The Artemis program’s direction problems

NASA was a pillar of American excellence for decades, pushing the absolute limits of engineering during the Saturn program and later the shuttle. Those days have passed; today NASA is a shell of its former self, not launching a crewed space vehicle of its own design since the shutdown of the aging shuttle program in 2011. The Space Launch System (SLS) is NASA’s new heavy launch vehicle. The Orion spacecraft is its complement as NASA’s chosen deep space vehicle capable of bringing man back to the moon and beyond. Along with the massive refurbishment of the pad crawlers, these form the key elements of the Artemis program. NASA seeks to bring Americans back to the moon, not only for longer than before, but to set the foundations for a permanent presence. Like the Saturn and Shuttle programs, this endeavour requires America's aerospace and heavy industry to achieve these goals. However the NASA of today is not the NASA of before. Dynamic visionaries like Wernher Von Braun, Kurt H. Debus, and director Gene Kranz etc, who were the keystones of our early space endeavours, are now absent. Men of such a caliber were able to effectively reel in the great corporate might of American industry to make their vision realized. However, today NASA’s Artemis program can barely cope with the contractors they have incorporated already. Stated in their SLS overview “SLS is America’s rocket with more than 1,000 companies from across the U.S. and at every NASA center supporting the development of the world’s most powerful rocket” (Mohon, 2021,paras. 10). Over budget, overtime, and shortsighted are the ways many onlookers would describe the current Artemis program, even congress is openly skeptical: "It is very disappointing to hear about delays caused by poor execution when the US taxpayer has invested so much in these programs.” commented Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Observers fear that the Artemis program will become no better than the infamously delayed James Webb space telescope.

The idea that NASA should take a backseat to the private space industry and surrender its control in the Artemis program is offensive to many. The sentiment that space is the common heritage of all mankind and all of us should have it equally, not part and parcelled to the hideously wealthy, stands strong in an America deeply divided by wealth. NASA has always served what it felt was the greater good, whether that not only be its transcendent aspirations along the final frontier or how it sought to translate those endeavors into material gain for the US public. There are general concerns about the growing power of the ultra wealthy like Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk’s attempts to commodify space. Many would look to the Artemis program and the NASA administration to be a beacon of public interest and the scientific community in the ever more congested cislunar space. By going out of its way to contract from the full breadth of the aerospace and other heavy industries the Artemis program has created jobs and opportunity from east to west. The SLS/Orion capsule have afforded themselves incredibly diverse teams of technical experts and independent designs for redundancy. One may speculate these key benefits would be lost if NASA centered its resources on a considerably smaller number of contractors or to totally put the program in the hands of a heavily vertically integrated design, (“Vertical Integration”,2021, paras. 1)

“A vertical integration is when a firm extends its operations within its supply chain. It means that a vertically integrated company will bring in previously outsourced operations in-house. The direction of vertical integration can either be upstream (backward) or downstream (forward). This can be achieved either by internally developing an extended production line or by acquiring vertically”.

With a vertically integrated company like SpaceX there would be considerably fewer benefactors. However, the Artemis program has seen the potential in SpaceX’s Starship platform which is why NASA awarded SpaceX as the sole recipient of 2.9 Billion dollars to develop the HLS (Human Landing System) as reported in the Washington post (Davenport, 2021, paras. 3). SpaceX’s design is a lunar specific variant of starship that will shuttle future astronauts to the lunar surface and back to the proposed lunar gateway station and or the Orion capsule for return to Earth. Even if NASA took the backseat and gave the market the reins to compete and produce the most economical launch vehicles, orbiters, and future stations themselves, who is to say that this hands off approach wouldn’t breed greater corporate parasitism?

It is strongly my belief that NASA has done the American public and the world a disservice in its direction with the Artemis program. SpaceX and its fully reusable starship is the clear front runner. Blue Origin’s contender the New Glenn also strives for full reusability. Economically built, easily reused rockets are the future. Instead the Artemis program has and will spend a large fortune on a disjointed mess of contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and the aforementioned hundreds of other entities. The Artemis program has misused the people's money, and the people's time.

Massive budget overruns seem to be the new normal for anything being developed by a government agency. One would hope that NASA could be the exception to this trend, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Reported by (Smith, 2021, paras. 1)

“NASA’s Inspector General remains skeptical that NASA can launch the first three Artemis missions on their promised schedules, calling it “highly unlikely.” In a report released today, he also estimates that NASA has spent $37.2 billion on Artemis so far, a total that will reach $86 billion by the end of FY2025.”

All to possibly deliver a fully expendable and enormously expensive launch system that may be abandoned after a handful of launches or fewer. Not only has the Artemis program had significant challenges with its launch vehicle and spacecraft, but even the astronauts' suits themselves may threaten to delay America’s return to the moon. As reported by (Doubek, 2021, paras. 1) “NASA won't be ready to send astronauts to the moon by 2024 as planned because, among other reasons, their spacesuits won't be ready, the agency's internal watchdog found”.

While the Artemis program began before it could receive the benefits of the past decades explosion in reusable rocket technology and the meteoric growth in the private space industry, that is no excuse for its current state. It admirably attempted to involve SpaceX and its great advancements in their choice for the HLS. However, this is convoluted in the big picture. Starship will be a fully reusable vehicle of various configurations. Starship will be able to be rapidly built, launched and recovered. Capable of refueling in orbit with tanker variants and bringing humans to the moon without the assistance of other expended stages or vehicles. Starship dwarfs the Orion capsule and even structures like the International Space Station by volume, yet it has been sidelined as simply the lander. It would seem to many observers that NASA may have already recognized the unsustainable nature of the Artemis program and its SLS vehicle.

The program already seems to believe that privatization is the key to economic operations. As reported by (Berger, 2021, paras. 2)

“NASA says it wants to transition ownership of rocket production and ground services to the private industry. In return, this private contractor should build and launch the SLS at a substantial savings of 50 percent or more off of the current industry baseline per flight cost”.

Similar action has been taken in the past when NASA consolidated shuttle operations under Lockheed Martin and Rockwell (Berger, 2021, paras. 3). Although with such an uneconomical base design, it is doubtful that serious savings could be achieved.

I think the leadership of the Artemis program would agree with me in that no hubris or pride should be held for NASA’s own sake. What is best for America's future in space is what should take absolute precedent. Furthermore, the greatness of the United States was attained through private enterprise. Private homesteaders settled the great expanses of America's interior and western frontier. Private companies built the transcontinental railway. Much like those cases it is only logical that privatization will also be the force that will conquer space. While projects like the Artemis program for face value seem to be stimulating the private aerospace industry, it pales in comparison to what could be accomplished if the Artemis program was about fostering private development of the Moon and not purely a transient scientific endeavour. This approach not only would produce greater lasting results in the pursuit of establishing men and women working, and living in space. It would also be significantly more economical for the NASA administration itself. As a regulatory body, its shrunken budget could be stretched farther. Not just for fostering private space development, but also putting that money towards hacking away at the regulatory restraints that stifle startups and make the space launch industry so prohibitively expensive. While this all may be significantly less romantic than the internal development of a mega rocket like the SLS, deep space capsules, and massive new launch infrastructure. America’s future in space is directly linked to the ability for space to become a home to profitable private ventures. This is the future NASA should be fostering with a program like Artemis, not grasping at its legacy.

Works Cited

24, J. F. — M., & Foust, J. (2021, May 24). Cost and schedule overruns continue to grow for NASA programs. SpaceNews. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://spacenews.com/cost-and-schedule-overruns-continue-to-grow-for-nasa-programs/.

Davenport, C. (2021, April 19). Elon Musk's SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the Moon. The Washington Post. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lunar-lander-contract-spacex/.

Doubek, J. (2021, August 21). NASA wants to return to the Moon by 2024, but the spacesuits won't be ready. NPR. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2021/08/21/1029750027/nasa-moon-spacesuits-astronauts-return-2024-problems.

Eric Berger. (2021, October 27). NASA wants to buy SLS rockets at half price, fly them into the 2050s. Ars Technica. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sls-rockets-at-half-price-fly-them-into-the-2050s/.

Mohon, L. (2015, March 16). Space launch system (SLS) overview. NASA. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/overview.html.

Smith, M. (2021, April 19). NASA IG: Artemis will cost $86 billion through FY2025, launch dates "highly unlikely". spacepolicyonline.com. Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-will-cost-86-billion-through-fy2025-launch-dates-highly-unlikely/.

Vertical integration. Corporate Finance Institute. (2021, June 4). Retrieved October 31, 2021, from https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/strategy/vertical-integration/.