intuitive machine
Most of NASA is a pretty subdued place these days. Nearly 70 years after its founding, the space agency is no longer the rambunctious youth it was during the race to the moon in the 1960s. If you go to a NASA field center today, you’re far more likely to be dragged into a meeting or review than to witness a rocket engine test.
Today’s space agencies can be described in one word as “risk-averse.” Admittedly, this is partly understandable. NASA is a place where Flight Director Gene Kranz famously said during the Apollo 13 rescue that “failure is not an option.” Furthermore, after his three major accidents, Apollo 1 and the Space Shuttle, in which 17 of his astronauts died; challenger and Columbia-NASA is taking every possible precaution to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future.
But there will always come a point when NASA becomes so risk-averse that it stops taking bold, large-scale steps and succumbs to analysis paralysis. As one of NASA’s longtime engineers half-jokingly told me several years ago, the engineers designing the Orion spacecraft had to pass a rigorous safety review process to get the spacecraft a small pass. A miracle was needed.
But fortunately, space agencies still have corners where mad scientists can have fun. One of them is in his NASA science “department,” and about seven years ago, a few scientists and engineers figured out how to do experiments on the moon without blowing up their limited budget. I was about to. Flying a phalanx of such missions using traditional methods would cost billions of dollars. They didn’t have that money and it wasn’t always available.
These scientists, including the agency’s leader, Thomas Zurbuchen, knew the moon was about to become a hot target for exploration.
back to the moon
For decades after Apollo, NASA basically ignored the Moon. As Apollo His 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, it was spectacular, but bleak. The space agency moved its robotic exploration efforts to Mars and beyond, while its human programs remained in low-Earth orbit. Moon? It was cold and gray, dry and airless.
But by the mid-2010s, Zurbuchen and other scientists became convinced that water ice was deposited in permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles. Additionally, NASA’s human exploration program was finally getting serious about returning to deep space, and it was clear that the Moon would be its first destination. Finally, there was a sense of crisis as China began landing rovers on the moon and began making plans to build a lunar base near Antarctica.
That’s why NASA scientists are sending experiments, probes, and more to the moon to reevaluate the lunar surface and determine what resources are there and how they can be exploited. I was thinking about it. None are too large, mainly loading capacities from tens to hundreds of kilograms. Get close to them. The idea was not only to do good science, but also to prepare and support human activities on the Moon. But NASA’s science division didn’t have the billions of dollars to spend on a lunar program like the human exploration division.
So Trubuchen and his team had to make a choice. They could save money for a few large, expensive missions flown by traditional contractors. Or you can try something new.
The commercial space industry, spurred in part by the failed Google Lunar xPrize, started making noise about developing a small lunar lander. Could NASA give some incentives to some of these companies to complete their landers and deliver experiments to the moon?
At a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, such a commercial plan made some sense. But there were also risks. Going to space was difficult enough. Will we really land on the moon? That’s very difficult. The lander needs to be powered all the way to the surface. Because there is no atmosphere to apply the brakes. Additionally, due to communication delays, power must be supplied autonomously. And, oh yeah, there are rocks and craters all over the moon, so the lander had better have a smart navigation system.
Zurbuchen knew this was risky and that NASA would have to accept some degree of failure. Private companies would have to abandon many of NASA’s strict safety procedures to do this for less money. Mr. Zurbuchen used the term “shoot on goal” to describe his plan to help administrators understand what he and the commercial company wanted to do.
He knew that private companies would miss out on some opportunities.
