If NASA wants to send humans to the Moon or Mars, it should not spend billions on random cost-plus infrastructure projects that supposedly might come in handy if some day there were a program to go. Instead it should just take competitive bids for delivery services. It should incentivize the development of additional systems, including rovers, habitats, life support, power units, space suits and so on, the same way.
It’s pretty clear that, whatever individuals might desire, institutionally, neither NASA or Congress care whether or not they send humans to the moon or Mars, and haven’t since 1972. I do think, though, that despite Bob’s skepticism, the entrepreneurs will get us there.
Yes, this would be a much better architecture, but unfortunately, while Buzz is probably the most famous moonwalker, he’s also not taken as seriously by many in the industry.
Two comments: I’ll have to ask Eric where he gets the $1.5B/flight number for SLS. And is he proposing to do this in the ISS orbit, or at a lower inclination?
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).