Main Engine Cut Off - T+252: NASA Selects Blue Moon for a Second Lunar Lander, But is Facing a Grim Budget Reality

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

NASA selected Blue Moon as the second human lunar lander for Artemis—which is awesome!—yet the budget outlook for the next few years is…not good. I think through what NASA can, should, and might do in the face of a grim budget reality.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Tyler, Pat from KC, Brad, Theo and Violet, Matt, Fred, Robb, Simon, Dawn Aerospace, SmallSpark Space Systems, Moritz, Donald, Frank, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Kris, Harrison, Chris, Joel, Jan, Russell, Pat, Benjamin, David, Lee, Bob, Joonas, Lars from Agile Space, Stealth Julian, Steve, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Ryan—and 842 other supporters.TopicsNASA Selects Blue Origin as Second Artemis Lunar Lander Provider | NASANASA awards Blue Origin $3.4 billion Artemis moon lander contract – Spaceflight NowNASA selects Blue Origin to develop second Artemis lunar lander - SpaceNewsNASA’s Artemis program may face a budget crunch as costs continue to rise | Ars TechnicaA new report finds NASA has spent an obscene amount of money on SLS propulsion | Ars TechnicaAt long last, the glorious future we were promised in space is on the way | Ars TechnicaNASA’s Selection of the Blue Moon Lander for Artemis V | Selenian BoondocksThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and we had big news over the last couple weeks where NASA selected the Blue Origin-led Blue Moon lander as the second lunar lander for the Artemis crewed landings that will be coming up in the next couple of years. How many years? Up for debate on the back half of this episode, I guess, when we talk about the budget scenario. And unfortunately, looks pretty grim for Artemis overall, to be honest. But first, on the good news, the lander. Artemis overall, to be honest. But first, on the good news, the lander. I am straight up in love with the new Blue Moon Lunar Lander. I think this is an awesome design. It's really clever. I love the look of it, number one. It just looks like what I expected the 2020s to look like,

so I'm pumped about that. I recommend taking a look. I have it as the album art right now for the show, so you get a look at it. But it's a cool mix of some of the stuff that we've seen in other concepts before. Not only, you know, it's a refined version of what Blue Origin and team submitted last time around, but it's a single stage lander at this point that is meant to fly down, fly back up, get refueled, and be reused into the future. Now, it is helped by a tug that we'll talk about. Um, but the really cool part is the habitat portion of the lander. It's very close to the surface. It's a bottom lander. Um, it sounds like it's going to be, uh, kind of like a ring shape where the engine is actually tucked up in the middle of the hab area. Uh, then the tankage is on top. Uh, so it's a really cool

look. It keeps the crew low to the ground. There's stairs instead of a really, really long ladder like there was going to be last time around. So that part I really enjoy. The way that the team got shuffled on this, right? If you remember, think back to 2019 when the Blue Origin national team was announced. There was a certain makeup. The lander itself was multiple stages,

a bunch of expendable stages. But now it is trimmed down to the single stage that goes down to the moon. And it is assisted by a thing that Lockheed Martin will be building that they called a cislunar transporter. And that would carry propellant from low Earth orbit

to near rectilinear halo orbit where the lander would hang out. It would refuel the lander and that lander would hang out. It would refuel the lander and that lander would be used again and again. Presumably that transporter spacecraft could go back to low Earth orbit, but I sort of expected that would be expended at that point. Haven't seen details on that, but that's sort of the breakdown there. Now, Lockheed Martin still is, you know, a top named partner in this program, but formerly they were building the ascent stage

of the Blue Moon lander. And now that is all kind of a Blue Origin stack there, that single stage, and Lockheed's building that Cislunar transporter. Now, if I'm Lockheed Martin, you know, how long am I going to be building that transporter? Kind of feels like the first thing to be replaced by Blue Origin themselves somewhere down the line. But, you know, for now, maybe they'll get a couple missions out of it and Lockheed Martin is happy to be part of this program nonetheless. Boeing is contributing the docking system that is used. That docking system for the crew is actually on the side of the habitat area. I presume the transporter would dock to the very top of the lander, as it looks in this graphic, where there would be some sort of interface to refuel the lander itself. Then there are some other team members, Draper

working on guidance navigation, Astrobotic handling cargo accommodations, and Honeybee Robotics providing cargo offloading. That's what was called out in the announcement around this. The lander itself is quite tall, it's 16 meters meters tall and it is sized to fit within the seven meter payload fairing of blue origins nuke len launch vehicle so uh that is a key piece of the puzzle here is that nuke len has to be launching to launch this thing now i haven't seen if this does fit height wise inside starship i assume that it would um but uh because you know the last lander was sort of being built to preserve the capability to launch on a five-meter fairing of a traditional launch vehicle that are

flying today. This one is sized up to make full use of the Nuke Lend payload fairing. I'm sure they have some backup plans if that's not possible, just hedging their bets on all variables there. you know, just hedging their bets on all variables there. But, you know, maybe not. Maybe it is really tied tightly to New Glenn. Certainly, you know, size-wise, it's stated at 45 metric tons when fueled with propellant all the way, which is about the low Earth orbit capability of New Glenn. So presumably it's sized right up to New Glenn's capability for that reason as well. And then the lander would fly itself to lunar orbit. It's kind of how I'm reading between the lines there. Now, they say that they have this version that would carry astronauts, but they also can build a cargo version that would be able to transport

20 metric tons down to the surface and back up to orbit, or 30 metric tons on one-way missions for full habitats or other permanent infrastructure that we put on the moon itself. Just to round us out on the thing that was pitched here, I should have stated up front, this is for the Artemis 5 mission. So this is a couple Artemis missions away, and that is Slater right now for 2029. Blue Origin pitched this bid at $3.4 billion, which is less than what I thought they had to come in at. I thought if they came in around $4 billion that they would have a good shot at winning this. I

believe that was my prediction on Off Nominal, the other show that I do, back at the end of last year. So a little less than what I expected, nonetheless, but half a billion more expensive than what SpaceX won with Starship a couple years back. So right in the range, the expected range budget-wise for this kind of thing, given what we've seen. Blue Origin was only one of two bidders. Dynetics was the other bidder. They submitted an updated version of the bid that they did last time around and surprisingly have not protested. It doesn't look like they're going to be protesting this award either. There was some talk about how they just couldn't hit the budget required for this. And that's a key thing I want to talk about in a couple of minutes. But overall, I just, I find this a very compelling

bid. It's a really interesting architecture. The fact that we now have two reusable landers really changes the math on the back end of Artememis you know once we get to fielding these landers i think conversation changes a lot when we've got two landers that are being refueled and flown back to the lunar surface multiple times that introduces a lot of questions uh a lot of of potential political chaos when there are two landers ready to be used time and time again and the flight cadence of SLS Orion is not yet there to support the capability of two reusable landers. I think that has major potential to shake things up when those things exist. But the road from here to there is very,

very uncertain, to be honest. Now, just to start on this particular program before we zoom out to the overall budget scenario. One of the things I saw talked about online was that it's some people feel weird about this program. And when I say this program, I mean, human landing system, SpaceX Starship winning the last round and Blue Origins, Blue Moon winning this round, that it feels like a pay to play situation, right? That you have to have the ability to spend governmental amounts of money on a program to bid, you know, a couple of billion, small billions in these contracts and still be able to develop your vehicle. That you need to be willing to spend as much money as you're bidding

here, right? So SpaceX bidding 3 billion, 2.9 billion, whatever it was, Blue Moon bidding 3.4 billion. They both said that they're putting in, much or more than that. Certainly, SpaceX is spending billions on Starship. Blue Origin was a little bit dodgier in their statement, but it sounds like based on how they account, they'll come around $3.4 billion for this program as well. I'm sure they'll be north of that in the long run. Some people that on, you know, that, that I've heard talking have feel uncomfortable at that. And people I've talked to in the industry feel uncomfortable about that, but I kind of don't know what NASA's other option is here. You know, if, if you look at the way that this lander fits in to NASA's plans, they certainly can't do these missions without the

lander, but there's certainly no money to go around to fully fund a $10 billion lander right now. You know, there's barely money to fund these couple billion dollar landers right now because of all the other commitments. So yes, it's, it's pay to play in a certain way, but it's also the fact that NASA's really working this angle of contracting to effectively double the available budget that they have for these landers, right? If NASA is putting out there, and I guess I should clarify that, I think a lot of times these programs get credit for just purely being fixed price contracts that SpaceX bid $2.9 billion, and that's all they're going to get for that mission, plus the uncrewed demo mission they're going to fly before that, which I failed to mention, Blue Origin's also

planning an uncrewed demo mission before their flight to fly before that, which I failed to mention, Blue Origin's also planning an uncrewed demo mission before their flight as well. But a lot of times people stop at fixed price versus cost plus. When in reality, the story's much more complicated than that, which is it's fixed price, but they're also expecting contribution or cost offsetting from the bidder to actually complete the program. And this holds true for Human Landing System, this holds true for the Commercial Lunar actually complete the program. And this holds true for human landing system. This holds true for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, where they're flying

these small landers to the moon. NASA is openly stating in both these cases that they expect investment from the bidders to complete the development and operation of these vehicles. And they are expecting, in the case of CLPS, selling additional payload space on board to offset the cost for actually flying those missions. So in both cases, it's not just that they're fixed price, it's that it is openly stated that you need to contribute to the development of this. It's NASA being able to put certain amount of budgets towards a certain project, but needing double that or more and being able to get that by there being people out there willing to spend governmental amounts of money on certain programs like this. And this holds true for the commercial space stations programs that they're undergoing

right now, where they're expecting heavy investment from industry to make these things possible. The spacesuits for Artemis are on these fixed price public-private partnerships, which means invest heavily in the program that you just won. I find myself becoming increasingly cynical about it. Now, to NASA's credit, there are people out there that are willing to spend governmental amounts of monies on these programs. So if those exist, then take advantage of their existence. That's what we want, right? We want NASA to take advantage of what the industry in general is doing. It does lead

to a scenario where you are effectively outsourcing half your budget for these big programs. And, you know, again, what is NASA to do other than that? If they want to have a lunar lander program, they have to go this direction. So you can say it's pay to play, but it's also NASA's only option when it comes to landers. Now, of course there are other options, right? There are the options where NASA could cancel programs and reassign budget, but in the political reality we're in, go out and try to find a program that you could do that with. You know, we've got SLS Orion, the ISS program, and planetary science eating up a vast majority of the NASA budget these days. And planetary itself is getting kind of weird internally of like which programs are getting funding, are getting canceled, etc.

And finding anything that you could cancel and reassign to the lander is just not politically viable but at a certain point they are going to have to come up with some hard answers to questions that we're looking at as we look out over the next 10 years and the budget scenario doesn't look great it's certainly just to put it lightly doesn't look great great for NASA to get a huge increase to cover all of these new programs and these new starts that they have and these funding curves that they need for not only the lander, but the spacesuits and the space stations and the gateway.

And there's so many different programs that are sort of started now, but need these big ramp ups in funding to actually be completed on any reasonable timeline. It's not a good outlook for that scenario in the next 10 years. It's not going to happen. So there is a coming moment where NASA is either going to have to answer these hard questions and come up with a way around this or face the reality that these things are going to get, you know, shoestring budgets relative to what they need and stretch out over 10 years rather than being able to hit any of the timelines outlined in any of the paperwork. So I want to just delve into that a little bit, talk about some things that I feel will have eyes on them in the next 10 years or should have eyes on them if we're going to honestly look at a

rational solution to this problem. But obviously, rationality is not always how politics goes. So, you know, I will present some ideas and we'll see exactly how it all falls in the future. But before I do that, I need to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 878 of you supporting the show every single month, and I could not be more thankful for that. This episode was produced by 36 executive producers. Thanks to Pat, Brad, Tyler, David, Jan, Pat from KC, Theo and Violet, Lars from Agile Space, Eunice, Steve, Ryan, the Astrogators at SCE, SmallSpark Space Systems, Harrison, Bob, Chris, Tim Dodd, the Every Action Knot, Lee, Donald, Chris, Joel, Dawn Aerospace, Russell, Stealth Julian, Craig from Space

Happy Hour, Frank, Matt, Fred, Benjamin, Warren, Rob, Simon, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode of the show possible. I could not do it without you. If you want to help support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Join up there. You get access to Miko headlines if you're at $3 a month or more. Would you buy me a coffee every month if we were hanging out and I talked to you for

somewhere between one to three hours a month? Probably. So do that. Get an extra podcast feed in your podcast player right now. I bring you the headlines every week to 10 days, considering the news is getting much longer to read these days. I read through all the news and I really boil it down to the things that you should know about and put them all in a Miko Headlines show that comes out in a special podcast feed just for you. You can listen to it right alongside this one. It's a great way to stay up on Space News, support the show. And I thank you all so much for those of you that are doing so already. All right, so the budget scenario overall is very complicated, right? The larger political picture, I think, as I'm recording to you right now, there's a debate going on in Congress about this debt ceiling situation. The deal that's currently been floated would essentially keep the part of the budget that NASA comes out of flat for at least two years.

No big increases beyond that is yada, yada, right? It's going to be a very intense budget scenario for NASA. If this thing comes to pass, it doesn't mean that NASA's budget can't go up, but it means it's almost a zero sum pie in that, in that portion of the budget has to come out of somewhere else. almost a zero sum pie in that portion of the budget has to come out of somewhere else. And the outlook for that, you know, politically when probably changes

depending on which party is in power, but taking money from other programs, applying it to a lunar landing program, not a great outlook. I wouldn't rely on it. I wouldn't bank on it in any scenario. So, you know, maybe NASA's budget goes up a little bit. Maybe they get an increase in in

certain areas of research or planetary science or earth science or whatever it is but seeing a large increase for artemis in the way that's envisioned in the budget outlays that are floated by nasa when they put their budget request out does not seem realistic in any way so given that you know what is is NASA to do? Like I said, they're taking advantage of these other programs where they can get outside investment to continue their goals and to move their goals forward without having to go to Congress for every single cent. And that is the sensible thing to do these days. When there are people in the industry interested in investing in those areas, commercial space

stations, lunar landers, launch vehicles, it makes sense for NASA to take advantage of that investment. But they are so heavily reliant on that that it's kind of a weird cycle because then the companies that are bidding on those programs are also relying on that funding coming in for them to continue the program overall. Now, there are companies like SpaceX who are going to continue their Starship investment as long as they continue to have funding personally for that. If the NASA money never comes in, they're still going to be building Starship because it is key to their own future. Is that the case with Blue Moon? Is that the case with commercial space stations? Is that the case with the lunar landers, the Eclipse lunar landers? Now, in that case, you know, do they have enough customers to fund them their development probably not based on what we've seen so you know in in again spacex

being the outlier starship is a weird one set that one aside and all the other scenarios these programs are not going to continue at the speed that nasa would like them to if the nasa money doesn't come in at some point on a reasonable time schedule. Now, the way that it would typically work in, you know, NASA of yore, if that budget is coming in lower, the timeline is going to get stretched out so that it will take that amount of money, if not more over the long term, but it will be stretched out over 10 years instead of four or whatever the case is, right? The funding curve changes and it gets stretched out a lot. There are inefficiencies with that, timeline delays certainly, but that's kind of the way that typical things happen. The other scenario would be, like I said, is figuring out a way out of the budgetary jam

that NASA finds themselves in. And one thing I didn't even mention in terms of new starts or new programs that NASA is taking on is just this year in the budget request, they put in a $180 million line item for an ISS deorbit tug. And that is a thing that needs to be put in place. They said it's about a billion dollars. They're hoping it's less than that when they finally get there, but they're penciling in a billion dollars between now and 2030, or maybe even now in 2028. I forget exactly where that budget landed, but they need to have this deorbit tug ready for the ISS if they can't rely on Russian vehicles to do it.

A very sensible thing, but a thing that has to be considered with all the other programs that NASA has going. My general vibe is just that NASA has too much going on budgetarily, all aimed at the same 2028 to 2030 time window. ISS de-orbit, commercial space station replacements, Calypso lunar landers, human landing system, Artemis 4, the Gateway, SOS Block 2, Mobile Launcher 2. There are so many large budget items that just keep getting put to 2028 to 2020-30 because it feels sufficiently far away. It is only five years away. That is really close. That is like tomorrow in terms of space projects. And all of the big budget items that NASA has, spacesuits, I didn't even mention spacesuits, all of these big budget items are slated for then, and their budget outlook is

terrible. So NASA either needs to answer some hard questions about which of these programs would you drop if you needed to prioritize, and what would you do about it? Or if these get stretched out, how does that timeline actually work? Because you can't stretch out the ISS infinitely. At some point, that hardware is going to come apart. And that is a pressing element. So does the ISS deorbit tug get promoted to the top of the stack? Does commercial space station replacements get promoted? Or is that something that NASA is willing to dispense with in lieu of these other programs? A big one that feels like it's going to get some eyes on it if this kind of scenario comes to pass, where NASA or the political structure around NASA starts looking at things and weighs out of a jam, a huge one would be the Gateway. Once again,

we're back looking at the Gateway, and here's why. SLS and Orion flew. It worked great. We have a system there, SLS Block 1 with Orion can go to near-rectilinear halo orbit, just like it's going to do for Artemis 3 for the first lunar landing. It's going to meet up with a starship and go down to the surface. Gateway kicks off, the existence of it kicks off a series of things. It requires SLS Block 1B because NASA has dictated that certain components of the Gateway are going to be co-manifested with Orion, flying alongside Orion on that bigger SLS, and Orion is going to take them to dock with that core Gateway module. So Gateway necessitates SLS Block 1B, which

necessitates Mobile Launcher 2 that is already going to cost multiple billions of dollars. SLS Block 1B also needs the Exploration Upper Stage, which is going to cost multiple billions of dollars. SLS Block 1B also needs the exploration upper stage, which is going to cost more than a billion dollars. It necessitates so many different things that are going to cost a ton of money on just the SLS side. Then you factor in the development of Gateway itself, the operations of Gateway itself. That's never going to get cheaper. That's only going to grow and grow and grow over time as things do. You're going to need all this infrastructure to support the gateway where then these new lunar landers would go to meet and then go down to the surface

from there. It is a staging area for the international partners' contributions to the Artemis program right now, which is why it is sticky. But when you look logistically, if NASA has two fully reusable lunar landers that can go down to the lunar surface from near rectilinear halo orbit, in fact, Artemis 3 is going to do exactly this with the SLS that we have today, Gateway starts to look like a thing that, with sufficient eyes on it, you realize, well, that's a couple billion dollars right there that we could kind of excise and move on with our life to the surface of the moon rather than building out this gateway. Now again, the political scenario is not always going to operate rationally like that. There are huge interests in developing the gateway, not only from the commercial companies

that are going to build components of the gateway, but Boeing, who would like to continue to build the exploration upper stage on SLS to support the gateway. The international partners that are going to be contributing a module to gateway. Canada is not going to be able to find a spot to put their Canadarm 3, if not for Gateway. So there are all these different things that kind of make Gateway sticky. But when you're looking at a several billion dollar shortfall in budgets and all these new starts that NASA has, that feels like the one that probably should have eyes on at first. Because we have lunar landers that can get to the surface from NRHO.

They can meet up with Orion right there, go down to the surface. We can build up infrastructure on the surface, bypass Gateway, bypass Mobile Launcher 2, SLS Block 1B, the Gateway itself, all the development, the operations, Dragon XL, Jake's favorite spacecraft. all the development, the operations, Dragon XL, Jake's favorite spacecraft. There are so many things in Gateway alone that would kind of be, I don't want to say easy to get rid of and reapply focus elsewhere, but sort of kind of easy to get rid of logistically, architecturally, unless you're somebody really committed to Gateway for another reason. So that's where my eyes go when I look at this situation, where we've got an ISS program that's

reaching a critical point in the 2028 to 2030 window between deorbiting new commercial space stations, figuring out what we're doing in LEO, gateways all hitting at the same time, SLS Block 1Bs all hitting at the same time, at the same time we're trying to field all these lunar landers. There are too many things there, and everyone will have their own opinion on which things should get the eyes, which things should attract the eye of Sauron. Gateway once again feels like the thing that attracts the eye of Sauron here because we are now set up with two contracts with fully reusable lunar landers, right? Maybe not fully. Fully is a little bit much because of the cislunar transporter thing that Lockheed Martin is going to build. We don't know what that looks like yet. Mostly reusable. The lander itself is reusable. Not only that, but like, could SLS block one fly more frequently if

we really just focus on that and make use of all these landers that we have out there? There's so many interesting questions to be really figured out there. And, you know, the gateway element really jams up the Artemis manifest in a way that not only makes scheduled questions, you know, I've talked about it before, if there's a lander at the gateway, are they really not going to go down to the surface all the time? If there's a lander at the gateway, are people not going to ask why aren't we going down to the surface all the time? That sort of stuff. So you couple that with the fact that it is a linchpin to kind of unlock a couple billion dollars that might not have to be spent if we bypass that thing. At a time when the budget outlook is very grim for new programs and new large programs like this,

I kind of don't see a way out of Gateway having eyes on it. And yet I don't see a way that the political infrastructure would support Gateway having eyes on it. And that's a real log jam to be figured out sometime between now and, I mean, honestly, like three years from now. You know, the time window on figuring this thing out is pretty short because the timelines of these programs are not insanely long. So it just feels like a thing that maybe not this administration, but the next one has to figure out. You know, whoever succeeds Bill Nelson at NASA is going to be the one in front of Congress answering these questions, or everything's just kind of going to be piddling along for the next 10 years on shoestring budgets, and no one's going to be happy about that. And

is that probably how it's going to go? Probably, because that's sort of the inertia direction that things are heading. But could there be an inciting incident that makes harder questions than that be asked? I don't find it implausible. So I'm sure I'll hear from a lot of you after this show, but it's kind of just stuff that's been bouncing around and why you haven't heard from me for a couple of weeks on this particular feed, because I've just been thinking about all this in my head and trying to put it all together. And I'm not sure I really did that. So hopefully you enjoyed the rumination here on the lander and the budget scenario. If you have any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com,

on Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon at mikoatspacey.space, and check out my other show that I do, OffNominal, offnom.com. We have conversations much like this all the time, and if you're not listening to that yet, I really, really think you should be because it's one of the most fun shows that I know.

So check that out, and until next time, thanks so much for listening. I will talk to you soon.