Main Engine Cut Off - T+81: Resource Prospector Cancellation

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

Last week, we heard news that the Resource Prospector mission has been cancelled. I spend some time thinking through my initial reactions to the news, and speculate about what the path ahead may hold for lunar development. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, and six anonymous—and 161 other supporters on Patreon. NASA scraps a lunar surface mission — just as it’s supposed to focus on a Moon return - The Verge NASA emphasizes commercial lunar lander plans with Resource Prospector cancellation - SpaceNews.com Commercial Lunar Payload Services - CLPS - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities Email your thoughts and comments 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

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. Wanted to give some quick thoughts on this resource prospector situation. The dust definitely has not settled here yet on whatever's going on with this mission. But I did want to give some first instincts, thoughts on it, and kind of think through where I'm at with this program and some of the things surrounding it.

So to sum up what has happened, last week Jim Bridenstine was sworn in as NASA Administrator on Monday, and the same day, Resource Prospector was canceled. Now, this was a mission that was still in the concept and prototyping phase that would be heading to a formal proposal and hopefully funding towards the end of 2018 to turn it into a mission that is in development rather than concepts. And the goal was to land this rover on the lunar poles

and rove around, find some ice in the permanently shadowed craters, as has been theorized, and kind of ground truth some of this data to see, you know, is there water in these polar caps, the polar craters that are permanently shadowed? Can we harvest it? Can we turn it into resources for a human settlement on the moon? So it was kind of targeted at being a human precursor and realistically, you know, an economic precursor to figure out, can we develop the resources that are on the moon? So it was formulated in that context. It's not going to look for really anything scientifically other than the resources of the lunar surface and, you know, the subsurface. So the same day that Jim Bridenstine was sworn in, the program was officially canceled. Now,

there was no funding for it in the 2019 budget request, and there was a couple other indications that, you know, things weren't going well for it in the funding department. I always thought that it never got the attention that it deserved. It always seemed like a very cool mission that really could teach us a lot about what is out there for us to build infrastructure on, which is a very hot topic that I'm talking about a lot here on this podcast, but that the community at large has been talking about for years and years now. It would really give us some hard data to work with to see if our architectures that we're drawing up, that we're coming up with these master plans, if any of that is viable, given what we could find at the lunar poles. So in response to that news, there was a group

of scientists that were working on this mission that sent a letter directly to Jim Bridenstine on kind of his first day of work and said, you know, to appeal to him to say, hey, this mission was canceled, but we really see the value in it, especially at a time like this when NASA is looking back towards the moon. How can you cancel a mission that is laying the groundwork for what you would hope to see in the near future. So they kind of petitioned that and sent that in. And then later in the week, I think it was Friday, there was a NASA statement that instead of the Resource Prospector mission, they're going to take some of the instruments,

some of the science instruments on there, some of the functionality of Resource Prospector, and distribute that among these small commercial landers as part of the commercial lunar landing program that we've been talking about on the show here that NASA has been talking about getting out this year. These commercial landers for small payloads and medium payloads, they're going to distribute the Resource Prospector scientific instruments to those landers and spread the wealth around the moon. Maybe fly multiple of certain instruments

and get them access to different areas on the moon while also developing this commercial lander side. So I don't know if this is definitely good or definitely bad news. There's definitely a little bit of each. It's really tricky to figure out. And as I said, the dust has not settled yet. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear a lot more about this in the coming weeks. But it still warrants some initial takes. And overall, I think when I explain it like that, it sounds a lot like what myself, what I talk about a lot, what I hear from a lot of you is what we would like NASA to do, which is to break up these big single point of focus, single point of failure governmental programs, break it up, distribute it, make it a little more fault tolerant,

spread it around smaller, more cost effective vehicles or landers, and be able to do more by taking advantage of the industry that exists. And that's kind of, it fits into that general realm. But the problem is, and maybe a little bit of tragic irony, is that Resource Prospector is not one of those missions that I think needed that. Resource Prospector, in a lot of ways, was all of the good parts of a NASA-run program. It always stayed pretty lean and mean. You know, I think there was going to be a cost cap of something around $250 million on the mission. It was very focused. It had a very tightly focused mission in mind, and it had a mission statement that could be easily stated. So it was very focused, unlike the big government programs that I think people talk about that need to be broken up. SLS Orion, one of the biggest points of failure there is that it doesn't have a clearly defined mission. But Resource Prospector really was focused and tightly focused on a singular

mission on the moon, so much so that it was always under the Human Exploration Division of NASA, not the Scientific Division, because it wasn't a science lander. It was specifically a precursor to human settlement and to industrial development of the moon. So it's a little bit of tragic irony that a program like that was the one to go this way, to be split up and broken apart into the industry and, you know, in an effort to maybe land more payloads on the surface to lay the groundwork for better missions in the future. So that's kind of the bad part is that I do think Resource Prospector had a future of a lean, mean program within NASA

that could accomplish a lot and be very productive and be very useful for laying the groundwork for a lunar architecture. Now, that said, I do think there are some benefits of going the way that the vague NASA statement intends to go. We'll see exactly how they follow through on that part of the plan of distributing this among commercial landers. But when you look at Resource Prospector and how it fits into the lunar architectures as a whole, if Resource Prospector was fast-tracked to fly to the moon and made it there by its 2022 date. And there was nothing really else to follow on from it.

I'm not sure if that's how to best take advantage of what it was meant to do. Because if Resource Prospector made it by 2022, found some answers to these questions that we have, and then we were still six, seven, 8, 9, 10 years away from any sort of landings there under the SLS Orion roadmap. If we were just in a NASA world and NASA and partners world, I'm not sure how quickly we could have some follow on to Resource Prospector. So in the way that NASA is talking about it, linking it to the commercial development and the infrastructure development of lunar landers is interesting because it gives these land very good guiding light of a payload to build their landers for, to motivate them to actually produce a lander and to put it on the surface. It gives them some payloads to fly,

and that's one of the biggest things that I've heard from people that work within certain organizations that are interested of landing on the moon. They need payloads to fly to the moon. So if this is a way to get them payloads and to provide a little motivation on both ends, the payload side and the vehicle side, it is interesting in a way in that they can work together to develop the industry, the vehicles, the architecture that is needed to

have some sort of lunar program, and the people developing that side have payloads to fly. And if we do get a successful landing on the moon with some of these payloads and learn some of these answers that we're hoping to learn from the lunar poles, we are set up with some level of infrastructure to keep flying follow-on missions to the moon at very cost-effective rates. We don't have to wait for an SLS launch to get there. for an SLS launch to get there. We don't have to wait for some of these larger vehicles and bigger architectures to come around before we fly follow-on missions because we've effectively bootstrapped some small landers, medium-scale landers to fly follow-on missions to whatever we learn from that initial round of resource prospector missions. So in an ideal world where this kind of distribution of payloads to new landers works out, I think it's setting itself up for more success in the early 2020s, in the mid-2020s, because you can very easily fly follow-on missions at cost-effective rates with these landers that you've effectively bootstrapped. And it gives you a more firm foothold for whatever architecture comes out from there. So it's a little bit of a shame that a good NASA program was kind of sacrificed for

this. But in the grand scheme of things, and in what Resource Prospector wanted to be a precursor to, and what it wanted to kind of trailblaze for us and set us up for, it is an interesting partnership to link that to developing an infrastructure of lunar landers. So overall, you know, it's good and bad, as I said. I don't think the dust has settled. I think we'll hear more about it. And I reserve the right to be completely wrong and change my mind next week on this when I hear some more information. But all in all, you know, looking, taking the long view, the 10, 20 year view of this, I do think this has potential to turn out better than a one-off rover that is completely disconnected from the rest of the lunar

architecture out there could turn out. I do think there's hope in linking it to this development and bootstrapping of some lunar landers, because that is what Resource Prospector needs in the future if it wants to be a foundational element of the 2020s and 2030s on the lunar surface. So those are kind of my quick gut instinct responses to this Resource Prospector news. There are some great articles about this. My favorite was Lauren Grush of The Verge. She wrote a great piece about the resource prospector cancellation with some great quotes from people that work on the mission. So I'd highly recommend checking that out. I've got a link to it in the show notes.

And there's also an RFP out now for these commercial landers that was released on April 27th. So very closely linked to this. So check those two things out and think about what I've said a little bit more and let me know what you think anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com is the email or on twitter at wehavemiko before I get out of here I want to say a huge thank you to all the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff

over on patreon.com slash miko there are 192 of you supporting the show it's crazy we're getting close to 200 there and this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 31 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible.

I could not do it without you and everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. Head there if you want to help support this single person operation here. It's just me running this and you help it keep going. You help it keep growing. You help it stay independent. And I hope you are enjoying the show week in and week out. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you next week.