On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was returning from space when a fissure in the wing edge allowed superheated plasma to shred the shuttle during re-entry, killing its seven occupants. It was the second fatal space shuttle accident, after the tragic flight of the Challenger in 1986. An independent committee was formed to investigate the accident and evaluate the American space program.
The movement led then-President George W. Bush, in 2004, to present the policy known as the Vision for Space Exploration, which had some basic items: complete the construction of the International Space Station in 2010, then retire the space shuttles, considered as inherently unsafe, and establish a return-to-the-moon program in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars.
The first two items were completed with just one year of delay, in 2011. The third, more complex, remains. That’s because fulfilling the initial two meant ending many of the space industry jobs that were focused on space shuttle operations.
In a botched attempt to save them, it was decided that the lunar return program, Constellation, would develop two launch rockets, Ares 1 and Ares 5, in addition to a capsule (the surviving Orion) and a lunar lander (called Altair).
Ares 1 would be based on the solid fuel thrusters that helped the space shuttle take off and would only serve to take Orion to Earth orbit.
The giant Ares 5, on the other hand, would be based on the tanks and engines of the shuttles and would serve to take the Altair into space, dock its last stage to Orion and then propel the whole set into lunar orbit, in the old Apollo style.
All beautiful on paper, very expensive in practice.
In 2009, under President Barack Obama, the US began a new review of its program, concluding that it did not have the resources to run the Constellation as originally planned.
The new ruler’s intention was to simply cancel everything and bet on commercial solutions, hiring the industry to develop future vehicles. But Congress, by its parochial nature, feared the devastation of old jobs and managed to establish a middle ground: Altair and Ares 1 died. Ares 5 would be replaced by another large-capacity rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, and Orion would move forward, but with European participation.
The SLS (incorporating, as it did, technologies from solid thrusters and from the space shuttle tanks and engines) was expected to be able to make its first flight in 2016, at an estimated development cost of US$10 billion. It ended up costing more than twice that ($23 billion) and didn’t arrive for its first release until six years later, in 2022.
During Donald Trump’s administration, the lunar program he is a part of was renamed Artemis (Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology), with the promise of putting the next man and woman on the moon. So the goal was set to perform a new moon landing in 2024.
Now, NASA is already talking about 2026, in the most optimistic projections. And that depends on the commercial side of the American space program, which was born shy of cargo (Bush) and crew (Obama), but is now beginning to show itself as a preferential path for the future: NASA decided to hire the manned lander for the Lua with SpaceX, based on its own giant rocket, the Starship, at a fixed cost of $2.9 billion. It’s a stark contrast to the cost of SLS.
