What? A post about going to the Moon here? This is a rural-life blog, true?
True. That said, I enjoy considering how the tools we use, from a good framing-hammer to a Moon rocket, reflect and reify deeply cherished cultural values.
Right now, many of us Americans seem to value huge things: McMansions, burgers that weigh nearly a pound, super-tall skyscrapers, hulking SUVs and lifted pickups guzzling gas on ten-lane superhighways. Add to that list the massive Starship Rocket Elon Musk wants to use to build settlements on Mars. While I'm not a Musk fanboy, I acknowledge that his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla have made some enormous contributions to technological progress. Moreover, they understand how failure teaches us to improve our work. I use lessons from SpaceX to encourage my students, many of whom have never experienced any sort of personal or academic failure; their first shuts them down, emotionally.
Yet as someone who wants us to explore space and eventually settle on other worlds, I'm concerned about the gigantism embodied in Starship. Other objections to human exploration of the Moon and Mars, be those environmental, social, or economic, may have their day and their place, but I want to look at the problems of gigantism here.
Musk's dream, it turns out, is nearly 70 years old. In my first-year seminar, "The Space Race," we divide our time between considering the Soviet-US race to the Moon and the plans to return today. One chapter in that earlier race gets lost as we discuss NASA's plan to land humans there again: Wernher von Braun's massive Nova rocket.
He dreamed up this design in the 1950s, refining it until NASA canceled the booster in 1964. Budgets began to scale back America's space plans, as did some reasonable qualms about the danger of such a rocket exploding on the pad with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon.
Nova would have flown directly to the Moon, with its top stage, some 65' tall, landing on the lunar surface. No complex dance of lunar lander and command module in deep space needed! As Michael Neufeld's magisterial biography of von Braun notes, the German engineer really intended to build a Mars rocket with Nova. That had always been his goal, as is Musk's in developing the Starship/Super Heavy Booster stack.
What an impressive sight Nova would have been, lifting off from Florida. Yet at the same time, what an improbable task, landing its final stage, the height of a six-story building, on difficult terrain. Then imagine doing that while seated at the very top of that building. Aldrin and Armstrong, during the Apollo 11 mission, found themselves improvising their landing when faced with boulders the size of automobiles. A larger lander than their small LEM (its outer skin was little more than foil) would have certainly toppled over had it landed poorly.
Today, NASA has a Moon rocket but not a lander, opting to have a version of Starship called HLS descend with crew for touchdown. Granted, we have better computers than anything Project Apollo employed. I doubt any human aboard would fine-tune the automated landing. Moreover, SpaceX has shown again and again that its smaller boosters can land for reuse, even on an automated platform at sea.
Why then was I so queasy when Starship's latest prototype blew up on its maiden voyage?
Musk's company went through similar glitches with its Falcon 9 rockets. There is, however, a key difference that troubles me: the Super Heavy Booster for Starship sports a cluster of 33 Raptor engines to develop full thrust, as compared to the five F-1 engines in the Saturn V's first stage. The SpaceX design reminds me of the failed Soviet N-1 Moon rocket, a multi-engine behemoth that kept exploding on test flights. Finally the USSR ended the program, ceding the first landing to the United States.
Given the failure of Starship/Super Heavy's first launch (whatever SpaceX claims to the contrary) as well as considerable damage to the launch pad from all that thrust, I wonder if NASA will see any of its astronauts set foot on the Moon in this decade. If Starship continues to lag NASA's SLS, would we do what we might have done in the first place, stop subsiding Musk's Mars dream and instead land the components for an inhabited lunar base with several small vehicles, launched from Earth by smaller rockets?
Those of us who dream of settling the Solar System's other worlds have seen the price of gigantism before it got so scaled back that no sustainable infrastructure survived into the 80s. In consequence, since 1973 our species has been stuck in low Earth orbit.
Even if Musk's booster works, there's landing HLS safely. SpaceX's lander will stand 165 feet tall. Here it is, reminiscent of the single-stage rocket from Irving Pichel's 1950 SF epic, Destination Moon. As in the film, people and cargo will be lowered from the nose on an elevator.
- why did NASA opt for an enormous lander so similar in concept to von Braun's, rejected 60 years ago?
- will SpaceX send a robotic excavator/roller to prepare a perfectly flat landing spot on the Moon?
- how soon will the company be able to test the Super Heavy with lander before the Artemis III mission?
- when would a robotic HLS practice landing on the Moon and then blasting off again?
- what plans do NASA and SpaceX have to get astronauts off the Moon if the Starship lander fails to relight its engines?
My questions may come to naught with successful tests of each component, until Starship is human-rated for flights. I also suppose that my final question, "what could possibly go wrong?" will answer itself. One troubling outcome of American gigantism played itself out with fire and debris last week, 24 kilometers above the Texas coast.
Perhaps, if Chinese astronauts set up housekeeping first on Luna, we'll see it a sad rebuke to America's infatuation with the gargantuan.
This blog promotes thinking small; getting the Moon is big, building a permanent settlement bigger still, but if we choose that path as a species, how big need our tools be to get the job done safely and sustainably?
I don't use a sledge to hammer nails, or a backhoe to plant a new raised bed, after all.
