head of Roscosmos wasn't there because he's not allowed in the country. A bunch of other storylines that we don't need to touch on here.

But there was a common theme through these. Even in the very America First heavy speech by Mike Pence, the first half of it was the same old you've heard before, America wants to lead in space, America is going to do this itself. The back half of the speech was very different than other speeches have been by the administration, not by Bridenstine as much, but by the other members of the administration. There was a lot more reaching out to the international community, telling them that we want them to come with us, that we want their participation in Gateway, in the lunar landings. There was a lot more outreach, even if it was kind of couched in this very America First vibe. If that's the case, you know, I think there's a lot more there than he would like to say. And then when Bridenstine spoke later in the panel of the heads of agencies, he was even more harping on the international outreach. He's

never so much, he's never really big on the whole America first thing in his own speeches, kind of leaves that for the administration. And he's the kind of good cop in reaching out to the international partners, but it was even heavier than previously. And this kind of felt like the vibe of the conference. And I think it can all be traced back to how the whole 2024 deadline is going over politically here in the US. So the budget request was submitted a while back to Congress that didn't include any additional money for the 2024 landing because we only found out about that in like March, I believe it was, maybe even May. And at that point, then NASA submitted an extension to their budget request, which added an extra billion dollars for a landing system, notably. Well, as Congress has worked

through those pieces of budget, we've seen a varying level of interest in the 2024 Artemis deadline. The Senate has added an extra $700 million for the lander, but they've added a $300 million line item for SLS Orion, notably the Exploration Upper Stage, which is slated to fly on Artemis 4 or something. That's that beefier upper stage that can put more into orbit, more to TLI for SLS Orion. And that's kind of been a big sticking point of many members of Senate. It's been a sticking point for people at NASA, either wanting to see it or not wanting to see it and wanting to put money elsewhere. But nonetheless, they took $300 million out of the lander budget that was requested and put it towards SLS and Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS. On the House side, they added precisely $0 for the billion request that came in after the initial request. So that's a real situation here for NASA. We're at the point in the year, well,

number one, we're in a continuing resolution, which means we haven't decided on budget affairs. So everything just sticks at the levels that they were last year until otherwise noted. That CR, as it's called, is going to expire shortly. And even Richard Shelby, who's the senator from Alabama, he thinks that we might be in a CR kind of environment until March because the president's getting impeached and that's going to throw everything into a tizzy. We haven't decided on any budgets yet. So everything's kind of, you know, at complete gridlock, let alone we're going into an election year. It's messy. That's kind of the TLDR. It's totally messy. Now, if they are able to get to deeper budget talks, what's going to happen is

the Senate is going to go to conference with the House. The House wants $0 in addition to the NASA budget. The Senate wants $700 million for Lander, $300 for EUS. Basically, they're going to probably split the difference on that. It's very rare that you go to conference and one person gets exactly what they want. So what that means is that the lander is likely to get about $300 million, not a billion. So that is obviously not a lot of money. I think that really impacts the idea here for NASA to land by 2024. And I'm not quite sure how everyone is going to handle this. Proposals for the human landing system are due at the beginning of next week, I think it is. November 5th was the last date that I saw. Now, all the proposals are going to come in, but there's no money to fund any of

those. So I'm not quite sure what NASA does. NASA says they want the selection to happen by early next year. Hopefully by then, you know, they've figured out what the funding situation is. They can select the two landers that they want to fund and then fund them with whatever available money there is. It's not going to be full development. It might be some initial studies, some more initial development, but there's not a lot of money coming here for Artemis. So I think, you know, this is the real logjam that we're in. And until this kind of mess gets cleaned up, there's not a lot of clarity on what's going to happen here for NASA politically. And I think, you know, obviously 2024 seems like

it's off the table under these circumstances. It's not even clear to me that uh that much more than the initial two gateway modules are gonna happen um so there's just a lot up in the air who knows what's gonna happen next year with the presidential election and what that would kind of force on to nasa it's a real bad situation right now if you are somebody who's rooting for this political program to win uh and you know it's it's straight up politics. They didn't do a great job of getting everyone on board with this. The whiplash is definitely not appreciated by some parties here. And the old guard kind of wants things to keep on keeping on. And that's where we're at right now. But last week at IAC, Jeff Bezos was there, made a huge announcement about

a partnership on Blue Moon that's specifically targeted at this Lander program. So I want to break down that as well as what else we might see from the Lander program. But before we do that, I need to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 333 of you, and each and every one of you is exactly the reason why I went to ISC. Your support makes that kind of trip possible, and I cannot tell you how much that's going to do for the show in the long run. We've got a couple of interviews in the works already from that, and a couple of connections that are going to be longer-term things, but really are

just absolutely incredible that I was able to be there, be on the floor, meeting people, seeing what's there, and I am so thankful for all of your support. This episode was produced by 38 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support making all this possible. I could not do it without each and every one of you. All right, so this big Blue Moon announcement last week. Jeff Bezos was there accepting some made-up awards that he would come

to IAC. That's kind of how things typically work. And he was there to talk about everything that Blue Origin's working on, but specifically he announced the partnership that turned some heads. So this is a partnership where Blue Origin is the prime on this program, and they are partnering with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper.

And this entire partnership is structured around the way that NASA sees the human landing system going right now. So Blue Origin would lead the program management, the engineering, everything that is going on with this mission. And the Blue Moon Lunar Lander would be the descent element for the system. And that would be the larger of the Blue Moon models. So if you remember, there's the Blue Moon mock-up that we've all seen with the spherical tanks, and then there's a stretched version that would have the payload capacity to put an ascent element on the surface. It would be that stretched Blue Moon lunar lander.

Lockheed Martin would be developing the ascent element. They had a model of this, a kind of wood and inflatable model on the show floor. And the idea is to take the internals of Orion, reconfigure them into an ascent element, and then that would be stacked on top of Blue Moon. And then Northrop Grumman would provide the transfer element. So this is a tug that would be able to take the ascent and descent elements down to a lower orbit than the Gateway to put them in position to land on the surface. And then Draper is in there to lead the descent guidance, flight avionics, and some of the smaller bits of the program. So this is an entirely structured partnership that is specifically structured around the way that the human landing system that NASA is kind of working with right now

is structured itself. So this isn't necessarily the way that Blue Origin would see this going. This isn't the way Lockheed or Northrop or Draper would see it going. This is a partnership built to address what is laid out in the human landing system contract by NASA. So this is a very politically minded move by Blue Origin to gun for that contract. They've basically scooped up all the partners that would be bidding for this. Boeing has come out and said they're going to bid an integrated solution for landing that's integrated with SLS Orion. They're working with Intuitive Machines. I saw some notes about that. We assume that SpaceX would bid something, Starship or otherwise.

But the list gets pretty short beyond this list of partners in the Blue Origin partnership to think about who's going to be bidding for this kind of human landing system. So I think, you know, with this collection of partners that NASA is already very comfortable with, save for Blue Origin, it's tough seeing them not winning one of those two lander contracts from NASA. It's just a really tough thing to see anyone else, you know, two other partners beating out this, as somebody was calling it at IAC, the United Lander Alliance, which is what we'll call it from here on out.

It's tough to see them losing out to two other concepts. Now, I don't think these are going to be necessarily good partners. I'm not sure they're going to all go well together. I think there's going to be a lot of butting heads internally. I would be shocked if this was like a smooth sailing partnership in which everyone was in complete agreement about how things should go. But I do think, you know, it is a political situation that makes strange partners. And they all got their eyes set on one thing, getting that contract from NASA. Now, as we just talked about, the funding for that contract is likely non-existent.

So even if they put together a really good proposal, it's unlikely that NASA is going to have the money to pay for that kind of thing in the near future. So let's talk about that a little bit, about how this might go down. Well, a really interesting dark horse of this all is that Blue Origin has massive resources. So I would be very curious to hear more about how this partnership is structured. If Blue Origin is serious about putting people on the surface of the moon, If Blue Origin is serious about putting people on the lunar surface, you know, it's not entirely unlikely that they could do it, and they could fund the partnership up until the point when NASA is ready. So maybe they put their

own funding in for the first year, move the ball along, wait for NASA to sort itself out, hope that the resources are there next year, and boom, all of a sudden, they're a year ahead of everybody in developing this system from the ground up. Now, obviously, that would attract Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper because they might be able to sell some stuff without NASA having their stuff sorted out. If NASA's not coming up with the money, but Blue Origin is, why does Lockheed care? Why does Northrop care? They're getting the money from their contractor, or their prime contractor. Doesn't really matter if that's out of Bezos's pocket or ours. Now, I'm not saying that is what is happening, but it is something that I don't think we should totally shrug off entirely. Now, on the Boeing front, I mentioned that they're going to bid this integrated lander.

I got into some late night talk that was kind of depressing in that, if you remember what I just talked about with the budget debate, the Senate put up $700 million for the lander, $300 for essentially the exploration upper stage, which is built by Boeing. Well, this whole lander system needs some sort of tug. system needs some sort of tug. So if they're talking about an integrated lander solution that would interact with SLS Orion, and there's extra money coming in from the typical Boeing favored Congress people, well, what if their proposal includes the exploration upper stage as the tug element? I don't know exactly how this would work. I don't put it past Boeing to finagle this in a way that would work. I'm very, very curious about what they're going to propose there. They have tons of lobbying support in Congress. They have tons of people just pushing out op-eds about how SLS Orion is the way

to go. They have tons of people doing the groundwork here behind the scenes. And it worries me. It honestly does. On the SpaceX side, I assume Starship is what they're going to bid here. I assume NASA is going to be scared of that, and who knows what's going to happen there. But that is kind of the other thing in the triad, right? I don't know who else could really bid for this. But what I do know is that Boeing isn't going to work on theirs without funding from NASA. Starship is well underway, and Blue Origin has massive amounts of resources. So we're going to see here who bids for this, what they bid, and then what they do when the money from Congress doesn't come.

Starship is not dependent on it. They're going to be doing their own thing. You know, politics be damned. Are Blue Origin going to do the same? Are Northrop, Lockheed, Draper? Who knows? That's the stuff that I'm going to be watching over the next couple of weeks to months once we see these proposals come in, once we see politics further devolve into mayhem. It's going to be a long couple of months here for the space policy fans out there,

but for the people that are interested in, you know, engineering challenges, there's plenty to be had here. And I'm excited to watch it all. So those are kind of my thoughts on where things are at with this landing system, the political move that it was by Blue Origin to put this partnership together, and the logjam that NASA finds itself in. I'm sure, sure, sure, sure, we'll be talking about this a lot more, because it is the politics story of the end of 2019 beginning of 2020 and we love talking about that stuff here but for now that is all i've got we will be back a lot in your feed this week and next i'm trying to line up as many interviews as i can coming out of ic i've already got one lined up we'll see how the others go but for now thank you for listening i will talk to you next week.