Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “No sir, we never met face-to-face,” Mack says, “but you did hire us.”

  “Prove it,” Bob says flippantly, knowing that they can't.

  Mack sets a briefcase on the end of the table and opens it. He extracts a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve and lays it on the table. “That's your fingerprints, containing a residue of pig feces, caked onto a letter in which you lay out the terms of our employment.”

  “That doesn't prove anything,” Bill says, while holding a pig in his lap.

  “That's not even why I brought them in,” K says. “This is going to be fun,” K says to Hannah. Mack takes a small projector out of his briefcase, setting it on the table. He starts a video showing the Koke brothers sitting on Sergei Kuznetzov's patio, recorded from quite a distance away, with audio provided by a pair of long-range listening devices.

  “Be specific,” Sergei says on the recording.

  “You vote how we want and we've got a billion dollars with your name on it,” Bob says.

  “You know I'm being watched, how would I explain-”

  “This is off-the-books money.”

  “Ghost money.”

  “Tax-free, totally hidden, no strings attached, an easy billion.”

  “Okay, you have deal,” Sergei replies on the video just before it ends. Kingsley laughs to himself.

  “Ghost money,” K says with a smile. Sergei laughs quietly via Skype.

  “We want that money back, Sergei!” Bob shouts toward the mic on the table.

  “What money?” Sergei asks with a smile.

  “Next time you hire private detectives,” Kingsley says, “I'd make sure I actually pay them. You know, unless you want to make enemies with people that make a living uncovering secrets. So, yeah, I think we're done here.” K gets up, wraps his arm around Caroline and heads for the door. “Good meeting.”

  Brittany catches up with Kingsley as he and Caroline head for the parking lot. “Kingsley!”

  “Sorry Britt, looks like you'll just have to be my Vice President a little longer,” K says.

  “You know I didn't want your job,” Brittany replies. “I'm with you all the way. I just wanna know, how did you turn Sergei? I mean, you knew he took a secret billion, but then you also knew he was going to vote for you. So how did you flip him?”

  “I just told him he could crash at my place for a while.” Kingsley and Caroline reach the door and head for his car. Brittany stops at the doorway, thinking about K's answer.

  “Wait, what? Kingsley, what does that mean?” She chases after him.

  “I just told him he could live on Excalibur,” K adds.

  “You promised a Russian gangster that he could live on our space station?”

  “Indeed,” K replies.

  “For how long?” Brittany asks.

  “As long as he pays his rent, which, judging by the fact that he just made a billion dollars, I'm going to say he's going to be living there as long as he wants,” K adds, reaching his car, the new Tezla R 2.0, which is an update on the original Tezla sports car. Caroline reaches the passenger door but the doorhandles on the new Tezla are recessed into the side of the car until the key is detected nearby. Caroline clears her throat and Kingsley holds his key by the handle on his side while still talking to Brittany. The door handles emerge from the doors and Caroline enters.

  “Well done K,” Brittany says. “We've got a year until they can hold another one of these votes. You better have some progress in reusability by then. Harding seems to be on their side, all they have to do is persuade Wilke. He's a businessman, if a year from now we've just got a bunch of crash landed rockets, he'll flip.”

  “Well, a year is plenty of time. We've got a lot of launches to keep testing first stage return, can start on second stage return, and these cargo missions will let us test powered landing of the capsule. We'll have a lot of progress in a year. But for now, I've got some billionaire philanthropist things to do.”

  Chapter 11

  “The State of NASA: 2016”

  By Gregg Brooks

  2016 is a presidential election year in the United States, and as so many things do, the future of space travel hinges on the results. It's been five years since a space shuttle flew and the next manned NASA launch is scheduled for five years from now. In the halls of NASA there's a saying, which goes something like: “every President announces a twenty year plan. Eight years later we get a new president and a new twenty year plan.”

  President Obama is now counting the days of his last year in office. While the two parties still battle to decide who will win their respective nominations, NASA is preparing for a new twenty year plan. You don't even need to ask people at NASA, the question is in the ether, wafting down the hallways, influencing every meeting. You don't need to ask them because they're all already wondering if the Space Launch System will fly in five years. There are plenty of theories as to what will happen. The new president might find a congress ready cooperate with anybody that's not Obama.

  This congress has been historically bad by almost any metric. They've actually enacted fewer laws than any other congress in history, despite living at a time when there's more for them to be doing than ever before. It's a bit of inescapable irony that the Keynesian Democrats rarely get to enact economic stimulus because of the Republican blockade. But when a Republican president is in office, the Republicans will spend money on all kinds of programs they like, essentially becoming the Keynesian they argue with so vehemently. Only Nixon can go to China. And maybe nowadays only a Mitt Romney type can go to Mars.

  There's hope at NASA that regardless of party, the next President will be able to throw NASA some funding to go along with the inevitable and expensive twenty-year plan he or she will challenge them with.

  Ever since Kennedy's stirring Moon challenge that practically launched NASA, most presidents want to duplicate Kennedy. The result is NASA constantly being challenged by new presidents, as if the only thing in their way is a lack of confidence that a speech could impart. No, the obstacle is of course money, and the wannabe-Kennedys rarely deliver with the cash that Kennedy did.

  Perhaps a Republican president will find a congress just itching to spend money in their districts and will have the clout to launch us finally on the course for Mars. Or maybe the Republican will be one of those anti-science, climate-denying, “taxes are evil,” childish Randian types and will gut the NASA budget along with all that wasteful science funding like the totally superfluous “volcano monitoring,” that Louisianan Governor Bobby Jindal once decried as wasteful spending. In recent years, the Republican gerrymandered house has cut funding for all kinds of research and science, up to and including cutting NOAA's funding for tracking hurricanes. Why don't we ask Governor Jindal if hurricane hunting is wasteful spending.

  Some in NASA are rooting for a Democrat to retain the White House because the general opinion within NASA is that Democrats care about science, research, learning about the cosmos, and the dream that is NASA (which might have something to do with the Dems not being climate-denying creationists), while the Republicans see NASA as nothing more than a jobs bill, or as some say, “a pork delivery service.”

  With a political landscape in total upheaval, it's hard to say what the next twenty-year plan might be. For now, NASA is going on as if they don't expect a new president to come into office and challenge them to a Kennedy moment. The Orion capsule has flown once already, albeit unmanned and not on an SLS. The checkout flight will (allegedly) pave the way for the first SLS flight in early 2018. This will also be an unmanned flight of the now 80-tonne (to LEO) launch vehicle. SLS-1 will send an unmanned Orion on a trip around the Moon before coming back to Earth. The mission will test the SLS as well as the Orion's ability to survive a re-entry return from deep space. This all sounds great, right? So we'll follow this up with manned missions to deep space, right?

  Not so fast. After SLS-1, they don't even plan to fly a second SLS or another Ori
on until 2022. Yeah. After proving the thing works, they'll wait four years before flying it again. No space program has ever worked this way, with such infrequent launches. For comparison, the first launch of a Saturn V rocket, called Apollo 4, was in November 1967. The unmanned launch was a checkout of the Saturn V, very similar to the SLS-1 flight. This test was followed by Apollo 6, a second unmanned test of the Saturn V in April 1968. The third Saturn V launched Apollo 8 and sent humans on a historic trip to the far side of the Moon for Christmas 1968, barely more than a year after the first Saturn V launch. By July of 1969, Neil and Buzz were walking on the Moon. So why is it that the first Saturn V launch was followed up by the sixth Saturn V and Apollo 11 less than two years later, yet the first and second SLS flights are four years apart?

  The answer is funding, or rather, a lack of it. NASA simply doesn't have the money to run the SLS. Yet they are mandated by Congress to build it. What do you call the opposite of “diminishing returns?” I call it the NASA budget. Producing anything from giant rockets to cell phones is all about fixed costs. NASA has to operate the facilities that build, test, maintain, and launch all the components related to the SLS. Whether they fly an SLS every three months or every four years, they still have the same fixed costs of operating all of those facilities and paying the salaries of all of those people. The actual materials of the rocket, the fuels, the payloads, all of these things costs just a fraction of those fixed costs. Since most congressmen care only about funneling money to their districts, they insist that these NASA facilities and contractors need to be kept in place, but they don't particularly care if they actually do anything productive. So we find ourselves in a situation where congress has found the funding to give NASA enough to cover the enormous fixed costs of developing the huge SLS rocket, but only enough money to actually launch the thing every-other-year at best. Once it goes into operation, the SLS program will cost about two billion dollars per year even if they don't launch a rocket that year. So an every-other-year approach means that the American taxpayer will be paying more than four billion dollars per SLS launch. Sound like a good deal?

  According to CP Bray, a professor of spacecraft systems engineering at MIT, if congress doubled the SLS budget, not the total NASA budget which sits at 18 billion dollars, it would allow NASA to launch three or four SLS missions per year instead of one every-other-year. In other words, a doubling of the budget increases the capability of the program by six or eight times. “In fact, a six-fold increase in the number of launches would do more than just increase the capability six-fold. Infrequent launches mean we can't perform Earth-Orbit-Rendezvous missions where two launches put together a larger spacecraft. Such techniques are absolutely necessary for any kind of serious space exploration. Simply doubling the SLS budget will allow us to have chronologically-contiguous launches and opens up the solar system to exploration. With this every-other year approach, we'll be stuck in the 1960's version of exploration in which we plant a flag and immediately leave. No real science, no real progress.”

  Numerous experts have called for cancellation of the SLS, but that's not very likely. It's not that NASA doesn't see its flaws or that this situation is the result of mistakes that can be corrected. No, we're in this state absolutely by design. This is what the politicians wanted. A big expensive rocket that means a lot of jobs in a lot of their districts. And if said giant rocket ever explodes or fails or comes under scrutiny, then they might lose those precious dollars for their districts. So they don't want a rocket that flies often or does anything risky that might result in some negative attention. So that's what we have; a big expensive rocket that will rarely fly and never do anything risky.

  But there's one big flaw in this plan: there might be an alternative. Politicians who've gotten their way absolutely hate alternatives and will do anything to kill alternative choices to the pork-plan they already have in place. We saw this in the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle. The X-38 was a small lifting-body space plane meant to be docked to the space station and used only in an emergency to bring crew home without the need for an emergency shuttle launch. The program was going great and we were only two years away from launching the X-38 and having a permanent lifeboat on the ISS. Then the budget was cut and the X-38 died. Why? Because the shuttle-bloc of politicians saw it as a threat. You could put astronauts in an X-38 and launch it on a cheaper rocket like a Delta IV Heavy for much cheaper than a shuttle launch. And that meant there was a much cheaper alternative to the shuttle's ability to move people to and from the ISS. The X-38 was not really a direct competitor with the shuttle though. It had a fraction of the capability, it was like comparing a lifeboat to the Titanic. Okay, maybe that's a bad analogy. But the point is, the system that is already in place is in place because it's the option that won the political battle, and as such, it will have the power to undercut any alternative that might come along.

  We saw history repeat with the commercial crew program. Part of the deal with SLS was a compromise that NASA would stop doing routine flights for crew and cargo, and instead allow private industry to do it. In return, NASA would allegedly get the funding for deep space exploration. So billions have been sent out to numerous companies that came up with systems to deliver crew and cargo. But then two years ago, after the sequestration cuts became semi-permanent, the funding for commercial space programs was slashed to the bone, leaving NASA with no choice but to pay 70 million dollars per seat on the Russian Soyuz and leaving SpacEx, ULA, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow, Orbital Sciences, and other companies scrambling to make ends meet. This move makes no sense. Unless you see it as the SLS-bloc of politicians see it, as a threat. Cheap routine flights make the SLS look ridiculously expensive. So instead of finding a way to make SLS cheaper or canceling it altogether and moving that money to the private space industry, the pork-politicians have doubled down on SLS and are trying to kill the commercial industry.

  Now in the midst of an investigation into the F-35 Joint Bankruptcy Fighter, a Congressional hearing is set to address the state of the space program. I already know how this will go. The SLS-Porkiticians will prevail. It's a program designed to be too big to fail, too many jobs in too many districts, and seeing as this is a major election year, you don't think politicians are suddenly going to care more about the national interests than their re-election bids do you? So SLS will stay in place, the commercial space industry will be ridiculed and made fun of, SLS will be touted as the best rocket in the world and the key to the future. So the end result will be more of the same.

  It feels a little like being in the middle of a long tunnel. It's dark as night, but there's two ends of the tunnel that are barely visible. But which one do we head for? On the one hand, if we actually funded SLS, we could have 3-4 launches a year of a super-heavy-lift vehicle and go to the Moon and Mars. It wouldn't take a huge sum of money to get there. A NASA budget with enough money to operate the SLS at a high flight rate as well as make actual payloads like lunar landers, deep space habs, etc, would probably be closer to 25 or 30 billion dollars. If that sounds like a lot, then you should take a gander at the budget we give the Defense Department. Homeland Security gets 50 billion dollars a year. This year we'll spend over 100 billion dollars on interest payments for the money we borrowed to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. We really can't find an extra 10 billion for NASA?

  So that's one way out of the darkness: actually give NASA a big enough budget to use the massive rocket we've forced them to make. However, it's probably not likely that we'll get a 50% increase in the NASA budget or anything close to it. So that leaves us stuck in the darkness of this tunnel with a massive expensive rocket and nothing for it to launch. So maybe we inch toward the other end of the tunnel. Assuming no change in the NASA budget, the only way out of this hole is to cancel SLS. Instead pour that money into a private space industry which will immediately give us the ability to send people and cargo to the ISS and with some development funds will allow us to explore deep space within a few years. But odds are, the
Senate-Launch-System won't be going anywhere and so it will be a huge drain on the NASA budget while producing little value as long as the NASA budget stays where it is.

  We know the way out of the tunnel, but there's a bunch of politicians in here with us telling us that we're just fine where we are while they pile bricks up to block the other end of the tunnel and hope we forget the option ever existed.

  “The Future is Now”

  by Hank Collins

  I don't need to tell you about the clusterf@&% over at NASA right now. I'm sure you've heard all about it. You can't even express optimism about NASA or the SLS or Orion without someone coming along to burst your bubble and tell you that SLS is a boondoggle.

  But that's not what I'm writing this for.

  China has a six-person, three-module space station in orbit, and they're gearing up for something big. The new rocket, the Long March 9, seems to be shooting for a 100 tonne+ capability. China is famously tight-lipped about their plans, but many are speculating that China is about to announce a lunar program. Don't be too surprised if there are Taikonauts walking on the surface of the Moon in five years and the Apollo program that landed twelve men on the Moon is quickly overshadowed by a Chinese program that puts twice as many humans on the Moon in the decade to follow. The first woman to walk on the Moon might very well be Chinese.

  How can they do this with a budget that's a fraction of the NASA budget? Well, the short answer is that there are other countries where people actually care about getting things done, as opposed to the US where all anyone seems to care about is making a buck. I honestly think Americans have been completely overcome by greed. We did great things back when we had an enemy and a competitor that kept us honest. Then we won the Cold War and decided we deserved to be rich and lazy and that's how we've acted ever since. Tax cuts for billionaires and laying off inner-city teachers. Major bridges falling into rivers. A failing power grid, a laughable internet infrastructure, a joke of a healthcare system. Somehow the richest nation on Earth can't afford to give teachers a decent pension or to maintain its basic services. Oh, but we do have the money to pay a privatized prison industry to imprison more of our own people than any other nation on Earth ever has (don't get me started on the war on drugs). Forget about the Gulag. It's all about greed. The rich are greedy for more and they buy up influence from people who will do anything for a buck.