NASA’s Lunar Space Station Is a Great/Terrible Idea

The average person doesn't care much about a probe landing on a comet, even if it is extremely impressive technologically. If you can show people walking on a celestial body, the average person can put that into perspective.

So why is NASA wasting billions to make a rocket, something we've known how to do reliability for more than 50 years? The reason is simple - politics. NASA is a political agency. They suffer from the same short-sighted, narrow focus thinking that a lot of other areas in policy live with. This is what hamstrings NASA the most, the constant change in directive, especially with regards to human spaceflight.

There are commercial alternatives that can already provide heavy lift capability, or at the very least are well positioned to take $1-3B and get one with even heavier capabilities flying. NASA is far too risk adverse these days to be building a rocket or a crew vehicle. They figured this out for commercial crew, why can't they figure it out for other architectures? Imagine NASA being able to cut the $2.5B/year line item that SLS has ballooned to and redirect that to other human spaceflight goals. Leaving commercial companies to build does not mean NASA is entirely removed from the process, for example ULA/SpaceX have been heavily reliant on knowledge transfer and oversight from NASA on their path towards commercial crew.

Honestly, having just graduated from a top aerospace/electrical engineering school and having experience in the industry myself, this is why you see the top talent going to places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a whole host of other commercial companies. These companies have a clear vision that NASA lacks. The NASA centers recent graduates gravitate towards are Caltech/JPL and APL/Goddard because they operate (almost) entirely independently from the rest of bureaucratic monster with serious research and a get-it-done attitude. A lot of the work at other facilities is farmed out to commercial companies, leaving a lot of NASA people in oversight/paperwork heavy jobs. This is not a blanket statement, but there is certainly a lot of "one technician doing the work and 5 engineers watching him" going on.

So if you follow the idea that NASA belongs at the forefront of research, what type of work do they do? Well, they are research heavy and build only the most advanced tech as a result. They research Mars and build rovers/architecture to further that research and get humans there. They conduct research on the ISS to further medicine for people back on Earth and learn about long term "0g" exposure. They research deepspace travel and build lunar gateways and architecture to support that. They build drones to go to Titan, build probes to fly by outer planets, etc. And then, they pay a commercial company to fly it for them (just because NASA did the bulk of the research that enables current rockets to be so successful does NOT mean they have to continue being the one making the rocket. Yes SLS has Boeing as a primary contractor, but the point is it's branded as a NASA rocket).

I've got two friends there, a civil servant and a contractor, and I've heard no such thing. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but I'm curious whether there's any data to back this up. You'd have to be careful looking at that data, too: a lot of people are retiring from NASA simply because they're old.

Nothing that's happened to NASA lately is a new phenomenon.

I think that tells us two things:

1) We can still accomplish great things even from lowly motivations, and

2) We shouldn't necessarily take those lowly motivations as proof of a craven administration.