Over at Behind The Black, the blog of space enthusiast Robert Zimmerman, he has some suggestions for the US space industry and in particular NASA’s Artemis program to land humans on the Moon. The advice is directed at Trump’s nomination for the head of NASA, Jacob Isaacman, a billionaire who has already flown in space twice, with purchased flights onboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, the last flight beating the old Gemini 11 record for the highest altitude orbit, and also becoming the first private citizen to conduct a space walk.

In a previous post Zimmerman argued that the entire SLS rocket and Orion capsule should be scrapped because, after almost twenty years of development (far behind the schedule set by President GW Bush in 2005), they’re vastly too expensive (perhaps $4 billion per launch), and slow (maybe one launch per year) and limited The Orion itself , as other critics have long argued (NASA is dead), is barely more than a souped up Apollo command ship, with four astronauts instead of three, and incapable of anything beyond going to the Moon. Within two years the Starship system will have outpaced Artemis in every way possible.

Zimmerman admits that scrapping the SLS-Orion system is unlikely, given that it’s a bipartisan political donation machine to key states, just as LBJ planned it in the 1960’s. It’s tagged the Senate Launch System for good reason.

But in this post Zimmerman pushes beyond merely scrapping the system; he proposes scrapping the goal of the project and focusing on something different:

The primary goal of Artemis should therefore not be to land humans on the Moon, but to first create a multi-faceted American space industry focused on competition and free enterprise, doing many different things. 
…
Isaacman should therefore focus on the using all the remaining assets of Artemis — as well as the fleet of space stations that private American companies are presently building to replace the ISS — to build a sustainable real space-faring industry in Earth orbit that will quickly expand outward naturally to the Moon and beyond.

He reckons NASA should use the money to assist four private sector space stations that are already being built to replace the ISS when it’s decommissioned in 2030, but the assistance should be focused on getting them to create a space industry in orbit around the Earth, which will then naturally provide the capabilities to go not just to the Moon and Mars but to work through the entire solar system.

On ISS NASA blocked such commercial enterprises. On these private stations commercial enterprise will be their main function. Furthermore, these space station companies will be in competition with each other for this business, the best thing possible for driving costs down and promoting innovation.

Interestingly he quotes Issacman saying something along similar lines, where the astronaut-billionaire, praised NASA’s existing Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew programs for encouraging private competition. Zimmerman wants this to be pushed much further.

NASA was established to push the boundaries of space exploration when only government could do things like building rockets, launching machines and men into space, and getting them back to Earth. But that was all successfully done over fifty years ago, and private sector companies have been routinely doing that now for years. NASA should not be merely repeating what it successfully did fifty years ago,, it should still be pushing the boundaries and Zimmerman’s argument is that the boundary is now enabling an Earth orbital space industry, with profit as the lever to enable greater capabilities:

And in the end, these near Earth capabilities will make getting back to the Moon not only easier, they will make building bases there far more likely. Without much difficulty this tortoise-like space station effort will soon swamp China’s Apollo-like lunar program. And the knowledge gained from this will further fuel the knowledge required to build the more difficult bases on Mars.

Isaacman need only lay out a more relaxed Artemis program of lunar missions, tied not to China’s schedule, but to the development in Earth orbit of the technologies needed to make those landings and the establishment of a viable lunar base practical. The lunar program could still be the centerpiece of the program, inspiring it forward, but not on the present schedule that makes no sense.

Let’s hope Issacman hears this and proves to be an innovative disrupter of NASA because this is what awaits us.