NASA's agenda to return to the Moon (and stay)

Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan during the 'Apollo XVII' mission, the last time the Moon was stepped on.NASA

At the end of 2017, coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the last flight of the Apollo program to the Moon, former US President Donald Trump signed a presidential directive that urged the US space agency (NASA) to renew its efforts to return to the Moon as soon as possible.

He did not set a date, but just a year later, former Vice President Mike Pence did: 2024. Presumably, he was counting on an eventual re-election of Trump, who would somehow emulate the gesture of John F. Kennedy half a century earlier.

But the deadline was too tight.

There was neither the right ship nor the right rocket, nor even a concrete plan of how to do it.

it had been raised with a program essentially of national prestige, with limited scientific ambitions;

a return to the Moon should be an exploration mission with broader goals, apart from planting the ceremonial flags, that too.

Thus the Artemis program was born, from which we have now learned of new plans to reconquer the Moon.

Artemis, in Greek mythology, is the twin sister of Apollo.

And she almost from the first moment she began to accumulate delays.

NASA never officially revealed her intentions beyond the first three flights: the first, without a crew;

the second, already manned, to orbit around the Moon;

and the third, already destined to perch on its surface.

The date: 2025. For many experts, an unattainable deadline.

lunar spacecraft

and its carrier rocket, the SLS, have not yet flown.

Both should debut this summer.

The

is an orbital capsule, not a descent to the surface.

This mission has been entrusted to the

of Space X (which was the one who presented the best economic offer).

Space X's Starship is a revolutionary concept, but so far its prototype hasn't reached more than 15 kilometers in height

On paper, the

seems like a promising and revolutionary concept: freighter, orbital spacecraft with capacity for dozens of crew members, suborbital passenger transport vehicle, in-flight refueling tanker, landing capsule on the Moon and – finally – explorer. from Mars.

The only drawback is that so far her prototype has not reached more than 15 kilometers in height and has only managed to complete a successful landing.

Which is a lot, certainly, but not enough at the moment to think about going to the Moon.

Now a draft of the plans for future flights that would follow has just appeared, leaked to the

medium .

would be used to begin construction of an orbital station around the Moon, which would include substantial European cooperation.

That would be, at best, between 2027 and 2029 and would require at least two or three more flights.

Already in the next decade, NASA contemplates five more Artemis missions.

They would take elements to the Moon to build a small permanent base and also a pressurized vehicle that would be something like a rolling laboratory similar to the one that appeared in the movie

.

The last planned flight is

, scheduled —with overflowing optimism— for 2034.

The great obstacle to materializing these plans is their disproportionate cost.

It is not clear that Washington will accept to cover bills that will undoubtedly exceed 4,000 million dollars per flight, today almost 20% of NASA's total budget.

And voices are already being raised questioning the use of the new SLS superrocket, now resting on its ramp at the Kennedy Center.

The SLS 'Artemis 1', on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral (Florida, USA), on June 27.

JOE SKIPPER (REUTERS)

The SLS began to be designed before Space X demonstrated the possibility of recovering the rockets for reuse.

Since then, Elon Musk's company has recycled some of its launchers in more than a dozen flights, with the consequent lower cost of each operation.

When it takes off, the SLS will be a "throwaway" rocket: its four main engines -harvested from old ferries- will end up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Since it used engines, center tank, and side throttles derived from the Shuttle program, the SLS should have been cheaper than the Saturn 5 of the 1960s. It wasn't.

Each moon rocket in the Apollo program cost about $1.4 billion (in current dollars);

each ferry, about 1,500;

the SLS will go from 2,200.

That, without counting its astronomical development costs... And the fact that for future lunar operations an even more powerful version will have to be built.

SLS is not the only Achilles heel of the Artemis program.

Many believe that the Gateway base around the Moon makes no more sense than to provide a secure high-altitude mooring point for the

capsule , whose engines would not allow it to pull itself out of low lunar orbit.

The future moon landing

(known as HLS: Human Landing System) will also have to dock with the orbital station, with the paradox that its size will be much larger than the Gateway itself, with many duplicate systems: vital maintenance, communications, stabilization... So the question is whether the cost and time spent building the station can be justified and whether a cheaper alternative could be found.

Perhaps the answer should be sought not in technique but in politics.

Twelve years ago, the SLS program was designed to appease large aerospace contractors who were concerned about the end of shuttle operations.

And, at the same time, keep jobs.

Almost all the states got a more or less important piece of the pie, depending on the negotiating skills of their representatives in Washington.

Between them, 24,000 million were shared out only in development expenses.

And it is that we were no longer in Kennedy times in which going to the Moon was a matter of national pride;

now it was just a matter of business.

You can follow

50% off

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber