The NASA cis-lunar universe: LEO to Mars+

The highlight of the sci-fi flick is the opening credits with the moody music, the point of view imagery as if floating in space, and the fly-through tour of the inside of a ship. Then it’s downhill from there. This is what usually happens. Though this may be my peculiar view. I’ve been steeped too long in the space business. A suspension of disbelief is impossible when, five minutes in, I’m mumbling, “That’s not how gravity works,” or “There’s no way that small thing has the propellant to do that.” Ten minutes in, we stream something else. Is this why doctors can’t enjoy medical dramas? “That’s not how you hold that!” Once, talking to a fellow engineer who advised on a big-ticket movie, we laughed non-stop about the liftoff sequence, the dialog, and how the writers ignored his every input. The writers would say they know what works, the way Wile E. Coyote is funny precisely because he runs straight off a cliff, pauses mid-air to realize he has no ground beneath him, and only then falls. It’s storytelling, not science class.

NASA is making its own movie now. The marquee franchise is the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon. The approach, or “architecture,” is “Moon to Mars,” as if to say the parts and pieces of the LEGO set. Think Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which resides Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the best in the bunch, if you ask me. Though, of course, everyone’s a critic.

Recently, NASA held a Moon to Mars workshop in Washington, DC. (Think focus groups for a new product or movie. What about the scent? What about the ending?) My recurring conversations leaned to the current production doing well, in contrast to the previous flop. (That, and what’s up after retirement.) Though, my sampling also felt the first attempt at pulling together a Moon program years ago set the bar rather low. NASA’s earlier lunar program somewhat met its demise in 2009. The pieces didn’t connect too well, as far as physics. Worse, they did not fit inside the kind of NASA budget foreseeable by a sane person. Brinksmanship is not a space exploration strategy it turned out. Rocket, check. Spacecraft, check. No funding left over? Now, Congress must provide all the funds necessary for a lunar lander, right? Not quite. Though rather than give up, the “somewhat” part about the earlier lunar program’s demise, most everything continued. The Space Shuttle-derived rocket and the crew spacecraft simply persisted without a means to land on the Moon.

Except, looking back on earlier franchise failings, Houston may still have a problem.

Ten years later, having mulled over lunar landers for a while, NASA had new options. NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for a large lander in 2021, a variation of their Starship. Amazingly, this award came in at the budget indie film price of only a few billion dollars. Firm. And fixed price. The price allows many more pieces to follow – spacesuits, rovers (two types), and a Gateway station in lunar orbit to park it all. This was inevitable. With no change to business as usual, NASA would have a rocket, the Space Launch System, and a Crew Spacecraft, Orion, but no way to land on the Moon. If NASA started (or re-started) a business-as-usual lunar lander in 2021, judging from the experience to date with the rocket and the spacecraft, decades would go by. This kind of timeline arises when combining extremely high total costs with miserly yearly payments. As a rule, the probability of such an approach being overcome by events approaches one.

But NASA changed how it does business, after all. The re-booted NASA cis-lunar universe parts and pieces have not quite formed around some infinity stones, but there are signs the writers have a plan. Except, looking back on earlier franchise failings, Houston may still have a problem.

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Cis-lunar space in National policy is the “region of space beyond Earth’s geosynchronous orbit.” Over in low Earth orbit (LEO), NASA plans to use private space stations after de-orbiting the International Space Station (ISS). This will allow “NASA to focus government resources on deep space exploration through the Artemis program.” This is the quiet part written down – how plans for the Moon mean NASA budget dollars must be freed up elsewhere. It’s “Moon to Mars,” leaving LEO behind for others. The steps ahead are lunar orbit, then the Moon, then Mars. The connected steps, that is.

“You can’t get there from here.” This is not what anyone wants to hear when asking for directions. Though it’s common when trying to cross the street to that restaurant you see from your hotel, in Florida. Something in the steps does not connect. In space, no one can hear your frustration.

Every dollar through any location in space includes the dollars to get past the previous point. Like rockets and “delta-v,” where we measure changes in velocity, skipping steps is not allowed. It must all add up to “get there from here.” The rhyme to this is intuitive to a military mindset in a campaign. The territory controlled behind your front line secures and enables your forward movement. Neglect your rear, and it may collapse. The supply chain will be unable to support your forward momentum. This lesson is fundamental in NASA and in DoD, but perhaps it is a habit to neglect it. This world is where large programs are rewarded for getting ahead of themselves and scaling up quickly before anyone notices. The survival strategy is to grow fast, then be too big to cancel. We go from an enthusiastic early phase lasting years, where everyone is looking at everything, to the next phase where, no matter what we found, “it’s too late to stop.”

As the historian Nazzar noted in 2036…

Some sci-fi follows. Credits. Moody music. A starfield. An alternate universe. The fundamental connection from LEO to far beyond came to be called “LEO to Mars+.” As the historian Nazzar noted in 2036, “National investments in an ever-expanding human presence in space evolved as they would inevitably. As a foremost example, the shape of the NASA budget in this golden decade reflected and took advantage of dramatic decreases in the cost of human activity in low Earth orbit. Only afterward did human activity in cis-lunar space begin to outgrow its earlier limited flirtation with a lunar presence.” Human access to LEO is now routine, frequent, and cheap. Because of this, NASA funding (and Congressional interests) freed up to go further. Ironically, early attempts to speed up lunar exploration by not spending on LEO delayed further advance.

Continued NASA investments in low Earth orbit were critical. The notion of NASA as an “anchor tenant” buying time and space on private space stations initiated much more. The necessity of a vibrant orbital ecosystem spawned entirely new industries, from in-space medical research and production to semiconductors. In the same way the Apollo program in the 1960s needed technology that did not exist in order to reach the Moon, going on to invent it, the new low Earth orbit economy boom created industries that did not exist in order to reach even further, to stay.

Eventually, in this alt-NASA universe, the same happened in cis-lunar space. Human activity in cis-lunar space and the Moon became so commonplace that NASA moved on to Mars within its measly, pedestrian budget. The increasing investment in space by others, from the US Space Force, the Space Development Agency and the private sector rounded out an era of innovation. It finally added up, the only way it ever would.

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In NASA’s earlier lunar program (called Constellation, a shame we can’t use that tagline again), one glaring flaw arose from pushing energy needs away from the nearer projects in work. Energy. It’s what it’s all about. A rocket might not have enough energy. The simple fix is to ask more of the spacecraft. However, the spacecraft may not have enough energy either. The simple fix is, again, to ask more of the next element. Ask more of the lunar lander. And so on. With complex roots and causes, this poor habit explains parts of NASA’s current lunar plans. The Gateway at the Moon results from limitations in the other parts and pieces. The debris from the lunar program’s destruction fifteen years ago is still around today.

Another after-glow from NASA’s earlier lunar program is the current Artemis program realizing they can’t go it alone. There are elements of brinksmanship here again, of course, initially a European service module on Orion, or recently, the Japanese joining to provide a lunar rover. Elegantly, the Artemis Accords are a geo-political form of daring anyone to give too firm a critique. Words matter, and there is power in words and intent. As with the International Space Station, long ago, it faced a problem of stakeholder support, and the solution was finding more stakeholders. Too big to cancel mutates into too many stakeholders to stop. Yet a well-intentioned version of this effect offers hope. As General Eisenhower advised, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.”

“Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” -President Dwight D. Eisenhower

NASA has begun to make the problem of expanding our human presence to the stars bigger. The Artemis cis-lunar universe and an expanding list of Moon to Mars entries is a start. It’s tempting to leave LEO behind, to the private sector and to private stations. Or a station. A mere couple hundred hours a year for NASA astronauts, on and off. Yet this assumes leaving LEO behind is an option. More likely, “you can’t get there from here” will prove true as every step from Earth to orbit to the Moon and beyond accumulates the effort of previous steps. It’s how gravity works and dollars too. As we put down the remote, we can say yes, that’s how that works. LEO to Mars+ sees the step at low Earth orbit is critical and can’t be skipped. “Moon to Mars” made the problem bigger, just not big enough.