Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  They say that at this point they'll then go send a crew to flyby Mars or Venus, or some other far-flung destination. But I have my doubts. If they send a crew into deep space and they don't come back. That could be it for SLS, hell for even NASA manned spaceflight. You think the congress-pigs who designed this pork delivery system want to risk it being canceled by staking its existence on the success of a mission to Mars or Venus? I don't think so. I think NASA is going to be stuck doing things in near-Earth space, sending yearly missions out to a lunar space station, like the space shuttle, only more expensive. So imagine what it'll look like in 2026, think about ten years from now. We've spent twenty billion on SLS, we haven't brought down the price to orbit at all, in fact SLS is going to be more expensive than a lot of existing launch vehicles. And for those tens of billions, all we'll have to show for it is maybe a couple of interesting missions. NASA will be trying to get the money, the backing to go to Mars, but it's not gonna happen. Not then. They'll study it, they'll pour billions into research and nothing will come of it for a decade.

  Meanwhile, I'll be out here working on reusability and bringing costs down significantly. By 2020, I'll be sending people around the Moon for 200 million a mission, not a billion. By 2024, I'll be landing people on the Moon for no more than 300 million a mission. By 2026, I'll be sending unmanned ships to Mars to start building my retirement home. What will the SLS look like when I'm launching reusable rockets once a week. Imagine what I could be doing in 2026 if I had some of that SLS money instead of having to do this on my own. Imagine if NASA had to use private industry to get to space, instead of building their own big dumb rocket that's essentially a giant cost-plus contract with no competition, no alternative, nothing to drive down cost. Imagine the competition to get those NASA missions. Imagine a fleet of dozens of space telescopes in 2030 instead of one big one. That's the difference between staying with SLS and canceling it. It'll be massive, it'll look cool once a year, it'll do a few great things, but it will absolutely set us back another three decades the way the shuttle did.”

  “If I cancel it, the next President can just bring it back, so what good does that do?”

  “But if the contracts are terminated, even if for just a day, that means they can't just re-open the program and pick up where they left off. They would have to have open bidding for all of the contracts and allow a competition. The whole thing about the shuttle-derived rocket is that they were able to get around allowing any kind of competition by keeping existing contracts in place and not having to justify those as new contracts. They kept the money in place, it's the pork delivery system that's been refined for years. If you cancel SLS, they can try to bring it back, but they'll have to be able to justify everything in a way that never happened with SLS. They can try to bring the same thing back, but after all this, it'll be really hard for them to justify all those decisions and contracts and to ignore the private sector. I mean, in 2009 it wasn't so crazy to ignore the possibility of NASA buying its access to space, but today? I've got a space hotel.”

  “And replace it with what?”

  “You don't get to pick the replacement. But you can make sure we don't stay on the path we're on now. Maybe NASA gets to build what they want, a flexible launcher with several payload sizes that allows them to actually bring up production to bring prices down. Maybe they design something totally new and innovative. Or maybe now, as opposed to in 2009, there's enough proof that the private sector can handle this and NASA can get out of the rocket business. True competition will keep prices down. This sole-source monopoly stuff is bad for the country, bad for NASA, bad for the tax payer. You can end it right now. . . but you won't get to pick where we go next, nor get any credit for where that might be. But you better believe you'll get all the blame if it goes bad.”

  “I'm used to blame,” Obama says.

  “Canceling it means putting a lot of jobs in limbo or ending them. That's not going to be popular.”

  “Is it better for the country?” Obama asks.

  “It could backfire. If the next guy wants to gut NASA, then this just helps him do that.”

  “You know I can't cancel SLS directly,” Obama says.

  “No, but you can make it happen.”

  “I want to believe we could have real competition. This F-35 thing just shows how a lack of competition is a recipe for disaster,” Obama says.

  “Real competition would completely change the game. If I had a quarter of the NASA budget, I would do amazing things with it. NASA is absolutely paralyzed by congress and politics and the lack of competition.”

  “The one thing the private sector hasn't done is heavy lift. If the SLS dies and NASA is in the market for say two or three heavy lift launches a year, what does the market do?” Obama asks, “What does that competition look like? I've got advisers telling me that it's too expensive to develop heavy lift and that only NASA can do it.”

  “Fire those advisers,” K says. “It's just wrong. Heavy lift is not exponentially harder, there just is no market for it. Nobody needs 80 tonne satellites. So with no market, there's just no reason to develop it, so it hasn't happened. But there's absolutely no reason to think that the private industry can't build a heavy lift rocket, it's not fundamentally different from smaller rockets. Alan Shepard was the first American in space thanks to a rocket built by Chrysler for god's sake.”

  “Does competition automatically bring costs down?” Obama asks.

  “Competition, fair, open, real competition absolutely can do great things. But the real key beyond just competition is implementing reusability. Reusability plus a high flight rate and low unit costs, together that's the silver bullet that enables us to do everything we want in space without breaking the bank. Competition, reusability, high flight rate. That's the key to success, and the complete antithesis to that is the SLS. No competition, not reusable, and a horrific flight rate. It is a cooperative endeavor that's designed to throw money at every company, so there's no competition and they keep trying to kill off anything that might be able to compete with it.

  “So you'd cancel it, get rid of all those jobs.”

  “I'd cancel it and use that money smarter to get more rockets and more capability. In fact, it might even create more jobs than it destroys.”

  “So if I cancel SLS, what happens?” Obama asks.

  “That depends on what NASA can do, or is made to do. Obviously I'd offer up the Eagle Heavy. It'll be capable of 63 tonnes when we get the new upper stage. When we move to the reusable Eagle 9R and HeavyR, with the upratings on the Merlin engines, the second version of the Raptor methane engine, we'll move up to about 68 tonnes.”

  “What happens if SpacEx doesn't make it. Is it just up to ULA then? We're back at a monopoly? Or will the Space Launch System live just as a private venture. Is that what we'll have SLS vs. ULA?”

  “SLS is sort of part of ULA. It's actually really confusing when you try to figure out who makes what. Technically all the Space Shuttle infrastructure was consolidated into a single company called United Space Alliance which is separate from United Launch Alliance, but is also a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Rocketdyne was founded by North American Aviation to study captured V-2s. They developed the Saturn V's engines as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine. North American sold Rocketdyne to Rockwell, Rockwell sold them to Boeing, Boeing sold them to Pratt & Whitney, they merged forming Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. In 2013, GenCorp bought Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and merged it with Aerojet, forming Aerojet Rocketdyne. Aerojet made missiles mostly, and were great with solid fuel rockets. When they were designing the shuttle, Aerojet proposed a giant monolithic SRB that would come in one piece. But the committee chairman was from Utah and gave the contract to Morton Thiokol in Utah. The Challenger was destroyed because of a faulty seal in the joints between the segments of the SRB made by Morton Thiokol, who couldn't produce the SRB in one piece and ship it to the cape. Aerojet was in Florida and could move their mass
ive booster by barge.”

  “You're losing me,” Obama says.

  “In other words, GenCorp, which used to be General Rubber and Tire, owns Pratt & Whitney, Rocketdyne, and Aerojet. The RS-68 engine that powers the Delta rockets for ULA, those are made by Rocketdyne. The SSME and the J-2: Rocketdyne. So it's not like we have independent companies that can put together competing products. This is just a single monolithic rocket industry that has several names, but they all work together. So if the SLS were canceled, I really have no idea what the result would be. Maybe Aero-Pratt & Whitney-Dyne can come up with a big rocket. But then again, they make engines for ULA.

  Maybe ULA beefs up their Delta IV to make a heavy lift rocket to replace SLS. Expand to lager tooling, maybe 7 or 8 meters, and put 2 or 3 RS-68s in each core. With 2 RS-68s, a single core gives you about 15 tonnes to LEO. In a Heavy configuration, you're looking at maybe 55 tonnes. If you go to 3 RS-68s, then a single core gets you probably 20-25 tonnes to LEO and a Heavy gets you to maybe 75. And they could use fuel cross-feeding to boost the payload. With a core at 20 tonnes or so, you could get a pretty good flight rate to bring down costs. And if I'm there to compete and keep them honest, they might actually get a decent vehicle. That is until I perfect reusability make them completely obsolete.”

  “And what if you don't pull that off? What if you go bankrupt next week?” Obama asks.

  “Then we have to make sure you get that competition, with multiple options. Maybe you need to break ULA up. This sole-source stuff is terrible for us.”

  “What about safety? I don't want corporations cutting corners to make the things cheaper and then killing astronauts.”

  “I don't think it'll be a problem. That's just one of those misconceptions about private rockets. I mean, if you're in the market for rockets and one company is cutting corners and another isn't, you're not going to pick the dangerous one. If the shuttle was competing with commercial rockets, it would have lost badly. It's only when there aren't alternatives, no competition, that you can go down such a bad path and rationalize away all the downsides. If I kill astronauts, then I can kiss my space program good-bye. But if NASA kills astronauts, it's not like they're going to go bankrupt.”

  “So you'd cancel the SLS contracts,” Obama sums it up.

  “Yep.”

  “Why isn't that what NASA is telling me?”

  “You're not talking to the right people in NASA,” K replies. “Put on a disguise, maybe some white-face, and go talk to the young engineers, or better yet, the science people at JPL, you'll get a totally different perspective than you get from those administrators.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what the young and idealistic me would do,” Obama says. “I know a lot of people are disappointed in what I've done in the White House, but you just don't understand the White House till you're in it.”

  “Sometimes I have nightmares where I'm 22 again,” K says, “broke, living in the tiny office I rented to start my business. I remember thinking I have enough to rent an apartment and work out of there, or I could rent an office and live out of there, and renting the office seemed to be a better bet at convincing business people to invest in me. I have nightmares where I'm back there, sleeping on the floor. I could have made it a bit nicer, an air mattress in an office or something like that, but the more comfortable I made things for myself, the less I would feel motivated to get the hell out of there. I remember going for months, living in that office, where I really never left. I was 22, I could have worked all day then gone out drinking with friends, maybe would have even been more productive. But I felt like I could always be working, I guess that's the curse of being your own boss. You never have to work, but you always feel guilty for not working. So I'll only be happy if I'm working 24/7.

  I don't think I'm all that unique, if you spend time around 20-year-olds these days, they want to change the world and think that comes first and making money comes once you do that. We need to get their backs so they think they can take risks, they can try something new, try to start a new company, invent something, because that's where innovation comes from. It's not coming from Microsoft with all their money, they didn't think of Twitter. They thought of the iPhone and then said all Microsoft products should run on Windows. Even though I succeeded, even though I'm rich now and that supposedly proves I'm not a bum, I still have those nightmares, I wake up feeling like a broke-ass piece of shit, lazy-ass 22 year old that's wasting his life coding something that will never work anyway. It's a long dark period between getting that idea and actually launching it and seeing success. That's a long time where I made no money at all and felt like shit. I would be lying if I told you I never thought about killing myself in there. Seemed easier than facing failure.”

  “But how do you setup the system so that you enable people like you and I who will take that opportunity and make the most of it, spending our twenties studying constitutional law or rocketry, but without enabling millions of lazy bums to just take that assistance and use it to subsidize their Xbox addiction?” Barack asks. “How do we do that, because it sounds like you finished what you started because you had to. Maybe if we spoiled you with the money to live on you wouldn’t have felt so guilty, wouldn’t have worked so hard, and it might have just fizzled out because you weren't pushed to that edge where you felt you either had to make it work or kill yourself to avoid the embarrassment of such failure. If the Spanish don't burn their ships, they don't accomplish what they did.”

  “You sound like a Republican,” K says.

  “That's what eight years will do to you. My mind is already jumping to what the other side would say. I of course think we'd be better off enabling everyone to be able to take risks without losing their healthcare, or going homeless, but how could I possible sell it to those who think food stamps are a luxury.”

  “You would have made a good dictator,” K replies.

  “Not dictator, enlightened absolutist,” the President replies.

  “What are you gonna do when you, graduate from being President?”

  “I can't even think about that right now. Why, you trying to sell me a ticket to Mars?”

  “No,” K says, “you're way too poor to go to Mars.”

  “That's racist,” Barack jokes.

  “Sorry Mr. President, but you clearly haven't accomplished enough to earn a ticket to space.”

  ~

  “What are you doing?” Caroline asks Kingsley, startling him.

  “Jesus, do you knock?” K asks.

  “We're outside, what should I knock on?” Caroline asks.

  “A tree maybe,” K replies. Caroline gives him a funny look. “Knock on wood, that's a phrase.”

  “That's not what it means,” Caroline says. “So what are you doing?” Kingsley is sitting at a table in his back yard between hundred year old trees, reading on his tablet.

  “Communing with Gaia, what does it look like I'm doing?”

  “To me, it looks like you're trying to buy a new jet plane,” Caroline replies, sitting next to him.

  “It's not just any jet, it's a Saker S-1. It's the first private jet fighter designed specifically for civilian use,” K says, showing her the tablet. The S-1 looks like an F-15, except that it's significantly smaller and of course has no weapons. But to a lay person, it would seem indistinguishable from a military fighter plane.

  “What happened to you not being a daredevil anymore?” Caroline asks.

  “I think you're confusing me with Ben Affleck.”

  “What?”

  “It was a joke. . . about a really bad comic book movie.”

  “So what happened. I thought you weren't doing things like that anymore, but you're going to buy a brand new plane that's made for what, flying through the Grand Canyon or something?”

  “Oh I see, you think this plane is unsafe. But actually I'm getting the deluxe package. Ejection seats included, so it's actually quite safe.”

  “Why do you need an e
jection seat if you're just going to be using it for transportation and not stunts?”

  “If those biographical movies about me are true, some terrorists might try to shoot me down.”

  “Iron Man is not biographical.”

  “A little bit,” K says.

  “What about the kid?”

  “What about him?”

  “You hired a nanny? You invited them to live here, but you don't actually spend time with him. Then you get a nanny to watch him. What's the point of having him here if you don't see him?”

  “Oh,” K says as if he finally 'gets it.'

  “Oh what?” Caroline asks.

  “I see,” K says, squinting at her. “I see what this is.”

  “What?”

  “You're jealous,” K says with a smirk.

  “Don't even turn that around on me.”

  “You don't like having another woman around, it's a jealous, territorial thing and you want me all to yourself. I know how women are.”

  “You know very little about women,” Caroline replies. “And don't you dare try to trivialize what I'm saying by dismissing it as some stereotypical female hysteria. This is not about me being some shallow jealous woman, so don't even try it. This is about you saying you're going to be a father and then not following through. You're ignoring the kid, you're going back on this no daredevil stuff. You want to keep me around, you better not dismiss me as some harping woman with nothing of value to say.”

  “Whoa there Speed Racer, let's not put so many words in my mouth.”

  “You were thinking it,” Caroline replies.

  “I was not thinking anything at all like that,” K says, “except for like 65% of it.”

  “You're going to spend some time with that kid,” Caroline says.

  “Alright, alright, I will. Promise.” Caroline yanks his tablet away. “Hey!” She looks at him sternly. “What, right now?”