Starships and space policyby Jeff Foust
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| “I’m still known as the person who was the most disruptive transition team ever” at NASA, recalled Garver. “I’m not going to hold that record any more.” |
While there are only modest technical changes with Starship since that October flight, there have been far more dramatic changes in the environment in which it will operate. The election of Donald Trump could upend space policy and, given Elon Musk’s prominent role in both supporting Trump during the campaign and being by his side since the election, could give the SpaceX CEO powerful influence to reshape that policy.
The incoming Trump administration has, so far, offered few statements about its plans for NASA or Defense Department space programs in the two weeks since the election. That includes not announcing an official “agency review team” for NASA, the members of the transition team who come into the agency to learn about agency activities and, in some cases, find problems.
“The job of the teams coming in, first of all, is just to get a sense about where the agencies are,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and who served on the NASA transition team for incoming president George W. Bush. “Part of what you’re trying to so is figure out what are going to be some of the immediate landmines that are going to come up in the first six months. Political people hate surprises.”
An example of that he had firsthand experience with was the discovery, as part of the Bush transition, that the space station program was $4.8 billion over budget, which meant informing those working on the transition at the Office of Management and Budget. “So, at 11 o’clock at night I go over to the OMB team and say, ‘Hi, I'm Scott. I’m from the NASA team. Got a spare $4.8 bil? We’re a little short,’” he recalled during a panel discussion last week at the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington.
A similar landmine, he suggested, are reports of persistent air leaks in a Russian module of the ISS. At a meeting last week of the ISS Advisory Committee, Bob Cabana, the new chair of the committee, noted that Russian and American officials don’t disagree on the cause and severity of those leaks, with Americans more concerned than Russians. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the U.S. believes that it’s not safe but we can’t prove to the Russians’ satisfaction that that’s the case,” he concluded.
“I certainly believe that NASA is paying a lot of attention to it,” Pace said of those air leaks, “but if I was an incoming transition person, I would want to do my own forensics on that and understand very deeply what was going on because nothing will ratchet to the top of a list faster than anything involving human spaceflight safety.”
The incoming administration’s interest in NASA, though, won’t be limited to studying leaks in a Russian space station module. There is the belief, almost an expectation, among many in the space community that the incoming Trump administration might upend many NASA programs, particularly in human spaceflight, including those that date back to the first Trump administration.
“I’m still known as the person who was the most disruptive transition team ever” at NASA, recalled Lori Garver on the panel. She led the NASA transition team for the incoming Obama Administration, which clashed with officials like then-administrator Mike Griffin on aspects of the Constellation program. “I’m not going to hold that record any more.”
That disruption, she predicted, will come from Musk. “I think that the change that he is going to bring to this administration will be like nothing that we have seen before,” she said. “For those of you who like what has been happening, no judgement, but it’s probably going to change.”
| “The Moon has both strategic purposes, militarily, and economic development purposes that Mars doesn’t,” Autry said. |
That could mean changes to major programs of record. “It’s going to be less—and maybe this is wishful thinking on my part—contracts to members of Congress for jobs in their districts,” she said. “I think those guardrails are broken. We do not have these massive senators who have so much power because they’re chairing committees with large contracts in their districts.”
Pace agreed that Musk will play a major role in any potential reshaping of NASA. “People underestimate how mission-driven he is,” he said. “It’s his mission for Mars, humanity, and so forth, that really drives him and will push him really hard.”
“Then the dialogue is over, what actually works? What will make sense?” he said.
Musk, before the election, talked about launching five Starships to Mars during the next launch window in the fall of 2026. “If those all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in four years,” he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns, in September.
Trump, during the campaign, appeared to endorse that idea. “We will land an American astronaut on Mars. Thank you, Elon,” Trump said at an October 24 rally. “Get that spaceship going, Elon.”
Pace said he didn’t see a problem with Musk pursuing Starship launches to Mars. “If you want to put a couple Starships on the surface of Mars, I think that is eminently doable and would be inspiring and interesting,” he said. “I’m not so sure about putting people on those missions because I think a lot of other things would have to happen first.”
Some, though, are worried that this strategy might be done at the expense of the current Artemis lunar exploration campaign. Before the election, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator and the person likely to become acting administrator at the start of the new administration, warned against making major changes to that effort to return humans to the Moon, without mentioning any candidate or alternative approach.
“We need to stick with the plan that we have. That doesn’t mean we can’t perform better,” he said at the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium less than a week before the election. “But we need to keep this destination from a human spaceflight perspective.”
“If we lose that,” he warned, “I believe we will fall apart and we will wander, and other people in this world will pass us by.”
Greg Autry, who served on the first Trump administration’s NASA transition team, offered a similar note of caution. “If it was just to show that we could beat China, if it was another flags and footprints mission, then I’d be for that,” Autry, currently associate provost of space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida, said at the Beyond Earth Symposium. “But the Moon has both strategic purposes, militarily, and economic development purposes that Mars doesn’t.”
He spoke specifically about resources on the Moon, like water ice, that could be valuable to future space exploration but which are concentrated in polar craters. “Those are limited resources, and getting to them early is critical. So I honestly think we have to do both, and I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Artemis, though, “has got to be fixed,” he said, citing problems with “every single major component of the system” for getting humans back to the Moon. “So how do we simplify what became a fairly complex and Rube Goldbergian sort of architecture in some ways?”
That could mean an enhanced role for Starship. He suggested a “full Starship stack to the Moon” as one solution, which would do away with many other elements, like SLS and Orion, but may require enhancements to Starship. Another approach would be to mix and match other capabilities, like having Dragon send crews to Earth orbit to dock with a Blue Moon lunar lander that then goes to the Moon and back.
| “I think the area where he is going to have probably the biggest impact in the near term is personnel,” Pace said of Musk. “People are policy.” |
“I think that needs to be looked at very seriously, immediately, whenever the new team comes into place, and some decisions made swiftly to, A, get us to the Moon before the Chinese, who are targeting 2030 and appear to maybe be ahead of schedule, and B, make sure that we have the long-term ability to stay there,” he concluded.
During the panel, Garver asked if SLS and Orion would continue in the next administration. None of her fellow panelists, which included Autry, Pace, and others who worked in the Bush and Trump administrations, raised their hands. “Not as they are,” Pace said.
There was less agreement among the panel about how the Trump administration might affect other aspects of space policy, like the role of international cooperation. Garver said she thought the next administration would deemphasize it. ““It is by its nature slow,” she said, “which is the opposite of what these folks have in mind.”
Pace disagreed. “I think international engagement is going to be an important part of the Trump administration because it’s part of larger national interests,” he said. “There can be different styles to it, different emphases on it, but it’s absolutely going to be central.”
Then there is the question of who will lead NASA in the next administration. Pace said he expected Musk to play a role here as well. “I think the area where he is going to have probably the biggest impact in the near term is personnel. People are policy.”
He recommended that the next administrator be someone focused on implementing programs. “It’s really somebody in program and project management, system engineering and integration: very dull-sounding kinds of things but really, really crucial,” he said.
That person could end up leaning heavily on Starship to carry out what the administration wants to do in space. That makes the next Starship launch, while only an incremental step forward technically, a harbinger of a much greater leap in what the US might do differently in space exploration, and how.
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