On a chilly night in early December 2017, I met a couple of industry sources at a southeast Houston restaurant called Nobi. Located just down the road from Johnson Space Center, Nobi serves Vietnamese cuisine and has an amazing range of beers on tap. We partook.
These space industry figures are not well known outside the business, but they are very informed and shrewd observers of spaceflight. And perhaps most importantly to me as a reporter, they were particularly candid in this setting.
They were in town for a space conference, so we gossiped and chatted and talked shop. Deep into our cups, speculation turned toward NASA's Space Launch System rocket. When, I asked, do you really think the big rocket will launch?
One of these sources responded with a surprising prediction. "Probably around 2023," he said.
At the time, NASA was planning a 2019 launch date for the rocket, just two years hence. The hardware was nearly completed. So a prediction of six years of work remaining seemed pretty out of left field. But I was mildly drunk, and what's Twitter for if not a little kibbitzing? So I grabbed my phone and tweeted his prediction:
An unbiased industry source spitballed tonight that the first SLS launch will probably come around 2023.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) December 5, 2017
The prediction did not garner all that much attention at the time, and it was largely dismissed as a bad joke. But as the years have gone by, in certain small corners of the web, this tweet has become something of an Internet legend, a wild prediction that might come true.
It has also spurred anger from supporters of the large NASA rocket. In 2020, the r/SpaceLaunchSystem subreddit discovered the tweet, and some readers were downright angry. User "insane_gravy" wrote, "Eric Berger once again proves that anyone can be a space 'journalist' because there are no standards." Well, I hope insane_gravy really likes gravy because the Space Launch System rocket and its Artemis I mission are now scheduled to launch on Wednesday, just eight days before Thanksgiving.
However improbably, the source has been proven to be correct. Given that we are less than two months from the new year, it is already "around" 2023. Moreover, fiscal year 2023 began five weeks ago.
A second prediction
Three years later, in October 2020, this same source made another pronouncement wild enough that I decided to again tweet about it. The prediction concerned NASA's forthcoming decision on a contractor to build a "Human Landing System" to take its astronauts down to the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.
At the time, SpaceX, a Blue Origin-led "National Team," and a third bidder led by Dynetics were competing for one or two NASA contracts. The conventional thinking in the space industry was that Blue Origin would win the primary contract since it led a team of new and traditional aerospace companies and proposed a design tailored to NASA's specifications. It was thought that maybe Dynetics or SpaceX would get a secondary contract.
Far from proposing a conventional lunar lander, SpaceX wanted to use its massive Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. This option was somewhat discounted by the space industry because Starship was an experimental, risky approach. There were also concerns that if NASA selected SpaceX, it would put Starship on the critical path for the Artemis Moon Program. This meant that for the Artemis Program to succeed, Starship had to work. And if Starship worked, it would mean that NASA had funded a rocket that was better than its own expendable and costly Space Launch System rocket.
Despite its delays—or perhaps because of them—this SLS rocket remains the darling of the US Congress. Key senators created it in 2010 and funded the program lavishly since then. Could NASA really convince Congress to fund Starship, knowing that Starship would ultimately undermine the rocket Congress built?
I and many others thought not.
My source, however, said NASA was impressed by SpaceX's track record of execution. (That fall, SpaceX was about to fly its first operational Crew Dragon mission, ending NASA's dependence on Russia for astronaut flights to the International Space Station). He also said that SpaceX was much further along with hardware development. While SpaceX was building and starting to fly full-size Starship prototypes in South Texas, Blue Origin and Dynetics were building low-fidelity, wooden mockups of their lunar landers.
Therefore, my source reasoned, SpaceX was most likely to win the contract. And given the paucity of money available, he said, SpaceX might win the contract as a sole source award. So I took to Twitter again:
FWIW this same source, who has absolutely no ties to SpaceX, recently speculated that Starship would eventually walk away with the Human Landing System contract because of its rapid hardware development.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) October 28, 2020
Six months later, NASA said it had selected SpaceX and its Starship vehicle as the sole provider for the Human Landing System. The announcement was surprising to everyone—that is, everyone except those who had learned to trust the "space prophet."
What about Artemis III?
A few weeks ago, after it became clear the space prophet would be correct about the debut of the Space Launch System, some of his acolytes began to ask on Twitter what he thought about Artemis III. This is NASA's first mission to land humans back on the Moon.
Originally planned for 2024, this mission will see NASA astronauts launch on the SLS rocket, inside Orion. Orion will then rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit, and two crew members will go down to the Moon's surface inside Starship. After nearly a week on the lunar surface, they will climb back inside Starship, blast off, and meet up with Orion. Then the crew will come home and splash down in the Pacific Ocean.
With the ongoing delays to the launch of Artemis I, the Artemis III mission is now planned for a launch in 2025. Most of the space industry (correctly) figures this date is pretty optimistic, as the following things have to happen before Artemis III launches:
- Artemis I has to fly—and fly safely
- Artemis II has to demonstrate the safety of humans on board Orion in a flight around the Moon
- SpaceX has to complete Starship, demonstrate orbital refueling, and land a practice mission on the Moon
- Axiom Space has to design, build, and test a next-generation spacesuit for the lunar surface
- NASA has to complete loads of paperwork to certify the "safety" of Artemis III
So when, I asked my source, "Do you think Artemis III will actually happen?"
"My starting point is 2028," he replied.
This does not seem like all that unreasonable of a prediction. This is not your grandparents' NASA, which delivered the Apollo Program on time and on budget. The 1960s were a very different era, and NASA was operating with an outsized budget, a geopolitical imperative, and a presidential mandate to hit the end of the decade for a human landing on the Moon. Today, the agency receives far less budget relative to federal spending, and the external forces driving NASA toward a deadline to land on the Moon have far less pressure behind them.
The bottom line is that there are no real consequences for missing 2025. Congress may huff and puff a bit, but in reality, Artemis is a solid choice for the space agency's human exploration ambitions. Its international partners are behind the plan, and there are no great alternatives. Most people will just shrug and accept the delays.
Given the bloat and delay baked into most big space programs today, 2028 is actually a pretty reasonable estimate for Artemis III. It would probably be my "starting point," too. But the space prophet didn't stop there. "It may happen in 2028, but I'm not sure it will be on SLS," he said.
Now this was a spicy prediction.
Starship, but more?
In essence, the Artemis Program was created about four years ago to answer a simple question: What should NASA do with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft? Until that time, Congress had been content to pour billions of dollars a year into the programs, which produce jobs in all 50 states. Why was NASA building them? For deep space exploration. But to go where? That was never really clear.
Initiated by then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and US Vice President Mike Pence, Artemis answered that question. NASA would go back to the Moon, this time to stay, and in a more sustainable way than during Apollo.
Congress more or less went along with this approach, but its support came with strings attached. US Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who holds the most power over NASA's budget in Congress, told Bridenstine that if NASA astronauts did not launch on the SLS rocket for Artemis missions, there would be no funding for Artemis missions. Period.
That's all well and good, my source reasoned. But 2028 is a long way away. Oh, and Shelby is retiring at the end of this year. A lot could happen in the next five years, depending on how well the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft programs execute, whether SpaceX succeeds in getting Starship flying, and how the political and fiscal environment in the US evolves.
One of the biggest spurs to change may be the technical problems NASA has had in launching Artemis I due to leaky hydrogen lines and weather. After years of delays, this mission was supposed to finally launch in late August. After two scrubs due to technical problems, it now will not launch until at least November 14. That is a potential deal-breaker for a human landing on the Moon.
Why? Because NASA will want to know that a lunar lander is ready and waiting for its astronauts, SpaceX will need to launch its Starship vehicle, fuel it, and fly it into an orbit around the Moon before the Artemis III launch. One issue is that cryogenic fuels stored in space "boil off" over time due to exposure to the Sun's heating. Starship will have the capability to "loiter" in lunar orbit for 100 days, but will this be long enough? An Artemis I launch on November 14 would be 90 days since mid-August, and there's no guarantee SLS will fly by then.
There are also valid concerns about the safety of the SLS and Orion hardware. These vehicles are large, complex machines that will only fly infrequently, at most once a year. At such a flight rate, this launch system will always be experimental.
It can reasonably be argued that Starship is also not safe to launch on and land back on Earth. It, too, is a large and complex vehicle that will come back through Earth's atmosphere, dissipate heat, and perform delicate maneuvers before landing under the power of its own engines. Even though Starship will launch at least dozens of times per year, the vehicle is unlikely to meet NASA's safety requirements for humans for a long, long time. So Starship-only missions to the Moon are not a near-term solution.
Something even the prophet cannot predict
However, there is an alternative, the source suggested. NASA presently has a vehicle it has deemed safe enough to launch humans into space and back. That's SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, which launches on the rocket that owns the world record for the longest streak of successful launches—the Falcon 9. By the mid-2020s, Crew Dragon will already have launched humans into space dozens of times.
The safest and lowest-cost means of completing an Artemis mission to the Moon, therefore, may involve four astronauts launching to a fairly high altitude in low-Earth orbit on Crew Dragon and rendezvousing with a fully fueled Starship. The astronauts would then fly to the Moon, land, and come back to rendezvous with Crew Dragon in Earth orbit. They would then splash down on Earth inside Dragon.
This architecture is less risky because it doesn't involve launching on SLS, nor does it require two rendezvous and dockings in lunar orbit, far from Earth. The crew would only spend a couple of more days aboard Starship than they would during the existing Artemis III plan, so Starship life support should be up to the task. If you care about costs, this plan also excludes the $4.1 billion launch cost of Orion and the SLS rocket and substitutes Crew Dragon, which would be on the order of one-twentieth of the cost.
Whether this actually happens will come down to execution—which of SLS, Orion, and Starship can demonstrate safe spaceflight?—and politics. When going before lawmakers, it will be difficult for NASA to sell a SpaceX-only lunar mission. But at some point, pragmatism may trump politics.
Alas, these are variables that even the space prophet cannot predict.
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