The Trump administration’s Moon-to-Mars program has already dodged the fate of many previous presidential space programs: cancellation under new leadership. Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced the Biden government’s support for Artemis, NASA’s flagship on the moon.
It was a rare transfer of the baton between two administrations that conflicted in almost every other area. And it quelled some industries’ fears that Biden would completely suspend the moonshot plan. While in its infancy, the Artemis program unleashed a surge of momentum in the industry, thanks in part to a stimulating, yet wildly unrealistic 2024 target date for planting boots on the moon.
To get an idea of what’s next for Artemis and NASA, The edge spoke with Bhavya Lal, NASA’s acting chief of staff and currently the oldest Biden appointee of the agency.
Artemis survived the transfer of power – now what?
The program is undergoing a thorough overhaul. The group of eight scientists and space experts tasked with assessing NASA for Biden’s transition team has lifted the hood of Trump’s rapid moonshot plan, announced in early 2019 by then Vice President Mike Pence. The experts came up with a list of things within Artemis that should stay in and things that should stay from to inform the NASA team’s assessment.
“One thing that was absolutely at play was the continuity of purpose,” said Lal, who has advised previous administrations on space policy and was the Biden team’s top space expert during the transition. “We wouldn’t throw out everything that happened over the years and start over.”
Lal joined NASA in February and is now helping lead the ongoing Artemis review within the agency, executing the guidance she helped draft during the transition.
That review covers every pillar of Artemis, including the agency’s long-delayed and astonishingly over-budget Space Launch System (SLS), the colossal rocket that will launch the first astronaut crews to the moon in the Orion capsule. It also includes reviewing the program timeline, international partnerships, and coming up with a budget that Congress will like. The evaluation will also refine planned activities on the moon and identify spots where more commercial activity could be involved, Lal says.
Nothing is set in stone yet. The review is underway and Biden, nearly two months after his presidency, has yet to elect his NASA administrator. That’s no surprise – it took Trump nearly eight months to nominate his clerk, Jim Bridenstine, and nearly another eight months to get confirmation through the Senate. It took Barack Obama four months to name Charles Bolden, and about ten months for George Bush to hit on Sean O’Keefe.
Going to the moon – just not by 2024
NASA is committed to continuing to invest in SLS and Orion, while monitoring private sector missiles for help if needed. “SLS and Orion will provide the first transport to and from the Moon beyond Artemis, and any proven commercial transport can fill any gaps,” said Lal.
By the time the Boeing-built SLS first flies (likely sometime next year, nearly three years later than planned), the agency will have spent nearly $ 20 billion on the program, NASA’s Inspector General reported last year, with each launch afterwards. comes to about $ 2 billion.
Cheaper commercial rockets built by firms such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance exist, but they are currently only ready to launch unmanned components of the Artemis program into space. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will launch the first two elements of NASA’s Lunar Gateway, a planned space station orbiting the moon.
Whenever possible, NASA should “maintain multiple launch vehicle, lander, and spacecraft suppliers throughout the enterprise so that the US is not overly dependent on one system or provider,” says Lal. That is the spirit set forth in NASA’s program of NASA’s human lunar landing system, the centerpiece of Artemis that aims to select two different landers that can bring astronauts to the lunar surface.
But Congress, while outright behind the Artemis program, opposed the Trump administration’s request for $ 3.3 billion to fund those landers’ rapid development. Instead, it gave NASA $ 850 million for lander development, hitting the final nail in the coffin for Trump’s 2024 goal, which was considered unattainable by many in the space industry.
Biden’s NASA will set a more manageable timetable, Lal says. “One of the transition team’s findings was that, given Congressional appropriations for at least the past two years, 2024 was unrealistic.” Setting a new date has to do with coming up with a tasty budget for Congress, “which is a question mark right now,” says Lal.
International partnerships, with Artemis and beyond
“Meeting commitments to international partners” was a key tenet of the transition team’s findings, Lal says, either on the International Space Station or in the Artemis Accords, a series of multilateral agreements with US allies that aim to establish legal standards of behavior. in space. Those partners include Russia, a US adversary but a longtime NASA partner on the ISS, where the shared goal of keeping an orbital lab healthy trumps Earth’s messy tensions.
But the relationship between NASA and Russia is changing. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, was reluctant to extend its alliance with NASA to the Moon, and last year the US tried to exclude Russia from early talks on the Artemis Accords. This week, Russia made good on its claim to ditch Artemis by announcing a new agreement with China to build a rival lunar base and space station in orbit, bolstering a new front in an increasingly polarized race to deep space.
NASA is seeking its own allies for Artemis, but it has been barred from partnering with China, thanks to a 2011 law called the Wolf Amendment, named after now-retired Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA). But as Beijing is expanding its game on the moon, some of Biden’s space advisers have opposed China’s exclusion policy. “I think it’s a failed strategy to rule them out,” said former astronaut Pam Melroy Politics last year, before joining Biden’s NASA transition team.
Lal is weakening prospects for NASA-China cooperation under Biden’s NASA: “I don’t expect any Chinese partnerships, at least as far as the Artemis program is concerned, in any form.”
She says the relationship between NASA and Russia should continue for the foreseeable future. “There is no reason why we should not partner with them in deep space activities.” Despite Russia’s withdrawal from NASA’s Lunar Gateway program, NASA said in a statement against it The edge Wednesday that “they have offered to continue exploring interoperability and we welcome such a discussion.”
International relations could extend to NASA’s climate science operations, a quieter side of the space agency expected to grow under Biden. Last month, NASA’s acting administrator Steve Jurczyk had a phone call with Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin, where Jurczyk spoke about NASA’s “focus on climate change studies using space technology,” according to a statement from Roscosmos. Rogozin “supported the idea of working together in this area,” the statement said.
Lal says it’s too early to discuss what specific plans are in the works to bolster NASA’s role in Biden’s massive climate agenda. But she says it’s not just about expanding current programs or increasing the workload for NASA’s existing fleet of weather satellites – it’s also about starting new programs on both domestic and international fronts.
“The climate is one area where we join hip wounds,” she says. Like the Space Station, where astronaut safety transcends geopolitics, “we may need to work with even some of our adversaries” on an agreement to share critical climate data.