Howard Bloom’s Space Development Steering Committee advises Joe Biden’s NASA to make a radical switch. Stop building rockets, buy launch from private companies, and concentrate on building the infrastructure we will need to bring life to the moon and Mars. Oh, and make every vehicle reusable.
For example, says Bloom, the Biden administration can get Americans to the Moon at one fortieth the cost of the Trump plan. And it can get us there faster.
How? The Trump administration’s Artemis moon program used a rocket called the Space Launch System. The Space Launch System was originally due to take to the skies in 2016 and is still nowhere near its first flight. Worse, the Space Launch System is a massively expensive rocket that NASA intends to use once, then throw away.
As a result each launch of the Space Launch System will cost two billion dollars. Explains Bloom, “For that price, you can buy 21 launches of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon Heavy rocket, 33 launches of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket, or 40 launches of SpaceX’s upcoming 100-passenger Starship.”
In other words, SpaceX has proven that NASA can achieve its goals with reusable rockets—rockets that can be used over and over again the way trains, planes, and automobiles are reused. And SpaceX has proven that you can now buy space transport services from private companies and save the money you would spend building NASA rockets. This changes the space game utterly.
Says the Space Development Steering Committee’s Bloom, “Now NASA can concentrate on developing the equipment we need to build housing and farming on the moon and Mars, not the rockets to get this equipment there.”
Hence the Space Development Steering Committee recommends that we kill the Space Launch System and redirect its three billion dollars a year to the development of the infrastructure we will need to bring life to the moon and Mars permanently: habitats, construction equipment and water-mining equipment, infrastructure we will need to truly bring space to life by bringing life to space.
The Space Development Steering Committee also recommends that the new administration mothball the plans for a program called the Lunar Gateway, an unneeded but macro-expensive space station in orbit around the moon whose cost could prevent us from ever getting to the moon’s surface. Using the SpaceX Starship, we can go direct to the moon and land 100 tons or 100 passengers. And we can do this 40 times for the cost of one Space Launch System launch. In fact, for that price, we can get 4,000 people to the moon.
Or as the Space Development Steering Committee’s Dr. Ajay Kothari, President of Astrox Corporation, says, “From here on out, reusable rockets should be the railroad locomotives of our programs in space.”
The official website for Howard Bloom may be found at https://www.howardbloom.net