Eric Berger has the story:
NASA is taking a two-pronged approach toward the Artemis program. The agency has a clear mandate from the White House to land humans on the Moon by 2024. This has been criticized by some as a “political” date, but supporters of the fast timeline say it has injected needed urgency into the program. At the same time, NASA also wants to avoid the pitfalls of the Apollo Program—which flew six missions to the Moon and then ended due to high costs—by designing Artemis to be sustainable for the long term.
Unfortunately, as long as NASA is forced to continue to use SLS, that’s an impossible goal. Speaking of which, they just awarded a contract to AJR for $100M/engine.
Plus, Eric has a story on the uncertainty of launch architectures.
[Monday-morning update]
OK, so it’s not a hundred million per engine. It’s $146M.
[Bumped]
This has been clear for a long time now, and not just with Artemis.
Also, depending on the timelines and prices, Starship dwarfs the competition. Could BO and Dynetics fly sooner and cheaper to allow for different types of missions?
I don’t know that either the Blue Origin or Dynetics landers will ever be used much, or even at all, for getting crew from lunar orbit down to the lunar ground. But both could be very useful, even if landed uncrewed, for later expeditionary hops to sites distant from the initial landing site/base near the lunar south pole. That could certainly include jaunts well into the lunar farside once suitable commo relay sats are in place. Both these landers are reusable and refuelable. The Blue Origin lander would only need its descent element – basically, the Blue Moon cargo lander – refueled. The LockMart-built ascent module could be left unfueled and used strictly as a crew cabin.
“But both could be very useful, even if landed uncrewed, for later expeditionary hops to sites distant from the initial landing site/base near the lunar south pole.”
I like this idea a lot – especially with the Dynetics lander, which could be well suited to less even terrain landing sites.
I suppose anything could happen. But Starship has its engine developed and is actively working on the Starship at an extremely rapid pace. If BO (with its opposite philosophy of tortoise slow) and lack of orbital experience is actively working on and testing its lander, it isn’t apparent that that is the case. I suspect that, unlike SpaceX, Dynetics cannot move forward with development until they get funding. So, I don’t see the other two taking the lead from SpaceX.
The Berger article is maximally pessimistic, with some factual errors as well. (SLS can send 26 tons to LEO? Worse than I thought…). And too many people can’t see the forest for the trees. For example:
Part of the Starship ecology includes what Musk called Starkicker, basically an expendable upper stage for SuperHeavy, which he suggested be used for thing like outer solar system probes. What’s generally overlooked is, SuperHeavy/Starkicker, in full expendable mode (meaning loss of booster as well as upper stage) can place in excess of 300 metric tons in low earth orbit, or about 2.75x Saturn V in Apollo configuration for a cost of around $200mln (payload extra, of course).
That means it can insert a fully fuelled Orion with your choice of Blue or Dynetics lander directly into low lunar orbit. As soon as one of the Starship SNs completes a successful 150 meter hop, that’s proof of concept, and SpaceX can proceed with SuperHeavy development. The main sticking point would be the development of a SLA-like fairing for Starkicker. LC-39A already has hydrogen fuel capability to service whatever lander is in the SLA, and the pad is big enough for SuperHeavy. NASA could even stack it in the VAB on a crawler and call it the SuperHeavy Launch System or SLS…
(Yes, I know it’s not “sustainable” but we’re talking state of the art morons here. Just look at Berger’s comments section.)
The Dynetics lander is certainly the most innovative architecture, though I’m biased because I’ve been suggesting similar out-of-the-box thinking. Perhaps Powerpoint landers with fifty foot ladders are one of my pet peeves, along with designs that would give Grumman grounds for copyright infringement on their early LEM design studies.
The LEM is a reflection of all of its design constraints, such as shortening the development path, viable (early 60’s) rendezvous technology, payload size, almost unlimited per-mission costs, etc. You don’t come up with a warmed-over LEM II unless you’re adhering to that same environment, or you’re not putting a lot of thought and effort into giving everything a fresh look.
The interesting thing about the SpaceX Starship proposal is that the only real assumption is “Ha! We have a Starship!” The architecture is pre-LOR direct ascent, straight out of the 1950’s, where they kind of assumed “Ha! We’ll have a Starship!” SpaceX is probably reusing the same giant ladder to get Spaceman Spiff to the surface.
Yet even the worst Starship architecture gets more payload to the surface, sooner and for less dollars, than the most efficient non-Starship architectures. That counts for a lot.
Yep, sure does count for a lot. A whole lot.
Among that lot is that HLS Starship also embodies an ability to get Artemis 3 done by 2024, then segue directly into follow-on missions, even if NASA doesn’t certify the Super Heavy-Starship combo to launch humans directly from the ground by 2024 and SLS and/or Orion and/or the other landers aren’t ready by then either.
SH can launch HLS Starship to LEO without crew. The crew can launch on a Crew D2 and transfer to HLS Starship in LEO as both ships have standard autonomous docking adapters in their noses. Then HLS Starship can refuel in either LEO or MEO from the “milch cow” Starship that is also part of SpaceX’s proposed architecture, do it’s TLI burn and go to the Moon directly.
Once on the ground, the crew can off-load and set up the 100 tonnes of goodies packed in their own HLS Starship and the other 100 tonnes of goodies that will have been waiting there for them for two years since the HLS Starship crewless demo landing SpaceX plans to do in 2022. They can take their sweet time doing this because HLS Starship – both of them – will be equipped with twin airlocks, lunar dust abatement “mud rooms” and much roomier living quarters for four than an Orion or even the “bus station locker room” hab module of the Gateway. I’m thinking at least showers, a small galley and bunks on each.
There was even a hint in the prolix and elliptical bureaucratese of the NASA Source Selection Statement for HLS that SpaceX has also proposed carrying lunar-capable vehicles – doubtless bearing Tesla badges – to the Moon as well. Tesla lift trucks, mini-dozers and flatbeds would be damned handy assists for all the stevedoring and site prep the crew would have to do.
When done extracting and setting up 200 tonnes of initial lunar base, the crew could use said vehicles to also do more than a bit of exploration and ice prospecting. At the end of the mission the crew would come back to LEO again in HLS Starship – or perhaps even in both of them – leave it/them in LEO for reuse, transfer back to the loitering Crew D2 and land in the Atlantic.
Thus, a viable EOR, rather than an LOR, architecture. And quite doable with only SpaceX assets to be in-hand by 2024. No dependencies on what any other entity does or doesn’t have ready to go by 2024.
Look more closely at the picture. Starship has a nice elevator for Spaceman Spiff to ride up and down, and so much extra capacity if the elevator breaks they can just unpack the spare elevator. Earlier renderings of lunar Starship show the elevator delivering a pressurized rover to the surface, with a second pressurized rover visible in the cargo bay.
Starship is more than twice the size of the direct-ascent version of Apollo and, indeed, more capable than Von Braun’s original lunar lander with a crew of 50. This is a lander that can deliver the major elements of a moonbase in a single cargo flight.
There’s another option that has been kicked around a bit for other vehicles. Once the Starship has landed, attitude control is used to topple it in a controlled topple to be caught by two side legs after being slowed by the ground facing attitude control. Figures about 0.4 tons of propellant on the lowering, and about half of that on the raising before take off. Plus the extra structure of the side legs and any additional structure for the side loading while horizontal. Whether it’s worth looking into such a thing to get hatches near ground level would require considerable study.
The problem with that is, it’d require substantial redesign. Starship is like an egg, rigid on one axis, not so much on the others. The elevator will work fine for personnel and anything that’ll fit through the cargo door. I’d bet the orbital satellite deploy clamshell door SpaceX has shown will never see the surface of a planet other than Earth (when they’re putting the satellite aboard). What 100 ton monolithic object would you be bringing to the Moon or Mars? The odds of anybody falling off the elevator is pretty low, and if it was a concern, those gas airbag harnesses linemen sometimes wear could be adapted for use in a vacuum.
I’d just land it horizontally. The main engines would be useless for lunar landing because they can’t throttle down enough.
Assuming you have an 85 ton dry weight and 90 tons of payload, all you’d need to hover is four Superdracos. A crew Dragon has twice that many.
This does illustrate what I was talking about: “I like belly landers, so Starship should be a belly lander.” But Starship is a reusable upper stage that has the capacity to make a vertical landing to facilitate Earth and Mars landings. Moon is just a side venture. If you make Starship both an upper stage and a belly lander, that may cost close to 100% of its payload. If you make it just a belly lander, then it’s not a reusable upper stage. Land with the Starship you’ve got and forget about belly landers, Aldrin cyclers, etc.
If I were a betting man, I’d bet NASA will go with the National Team, becuase it’s most traditional, more or less expendable, and most compatible with SLS/Orion. I bet, barring some massive change in US policy, Lunar Starship will be cut at the end of round 1, and the money SpaceX got will pay for SuperHeavy development (which is okay, because that’s most of what Lunar Starship needed in the first place).
Slightly off topic; I saw a post of Facebook that a team at JPL built a ventilator. It was the typical, feel-good, look what us smart people at NASA are doing for the community and our nation. Except, I couldn’t help thinking:
1) Musk directed his Tesla team to develop a ventilator and they delivered it weeks earlier. Although it met minimum requirements (it wasn’t fancy, just a metal arm pushing on a CPR bag), it still works and was available earlier.
2) Who paid for JPL to make a ventilator? If they are essential personnel and thus at work in a lab, then shouldn’t they be working on their essential work? If their work wasn’t essential, why were they not at home?
3) Maybe you argue that this is a good resource of national assets. Ok. But why is JPL part of NASA building life support systems? Why isn’t the human spaceflight part of NASA building ventilators? JPL specializes in unmanned vehicles, so why have that team work on human equipment?
4) I’ll admit that I’m impressed with what they built, but so what? JPL didn’t invent the ventilator. We already knew how to make them. The issue is mass producing them. This one still needs FDA approval for use. Then they’ll offer a “free license” to build them, but who is going to build them? Where is the need now? Places that could build them have ramped up production for weeks now, and there is an excess supply. I guess NASA can give away the technology to other countries, but again the issue is who builds them.
5) Wonder what The Resistance would think if Trump directed NASA to quit building SLS and use their production capability to produce JPL ventilators?
Good questions all, but probably all moot by now too as you also note.
By the way, that bare-bones “metal arm pushing on a CPR bag” ventilator wasn’t SpaceX’s, it was Virgin Orbit’s.
The Musk ventilator was designed by a combined Tesla-SpaceX team, was constructed mostly out of Tesla bits and was quite fancy by comparison – monitor screen and sensors and such. And, as you also correctly note, designed and in production weeks before the NASA effort.
An additional design requirement of the Tesla-SpaceX ventilator was that it not impact the supply chains for ventilators built by extant medical device suppliers like Medtronic but rely as much as possible on Telsa and SpaceX suppliers or internally produced bits and pieces from either company. There was evidently a lot of communication between the Musk design team and Medtronic, in particular, about both device design and non-poaching of supply chains.
As to question 5, I would hope The Resistance would think the same thing as me – “If I catch a bad case of Covid-19, do I really want to be put on a ventilator designed and built by the same people who were doing SLS?” I know what my answer would be.
Technically, JPL isn’t part of NASA. Certainly NASA is its essential customer, and anything NASA wants it to do will be given the most careful attention, but it’s CalTech that signs the paychecks.
Popular Mechanics calls them NASA. So does the various other digital media platforms that re-reported the JPL press-release: NASA-Developed Ventilator Authorized by FDA for Emergency Use
But more important is this from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine: “This ventilator is one of countless examples of how taxpayer investments in space exploration – the skills, expertise and knowledge collected over decades of pushing boundaries and achieving firsts for humanity – translate into advancements that improve life on Earth.”
I don’t see the value in distinguishing JPL as part of Caltech and distancing NASA from it considering the press release doesn’t make the distinction other than to say Caltech is offering the free license. However, I do have a few more questions:
What is the first for humanity here?
How did investment in space exploration lead to the ventilator?
Does Bridenstine not know the history of the ventilator?
Wait, let me walk this back some… Does Bridenstine not know that SPACELABS Healthcare already had a patent for a SARS Ventilator that “specifically, to a ventilator system that addresses respiratory distress due to the onset of an epidemic or pandemic disease state. In particular, the present invention is a ventilator system that can be manufactured quickly with minimal skill requirements and employed rapidly in response to epidemic respiratory disease conditions.”
Spacelabs Healthcare was created in 1958 to develop life science equipment for Gemini and Apollo. The CEO is Deepak Chopra.
1. For $100 million….why, you could buy two (2) entire flight proven Falcon 9 flights, base price. OR, one Falcon Heavy flight, with center core expended.
2. It’s become hard to avoid the sense that Bridenstine would just as soon dispense with SLS – if he could. But given how hammered he got when he played with the idea of launching Orion on commercial launchers, I think we are seeing ANOTHER kind of “two track” strategy at work:
a) Keep the Pork for now, but hem it in tightly: Retain SLS to keep the congressional protectors at bay, but try to restrict it to just crew delivery, and avoid if possible efforts to upgrade it (i.e., the Exploration Upper Stage), or use it for other missions (like Europa Clipper).
b) Aggressively pursue commercial-oriented programs as much as possible for all other facets of HEOMD (Commercial Crew, CRS, CLPS, Gateway logistics, human landers, the Axiom station), working for the day when they can finally crowd out SLS as political infeasible.
Bingo. That’s been my take on J.B. since pretty early on. It doesn’t hurt his strategy that everyone on both sides of the aisle seem to take him as some sort of Okie yokel ex-fighter jock who just stooges for Trump. Being seriously underestimated is always useful when playing any sort of game and Mr. Bridenstine’s seems to be 3-D chess.
A manageable bit at a time, he appears to be building a cofferdam around SLS until it has been completely removed from the mainstream flow, after which the isolated pond thus created can be drained and SLS left low and dry.
I worked in the chemical plant industry for a long time, so I’ve worked with temperature and pressure extremes, complex rotating equipment, critical controls systems, etc. Granted, nothing to the level of space-rated equipment, but still. Just what in the blue blazes are these engines made of that justify this price? If it were a one-of maybe, but I’m assuming this is the special volume discount price.
It isnt even certain that SLS will ever fly no matter how much money and time they have.
My favorite image from the whole business relates to Lunar ISRU. Sure you can make oxygen and hydrogen on the Moon, but methane? Well. Then I picture a cargo Starship unloading a hundred tons of anthracite for the coal gassification plant you brought up…
I loved how SpaceX neatly solved Zubrin’s biggest showstopper regarding Lunar Starship–they added an extra set of (thus far, undefined) engines just below the crew section *solely* to handle the final landing burn without producing a crater or risking major FOD.
Zubrin’s a good example of someone who had a great idea a long time ago, and has continued championing it long after its time has come and gone. The Aldrin Cycler is aother example of an idea rendered obsolete by Starship, but people across the Internet continue to say “Starship is great, but what we really need is an Aldrin Cycler.” What we really need is a bigger Starship. The original ITS was right sized, just a bridge too far. The Starship being built is the bridge.
William Barton, where there is water ice on the Moon I think there will be hydrocarbons. That black tarry stuff on the surface of comets.
I’m curious why you think that, specifically of the Moon, and how much do you think there’ll be? I’ve written etensively about the CHON resources of NEO, main belt asteroids, and especially noted the high likelihood of tidally processed bitumen-like resources on the Jovian Trojan asteroids. I have doubted there is much CHON on the Moon, other than possibly at certain impact sites.
I thought it was accepted that the lunar water came from comet impacts, so if that is true there will be CHON as well.
Maybe we should go look?
I think the data has already been collected by Chandrayaan-2 and is awaiting analysis. Hoswever, my understanding was, the ice collected in the polar cold traps came from comet impacts elsewhere on the Moon, so any CHON at the impact site will be somewhere else. I guess we’ll know soon, one way or another.
Why would the mechanism for trapping water vs CHON in the cold traps be different?
In theory, because the CHON minerals become ejecta at the impact site, whereas the cometary ice becomes water vapor that condenses at the cold traps. And bearing in mind that the melting and vaporizing points of minerals is not the same as their consituent elements.
In its simplest form, lets say you have a hunk of concrete consisting of bitumen (asphalt) and ice cubes, and it hits the surface of the Moon at 40,000 kph. Theoretically the ice cubes will flash into vapor and the asphalt will melt and splatter around the crater (and whatever does vaporize will condense quickly as tektites).
That’s the theory anyway. Since we’ll soon have the facts, it’ll be nice to find out what really happens.