This is my third Orion launch, but it feels totally different - Ars Technica

Overview

This is my third Orion launch, but it feels totally different

The first two launches of Orion felt hollow, but NASA is finally on a better course.

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—This will be the third time I have observed NASA’s Orion spacecraft take flight. But with this one, for the first time, am I genuinely hopeful about the future of the space agency and its plans to build a station on the surface of the Moon.

The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow. NASA, an aging bureaucracy, has repeatedly sought to recapture its fading glory while also looking toward a supposedly brighter future. Agency leaders would say things like this, from then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, after the first Orion launch in 2014: “This is the beginning of the Mars era.”

It wasn’t. No one who was paying attention believed it. But it was the kind of thing you had to say, I guess.

NASA now has a new administrator, a private astronaut named Jared Isaacman. Probably the most refreshing thing about Isaacman is that he does not talk in such platitudes. He tells truths, uncomfortable though they may be, about NASA. And then he outlines a clear plan to address these ills and get the space agency back on track.

That’s why this flight of Orion, which could take place as soon as Wednesday evening, fills me with hope rather than hesitation.

NASA rolled the first Orion spacecraft, a pearlescent capsule intended for a four-hour test flight, to the launch pad in December 2014. The overall purpose of this mission wasn’t entirely clear at the time. Orion was a boilerplate vehicle, lacking most of the hardware needed for a lunar flight. And it was only flying a few thousand miles from Earth, so it would not test the vehicle’s heat shield for a high-energy return from the Moon. It wasn’t even flying on the Space Launch System rocket. NASA procured a Delta IV Heavy booster for hundreds of millions of dollars.

I vividly remember standing at the launch pad, a day before the launch, listening to Bolden and other officials offer encomiums about the spacecraft and where it would take NASA. These were the days of the “Journey to Mars,” when NASA was supposedly building the capabilities to land humans on Mars in the 2030s.

NASA’s timelines, even then, seemed slow. The first flight of Orion and the SLS rocket was to take place in 2017. That estimate was only off by five years, with each year of delay costing about $4 billion. As for the first crewed flight of Orion, we were told that might happen in 2020 or 2021. Again, that estimate was off by half a decade.

In many ways, the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission was the perfect exemplar of NASA’s exploration program in the 2010s: costly hardware, going nowhere, and lacking a clear purpose, with lots of happy talk thrown in. It was bleak as hell for those of us who wanted to see our space agency on the move.

Eight years later—the same time that passed between Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon—Orion returned to the launch pad. This time, it was sitting atop the Space Launch System rocket. And Orion was actually going somewhere—into lunar orbit. It was a real spacecraft.

But in many ways, this was still the same old program, glossed with the usual talk of grand exploration goals.

The Artemis Program’s primary goal was to return humans to the Moon, “this time to stay.” But the plan was horribly convoluted. Instead of sending humans to the lunar surface, NASA was instead building a space station known as the Lunar Gateway. This station would fly in a weird orbit that would take it tens of thousands of miles away from the Moon and required a lot of energy for lunar landers to reach.

And why? Why indeed. No one ever could really explain why NASA needed a space station around the Moon when the lunar surface itself, with abundant building materials, gravity, and other resources, was right there for the taking.

As an experiment, I once gave NASA Administrator Bill Nelson several days to come up with an explanation for why NASA needed to spend billions of dollars to build the Gateway in an inconvenient orbit. His response, after all that time, was science: “You are going to have not only a way station for astronauts, you are going to have an ability to do science around the year, even when astronauts are not on the Gateway. And if you want a more detailed answer than that, we’ll get you the scientists and talk about the science.”

But if you want to do lunar science, the best place to do lunar science is probably on the lunar surface.

There were reasons for Gateway to exist, of course; NASA just didn’t want to talk about them. Johnson Space Center, in Houston, is home to a team of flight controllers who manage the International Space Station. The Gateway would give them a convenient program to roll into once the ISS ended. And there’s the Orion spacecraft’s underpowered service module. This doesn’t have the juice to go all the way to low-lunar orbit and back to Earth. So NASA needed to create an artificial destination further out of the Moon’s gravity well for it to go to. That is the realpolitik for why Gateway existed.

There were other, similarly frustrating elements of NASA’s plans. The agency was giving billions of dollars to Boeing to build a more powerful upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket that didn’t actually get humans to the Moon any more efficiently. And this new rocket required a $2 billion launch tower. The only purpose of this boondoggle (besides political pork, of course) was to bring Gateway modules to lunar orbit.

It was momentarily thrilling to watch (and feel) the Artemis II mission rumble into orbit in November 2022. Big rocket. Successful launch. It was cool. But it was like a piece of candy, sweet for a few seconds but then nothing but empty calories.

Isaacman brought a fresh set of eyes to these plans. If America and its allies wanted to go to the Moon, he wondered, why were they spending tens of billions of dollars to make that more difficult?

And then, remarkably, he did something about it. On February 27th, Isaacman announced that NASA was ending the Exploration Upper Stage program, the Space Launch System’s costly upper stage that enabled the rocket to carry elements of the Gateway to lunar orbit. A week ago, he said NASA was pivoting from the Gateway to build a Moon base. And during a news conference on Sunday, NASA’s Shawn Quinn confirmed a “stop work” order had been issued for the second Mobile Launch tower. Moreover, it’s clear that Isaacman has secured the political support necessary for such drastic decisions.

“For too long, we tried to satisfy every stakeholder,” Isaacman declared last week. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”

Isaacman says things that are uncomfortable but true. For so long, this has been absent from the public discourse of NASA officials and its industry partners. Privately, of course, many people will talk about how the plans NASA had been developing were dumb. But publicly, almost everyone was on board “Team Space.” Isaacman has said, bluntly, that “Team Space” is losing the high ground, particularly the South Pole of the Moon, to China.

During a news conference last week in Washington, DC, I asked Amit Kshatriya what he made of Isaacman’s shakeup of NASA. Isaacman arrived at the agency in December after a difficult year in which the agency’s budget faced the threat of major cuts, during which 20 percent of the workforce left, and an interim administrator, Sean Duffy, seemed more interested in preening in front of the cameras than understanding or addressing NASA’s problems.

NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya speaks for the work force.

Kshatriya, who has spent more than two decades at NASA, is the associate administrator, the highest rank a civil servant can reach. He is widely trusted within the agency’s workforce.

“I would say, in general, the workforce is hungry for leadership, and they’ve got it now,” Kshatriya said. “The clear vision is there. We’ve had feedback that some of the things we’re saying now are like therapy to them—things that we’ve known, but we just haven’t been able, because of the constraints we’ve been living under, to kind of deal with. A lot of folks have been just kind of like, wow, we can say what we think and do the things that we know we’re supposed to be doing.”

Things like actually putting all of their effort into going back to the Moon. Let’s go.

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Key Takeaways

• This is my third Orion launch, but it feels totally different

• The first two launches of Orion felt hollow, but NASA is finally on a better course

• KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla

• The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow