To Win New Moon Race, U.S. Needs To Launch National Emergency Campaign

To win the superpower race to the Moon, the U.S. has to swiftly launch a "national emergency" crusade to develop a lander that could beat Chinese taikonauts to the lunar surface, says a top mission designer at Lockheed Martin. Shown here is Lockheed's leading-edge Orion capsule in orbit around the Moon.Image courtesy of Lockheed Martin and Gary NapierAs the superpower race to the Moon skyrockets into the global limelight, the U.S. needs to launch a “national emergency” campaign to beat China in landing astronauts on the orb’s South Pole, says a leading scholar at one of the top American spacecraft outfits. The race’s starting pistol has already been fired, but NASA could lose this celestial contest if it doesn’t act now to spark the rapid-fire development of a lunar lander to whizz American aeronauts to the silver globe, according to an acclaimed space mission designer at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed’s Orion spacecraft, now the globe’s most technologically advanced space capsule, is scheduled to carry four Allied astronauts to lunar orbit two years from now. While the Orion is a marvel of next-generation space engineering, NASA still needs a shuttle to dock with that ship, and ferry two aeronauts down to the surreal elongated shadow world of the polar cap, which has remained an unexplored enigma for four billion years.Lockheed's Orion spacecraft is the globe's most technologically advanced human capsule ever developed, but NASA still needs a lander to shuttle astronauts from Orion, when it orbits the Moon, down to the cratered lunar surface (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)Getty ImagesThe United States seized its supreme status in spaceflight a generation ago, during a Cold War face-off with the Soviet Union. As the dueling powers built massive nuclear arsenals, they raced each other to reach the Moon’s myth-generating dunes, transforming their intercontinental ballistic missiles into colossal rockets to propel capsules and landers into the heavens.MORE FOR YOUWashington only won Space Race I because it led a call to arms that galvanized the entire nation, from NASA’s expanding research centers to elite science universities to vanguard space-tech outfits like Lockheed, to rally around Project Apollo, says Tim Cichan, Chief Architect for Human Exploration at Lockheed.Cichan told me in an interview that to triumph in the 2020s Space Race II, the government would have to swiftly launch a second all-out drive to speed modern American navigators to the ancient cratered world.A generation ago, Lockheed aerospace wizards responded to President John F. Kennedy’s space call-up by creating the launch escape system for the Apollo 11 Moon capsule, a fail-safe that could instantly propel the crew away from an exploding rocket.With the new Moon Race, Lockheed has proposed crafting a twin-stage lunar lander at breakneck speed, but is still awaiting the go-ahead from NASA, says Cichan, Lockheed’s one-time Orion System Architect. The U.S. only triumphed in the superpower race with the Soviets to land astronauts on the Moon by leading a nationwide call to arms surrounding Project Apollo. Now Lockheed's leading engineers are patterning a new Moon lander after the original two-stage NASA design (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)Getty Images“China’s predicted they’ll fly their crew to the Moon before 2030,” he says, so the countdown has already started.NASA commissioned SpaceX, with a $2.89 billion contract, to deploy its prototype Starship to dock with the Orion in orbit around the Moon and ferry two aeronauts to a week-long surface expedition, for the Artemis 3 flight originally scheduled for 2024.SpaceX’s titanic Starship is the most powerful human capsule ever developed on Earth, but three flight tests of the ship have ended in sensational pyrotechnic explosions this year.This cluster of mid-air blasts has sparked shock waves of panic crisscrossing Congress and NASA about when the craft will be ready to stage a safe Moon touchdown.SpaceX's Starship super-capsule could one day lead a rocket revolution that opens the way for millions of spacefarers to lift off in times ahead, but a series of flight test explosions have cast a colossal cloud over its ability to shuttle NASA astronauts to the Moon's South Pole before China's taikonauts land. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesAt the same time, Cichan says, Beijing’s space agency is speeding ahead with its parallel Moon mission plans, closing in on a win in the U.S.-China matchup.In a bid to catapult NASA’s space pilots back into the race, he says, “We offered up some ideas of how we could do a lunar landing mission as quickly as possible.” Lockheed is rushing to review its earlier conceptual designs for landers, and its treasure house of aerospace technologies, along with those of its allies, to “build a multi-stage lunar lander that would provide for the safety of the crew.” This deus ex machina lander could be developed at lightning speed, he predicts.Over the course of a sweeping interview, I asked Tim Cichan if this improvised Moon racer could be launched in time to beat China’s taikonauts to the lunar version of Antarctica.“That is a difficult challenge," he says, but quickly adds: "We could.”“It would depend on how the [NASA] program was set up, with the focus on speed."“You know it would need to be a national emergency kind of program, but there’s a chance.”Would this high-stakes campaign - with its extreme urgency - be similar to the Manhattan Project, the pivotal battle the U.S. staged to outpace the Nazis in developing the world’s first atomic bombs? This national emergency crusade, Cichan says, would have to rival the Manhattan Project, Project Apollo and the rush to perfect COVID vaccines in terms of super-compressed timelines and an overarching will to win that reverberates across the United States.To reach peak velocity in crafting this Moon-ship, Lockheed’s army of aerospace architects“would need to team up with other outfits” in a new lunar alliance, says Cichan, who heads a coterie of visionary engineers mapping out future inter-world odysseys by human and robotic explorers. Yet he says Congress and NASA would have to move almost immediately to kickstart this super-speed lunar quest.There are already signs that the Senate and the presumptive new head of NASA are poised to act.While leading a recent Senate confirmation hearing for NASA’s new administrator, Senator Ted Cruz, Congress’s foremost champion of American space power, warned that winning “the second space race,” of the 2020s, “is critical to our national security.”NASA, Cruz said, needs to speed into action “if we are to beat China back to the Moon."Across a series of hearings on Capitol Hill, former NASA chief Mike Griffin has testified the U.S. would lose its pole-star position in spaceflight unless it rapidly commissioned a new lunar lander to replace the SpaceX Starship, which still has to perfect the refueling of the capsule in low Earth orbit via myriad tankers - a sophisticated operation that has never before been tested. Dr. Griffin, one of the world’s leading space scholars, has cast doubt that SpaceX could navigate this orbital minefield of technological challenges in time to land the first human scouts on the Moon in the new millennium.On opening the hearing, Senator Cruz hailed billionaire space pilot Jared Isaacman, nominated as NASA’s new head, as “a strong leader” and charged him with “landing Americans on the Moon before China, which is aiming to send its own taikonauts there by 2030.”“Jared,” Cruz said, “I know you are as committed as I am to American supremacy in the final frontier.” “The United States must remain the unquestioned leader in space exploration,” Senator Cruz told Isaacman, “and this imperative is why we must confirm your nomination as expeditiously as possible.”Isaacman, an aerospace engineer and space pilot who has commanded two sensational orbital flights by independent astronauts, told me during an earlier interview that his testing out new spacesuits and capsule innovations during those missions was aimed at opening space treks to the Moon and Mars by millions of spacefarers ahead.At the Senate, Isaacman paid tribute to NASA’s astounding scientists and inventors, and said he looked forward to “serving alongside the brilliant minds at the world’s most accomplished space agency.”Yet he added he had come to the Capitol bearing “a message of urgency.”“We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space.”If NASA lost this challenge to place its new-generation discoverers on the Moon first, he warned, “the consequences could shift the balance of power here on Earth.”Senator Ted Cruz hailed billionaire space pilot Jared Isaacman, nominated as NASA’s new head, as “a strong leader” and charged him with “landing Americans on the Moon before China." Shown here is the Moon rising over the Capitol (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)Getty ImagesHe pledged to the Senate, and to millions of space aficionados spread out across the U.S., that “America will return to the Moon before our great rival.”“Along the way, we will pioneer the next ‘giant leap’ capabilities to extend America’s reach even further into space,” he added, “we will set the stage for future missions to Mars and beyond.”“We will begin making the investments now,” Isaacman said, “for the inevitable spacefaring future that is just on the horizon.”There are also signs that Senator Cruz could quickly rally advocates of American space ascendancy across both houses of Congress to allocate special funding for a new spacecraft to rush Allied aeronauts to the southern tip of the Moon.When the White House proposed terminating the leading-edge Orion capsule and Space Launch System super-rocket after just one Moon touchdown, Cruz rushed through the passage of a new reconciliation act providing nearly $10 billion in additional funding for NASA, including more than $4 billion for flights of the SLS and Orion through the 2020s.Senator Cruz, widely hailed as the patron saint of NASA and of the U.S. as the ultimate space hyper-power, could follow up by speedily sending emergency funds for the thunderbolt development of a Moon lander.During his dialogue with Cruz at the Senate, Jared Isaacman promised that when he heads NASA, the agency “will never accept a gap in capabilities again … in our ability to send American astronauts to the Moon.” The widely popular Isaacman is expected to be quickly confirmed as NASA’s new Administrator by the full Senate, and to begin restoring the techno-optimism that radiated throughout the agency across the first Moon Race.Tim Cichan says his team inside Lockheed envisions the hyper-speed prototyping of a lunar module that echos the Apollo lander of a generation ago, with a descent vehicle that remains on the landing site after touching down, and an ascent craft that lofts the crew back into orbit after their days-long sojourn. NASA could deploy this compact craft across Artemis treks to the Moon until the “large fully reusable landers” being developed by SpaceX and by Blue Origin come online, he says. Lockheed’s smaller, simpler shuttle could be boosted by a single rocket, or a two-rocket launch, that would avoid the quagmire of having to refuel in orbit, Cichan says.“We could definitely avoid refueling,” he says. “The number of launches is really dependent on what launch vehicles we use - the bigger the better.” “We are designing the system to be very flexible and modular to be able to accommodate all different kinds of launch vehicles.” If NASA and Congress act with swiftness, American explorers could begin building the first human outpost on the Moon before the end of the decade.“You know we can go very fast,” Cichan says, while predicting NASA might repeat its first space race triumph with a new fast-tracked lander that wins Moon Race 2.0.