It’s easy to imagine a long list of reasons transitions cause distress and terminal distraction. Evolution passed along in us only so much appetite for risk, novelty, and shifts away from the familiar. Is that mysterious cave calling? Become lunch. Alternately, too much of a taste for stability could prove fatal, too. Leave those well-known lands while you still can. The rain is not coming back. Today, the adventure is not rewarded. Tomorrow, you are here to tell the tale and pass along your tendency. From this constant feedback loop, the human risk-taking dial evolved into an ill-understood mixture of leanings, cognition, and uncertain forces wrapped in culture, surrounded by fog.
To add to the mystery, there is the category of none of the above. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb posits in Fooled by Randomness, “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” The taste for risk, or not, and a belief in the most well-considered decision leading to “wild success” has nothing to do with it.
This is the season of talk about transitions and boarding teams in Washington, DC. As if this is Star Trek, you send crew to the Borg cube, or someone sends their crew to you. “Assemble a boarding team.” This is not the prelude to a friendly gathering.
What sounds simple is attractive, though complex situations rarely lend themselves to simple solutions.
For NASA talk about the upcoming transition, the banter predictably starts with Artemis and the Moon, then segues quickly into headline projects, the NASA SLS rocket, the Orion crew spacecraft, spacesuits, and a hodgepodge of more acronyms. The give-and-take wraps up with canceling something or someone, Starships, SpaceX, and finally – Elon. The other half of NASA, the science half understanding spaceship Earth and its climate and sending probes across the solar system, gets short shrift as the conversation meanders to budgets and Congress. The discussion is punctuated with short pronouncements that take the complex world of NASA and boil it down, name that tune style, to only five words. What sounds simple is attractive, though complex situations rarely lend themselves to simple solutions. Alternately, it’s easy to doze off at the details, the expert so arid and humorless, the information so dense, but the catchy blurbs delivered passionately are soon repeated.
Oddly, in this moment of transition (again), portending change, a steady policy fixation persists. NASA must get boots on the Moon. In all the voices sharing perspectives, we end up Marth Stewart-ish, enthused about plans to completely empty the room and move a wall, calling it a long overdue freshening up. The change seems constant, but we persist in neglecting the old roof issue and the crack spreading at the foundation.
While a steadfastness of vision is admirable, a necessary NASA shift worth talking about at this moment is fundamental. This begins with a question: Is NASA equating a place with a purpose? There is an old adage, Goodhart’s Law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” You see improved treatment leading to shorter hospital stays, so you target reducing the length of stay. Bad move. The awareness of the measure leads to poorer outcomes as patients are sent home prematurely. Gaming, let me introduce you to targets. Has the Moon become NASA’s target, and no longer a good measure?
Good questions are far more valuable than good answers.
Good questions are far more valuable than good answers. It took me some decades in NASA to arrive at this conclusion. During most of this time, I was among those regularly tasked with delivering answers. Catching on finally, the paradigm shift of showing up with better questions often meant a reception as if we traded the cow for magic beans. Paradigm shifts will do that, making difficulties in the recurring moments of transition seem like much ado about nothing.
A good question sets everything after on a course that might lead to success. However, a good answer to a poor question is like a detailed map of what lies north without knowing where you want to go. The usual retort at this point is to bring out a Beltway bandit cliché to demonstrate you understand how the world turns. NASA knows precisely where it is going. Congress, and on a good day, the executive branch, tells NASA the place. It’s not complicated – the Moon is the target. Other requirements, though, came with the marching orders. The journey must pass through specific districts. The map through cis-lunar space unfolds after. Yet this capital observation only confirms what’s seriously amiss.
More is going on here than a mere semantic confusion of a destination with a plan.
Today, the answer in NASA human spaceflight is the Moon to Mars architecture and Artemis, with a lawyerly distinction between elements and execution. To translate, the parts on the garage floor are the architecture (MtM). Once all the cars and other moving parts run toward the Moon, that’s the mission (Artemis.) NASA is filling the shelves with the tools to accomplish a job it is mandated to do.
More is going on here than a mere semantic confusion of a destination with a plan.
These new answers from NASA emphasize differences from the old ones. This time, NASA is going to the Moon to stay. This is not flags, footprints, and goodbye. Also, rather than go it alone, NASA is going with international partners. Most importantly, this race emphasizes economics instead of a geo-political race to the Moon (this time with China as the competitor). Commercial space is the most important part of this new answer because the private sector, spurred by competition, will get things done – better and for less. A new and growing commercial space sector will ensure NASA does not carry the total cost of all the systems and every technology, as all this will also be used by non-NASA customers.
A valuable measure of NASA human spaceflight is also the most difficult – benefits to people on Earth. Directly, there are space sector jobs. Touching this all is national prestige. Very nearby, there is scientific discovery, a Nobel Prize, riches, and everyday conveniences that depend on satellites, with strength and deterrence in our national defense. The promise of greater benefit is about what lies beyond communications or global positioning toward medical advances or new materials made in space. Yet therein lies the rub – realizing the current emphasis on the Moon, seemingly shifted, new, and improved, remains mostly about getting there. By dollar amount, almost all NASA human spaceflight resources today are about transportation, a means to an end.
This is not a new observation. The commercial elements in the parts and pieces of NASA’s Moon to Mars architecture would seem to address concerns. But it is a shelf full of car parts without room for goods or passengers. Private sector partners are supposed to develop systems that attract non-NASA customers, creating new markets and as yet unimagined opportunities. The market. A magic word like an invisible hand that cures all ills. Admittedly, this is easier said than done – because we have been here before.
In low Earth orbit, enter non-standard orbit, Mr. Sulu, flying at about 5 miles per second, is the International Space Station. The ship, as it is hardly stationary, flies above Earth like a guardian angel, with people aboard continuously since 2000. In the billions of dollars a year to keep this ship journeying above us is a much smaller number – the amount for R&D. The ends, why the rest exists, the R&D, are a very small part of the means, those yearly resources to get crews to the ISS and to operate and maintain it. (In 2024, ISS R&D is $305M. Keeping the ISS crewed and in orbit is $2.9 billion) Each year, NASA spends a few hundred million dollars on the goal, vs. ten times that amount on the means to the goal, the means being the ship, as lovely and elegant and a symbol of hope as the ISS is.
Officially, as policy goes, NASA has a plan. The ISS will be de-orbited due to old age around the year 2030. Private space stations will still see NASA astronauts and the business of R&D. These new stations are expected to create new markets rather than depend entirely on NASA as the only customer paying for room and board and power and experiment racks. With NASA having commercialized low Earth orbit, it should have funds left over to dedicate to its mission to go further, to the Moon, and one day sending people to explore Mars.
The business case NASA is employing as it reaches for the Moon is the same as it is struggling with in low Earth orbit.
Watching this two-step dance leads us to a new question. The business case NASA is employing as it reaches for the Moon is the same as it is struggling with in low Earth orbit. With the ISS, NASA would be in low Earth orbit to stay. Rather than go it alone, the original NASA space station plan, it included international partners. As NASA moves on from low Earth orbit, it encourages commercial enterprises to remain and grow. Non-NASA markets will ensure NASA can do so. The raw ingredients of low Earth orbit development remain the same as they are for the Moon – this time to stay with international and private partners, to grow our human presence there, and to create benefits on Earth.
Yet creating new and growing benefits for people on Earth in low Earth orbit remains a promise, tantalizingly close, possibly, but unfulfilled. The existing benefits are wondrous – from communications to defense to devices using GPS location services to understanding our planet. Yet, deciding to go further, we have seen this movie before, how a destination became a plan, then a means became the end, to judge by the reality of where dollars are applied.
A new question is how we got to a plan that de-orbits the ISS around 2030 and moves resources further away, toward the Moon? This part is not too complicated. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, it’s natural that its parts and pieces persisted under the impression of change. The large SLS rocket uses the existing engines, manufacturing, and contractors from the Shuttle program. The Orion spacecraft uses remnants of the Shuttle orbiter organizations, government, and contractors. As the ISS won’t be around forever, having a NASA Gateway station at the Moon is convenient. This allows segments of the existing NASA ISS infrastructure to persist.
Not having finished the job in low Earth orbit, creating new, vibrant human spaceflight and a productive economy there, how does NASA move further? If this were a supply chain or a military operation, we would have all the signs of abandoning the rear instead of securing it. Fundamentally, the dilemma arises from seeing low Earth orbit and the end of the ISS as freeing up resources for lunar plans.
Not having finished the job in low Earth orbit, creating new, vibrant human spaceflight and a productive economy there, how does NASA move further?
First and foremost, at the risk of a catchy blurb, a transition that strengthens lunar Artemis places low Earth orbit as the pointy tip of the spear. NASA must succeed in developing new and growing benefits for people on Earth stemming from commercial space stations. Low Earth orbit must be secured and growing to enable what follows. Low Earth orbit is not a savings – funds NASA can divert to the Moon. Instead, LEO decides if moving further in cis-lunar space has a chance of succeeding, staying, and growing.
Tactically, if not getting much attention, one element already in Artemis is the transfer of propellant in orbit and possibly propellant depots courtesy of SpaceX. Refueling is not only a step along the way to Artemis and Starship lunar landers. It could be a critical step in the growth of commercial low-Earth orbit activities. Will SpaceX sell propellant to anyone who pulls up to the pump? This is a good question.
Strategically, another unfinished job is access to space. Regardless of the SpaceX advance of Falcon 9 rockets at relatively low cost, launching every couple of days, NASA must still do the hard, long-term work of enabling ever lower cost access to space for payloads and people. The benefits to people on Earth will follow from what goes on into orbit – and back. Starships may make significant headway here, but a people carrier is another advance entirely. Much like an airplane, the ability to recover easily from a critical fault must be a feature of NASA R&D – spaceplanes, hypersonics, and reusable launch.
Lastly, a NASA workforce signing firm fixed price contracts for services will quickly lose touch. As pointed out in a recent report for NASA, a good engineer gets stale very fast if they don’t keep their hands dirty. The generation in NASA that will still be here in twenty or thirty years must embed in new ways, if not micromanaging, with companies serving NASA while setting sights on new customers, too. Making all things “commercial” a target, this path too quickly loses value as a measure.
Asking better questions is merely a reminder to ask what it’s all about.
Does any of this mean abandoning lunar ambitions or canceling this or that project? Asking better questions is merely a reminder to ask what it’s all about. A destination was never a plan. NASA’s Moon to Mars and Artemis have already passed through many districts. It needs to pass through low Earth orbit and backtrack if need be. When thousands of people and hundreds of automated facilities dot Earth’s orbit like a string of pearls, dozens or hundreds of people on the Moon, to stay, will follow naturally.
Now, if only the real target – benefits for people on Earth – would persist in our upcoming transition. It could be a good start and a helpful measure.
Zapata Talks NASA 