Babin Disappointed in NASA Decision to Make NASA Marshall Lead Center for Lunar Lander
DEER PARK, Texas – Congressman Brian Babin (TX-36) issued the following statement in response to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s announcement today awarding the lunar lander program management to Marshall Space Flight Center.
“I am disappointed by the decision from NASA to not place the lunar lander program management at the Johnson Space Center (JSC),” said Babin. “Marshall Space Flight Center does tremendous work for our nation’s space program, but the knowledge base and skill set for this task unquestionably resides at JSC where the Apollo lunar lander program was successfully managed. Yesterday, I joined Senators Cruz and Cornyn in sending a letter to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine requesting that this decision be reconsidered.”
To view the letter sent to Administrator Bridenstine, please click here.
13 responses to “Babin Disappointed in NASA Decision to Make NASA Marshall Lead Center for Lunar Lander”
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I’m also disappointed that NASA has seen fit to reward MSFC with new responsibilities once more in view of its long history of incompetence and failure. But that, of course, is not the basis of Mr. Babin’s complaint.
Still, politics is the art of the possible. At this precise moment in time, the political correlation of forces did not allow stiff-arming MSFC as it so richly deserves. JSC was fortunate to get the work for the lunar lander ascent module, but even getting that indicates some diminution in the overall influence of the Alabama Mafia led by Richard Shelby.
Politics is fluid, however. Over the next year or two, the relevance of both the MSFC and JSC “awards” of recent days will be rendered effectively moot by events occurring external to NASA.
What events external to NASA do you foresee that will render these undertakings moot?
He means it looks like they’ve already started building the Super Heavy prototype in Cocoa
We will see a cargo version of SHSS in short order, I think. But a people carrier of the sort that moots the government program of record? I don’t know when we’ll see that.
Cargo Dragon came fast. Crew Dragon has not.
Starship has no abort system. How is that going to moot NASA’s current plans? One can certainly argue that it is unreasonable to expect an abort system on a spacecraft with the carrying capacity of a commercial jetliner. The retort is that, given the state of play, it’s unreasonable to operate a spacecraft with the carrying capacity of a commercial jetliner.
I want to see it happen. I want to see it happen quickly. But I expect a crew version of Starship to take some time. Years. And I foresee the lack of an abort system being a sticking point with the government.
But I do think that Musk should build the ship he wants to build. Maybe if NASA had not conspired to rob the Dragon’s propulsive system of it’s real utility, rendering the craft a technological dead end in the eyes of it’s creator, it would not have been neglected to the point where it blew up in preflight testing. So screw NASA. If they want a say, they gotta pay. They are clearly not paying. But the upshot may be that NASA never buys in.
And speaking of no abort system, I know the FAA is currently limited to protecting the uninvolved public, but when SpaceX announces flights of 500 or 1000 from NY to London, people are going to start sweating.
I think NASA will go with the no abort system once it’s up and shown to be working; they’ve certainly launched without an abort system before.
Re: Cargo Dragon came fast. Crew Dragon has not —that’s for damn sure! But, NASA got heavily involved with Crew Dragon, especially as the final CCtCap contract could no longer be done under a Space Act Agreement. And the earlier development rounds were held up by being underfunded. Finally, like you said, when NASA effectively took away propulsive landing, the whole endeavor became a bit of a dead end for SpaceX.
But anyway, SS/SH might not follow quite the same path as Falcon 9/Dragon since that rocket/capsule combo was originally developed for the purpose of transporting cargo (Commercial Cargo contract), with a plan to also use the rocket for commercial satellite launches and with an eye towards future reuseability and a future manned capability. In contrast, SS/SH seems to have been developed from the start as a reusable vehicle for transporting people to Mars, with an eye towards any other business opportunities that may arise so as to get the costs per flight down (to get the cost of a ticket to Mars down to an affordable level), including manned flights to the Moon, traditional satellite launches and point-to-point suborbital services. Sounds crazy just typing it, lol, but that’s what Musk laid out…
As to the point-to-point suborbital people transporting service, I don’t really see that happening, at least not on a regular basis. I’m willing to be surprised, but regularly putting regular people through all those Gs, the trip out to/from offshore platforms, the ticket price — its a bit hard for me to see it being in regular demand.
Regarding regulatory hurdles, the FAA has talked about having a lighter hand with space flight (mainly, concentrating on reducing risk to the uninvolved public) so as to facilitate things getting started. However, when it comes to a point-to-point service that would be competing with regular airline flights, I think they’ll handle safety much as you’ve described above — the full regulatory deal, plus likely more for a new, inherently riskier service
I don’t foresee SHS ever having an escape system in the form of identifiable extra hardware used for no other purpose. What I do think we’ll see is on-pad chill-in of Starship’s engines so they can operate with minimum latency anywhere from the pad to orbit should Super Heavy go pear-shaped. Against the possibility of a bad day for Starship itself, there is really no practical defense short of placing all the passenger seating inside of escape pods – ala Star Trek.
You could split the Starship into a crew module atop a service module. Ring the crew module with super dracos. Give it a heat shield and attitude thrusters. Obviously, you would be incurring a big mass penalty for all that, but you’d have an abort system, or you would if all those super dracos produced enough thrust to do the job.
Certainly, it’s plain why you would not want to do that. It would significantly reduce the utility of the craft. But it would protect you from some loss-of-crew scenarios.
I question the utility of a high thrust escape system in the first place on a liquid fueled rocket. Emergency engine shut down on the booster followed by a modest separation thrust. Capsule heat shield is facing the radiant heat from a bad booster. Dragon 1 could have been safely taking crew up for years now with rational decision making. Even the lost capsule could have been saved with minor foresight.
That isn’t yet official, but it’s pretty much the entirety of the SHS effort I was referring to above.
The initial launch to orbit of SHS, which I expect to occur in roughly a year.
We have good people at Marshall.
No, we don’t. To a man and woman they’ve been taking money under false pretenses for years. They need to either agree to start doing something useful for a living or to leave.
They were around before JSC–back when it was the ABMA–before the Air Force robbed them. I wish you would visit the folks here.