The administration is proposing ending Gateway, and SLS/Orion after Artemis III. That’s still two flights too many, but it all has yet to play out.
[Afternoon update]
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
[Sunday-morning update]
Speaking of Bob Zimmerman, he’s less than impressed with Lockheed Martin’s delivery of the first crew-capable Orion.
[Bumped]
What I predicted, split the baby.
Doesn’t mean much. Congress will fold and restore a lot of those cuts.
I suspect Gateway is the giveback.
I was thinking that the Chandra and Hubble cuts would be given back. Cheaper and more publicly visible.
I am at a loss to explain what the rationale (other than a blatant payoff to Cruz) would be for restoring the Gateway. Without Artemis, there is simply no point for it, and Artemis is going to be capped at two missions. I noticed a comment on Zimmerman’s blog suggesting that more ISS money would be the giveback (likely as an offset to the lost Gateway) along with some support projects for our ‘partners’ (JAXA’s work on a pressurized rover being the most obvious example), and quite frankly this strikes me as most reasonable.
I don’t disagree that there are going to be some givebacks, but Gateway seems the least likely to me. We should see shortly, and if I am proven wrong, I will happily concede my error!
The degree of international support.
What the international partners really want is their own flags and footprints on the Moon. Gateway was what they were willing to settle for in the short term. Give them what they really want and they’ll drop Gateway like a hot potato.
Artemis isn’t going to be capped at two more missions, SLS and Orion are. Artemis will continue with different means of getting crews to and from rendezvous with landers. The first of these different means will be an additional Starship variant. The second will be something reusable that launches atop New Glenn.
That something will not be Orion. Orion is not reusable and its production cadence is in line with SLS, not the launch cadence of which New Glenn will prove capable not too much further down the road.
Both replacements will support larger crew sizes than Orion. Both will also allow for far less expensive and far more frequent lunar missions. Neither will require the “services” of Gateway.
The larger crew sizes and more frequent missions will allow the ISS/Gateway international partners – minus Russia, but plus a lot of Artemis Accords signatories – to do what they really want to do which is see their own national flags and footprints on the lunar surface. They will not miss Gateway in the slightest.
Cruz should be mollified as the extra missions and faster cadence made possible by cancelling SLS, Orion and Gateway will give on-going and open-ended work to JSC mission control.
There will – probably sometime in the 2030s – emerge a need for one or more rotating 1-G space stations in lunar orbit as R&R locations for long-term lunar workers. Until then, lunar workers doing infrastructure development on the lunar surface will have to be rotated back Earthside for health reasons. At a minimum, these missions can be heel-and-toed like ISS missions. Thus, the Moon will be the next continuously-crewed “space station” in fairly short order following the initial Artemis landings.
“””There will – probably sometime in the 2030s – emerge a need for one or more rotating 1-G space stations in lunar orbit as R&R locations for long-term lunar workers. Until then, lunar workers doing infrastructure development on the lunar surface will have to be rotated back Earthside for health reasons.””””
Maybe and maybe not. It depends heavily on the health effects of 1/6 gee on the body. It may work out that the low gravity is good enough for continuous occupation, or it may have very little mitigation effects. We don’t know.
Also, it may be that a rotating structure on the surface may be more convenient and less expensive if 1 gee becomes necessary.
And the R&R may have features different from what has gone before. 1/6 gee sports and high gee carousels and low gee waterparks. Plus the possibilities for activities more associated with high earning tradesmen far from home. Gambling, drinking, and commercial s3x
Professor, I’m confused!
What was that Boeing spacecraft that became unsafe to return Butch and Sumi from the International Space Station, and how does it differ from this Lockheed spacecraft that is supposed to go to the Moon and not land there?
I got blocked by Jeff Foust for posting, “Looks great to me, assuming they do what is outlined in the link.”
There are some things getting cut that I think are beneficial but considering the debt and the near term importance of other issues, I think it is important to look at the greater good rather than what I want.
Letting SLS get some launches in and then go away isn’t ideal but it is a good compromise. Mars sample return isn’t needed as there might be people on the planet before its ready. NASA can come back to the propulsion work. I am guessing the gullible warming and DEI cuts are what stings the people who are always outraged over everything existing.
DEI is too religious and political for government agencies to be pushing and diversity will arise on its own just hiring based on merit. That is if you aren’t racist and think minorities are smart enough to do the job.
For years, wasn’t it the Leftist line about cutting NASA because it is better to spend that money here on the poor rather than waste it out there? So it’s gonna be amusing to watch Leftists get all outraged about these cuts when they are finally getting much of what they wanted.
Overall I am happy with the proposed cuts. We have to do everything we can to get our fiscal house in order. That is a huge ticking bomb.
But, I am disappointed to see the greatest risk to NASA’s involvement was left untouched (and even supported). The Commercial LEO Destinations (CLDs) have a high likelihood of locking perhaps $2 B/yr of NASA’s budget into a not particularly useful rut where we feel lock into utilizing those so-called commercial stations for what? Decades? And getting research that is about a non-memorable as much if the research that we are getting now. I would rather that money go to developing surface systems and purchasing large numbers of flights to the Moon and Mars using the Starship fleet.
I do wish that the last two Starship test flights had gone better because the case would be more clear that full reusability is likely and SpaceX would be on the verge of demonstrating propellant depot, transfer, and storage.
Overall the budget simply brings NASA’s budget back to what it was in 2016, about $18 billion. NASA was able to accomplish quite a lot with that amount of money, so this is not as draconian as many will certainly claim.
The real question is what did NASA accomplish with 24% more money over the last 8 years? That’s the real problem with NASA these days. There isn’t a program designed to be accomplished in a cycle that would allow it to survive.
Artemis was started over a decade ago using concepts developed even earlier. Orion two decades ago. While this may be rocket science; rocket science has progressed much faster than the project management of these programs at NASA.
Adjusting for inflation, $18 billion in 2016 is equal to about $24 billion today.