Congressional leaders backing NASA’s masterplan to be the first to land astronauts on the Moon in the new millennium are becoming apprehensive the U.S. could lose this future-shaping Space Race II.
Just weeks after SpaceX conducted the seventh flight test of its Starship super-spacecraft, with its capsule spectacularly exploding over the Caribbean, the House of Representatives Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee staged a hearing focused on NASA’s current scheme to deploy the Starship to speed its spacefarers to the Moon’s South Pole in 2027.
NASA has awarded SpaceX twin contracts – valued at $4 billon-plus – for the experimental Starship to fly its Artemis astronauts to the ancient silver and black orb in a series of missions starting two years from now.
Congressman Mike Haridopolos, who heads the group overseeing the American space program, said on opening the hearing that this pivotal lunar touchdown would mark “the most significant moment of America’s Space Program since the Apollo program.”
“The world is watching,” Haridopolos declared. “We are in a race to the Moon and America must win that race.”
“Our journey to the Moon is in service to a greater goal,” he added, “to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Yet an elite American space scholar – a member of the NASA Advisory Council – told these legislators he deeply doubts that NASA’s current mission blueprints to despatch astronauts to the Moon by 2027, or even by 2030, will succeed.
“Our approach today has a very low probability to match the ‘before 2030’ milestone for landing humans on the Moon,” Daniel Dumbacher, who formerly served as Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, in charge of the Artemis lunar landings, testified at the hearing.
While he didn’t mention the fiery breakup of SpaceX’s Starship during its January flight demo, Dumbacher, now a professor in aeronautical engineering at Purdue University, said that the ship’s need to be refueled with super-cooled liquid oxygen and methane in low Earth orbit via multiple dockings with still-to-be-developed tankers – a complicated operation that has never been tested – before each flight to the Moon involves an assemblage of complex technologies that might not be perfected within the next five years.
“We might have to build a lander – we might have to scale down the current lander,” Dumbacher told the House, “so that we get to that 2030 landing.”
To avert potentially spiraling problems with testing the colossal Starships during the countdown to this new Moon quest, he said, “I’d get myself a simplified lander – so that I can get to the Moon – that does not require multiple launches.”
Developing “a small new lander” at lightning speed, he predicted, could help NASA emerge as the victor in this super-charged lunar match-up.
Because SpaceX, with its next-generation Starship, is the faraway lead contender in terms of securing future NASA awards to rocket American astronauts to the Martian dunes, Professor Dumbacher’s testimony was doubly dispiriting, casting a shadow over projected flights to both celestial destinations.
Yet Robert Zubrin, the globe’s leading strategist for landing humans on Mars, and then terraforming the Red Planet to become a second foundation for human civilization, tells me he’s sketched out conceptual designs for a new spacecraft that could allow SpaceX to transport aeronauts to the Moon, and to Mars, on an accelerated timeline.
One of the top aeronautical engineers in the U.S., who co-designed an early version of NASA’s powerful Space Launch System rocket, Dr. Zubrin says his prototype for a “Mini-Starship” could place SpaceX’s planned odysseys to the eternally shadowed craters of the Moon, and to the orange-red sandhills of Mars, back on track.
During a virtual roundtable with space journalists and scholars that he joined – hosted by the Mars Society – I asked Zubrin about this space lifeboat, specifically aimed at rescuing SpaceX’s Mars and Moon expeditions.
With his extraordinary series of books prefiguring the rockets and robots that could set the stage for the human exploration and transformation of Mars, Zubrin is widely considered the supreme conceptual creator of a future Eden-like New World on Mars.
Zubrin told me SpaceX has already adopted most of the mission architecture precepts he set out in his masterwork The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, a guidebook for establishing a new branch of civilization on Mars while restoring the orb’s atmosphere and oceans.
He said he’s positive SpaceX will ultimately perfect its leading-edge Starship, and that prototyping, testing, crashing and designing new generations of the craft are all part of the outfit’s Silicon Valley-influenced modus operandi.
Yet to speed up lofting NASA astronauts onto the Moon, and onto Mars, SpaceX should rush to develop and launch a miniature version of its Starship, Dr. Zubrin told me in an interview conducted during the latest episode of the Mars Society’s riveting Red Planet Live webcast, hosted by anchor Ashton Zeth.
Zubrin says he’s already brainstormed with SpaceX founder Elon Musk on his proposal to craft a Mini-Starship, or Starboat, to push forward the upcoming lunar and Mars missions.
“There’s a lot of good things about the SpaceX Mars mission plan,” Dr. Zubin says. “Its point of departure was my own Mars Direct plan,” outlined in The Case for Mars.
For its Mars missions in the works, Zubrin says, SpaceX is adapting his blueprints for “direct launch to Mars, direct return from Mars using methane oxygen propellant made on Mars.”
“His [Musk’s] vehicle designs are completely different from the ones that I proposed in the Mars Direct plan, but this basic mission architecture is the same.”
SpaceX has designed an incredibly larger spacecraft than the Mars-bound rocket and capsule Zubrin sketched out two decades ago, he says, “because you know my attention was on Mars exploration [while] “Musk’s vision is centered on Mars settlement.”
“The defect in Musk’s plan is that the Starship is really big,” Zubrin says, “and to send it back from Mars to Earth on a direct trajectory would involve making about 600 tons of propellant on Mars.”
To do that, SpaceX would first have to fly a contingent of advanced interconnected robots to build the future astronaut base, and begin converting captured water and carbon dioxide into 600 metric tons of liquid oxygen and methane – the rocket fuel needed for each Starship to make the return voyage to Earth.
All this will require a power source capable of generating 600 kilowatts, Zubrin says, which would likely depend on a Mars surface nuclear power reactor.
Yet obtaining American government approval for a nuclear reactor – fueled by highly-enriched uranium – to be flown to Mars and operated by robots might entail a long, drawn-out process – even for a spacecraft operator who has high-level contacts in the White House.
To circumvent this potential Mars landing showstopper, Zubrin says, SpaceX could instead dispatch a flotilla led by one colossal Starship accompanied by a retinue of smaller Starboats.
Each Starboat, he says, would be one-fifth the mass of the Starship, and would therefore require only one-fifth the propellant of the super-ship to return to Earth.
When the Starship reaches Mars and begins circling the planet, he says, the Starboats can be deployed to shuttle explorers back and forth to the Martian surface, including to the NASA/SpaceX Mars Base One.
“Park a Starship in Mars orbit,” Zubrin says, “and just go up and down from the surface of Mars in a reusable Starboat.”
“So the Starboat is a mini-Starship – it takes 3.8 kilometers a second delta-v to to go up from Mars surface to Mars orbit.”
Delta-v is the physics term for change in velocity.
The Starboat would only require a change in velocity of 0.2 kilometer per second to land from Martian orbit, he adds, “because the Mars atmosphere does the slowing you down.”
“You just need a little bit of delta-v after you’re subsonic.”
So the Starboat round-trip between the Martian surface and low Mars orbit requires a change in velocity of just 4 kilometers per second, a calculation that sparked an epiphany for him, Zubrin says.
“Well guess what: to go up and down from low lunar orbit to the lunar surface is 1.9 kilometers a second each way, or 3.8 total,” almost the same as the delta-v and fuel required for the two-way jaunts between Mars orbit and the ground base.
“So the same Starship-Starboat combination that does Mars could also do the Moon.”
Under SpaceX’s current mission plans for the Moon and Mars, Zubrin says, “Musk is trying to do it all with one size fits all.”
“I believe it should be two sizes fits all.”
“Starship plus Starboat gives you both the Moon and Mars, and with a vastly more efficient architecture than either the current Artemis mission architecture, which is simply madness, or the Musk Mars architecture, which is not mad but is severely suboptimal.”
At the same time, the grand designer of Mars exploration flights of the future says, “the Starboat could be used to go surface to surface on Mars.”
With the Starboat, and an automated propellant plant near the first Mars astronaut outpost, “you could go a couple of thousand kilometers away from the base, land, explore a place over there and fly back to the base.”
So, equipped with one Starboat, or a squadron of these Mini-Starships, the first astronauts to explore Mars could potentially have planet-wide reach.
“Now, instead of just traveling locally in ground rovers, you can travel thousands of kilometers in the Starboat.”
“Starboat could be used as a reusable upper stage on a New Glenn,” the Blue Origin heavy-lift rocket that just aced its first flight test, Zubrin adds, or as an “upper stage on a Falcon 9,” the SpaceX booster that now dominates spaceflight worldwide.
Zubrin, who founded the Mars Society as a think tank and design studio to sketch out the geodesic dome-enclosed Martian hyper-tech cities of the future, says: “If you understand how to build Starships you can build a Starboat. So we need to do that – we need to get working on that straight away.”
He projects that by rapidly developing Starboats, SpaceX could “be doing lunar missions actually in this 2028 time frame – that definitely could be done – as well as robotic expeditions [to Mars] in 2028.”
During the Red Planet Live webcast, host Ashton Zeth pointed out that during the first race to the Moon, the dueling space superpowers were also engaged in a Cold War competition to stun the world with their new-frontier space technologies.
Zeth asked Zubrin: “Do we need another type of Cold War” to supercharge the new sprint to the ancient Moon?
“Well actually we’re in something a bit hotter than a Cold War right now even though some people may not realize it,” Zubrin said.
“The shooting has already begun.”
“We are in a a global conflict right now which includes both ideological competition but also a military action.”
“So yes, we do have a requirement right now to once again to astonish the world with what the free people could do.”
“In the early 60s,” Zubrin recounted, Soviet Russian leader Nikita “Khrushchev came here and he said: ‘We will bury you.’”
By that, Khrushchev meant that: “We are the future – you are the past,” Zubrin explained.
“And the authoritarians are saying this right now as well.”
“We’ve got to show that that’s wrong,” Dr. Zubrin said.
That is all-important not just for the race to the Moon, or to Mars, but to shape the future of the home planet, Zubrin adds.
“These people are not interested in peace,” he warns.“They’re interested in global domination.”