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takyon writes:

Here's why NASA's audacious return to the Moon just might work

Speaking in front of a high-fidelity model of the Apollo program's Lunar Module spacecraft, Vice President Mike Pence charged NASA with accelerating its Moon plans last week. Instead of 2028, Pence wanted boots on the ground four years earlier, before the end of 2024. This marked the rarest of all moments in spaceflight—a schedule moving left instead of to the right.

Understandably, the aerospace community greeted the announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Many rocket builders, spaceship designers, flight controllers, and space buffs have seen this movie before. Both in 1989 and 2004, Republican administrations have announced ambitious Moon-then-Mars deep space plans only to see them die for lack of funding and White House backing.

And yet, this new proposal holds some promise. Pence, as well as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have adopted a clear goal for the agency and promised enduring political support. Moreover, they have said the "end" matters more than the "means." This suggests that whatever rockets and spacecraft NASA uses to reach the Moon, the plan should be based on the best-available, most cost-effective technology. In short, they want to foster a healthy, open competition in the US aerospace industry to help NASA and America reach its goals.

[...] Pence directed NASA to land humans at the lunar south pole by 2024. Most likely, this would be a two- or four-person crew that would include the first woman to visit the Moon. Landing near the poles is significant because the Apollo missions half a century ago stayed relatively close to the Moon's equator, and NASA would like to understand whether water ice resources truly exist in abundance near the poles in shadowed craters.

[...] It is politically expedient to keep the SLS rocket, however, because it is based at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Bridenstine understands that there is no way he is getting NASA to the Moon by 2024 over the opposition of the Alabama delegation both in the House and Senate, which remains dead set against side-lining the rocket for cheaper commercial options.

So the administrator appears to be making the one play available to him: giving the SLS rocket a chance to succeed while also putting the program on notice. Bridenstine has told senior NASA engineers to take needed steps to give the rocket its best chance to launch in 2020, even to the point of waiving a traditional but time-consuming test firing of the core stage at a Mississippi center. He has also told the rocket's primary contractor, Boeing, that this is probably their last chance to execute on a contract that has cost NASA billions of dollars. In a year or two, if SLS continues to slip, Bridenstine will be able to say he tried.

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