If the market grows large enough, a dedicated lunar-to-LEO tanker industry could evolve
Trade. It enables, disseminates, and helps pay for new technologies and skills. It encourages sciences, the arts, and communications across oceans and cultures. It is a requirement for the evolution and supply of settlements and cities. Like technology and physical expansion, trade is a defining characteristic of humanity. It is impossible to overstate its importance in human history and development.
So, how do we get trade, and all of its ancillary benefits, started on the new frontier of space? After finding things to trade – like lunar or Martian scientific knowledge or lunar water – trade is most likely encouraged by making both the upfront and ongoing costs of space transportation and operations as low as possible. That requires the most efficient possible use of whatever transportation is available. One way to increase efficiency is to employ a concept the trucking industry calls‚“backhaul.”
The administration of Donald Trump challenged NASA to aggressively return astronauts to Earth’s moon, and to prepare for going on to Mars. President Joe Biden’s administration appears to support continuation of that vision. A young administration confronted with a Congress precisely balanced between bitterly fighting political parties is unlikely to want to spend its limited political capital squabbling over space policy. That encourages continuity.
There also seems to be a new sense of reality at NASA. While senators appear to have headed off any attempt to cancel NASA’s vastly late and over-budget Saturn 5-class Space Launch System and freeing the resources it consumes for more useful purposes, NASA is doing what it can to minimize the SLS’s lost opportunity costs. Payloads that Congress baselined for the SLS have been moved to cheaper commercial rockets. NASA picked SpaceX’s largely self-funded, Starship-based lander for the Human Landing System. Boeing has been strongly urged to improve their dismal performance managing SLS — though there is little sign of that actually happening. Nonetheless, it is becoming possible to believe that a “lunar gateway” station, and maybe even early visits to the lunar surface, could actually occur – if not by 2024, at least within the decade of the 2020s.
In an early, lunar transportation architecture dependent on the expendable SLS, the astronaut capsule alone will return to Earth — usually with a small amount of spare volume and mass. Later when reusable spacecraft ply between Earth and her moon, and supplies are transported in one direction, empty or partially filled vehicles will return to be used again. Since the empty vehicles produce no value beyond returning for reuse, anything that allows space on them to be used or sold is a net gain for the transportation provider. In the…
Read More: Op-ed | Can we backhaul our way to space?