No, Constellation Wasn't Better Than What We Have Now

 I've been trying to avoid rant posts, but this speech from a widely respected source (former NASA Admin Michael Griffin) is so full of bad takes that I've given in to the urge to address it.

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Griffin starts by saying we're further from returning to the Moon now than in 2007. Let that sink in for a moment.

In 2007, we had two new LVs to develop, a crew vehicle to develop and a lander to develop, and nowhere near enough budget to do all that at projected spending levels. And even the most optimistic plans put a landing 13 years out, with an OSTP review just 2 years later finding it would likely take a decade longer than planned.

In 2023, SLS and Orion have flown, we have multiple landers contracted and under development, with a crewed landing notionally 2-3 years / realistically probably 5-6 years from now. In other words, not only are we much closer than we were then, we haven't even really lost the time in between! We're still tracking towards a late 20s return. That's incredible given 16 years of mostly wasting time.

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Then he says he's tired of people thinking you're gonna get far beyond LEO without heavy lift space launch. Now what he means is with crew and *super* heavy lift space launch (50+ tons to LEO). He's defending his decision to pursue Ares V back in the days of the Constellation program. We did in fact have heavy lift (20+ to LEO) back then with two vehicles (the Space Shuttle and Delta IV Heavy), while a third (Titan IV) had just had its final flight in 2005, and a fourth was planned by SpaceX; not to mention two others (Ariane V and Proton) in operation with our then and current human spaceflight partners.

And he goes on to use an analogy (credited to Wayne Hale) of trying to do the Berlin Airlift with Piper Cubs to show why using smaller launch vehicles (than a superheavy) would be a bad idea (the claim is that you can do it, but it would be impractical). The problem is that the example of the Berlin Airlift shows the exact opposite of the point he's trying to make. The Berlin Airlift involved over 250,000 sorties over a period of 15 months using a mix of large aircraft *that were already available*. Not only was there no attempt to wait for a larger aircraft to be developed, but they didn't even restrict themselves to using only the largest aircraft they had, but threw just about everything available with substantial capacity at the problem. The Berlin Airlift was an exercise in using what already existed at breakneck rates.

Looking back to the mid-noughts, a mix of the heavy and medium launchers (Delta IV and Atlas V) we had as a result of the EELV program could have comfortably managed a repeat of Apollo (2 crew on the surface for a few days at a time) with 2-4 launches per mission, with leisurely assembly over the course of months. Even the more ambitious goals of Constellation (4 crew, longer stay) could have been supported with a single digit number of launches per mission. Compare that to 250,000 sorties over 15 months using hundreds of planes.

What's more, it's not like the Constellation plan was actually going to simplify things relative to a multi-launch architecture using existing LVs. Not one but two new LVs had to be developed (as is also the case for Artemis), as well as an Earth Departure Stage, and each mission would require two launches with rendezvouses in both Earth orbit and lunar orbit, with cryogenic propellants on not one but two post-launch (post-rendezvous & aggregation) components (EDS and Altair descent stage). Compare this to a notional 2-crew architecture that would use 2 Delta IV Heavy launches, rendezvous in lunar orbit only, and utilize only storable propellants beyond launch & TLI.

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Griffin here makes two* major points that I can agree with -- one is that NASA is not lacking in dollars to do great things, and the other is that you need to do some engineering of your own to properly judge the engineering of others. 

But then he launches from there to claim that space policy has gone overboard with commercialization, that he was right to not commercialize crew transport to LEO, and that NASA is and should be primarily about geopolitical posturing, with any "useful things" (his words) effectively a bonus.

There's more to unpack there than I have time to properly unpack, but I'm going to start with the last of those claims. He talks about standing up to Chinese ambitions and propaganda, as we did with the Soviet Union in the Apollo days. The trouble is that space has become and (is rapidly becoming even more) a useful domain where real power and real capability matter. Prioritizing a grand show ahead of useful capability is exactly what has cost us decades in real forward movement, and is one of the three biggest threats to our lead in the space domain going forward (the other two being public apathy and our lost lead in broad industrial capacity). If we build real useful capacity, we'll not only have tangible power, but we'll also get a grand show as a side benefit. If you pursue a grand show for the sake of a grand show, you're likely to be embarrassed on both the real power and the showmanship fronts. Our Great White Fleet in the space domain right now is not SLS & Orion, but our thrice weekly Falcon launches and the thousands of Starlink satellites they have carried to orbit. There's a reason that China is not only pursuing increasing commercialization but also pivoting to trying to reproduce SpaceX-like hardware.

Which brings us to the commercialization claims. He was obviously right that private industry wasn't capable of carrying the space station's trash, let alone crew, back when Griffin was administrator. But they learned fast. They learned so fast, in fact, that they beat the NASA-designed effort for flying crew post-Shuttle by 4.5 years and counting (May '20 for Demo-2 vs NET November '24 for Artemis 2), despite relatively inconsistent funding and a much later start (after ~20 years and ~$25B in development, Orion is still not quite ready to fly crew, even if SLS were ready for flight 2). Were SpaceX and Boeing lacking in the ability to deliver cargo and crew 20 years ago? Sure. Would it have been premature to commercialize crew alongside cargo? No. You might say hindsight is 20/20, but you can at least acknowledge that the decision to delay commercial crew had suboptimal results. We could have and should have pursued COTS-D, even if alongside Ares I - Orion. That likely would have dramatically lowered the Shuttle gap, and even without knowing how SpaceX and others would perform, the cost-benefit calculation should have led to some funding in that direction, because it was such a low cost and high potential benefit prospect.

And while Griffin can take some credit for COTS, the seeds for it were planted earlier by Goldin and watered in the days of O'Keefe. And in my opinion Griffin did not give COTS and what it represented enough weight, but instead got busy feeding the resources of other programs to the bottomless pit that was Constellation.

As for where NASA is now with commercialization, HLS (from both providers) is a massive jump in capability *and* massive reduction in cost relative to what would have been developed in house. And the providers are going in knowing full well that they are going to spend substantially more money developing those capabilities than NASA will pay them, and they're okay with that, because those capabilities are aligned with their long term goals. And that right there is why Griffin's claims about "commercial" being used to just mean "I want the government to pay me, but I don't want to follow the rules" is a gross mischaracterization. Yes, NASA is supporting them, but the providers have major skin in the game. This is a perfectly valid way to seed commercial spaceflight. The program is already set up to be a bigger success than commercial crew because we have two providers with long term commitment beyond lucrative NASA contracts. And if anything, NASA needs more commercialization, not less. Crew delivery to lunar orbit, for one, would benefit greatly from it; along with massive cost reduction (relative to ongoing SLS & Orion spending) it would remove a major bottleneck from the Artemis architecture, making it all more balanced, capable, flexible, and future-proof.

*I also mostly agree with Griffin's claims that NRHO isn't a good orbit to use for a lunar orbit station, and that prioritizing said station is premature, but that's tangential to the thrust of his argument.

All in all, it's frustrating to see Griffin sticking so strongly to his bad takes on space policy despite 16 years of evidence that should have prompted some introspection. And it stands in contrast to the examples of re-evaluation shown by Bolden and Nelson, as well as by a number of Apollo astronauts.