A really rare thing took place in front of a congressional subcommittee today. An expert witness, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, told them China is going to beat us to the moon and the plans to get there cannot work. More surprising was someone saying out loud that the reason the Artemis program is in such a deep hole is because of the perpetually late and over budget Space Launch System (SLS) and the recognition that the cost plus contracts they've been working under are a big problem.
Let's back up a minute.
Remember back in October when acting NASA adminstrator Sean Duffy did a review of the situation, partly to shake up everything? He got some things right but also got others wrong - in particular no focus on the cost plus contracts. But a month or six weeks before that, in the wake of Senator Ted Cruz hosting a "save the SLS" meeting in the Senate, Duffy was arguing we need to make Artemis III's mission the last SLS launch because we simply can't afford to use the SLS. In particular what Duffy said was:
If Artemis I, Artemis II, and Artemis III are all $4 billion a launch, $4 billion a launch. At $4 billion a launch, you don’t have a Moon program. It just, I don’t think that exists.
If I may be allowed to pirate that a little, I read that as, "$4 billion here, 4 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
As for what to do about it, Griffin said legislators should end the present plan.
“The Artemis III mission and those beyond should be canceled and we should start over, proceeding with all deliberate speed,” Griffin said. He included a link to his plan, which is not dissimilar from the “Apollo on Steroids” architecture he championed two decades ago, but was later found to be unaffordable within NASA’s existing budget.
That says the Artemis II SLS and Orion Capsule they just stacked for its February 5 mission will be the last SLS ever launched. I don't see how that could be relevant to whatever program replaces this, and if it's not relevant to whatever the program becomes, I say scrap it.
As I'm sure you're all aware, while there has always been a few percent of people who say we've never been to the moon, an argument I've noticed lately that I hadn't heard in the 1990s is along the lines of "things were so primitive in the 1960s, we barely had computers, how did we go then when technology today is so much better?" One of the reasons is people designing the Artemis programs thought it would be a waste to recreate the Apollo missions - send two guys to the moon for a day or two and come right back? That's silly.
The idea was to build out a way to stay on the moon longer. So they built the SLS rocket and capsule system (SLS = Shuttles' Leftover Shit) that falls short of the Apollo-Saturn V combination and kept band-aiding things onto that. A Lunar Space Station, um, "Lunar Gateway" that Apollo didn't need because they could get there for a couple of days, for example. Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits and more.
The most stringent criticism of the Artemis Program was offered by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. He has long been a critic of NASA’s approach toward establishing what the space agency views as a “sustainable” path back to the Moon, which relies on reusable lunar landers that are refueled in space.
Griffin reiterated that criticism on Thursday, without naming SpaceX or Blue Origin, and their Starship and Blue Moon Mk 2 landers.
“The bottom line is that an architecture which requires a high number of refueling flights in low-Earth orbit, no one really knows how many, uses a technology that has not yet ever been demonstrated in space, is very unlikely to work—unlikely to the point where I will say it cannot work,” Griffin said.
...
“Sticking to a plan is important when the plan makes sense,” Griffin said. “China is sticking to a plan that makes sense. It looks a lot, in fact, like what the United States did for Apollo. Provably, that worked. Sticking to a plan that will not work for Artemis III and beyond makes no sense.”
Aside from recognition and credit to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, CLPS, which has been behind many of the small budget missions to the moon over the last several years, the other positive things to come out of the meeting came from Dean Cheng of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, who said NASA and Congress must do a better job of holding itself and its contractors accountable.
Many of NASA’s major exploration programs, including the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System rocket, and their ground systems, have run years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget in the last 15 years. NASA has funded these programs with cost-plus contracts, so it has had limited ability to enforce deadlines with contractors. Moreover, Congress has more or less meekly gone along with the delays and continued funding the programs.
Cheng said that whatever priorities policymakers decide for NASA, failing to achieve objectives should come with consequences.
“One, it needs to be bipartisan, to make very clear throughout our system that this is something that everyone is pushing for,” Cheng said of establishing priorities for NASA. “And two, that there are consequences, budgetary, legal, and otherwise, to the agency, to supplying companies. If they fail to deliver on time and on budget, that it will not be a ‘Well, okay, let’s try again next year.’ There need to be consequences.”
“There need to be consequences?” This needs to apply to everything DC regulates/rules over and every agency doing it.
The Artemis II vehicle inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, this November. Image credit: NASA
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