Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “Of course I'm talking about a paper rocket, it's not built yet, we're talking about ideas, I don't have the rocket on me, that doesn't mean I'm wrong,” Senator Wallace responds.

  “Okay, but if you are comparing the SLS that might be built in 2030, it's unfair to compare it to the Eagle Heavy that I built in 2015.”

  “Look, Kingsley, you are always citing figures in payload to Low-Earth-Orbit, then you divide it by cost, and come up with a ridiculous price per pound to LEO as if that's the ultimate measure of a rocket. But let me ask you, what's the Payload to GTO, that's Geostationary-Transfer-Orbit, that's the maneuver that sends a payload out to where it can then burn to circularize at Geostationary Orbit, which is where we send a lot of satellites, and it also a good measure of how much payload a rocket can send to the Moon or deep space. So you've got 53 metric tonnes to LEO, what is it to GTO?”

  “The current Eagle Heavy has a payload of 11 metric tonnes to GTO,” Kingsley replies.

  “That figure, is less than the payload to GTO of the Delta IV Heavy, which has a payload to LEO of only 20 metric tonnes, but to GTO it's 12 metric tonnes. So it's crystal clear now that when talking about leaving Low-Earth-Orbit, the Eagle Heavy is a joke. The SLS, the 145 metric tonne version, has a payload to GTO of over 80 metric tonnes. That means the SLS is 8 times better than the Eagle Heavy. Yet you come out here and you say that the SLS has less than twice the payload, and neglect to mention the huge difference in payload to GTO, which is what we really care about. SLS isn't meant to go to LEO, it's meant to send payloads out to the Moon and Mars. So will you admit that you are being a weasel and that payload to LEO is a bit of a nonsense statistic?”

  “Look Senator,” K begins, “You are spouting off these statistics, I assume because you read them and now you think that you're a rocket scientist.”

  “I'm not claiming to be a rocket scientist, but it's not brain surgery to say that we want a heavy lift vehicle and to direct NASA to build it,” Senator Wallace replies.

  “Okay, but you have just demonstrated that you are either intentionally manipulative with facts or have very little understanding of even basic rocket science.”

  “What have I said that's either manipulative or stupid?” Senator Wallace demands.

  “That rant about the difference of payload to LEO versus payload to GTO. That right there is either ignorant or malicious.”

  “Why? Because you don't like having your rocket criticized?”

  “You made this comparison, you state like it's a fact that the Eagle Heavy is bad at going beyond low-Earth-orbit. It's a puny rocket with some fundamental flaw that keeps it from being good at going past LEO. That's basically what you just said, right?”

  “Well the payload to GTO figure speaks for itself.”

  “Okay, well Senator, Chairman of the Space Committee. Can you tell me, why is it that the Eagle Heavy has such a huge payload to LEO, but such a small payload to GTO comparatively? Why is it that we get more than 50 tonnes to LEO, but can only get 11 to GTO, while the Delta IV Heavy is 20 to LEO and 12 to GTO? Why is that? What's the difference between those two rockets?”

  “What do you want me to do, explain basic rocket science to you?” Senator Wallace asks.

  “Yes. I want you to explain to the assembled audience why it is the Eagle Heavy's payload to GTO is so wimpy. Why is that?”

  “Chairman, this witness is just being hostile now,” Senator Wallace turns to Walken.

  “Answer his question,” Senator Walken says.

  “I don't know, why does it?” Senator Wallace asks flippantly.

  “It's wimpy because the upper-stage of the Eagle Heavy is powered by kerosene, just like the lower stages,” Kingsley says. “Do you know why that matters?”

  “No, why, please lecture me,” Senator Wallace says sarcastically.

  “Hey, you're the one in charge of the Space Committee. Are you telling me you don't know what makes a good rocket fuel?”

  “Well why are you using kerosene if it's not good?” Senator Wallace asks. “This shows I'm dumb?!”

  “Kerosene is a high-thrust, low-impulse fuel. It's good for powering those first stages that need high thrust to lift-off. The first stage of the Saturn V ran on kerosene. Then after that, the second and third stages ran on. . . Senator? Can you tell me what fuel was used in the upper stages of the Saturn V?”

  “Sorry, I don't have rocket fuels memorized,” Senator Wallace replies.

  “The upper stages used liquid hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen has the highest specific impulse of any conventional rocket fuel. So when the upper stage of your rocket is a high-energy stage dedicated to burns beyond LEO, you get high performance. Right now, at SpacEx, we don't have a high-energy upper stage built yet. Our upper stage runs on kerosene for the time being, kerosene is good for low stages that need high thrust, but not for those upper stages that need high impulse.”

  “So you're using the wrong fuel and that makes me stupid?” Senator Wallace asks.

  “We're using the wrong fuel because we only had the money to develop one rocket engine at a time. So we developed the Arthur, which runs on kerosene. Our upper stages uses an Arthur, burning kerosene, that is just optimized to run in a vacuum, but it's not a high-energy upper stage. We use the same type of engine with the same type of fuel because it was cheaper to do it that way than it would have been to have two completely different engine programs while we were just getting started. Now that we've about perfected our Arthur engines, we are working on a new engine program. These engines run on methane. That's because methane has a higher specific impulse, not quite as high as hydrogen, but methane is much more easily storable as it doesn't need to be kept at just a few degrees above absolute zero. Do you know why that matters?”

  “No, but I'm sure you'll tell me,” Senator Wallace replies indignantly.

  “This is just downright anti-intellectual right here. You act like I'm an asshole that's mindlessly lecturing about something that doesn't matter. I'm not being overly pedantic. This matters.”

  “Don't call me anti-intellectual. I'm a United States Senator,” Wallace bellows.

  “You do realize that anti-intellectual doesn't mean I'm calling you stupid right?”

  “What's the difference?” Wallace barks.

  “I don't have the time or the crayons to explain that to you,” K replies.

  “I'm the chairman of the space committee, and you have the arrogance to come in here and try to lecture to me about space,” Wallace says. “So my response to you is because of your arrogance, not because I'm anti-intellectual.”

  “Okay, so you think you can play rocket scientist. You order NASA to build things, you wrote the law that required them to build SLS in a way that basically forced them to build a shuttle-derived rocket. You didn't just hand NASA a bunch of money and say, go develop a heavy lift rocket. What you should do is give NASA a bunch of money and say, 'go do rockets' and then let the real rocket scientists figure out how best to do what they want to do. Instead, you wrote the law that required them to build a heavy lift rocket and the law required a 70 tonne version in a short period of time that could then evolve to a 130 tonne version a decade or so later. That was specifically designed to hamstring NASA. If you said build a 130 tonne rocket in a decade, they could have done a clean sheet, they could have designed all kinds of things, innovated. But no, you told them to make the 70 tonne version early in the process which meant that they didn't have time to do a clean sheet and basically had to just make some changes to existing components because there just wasn't time to make something brand new. Oh and it just so happens that if you put SSMEs on an External Tank, get rid of the Orbiter, strap on some longer SRBs and you've got a 70 tonne launch vehicle. You and your colleagues in Congress basically designed this rocket, you wrote the law in a way that made them use the components that were already being made in the pork facilities you already have. So when you do things like that, when you try to play rocke
t scientist and tell NASA specifically what to do, yet you can't even answer basic questions about rocketry, it makes it crystal clear that you are in no way qualified and that you just like to play rocket scientist on TV. So since you think you can tell NASA how to design rockets, I'd like to know if you know what the specific impulse of hydrogen is.”

  “I don't memorize figures like that, that doesn't mean I can't make judgment calls about rockets.”

  “Can you tell me what specific impulse is?” K asks. Wallace stares back at him. “How about the unit, what are the units of specific impulse?” Wallace stares. “You got nothing? You can't tell me basic things you learn in rockets 101. There are probably a hundred thousand people in this country right now that can answer these questions. But the chairman of the Senate Space Committee, perhaps one of the three or four most influential people in space policy can't answer them.”

  “This isn't some pop quiz, we're talking about space policy, not space math problems,” Wallace replies. “I don't go around memorizing lists, is that what makes you think you can come in here and lecture the US Senate? That you memorized some names and numbers? Would you tell him to knock it off,” Wallace says to Walken.

  “Let's try to stay on topic Mr. Pretorius,” Walken says.

  “Okay, then. I'm developing a new upper stage as we speak, using methane, which will replace that inefficient kerosene upper stage we have been using. This new engine will be much more powerful so we can make this upper stage larger, and offset that weight with the uprated thrust of the first stage. With this new upper stage, we will boost the Eagle Heavy to somewhere around 65 to 70 metric tonnes to LEO. And then we'll have about 30 metric tonnes to GTO. We project to be using this upper stage in about two years. So rather than making comparisons between something that exists now and the SLS that will exist in 16 years, how about we compare the SLS rocket that you'll have in two years, to the Eagle Heavy I'll have in two years?

  SLS Mk.1 will be 80 metric tonnes to LEO, and 45 metric tonnes to GTO. The Eagle Heavy will be, let's be conservative and say 65 metric tonnes to LEO and 30 metric tonnes to GTO. So the Eagle Heavy has more than half the payload, for 120-150 million, while the SLS will cost somewhere between 500 million and two billion. We're looking at a fixed costs for the SLS at more than a billion a year to maintain all the infrastructure, so if you only launch the SLS once a year, it's at least a billion per launch. NASA doesn't have the money to launch it more than once a year, in fact, there are rumblings about them launching every-other-year. So that means, even being very generous on the unit cost of the SLS, we're still looking at something like a billion per launch. That means for generously a billion, you get 45 tonnes to GTO out of the block 1 SLS. Give me that billion and you get 180 metric tonnes to GTO. That's four times the capability for the same cost.

  For comparison sake, that Eagle Heavy will get about 23 tonnes to TLI, Trans-Lunar-Injection. The Saturn V was 45 tonnes to TLI. So two Eagle Heavys, at a cost of around 250 million dollars, can send 46 tonnes to TLI, and thus can launch an Apollo lunar-landing. But one SLS can't do it. You would have to launch two SLS block 1s and meet them up in Earth Orbit. And with the low projected flight rate of SLS, we're talking about two years worth of launches and you're doing both of them in the same week. And, you have to have a very short turn-around time because the upper stage uses liquid hydrogen that boils at 22 degrees above absolute zero. So you're looking at around two billion dollars to launch two SLS rockets and you have to do both launches very quickly before your propellant boils off. So that's 250 million dollars for me, two billion for you.

  So please, Senator, tell me again how it's silly to suggest that the SLS is too expensive.”

  “Mr. Pretorius, you're quick with stats, fast and loose with the truth, and you put together this mental wizardry that makes it sound like you have all the answers. But that's not how the world works,” Senator Wallace replies.

  “I don't know what any of that means,” K replies.

  “You put on a good show for the cameras and take your moment in the Sun, but it's just grandstanding.”

  “Did I say anything that was wrong? Don't just write off what I said as being grandstanding, as if that then makes it meaningless. You just tried to say the SLS is far superior to the Eagle Heavy, and when you make an actual comparison, a fair comparison, it's barely better but costs six times as much. So please, justify to me why the six times more expensive rocket is the one we should go with.”

  “Here we go again,” Wallace mutters.

  “Are numbers too hard for you? Do you need to phone a friend to come up with an answer?” K asks.

  “Here, Kingsley, is where your so-called expertise starts to show through for what it really is. Absurd. It's non-sense. It's clear you don't have any idea what you're talking about when you make comparisons like this. A space program isn't just some dollar numbers on a page. Man-rating NASA rockets costs money. It's easy to point to the cheap rocket you have and just assume it will not cost more once you start putting people on it and making it in larger numbers. It's just wild speculation.

  And, all of your extrapolations have one obvious flaw which you never address.”

  “What's that?” K asks.

  “You say three of your rockets can replace one SLS for cheaper, as if splitting up a 145 tonne payload into three parts is a breeze. Splitting a spacecraft into three smaller parts that have to all operate as independent spacecraft that then meet in orbit to assemble a larger craft drastically increases the complexity, increases costs of those constituent parts, and requires rapid launches of several rockets. So where's the numbers for that? If your three rockets are cheaper than one big SLS, you've still only addressed the rocket. But the truth is that your rockets simply cannot accomplish what SLS can. We need super-heavy-lift if we're going to go to the Moon or Mars.”

  “That's just not true Senator,” K replies.

  “Oh really? Calling me a liar again.”

  “What's the 145 tonne spacecraft you're going to launch on SLS. What is it? Where is it?”

  “We're talking about a flexible launcher that will be used for decades, I don't know every payload. But I do know that both the US and the Soviets came to the same conclusion in the space race, they needed 100+ tonne, super-heavy-lift rockets in order to get to the Moon. They had smaller launchers, they could have done orbital assembly.”

  “They started work on the Saturn V before we even had a man in space yet. So yeah, at the time they weren't too keen on rapid launches for rendezvous and orbital construction. They hadn't even been to orbit yet, let alone rendezvoused, let alone docked. That decision then has little bearing on our decisions now. And here's the real kicker. Go back and look at Apollo. The Saturn V launched a 120 tonne payload to LEO, right? That's your big massive launcher. But the Apollo spacecraft wasn't one big 120 tonne massive thing that couldn't be split into smaller components. In fact, it was split into three components. There was the CSM at 30 tonnes, the Lunar Module at 14 tonnes, and the Earth Departure Stage, the S-IVB was 75 tonnes in orbit. All three were independently operable spacecraft anyway, even when we had a monolithic launcher.”

  “None of this changes the fact that NASA wants the SLS, not your rocket.”

  “They are required by law to build it. That doesn't mean they want it. In fact, the NASA director came out and said that if Russia screws with us on the Soyuz, we should cancel SLS and invest that money in commercial crew. You think the NASA director would say cancel the SLS if he thought it was a great idea?”

  “The private space industry is not comparable to NASA,” Senator Wallace says. “A private space company, just this morning killed two people. That's the kind of reckless behavior and wishful thinking you find in the private space industry. At NASA, they don't think like that, and they spend more money to be safer.”

  “All due respect to NASA, but they've killed more astronauts than any other body in the world. Seventeen astronauts have been ki
lled while in their NASA spacecraft. The Russians have only killed four. And every private space company put together has killed a total of two. SpacEx hasn't killed anyone. So I don't know how you think NASA is somehow the beacon of safety.”

  “Isn't it true, K, that you have personally been involved in an airplane crash, and a fatal car crash in a car that you personally designed?”

  “That's Mr. Pretorius to you,” K says with gritted teeth.

  “Isn't it true, Mr. Pretorius, that one of SpacEx's astronauts was killed in a car you personally designed.”

  “People die in car accidents all the time,” Kingsley replies.

  “That's true, but this is a pattern of irresponsibility. You went against NASA orders and docked a spaceship to the ISS. You crashed your personal plane. There was that Gwenyth Paltrow incident with roofies. And I've heard that you live with two women, that you're polygamous. This all paints a picture, doesn't it? If we're going to spend billions on a space program, should we send that money to the agency that sent men to the Moon, or to just some foreigner with two wives, a history of drug use and irresponsibility?”

  “First of all, it was ecstasy, not roofies,” K says. “That might not make a difference to you, Senator, but it does to me. And secondly, I'm not polygamous, I'm not married to any woman, so I don't know how you get plural marriage from that.”

  “Aren't you launching a Russian gangster to your space station today?” Senator Wallace asks.

  “I'm launching a Russian citizen, a paying customer, up to my space station, yes. What's your point?”

  “Well, if you're willing to associate yourself with people of that kind...”

  “Senator, if I wasn't willing to associate with people like that, I wouldn't be appearing before the Senate, would I?” K asks.

  “Isn't it true that when you set out to start SpacEx, you made a rule that you would only hire astronauts that were bachelors, because you were afraid that you would put mothers and fathers in danger?” Wallace asks.