This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it's hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That's in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don't apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there's no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we'll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn't said much about space, and space wasn't an issue in his campaign, either.
To the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the "landing team" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.
In these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a "Journey to Mars." The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump's people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump "was very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot." That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.
The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they're both round objects in outer space, but beyond that, they're an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.
Yet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor "New Space" vs. "Old Space," to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)
The landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.
The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket — the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.
It's hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.
But there's this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly "commercial" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.
The problem is that it won't make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.
Follow the money, someone once said.