We're Not Going

As you should know by now if you’ve been reading my blog, I’m a bit of a nerd and am interested in many nerdish things. Space being one of them, I have been excited about technology, the future and the idea of human exploration and development of space since I was a kid.

I grew up watching TV shows like Buck Rodgers and Space 1999, reading Heinlein, Bradbury, Pohl, Niven and all the other great science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s, and being inspired by films like 2001 and Moonraker that made space stations and Moon bases look like they were within our grasp. From these experiences and many others, I developed an attachment to the idea of a near future in which I might have a chance to work in zero-G, live on a rotating space station or perhaps even explore the surface of another planet.

I've recently come to the unfortunate conclusion, however, that I don't believe we're going to be able to expand or even maintain our presence in space in a meaningful way going into the next decade. No establishing new stations, no returning to the Moon and no stepping foot on Mars... surely not in my lifetime and absolutely not with the mission plan and technology that's currently on the board.

The difficult thing is that I really believe that going back to the Moon and extending our reach to other planets and, ultimately other star systems is something we absolutely must do. Not only do I strongly believe we should be developing space for a variety of short and mid-term objectives, I believe it's the single most important thing we can be doing as a species for the long-term as well. But I have to say what's on my mind, even though I hate it... I don't believe we're going to make it. At least not now.

So why am I so negative about our prospects for making the leap to large-scale living and working in space? I'm glad you asked.

What is the Mission?

As I’ve said before, the “why” of a thing is the most important part. The reasons we give to ourselves for the choices we make set the tone for everything that comes after. Whatever the endeavor, having a truly inspiring “why” for it is the primary differentiator between achieving greatness and decline into mediocrity.

So let's begin with the why of our current plans to return to the Moon. Why exactly are we going back? Supposedly, I am told, so that we can ultimately send people to Mars. And why are we sending people to Mars? I've heard more than one "reason" but none of them have been particularly compelling. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the true reason is.

We told ourselves the first time that we were going because it was a challenge and we're a proud, powerful and wealthy nation of thinkers, makers and doers who are down for challenges... plus there’d be velcro and Tang. The more likely truth is that we went in order to prevent the Soviet Union from getting a leg up on weaponizing space before we could do it ourselves. Or maybe it was just a cool and publicly acceptable way to accelerate our efforts to bankrupt our ideological adversaries (alongside the nuclear arms race). Either way, I believe we didn't send men to the Moon because we ran out of challenges and suddenly got really interested in selenology... it was political.

I’m aware of people trying to push the idea that today we are already in a race against the Chinese to put boots on Mars… I’ve sat in rooms full of them trying to make the case that if we don’t act now, the Red Planet will become truly and permanently Red. But does anyone really believe that? Surely Americans wouldn’t fall for the same jingoistic propaganda a second time, would we?

So why are we going? Well from what I’ve heard, it comes down to a few specific groups of people pushing the trip for their own socio-political and financial benefit. Ouch, that was raw. Okay, so who are these "specific groups"? Old-timer aerospace guys who yearn for the glory days of the Apollo Era, tech billionaires who are funding their personal wealth on the back of public money, and identity groups who want the credibility of being the first so and so to do such and such a thing. Serious talk... I can’t say I blame any of them. If I had 10% more brains and 10% less soul, I’d honestly be trying to work one of those grifts myself.

But what about the science? I will assert here that there’s very little science that can’t be done by robots now, or even remotely through Earth and near-Earth based systems. We’ve got enough data from Mars rovers and the JWST to last us generations and it wouldn’t take more than one or two such missions a year to keep us supplied with more data than we can process indefinitely.

“But there’s a human component…” some would say… “you just have to have eyes and brains there on the scene to truly make sense of it all.” Stop. As an amateur astronomer looking at deep field images of distant galaxies from Hubble and now JWST, I just don’t accept that for one moment.

Okay, but aren't we going to wish we had a "backup copy" on Mars when that extinction event meteor comes that's gonna wipe humanity off the face of the Earth like it did the dinosaurs? Yes, we do need to get a human foothold off planet if we want our species to survive for the very, very long run… but I do not believe we're anywhere near ready for that. With the current state of technology, we should be working on preserving our original copy and improving our lives here rather than transporting a handful of people to a place that would make Dante's Inferno feel like the Garden of Eden.

It's an ugly thing to say, perhaps, but I promise you that the first 10,000 people... maybe the first 100,000 of them... to step foot on Mars are going to live just long enough to wish they hadn’t.

And yeah, I know about technology trickle down. But don't you think we could develop safe and effective back-yard nuclear power generators or super-efficient home waste and water recycling systems without blowing up millions of tons of rolled steel and rocket propellant every few weeks if we really wanted to?

Where is the Technology?

Let’s pull away from the why for a moment to talk about the how. How are we going to go back to the Moon? Well, to hear the old-school NASA guys talk, we’ve already got the perfect blueprints to get people to the surface of the Moon again. They are:

The Post-Apollo Space Program: Directions for the Future

and

”NASA SP287 - What Made Apollo a Succes”

The bad news is we’re not following either of them. Someone apparently decided that we’re more advanced now so we can do things better. But the hard-won lessons of the past won’t be tossed aside so easily… there are a few, shall we say, “issues” in the approach for the current mission strategy for Artemis which was supposed to put people on the Moon in late 2024 that may need to be reconsidered If we really intend to make this happen.

Issue 1: Fuel Type

Instead of using hypergolic fuels which, though less efficient and more difficult to handle, are far more reliable for use in the harsh environment of space as they react spontaneously on contact, the choice was made to send the Space Launch System rocket to the Moon using cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen that must be kept at temperature, stored at pressure and pumped to the nozzle for ignition. We’ve only ever done that a handful of times and there’s no guarantee we’re going to be able to do it reliably after extended exposure to space.

To be able to connect the complex chain of launches, refuelings, dockings and maneuvers specified for the Artemis missions, those cryogenic fuels are going to have to remain stable and contained, the tanks insulated and intact, and turbopumps clear and easily restartable... perfectly... every single time. If you run out of gas or your car doesn't start one morning, you may be late for work and perhaps get written up. If your propellant bleeds off into space or your turbopump freezes up and won't restart, you get Apollo 13... if you're lucky.

Issue 2: Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit

And then there's the question of the lunar orbit being specified for placing a landing craft on the Moon in the Artemis plan. For the Apollo missions, we put the craft into a reasonably tight orbit of the Moon for separation and recapture of the lunar lander. This meant the lander had a close communication relay to Earth in the Command Module which could be reached relatively easily, should timing of the departure from the lunar surface need to be adjusted, as the CM was nearby the Moon all the time. For the Artemis missions, they’re planning to put the Orion module in a much less accessible long elliptical polar orbit which reduces the frequency of its close approach to the Moon.

The word is that this long elliptical polar orbit serves future mission needs and doesn’t adversely impact accessibility or communications, plus it’s more stable than a low lunar orbit. But it’s likely they chose this odd flight plan because the idea was to place the Gateway module in this orbit using a Falcon Heavy rocket before sending an Artemis mission that would include a lunar landing... a decision which has now been reversed, likely for the sake of political expedience, and almost certainly because Gateway won’t be in place and serviceable any time soon.

Issue 3: HLS

The Apollo mission included both the Command Module and the Lunar Module in a stacked package that was boosted into lunar orbit by a single rocket, the Saturn 5. Getting people from the command module (in which they rode up from and eventually returned to Earth) into the lunar module which made the descent to the lunar surface involved a tricky de-coupling, flip around and re-coupling of the two modules. That was the real pinch point of the mission… but if it had failed, the lander would have been abandoned and the command module returned to Earth.

So this is the part where I feel the most potential confusion can occur. That NASA mission profile image at the top of the post shows Orion arriving at NHRO and then “activating the lander”. One might be excused for thinking the lander rode to the Moon along with Orion but it doesn’t. The “lander” is SpaceX’s Human Landing System which has to get to the Moon and into NHRO as an entirely separate process… one requiring a bit of what some might call “aspirational capability”.

So, unless this has all changed since I reviewed it online this morning, unlike Apollo, the Artemis lunar landing mission includes two separate rockets… the SLS which carries Orion, this mission’s counterpart to the Apollo command module, and HLS… developed by SpaceX and launched atop one of their Super Heavy booster rockets so it can wait in LEO to be refueled before making its way to the Moon to link up with Orion and ultimately do the actual descent from NHRO to the lunar surface.

Let me repeat that… SLS will carry the crew to the Moon in Orion in a single shot but HLS, as pictured above, launches separately without a crew and waits in low earth orbit for the significant refueling it requires in order to get itself to NHRO so that it can link up in space with Orion to receive crew to do the landing and then return them to Orion for transit back to Earth. If any part of the HLS portion of the mission fails, the crew in Orion either will not be launched at all… or they will be going for a very expensive few NHRO orbits of the Moon and then coming straight home. No landing, no Gateway… hopefully they’ll get some glorious photographs.

HLS and/or equivalent tanker rockets were intended to link up with and supply fuel to Gateway in an earlier version of the mission, thus the NHRO parking orbit for Gateway… but because the Gateway component has been delayed (see issue 5 below), and assuming everything else goes to plannow Orion/HLS is doing the less ideal (for an unsupported landing mission) NHRO orbit by itself because it wasn’t designed to be able to carry enough fuel to get into and out of an LLO orbit (which is a deeper in the Moon’s gravity well and therefore a lot more costly in terms of delta-v) without Gateway in place and prepared to provide that additional fuel. Which brings us to:

Issue 4: Refueling

This one is going to be a major issue that very few people are willing to even talk about publicly. The specification claims that only a handful of launches of SpaceX rockets (one depot tanker, four refueling tankers and the HLS itself) will be required to prepare the HLS for its trip to the Moon to position itself there for rendezvous with Orion so the crew can transfer to HLS to make the lunar descent.

Word on the street is that HLS is going to need more than just six launches… it's going to be more like twelve... at least. Refueling will require multiple launches because merely lifting anything to orbit burns an enormous amount of fuel and so the tankers will only have a small portion of their total capacity left to transfer to HLS once they meet it in low earth orbit which will be difficult to pump out of nearly tanks, regardless. And that’s not even considering the possibility that some quantity of the propellants will boil off into space after being transferred to the “depot”. The estimates being offered for how many launches will be required are suspiciously optimistic... perhaps, some would say, deliberately understated.

To add even more complexity, the act of refueling one partially empty Starship tanker with another one is something we have no idea how to do yet. It's complex enough on the ground where you've got gravity and pressure on your side... but transferring fuel from a mostly empty tank in one ship into a higher pressure tank in another ship... efficiently and repeatably... is going to be a real challenge. There are considerable doubts we’ll be able to do it at all, much less dozens of times for each launch.

Issue 5: Gateway

The introduction of a plan to deploy the afore-mentioned orbital refueling station around the Moon as a prerequisite to a lunar landing... which itself would be a prerequisite for a crewed flight to Mars has been, let's say... controversial.

There are those who still argue that the existence of Gateway has nothing to do with putting humans on Mars. But if NASA has decided to return to the Moon before going to Mars and Gateway is part of the process of returning to the Moon... which is to be used as a "stepping stone" for getting to Mars... well if you can explain to me how 2 + 2 + 2 can still equal 6 after you've remove the 2 in the middle, I'll believe it.

Having said that, I will assert the following: First we were going to go straight to the Red Planet… then things got more complicated and it was determined we’d need to start by learning how to go to the Moon again. Then because we ignored the lessons of the Apollo era, and for reasons of international cooperation, one imagines, the understanding "evolved" that we'd need a permanent fuel depot and habitat in orbit around the Moon to do it... by first depositing the Gateway refueling module in lunar orbit… then we'd go to the Moon, then maybe find some water on the Moon to make hydrogen and oxygen... or maybe launch dozens of nearly empty Starships for refueling... and only THEN go to Mars.

You can see what happens when the hype and promises made by huge government organizations with hundreds of corporate and sovereign stakeholders all working within the constraints of the UN ESG agenda, attempt to make "modern" improvements to the tested, documented and and proven methods passed on to us by the now “pale and stale” pioneers who went the first time. Like I said, I'm just a regular guy with some dumb opinions.

Based on the online response of Musk fans and space enthusasts, it seemed evident that the “Mars or Bust” crowd would agree with me, except maybe not for the same reason. Based on Musk's vision, it seems they expected to just buy a ticket for the Starship cruise liner, slip into their custom pressure suits, tap their Tesla-inspired touch screens, select their fancy dining options and strap into their seats for the amazing exterior views and zero-G ballet and blast off directly to Mars… and presumably die there on impact if things didn't go perfectly. They were demonstrably not happy with the evolution of our new and more pragmatic "extended multi-stop" plan to get there and pushed back hard on the Moon and Gateway elements in particular. Musk had promised them a Buck Rodgers "tail-stander" rocket ride to Mars and they were ready to go tomorrow... never mind it would be a one-way trip that would end in a huge fireball if they were lucky.

But returning to the Moon and establishing a long-term crewed habitat and refueling depot in orbit there actually makes a lot of sense if you don't want to be sending hundreds of mostly empty fuel tanks to space for the rest of the forseeable future. Additionally, the original mission profile of the Lunar Gateway makes placing it in a stable NRHO orbit perfectly sensible. Only now Gateway is being delayed (perhaps indefinitely) in order to get boots on the Moon sooner rather than later. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a crewed cislunar station (frankly I’d go to live in a tin can orbiting the Moon tomorrow with zero chance of return, but that’s just me). The problem is I have doubts about our being able to reliably crew, service and supply such a station, given we can barely do that with the ISS today. And if we're in a hurry to get to the Moon or to Mars and don't need Gateway to do either one after all, then why is it still part of the mission plan? It doesn't add up.

Issue 6: Onward to Mars

Now imagine putting 10,000 people on Mars in the span of a single generation… how many ships will we need? How much fuel, air, water, food, waste reclamation, medical supplies, radiation shielding, nuclear power plants, robotic drills, methane production systems, storage tanks, electrostatic dust scrubbers, robotic underground habitat builders, custom fitted pressure suits… all these things for all those people to barely survive in an environment that will be so harsh, so toxic, so bleak and incredibly deadly that they’ll wish they were ghouls hunting for fresh brains in Vault-Tec shelters on a post-apocalyptic Earth rather than trying to breath the rusty air of their desolate lava tubes, eating slime mold grown on the remains of their dead colleagues, surrounded by the disintegrating pieces of the ships they’ll curse for having brought them there In the first place.

Honestly. At least the people who survived crossing the Great Plains in wagon trains, though they faced wild animals, foul weather, sickness, starvation and angry natives to get there, had a San Francisco to finally drop their bags in when the trip was done. Imagine doing all that but there’s no San Francisco… and no air… and the ”natives” are near-light speed atomic particles that rip your DNA apart.

And for what? So you can use your free Starlink service to mine DOGE coins over IPFS? There’s a big difference between Jamestown and Jonestown and I promise you it pays to know the difference before you go. All those rich idiots who would sign up in a heartbeat to join Musk’s Martian Empire… will we even bother to dust off the hull plate with their names scratched into it it once we‘re finally ready to settle another planet for real?

The Issues, They Add Up

Even if living and working in space, on the Moon or on Mars was going to be desirable, tolerable or even possible, this plan isn't the way to get there.

I think we’ll find that Gateway will not fly in this decade and probably not the next one either and that any lunar landings we do manage to achieve with the Artemis program will be so incredibly complex and expensive that they won’t be worth doing… except maybe for scoring a few points for the cameras and thumbing our nose at the Chinese, who if you’re paying attention, already have enough problems of their own.

Nevertheless, and assuming all this works out… the refueling, the turbopumps, the lander, the Gateway, Musk not blowing it all up, the US Government not running out of money… we then have to find some water on the Moon, figure out how to extract it, scrub the razor sharp shards of glass and stone regolith out of it, convert it to hydrogen and oxygen, chill it to liquid temperatures, fire it at Gateway and reliably store it long enough to refuel a thousand Mars-bound Starships. Good luck! I assure you that we are not getting those Starships to Mars over the span of decades without a fuel depot near the Moon, each one requiring dozens more launches for refueling. Certainly not before your kids get tired of their kids having to pay for it.

If that's the plan... we aren't going. In fact, I don't think chemical rockets are going to do it at all, ever. Perhaps we should focus our efforts on some other form of propulsion first... something that doesn't require propellant. But that's just my non-rocket-scientist opinion.

And Finally, Who Really Cares?

Having said all that, now let me gently point out that our entire crewed space program currently rests on the shoulders of one psychologically unstable tech bro who cheers when his rockets explode over protected wetlands and a handful of ancient aerospace companies that couldn’t fill a copper bathtub with cold water without doing a year-long impact and feasibility study… and that both of them are addicted to public money which could dry up faster than you can say “Black Monday”.

As we speak, Musk fans continue enjoying the spectacle of his “flying grain silos” spontaneously disassembling themselves while Boeing’s “Starliner” (we have a problem with name inflation) is stuck taking up a valuable parking space on the ISS. And on top of that, we’re one hand-drilled hole away from total mission failure of our human presence in space… which is due to be de-orbited in the next few years anyway… while our plans for going to the Moon and Mars look like they were designed by Rube Goldberg and assembled by PeeWee Herman.

Do we really think anyone would die of a broken heart if the United States simply gave up on crewed space travel for a couple of hundred years? I don’t. We can console ourselves with VR simulators and the hopes that we might some day get another good Star Wars film. Meanwhile we can get busy “sour graping” space travel to the point where we’ll be unwilling to admit we ever tried it in the first place, just to save ourselves the embarrassment.

What's the Cost If We Don't?

Let’s try to return to being serious for a moment. Given that this isn't Star Trek and that time, effort and resources will remain limited for the foreseeable future, in order to wisely use those resources, we have to prioritize our efforts project by project and ask ourselves a few basic questions about cost, timeline and feasibility to decide what to do when. We’ve all heard of Return on Investment (RoI), but have you heard of WSJF? The “Weighted Shortest Job First” model is a prioritization method used to sequence work based on maximizing economic benefit. The “Shortest Job First” part is pretty obvious… but the “Weighted” part is where you have to also ask yourself “What is the cost to us long-term if we choose not to do this now?”

In an environment where change and technological advancement are a near given, it may seem ideal to take small, achievable steps toward a larger goal… that’s the “agile” methodology. But sometimes you have to invest in bigger, more complex and less achievable goals in order to build the technological capability and momentum to make future steps possible. And sometimes also if you delay those bigger projects, they can become much more difficult and costly to do in the future than they are now, not to mention the loss of benefit you’d have gotten from them in the mean-time.

It’s easy to say “We can’t do it with the tech we have today so we shouldn’t do it at all.” but it’s likely that the only way the tech we need to achieve a permanent human presence in space will advance is if we keep developing and keep trying, even if most of our tries end up being fails. We’re going to need to be a lot more tolerant of those failures and not worry so much about the cost or the possibility of “unplanned disassembly” that would cause us to halt the program for a decade every time something or someone dies on the launch pad. Harsh, but true.

WAGMI?

So have I talked myself back into the “We’re all going to the Moon together!” mindset? Not quite. I just want us to be realistic about our objectives and our capabilities so that we don’t give up when we realize that returning to the Moon is going to be much, MUCH harder than we anticipated it to be… and that going to Mars is going to be the worst thing that ever happened to anyone, ever.

Here’s To the Future

Imagine a massive global effort to create a colony ship that would carry a thousand people to our nearest stellar neighbor. That ship could take 25,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri 4.24 light years away using the best technology we have at the moment… accelerating to 50km/s then coasting most of the way before (hopefully) restarting to decelerate at the end.

To make that journey possible, we’d likely need to develop some sort of cryogenic hibernation or futuristic "make new people when we get there" system and include everything the colony would need once it (again, hopefully) found a livable planet there to land on.

But if we could construct that same ship and give it constant propulsion at 1G using some sort of super efficient, advanced drive system, it could accelerate to 228,000km/s (78% the speed of light) before flipping around to decelerate and make the trip in about 10 years of Earth time (4-ish years of ship time with relativistic effects).

The question then becomes: Do you start building the ship first or wait until you have the constant acceleration drive? I submit that we’ve chosen to try building the ship (“Starship”… again with the name inflation) well before we’ve got the drive technology we need to get it to Mars… but if we didn’t build the ship, would we even bother trying to develop the drive or whatever other technology it is that actually makes the journey possible?

A Brief but Important Game of Leap-frog

Imagine being the human popsicles on that chemical propulsion drive ship slowly coasting its way to Alpha Centauri only to be leapfrogged by cybernetic zero-point wave drives and stellar jump gates ten thousand years before you were due to arrive. You might be a bit pissed off at your wasted effort, but you’d like to be able to rest easy in the belief that the intrepid space travelers of the future remember they sent us first and stop to rescue us on their way, right?

Well, the truth is that in order to play leap frog, you’ve got to start with a frog… only then can you leap. According to my armchair analysis, The entire Artemis mission is going to be the most glorious frog yet in the history of human endeavor. And even if that frog dies in the process, we can only send it out there as best we can and hope it survives long enough to give our future selves a chance to jump over it.