How can NASA return to the Moon? By making everything reusable, chief says

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On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, left, was shown the Orion test crew capsule that will be used for the Ascent Abort-2 test. NASA's Jon Olansen, second from left, speaks as Orion Program Manager Mark Kirasich looks on.

One thing new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has shown is that he appreciates space policy history. In his first public speech last May after taking the reins of NASA, when discussing the Trump administration's preference to return to the Moon, Bridenstine cited a number of past human exploration programs proposed by Republican and Democratic presidents that fell by the wayside. "Times have changed," Bridenstine said. "This will not be Lucy and the football again."

This week Bridenstine visited Johnson Space Center for the first time as administrator. On Friday, he will unveil the first astronauts that will fly into space on board the Boeing Starliner and SpaceX Dragon commercial crew vehicles in about a year. As part of the visit, he also answered questions for an hour from a handful of media on Thursday. Ars pressed Bridenstine on why things would be different from past failures to return astronauts to the Moon or go on to Mars.

In short, he believes reusability—from rockets to lunar landers—is the game-changing technology that enables deep-space exploration.

Getting to the Moon

"We want the entire architecture between here and the Moon to all be reusable," Bridenstine said. When the space program can reuse its rockets, spacecraft, deep-space stations, and landers, it makes the program sustainable. What the White House does not want, he said, would be a program that spends a lot of money and sends humans to the Moon a handful of times before retreating back into low-Earth orbit.

"We know how reusability of rockets has changed the game for access to space and how it's just driven down the cost, and it will continue to drive down the cost," Bridenstine said. "So at NASA, we need to be looking at things differently. We need to be a customer when we can be a customer. We want to have multiple providers when we can have multiple providers all competing on innovation and cost. I think we are at the precipice of having an opportunity that didn't even exist five or 10 years ago on the commercial side."

In response to this, Ars noted that the Orion spacecraft has some potential for reuse. NASA has designed the deep-space capsule such that its avionics and costly computer boxes can be pulled out and put into new spacecraft, and, eventually, the space agency would like to reuse the Orion structure as well.

However, the big rocket NASA has been developing since 2011, the Space Launch System, is entirely expendable. It will cost $1 to $2 billion per launch, in comparison to much less expensive (and moderately less capable) commercial vehicles.

A senior NASA official sitting at the table, Johnson Space Center Director Mark Geyer, responded, "It's a good question about the rocket." What the SLS brings, he said, is an enormous Delta V capability that, combined with Orion's tug capacity, was necessary to build the Deep Space Gateway. "Energy is a key part," Geyer said. "So it's a big rocket, with a large size. To date, that's not something we've been able to reuse."

Bridenstine, however, would not be deterred from his interest in the potential of commercial companies to drive down the cost of spaceflight.

"But if we can take advantage of commercial industry that can develop a reusable rocket, we want them to be successful," he said after Geyer was done speaking. "We want to partner with companies that are willing to step up and take that challenge. It is not an 'either/or.' Right now, our best, closest capability is going to be SLS and Orion, but if 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there's a commercial capability that's successful, we're going to use it. And we want them to be successful. In fact, we're partnering with those companies today on commercial crew and other things."
"If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do or don't want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said. "I'm not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet."

Times, it seems, have changed. For Bridenstine, in addition to international partnerships, these very investments by commercial companies in large reusable rockets and other technologies may make all the difference.
A marked change

This approach differs markedly from Bridenstine's predecessor as administrator, Charles Bolden. Although Bolden strongly supported SpaceX in its capacity as a provider of cargo and crew services to the International Space Station, he didn't think much of its efforts to build heavy-lift rockets in a similar class to the Space Launch System that could be used for deep-space exploration.

In 2016, at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2016 Conference, Bolden was asked for his opinion on the emerging market for small satellites and launchers. He chose to respond instead with his thoughts on NASA's own rocket, the Space Launch System, and private-sector development of larger launch vehicles.