With the Florida primary over, the issue of lunar colonies, raised by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ridiculed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, will likely also recede into the background.
But before it does, it will be useful to examine a controversy that has divided space advocates since before the Constellation program was cancelled. The controversy is whether NASA should build a heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System, to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit or should the space agency use existing commercial rockets and orbiting fuel depots to accomplish the same task?
The Case for Fuel Depots
Supporters of fuel depots point to an internal NASA study that examined the use of various available or soon to be available launchers to deploy and fill a fuel depot in orbit. Once this is done, a space craft would be launched, would dock at the fuel depot, fill up its tanks, and then proceed on its way to the moon or an Earth approaching asteroid. The study suggests that tens of billions of dollars would be saved over the approach that builds a heavy lift vehicle. MSNBC suggests that a return to the moon plan using fuel depots would cost $40 billion and take eight years as opposed to $105 billion and 10 years under the Constellation/heavy lift approach.
The Case for Heavy Lift
The Houston Chronicle put the question of fuel depots vs. heavy lift to NASA's Director of Engineering, Dan Dumbacher. He suggests that the fuel depot approach would take longer and be more expensive than its proponents suppose. The experience with the International Space Station suggests that assembling things in Low Earth orbit takes a long time. Using many multiple launches for each deep space mission increases the chance of failure. He regards the internal study that says otherwise to be "flawed." In short, despite the short term development costs, having a heavy lift vehicle that can support a deep space mission with one or two launches will be less expensive and less prone to failure in the long run.
The Bottom Line
Neither of the major Republican candidates, Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, have directly addressed the heavy lift vs. fuel depot controversy during the Florida Primary. Gingrich has criticized the SLS in the past and his emphasis on commercial approaches to space exploration would seem to point to the fuel depot approach. On the other hand, Romney has a number of space advisers in his corner who have supported heavy lift, not the least of all former NASA administrator Mike Griffin.
Both Griffin and Scott Pace, another Romney adviser, published a piece in Space News that suggested that fuel depots will only have utility once extraterrestrial sources of fuel become available, say such derived from lunar ice. That suggests that whatever space mission a President Romney signs off on, it will be based, at least initially, on heavy lift launchers.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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