It’s up to SpaceX and Blue Origin to stick the moon landing

The Artemis II mission around the moon provided a conflicted nation with a much-needed wave of shared enthusiasm derived from achieving a lofty goal. The mission — a more comfortable and less complicated repeat of the Apollo 8 flight in 1968 — was the first step toward the dream of returning to the moon and never leaving. Now comes the risky part. NASA is betting on two relatively new space companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to build lunar landers and have them ready to test in an Artemis III mission next year. That would pave the way for the first mission back to the moon’s surface since the final Apollo flight in 1972. Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is about to launch its New Glenn rocket for only the third time and is only now working on a human-rated orbital spacecraft, the Blue Moon lander. SpaceX, the dominant player in the burgeoning commercial space market, is running behind on its huge lunar lander and is more distracted than ever with an initial sale of shares to the public that could raise as much as $75 billion.

Elon Musk’s space company, which is digesting the February acquisition of xAI, is telling investors how it’s working on direct-to-cell products and plans to build a network of data-center satellites. The focus now is on the crucial first test flight of its third version of the Starship rocket, whose launch was already pushed back a month to May. This is the challenge for Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator. On the one hand, he has a space-industry star in SpaceX that has experience building a capsule and sending astronauts to the International Space Station but has more pressing things on its agenda; on the other, he has a potential up-and-coming star in Blue Origin that is still unproven.

The situation is also an opportunity for NASA to resume the kind of risk-taking that has been lacking to shake the agency out of a post-space-shuttle lethargy and to reignite passions for reaching a stretch goal under deadline pressure. The rationale for the moon-base mission is clearer than ever now that scientists have confirmed the existence of water, helium-3 and potentially other valuable minerals since the Apollo missions. The threat of China beating the US on a permanent moon base goes much deeper than symbolism and would perhaps mark when the US began losing its position as the dominant superpower on Earth. Isaacman is well suited for leading the space agency during the rise of the commercial space industry, with its large potential profits and much lower launch costs because of reusable rockets. He’s an entrepreneur who as a teenager started a payments processing company — Shift4 Payments Inc. — from his parents’ home. He flies fighter jets at air shows and started a company — Draken International Inc. — to train military pilots. Isaacman commanded two self-funded space missions with an all-civilian crew aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

This enthusiasm for space and executive leadership skills could be the right combination to get the Artemis program back on a schedule. He’s seeking to repair morale at NASA by converting thousands of contractor jobs to staff positions and has promised to rebuild NASA’s engineering and technical prowess.

In a pivotal March unveiling of the revised moon program, Isaacman said that NASA experts would be embedded in companies throughout the supply chain to head off snags and threatened to take “uncomfortable action” if contractors slip into the bad habits of blowing past deadlines and budgets. Continuing the momentum with frequent Artemis launches is important to maintain support for the program.

Under the new plan, NASA added a test flight for Artemis III in 2027 to demonstrate docking and crew transfer between Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Orion spacecraft and the new lunar landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The agency made clear it will carry out this test in low Earth orbit with only one lander if the other isn’t ready — a dose of healthy competition. To put astronauts on the moon in 2028, the landers will need to refuel in space — another complex capability that will need to be proved.

Unlike the Apollo missions, in which the dinky spacecraft and lunar module were loaded as one package on the giant Saturn V rocket, the Orion spacecraft and proposed lunar landers are much larger and must be launched separately. The Eagle lunar module that first landed on the moon in 1969 had living space of 235 cubic feet. SpaceX’s lander will have nearly 10 times that.

In 1960, NASA engineers and its contractors constructed equipment and ran tests using pencils, paper and slide rules. Today, computer simulation and reams of telemetry data speed up designs and eliminate most of the guesswork.

It’s now up to SpaceX and Blue Origin to prove that a new breed of commercial space companies has the market discipline to design innovative space vehicles and meet deadlines. Isaacman must prod along Blue Origin, which has fallen behind in this billionaires’ race to space, and must keep SpaceX focused on the task at hand amid the noise of a record-breaking share sale. This certainly presents risk. It falls to Isaacman to ensure that, in the end, there’s also reward.

Thomas Black, Tribune News Service