January 8, 2020 • 19 mins
George Noory and space historian Robert Zimmerman discuss the new military Space Force, whether private space companies will come up with new developments before the government, and when humans will return to the Moon.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Norry
with you. Robert Zimmerman joining US Award winning science journalist historian.
He has written a number of books and numerous articles
and science engineering, the history of space, exploration and technology.
Some include Genesis, The Universe in a Mirror, Leaving Earth,
(00:22):
The Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space. His website is
Behind the Black dot com, and of course he also
reports on space and science news at his website Beyond
Behind the Black dot Com. Robert, welcome back, my friend.
Have you band George. It's always a pleasure to be here.
You know, it's been too long. It has been a
(00:43):
while since since we talked. They're talking more about the
Space Force. Congress's past laws, the Senate's past laws. We're
gonna get funding for What do you think of that?
You know, it's about the Space Force. That was Everyone
makes a big deal about how, oh my god, Trump
wants to have people in uniform with guns in space,
(01:04):
firing lasers and phases. The real reason he proposed that
was to get the military space bureaucracy reorganized. The military
has been trying to get this to happen for about
ten years. It's spread over, it was spread over many
different agencies. It did not have a voice in the
(01:26):
Washington bureaucracy. The Air Force ran it mostly and they
have their own interests that have a separate from space.
And so there's been an effort in the Pentagon to
get it reorganized, and they couldn't get it off the ground.
And Trump, being very clever about these things, announced We're
going to have a space force, and of course that
(01:47):
gets a lot of press discussion, and the result is
that they got they got the thing off the ground.
And so what's really happened here is that bureaucracy has
now been reorganized. Now I don't know if long run
this is going to work, because Washington bureaucracies tend to
grow and not save you any money and don't necessarily
make things more efficient. But the concept, the idea was
(02:10):
to make things more efficient and to give give that
the needs of the nation in terms of military space
a focus. And so we will see if that transpires
over the next few years. But at least it was
where I see it coming, and I think I think
the concept was a good one. We'll see you once
again how it plays out. Well, if we don't do
(02:32):
it another nation, Well Robert, well, yeah, you know what.
The fact is that the Chinese, who are an undeniable
threat to the United States, trying very hard to become
the next superpower. They want to literally replace the Soviet
(02:54):
Union in the world competition for power, and they are
part of the way they're doing that is to have
a very aggressive and well planned space program. And it
is a military program. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not
(03:15):
paying attention. They their military runs the entire operation, and
that's what their goals are. Anything they do in space
is specifically even if it's a civilian effort, a man
civilian effort, it's a scientific probe to the far side
(03:35):
of the moon, a rover. They have. All the technology
that they develop there is fed right back into their
military industrial complex, and so they are something to pay
attention to. They in a sense, already have their space force.
One of the things a lot of Americans don't know
(03:55):
about China to talk about this is that they have
been using their space industry as a training program for
their political leadership. So they're provincial governors. At Semifou state governors,
they're not elected, they are appointed. It's a it's a
it's this is very confusion in concept. They have a
(04:17):
management arrangement how they run their country as they have
the thousands of years. In the past, they used to
have this test where you had to take a literature
test in Chinese and anyone could take it, no matter
how poor you were, and if you succeeded in passing,
you would in line in the track to become a major, important,
powerful bureaucrat or manager or even leader within the Chinese government.
(04:42):
Thousands of years. Well, it didn't really work. It got corrupted.
You know, passing a test on literature doesn't necessarily make
you a good manager politically, especially when you start to
have to compete against technological countries from the west, and
they lapsed in the nineteenth century. They couldn't compete, and
so they now instead use their space program as that test.
(05:06):
And of their provincial governors, about half came out of
the space management, the management of their space program, and
they so they're governors that ruin the rule. Their provinces
came out of their space program. Would be like in
the United States. You want to become a governor of
New York State or California, you've got to be a
(05:27):
successful manager at NASA and have successfully run a program there. Now,
I don't necessarily agree with that approach, but what it
means twofold in China is they have found a way
to develop an effective management system in their government in
the modern technological world. That's one, and that makes them
(05:51):
a definitive threat, or at least competitive with US. And
the second thing is it means that their space program
is going to be treated probably by their government because
so many people came out of it, and you don't
go into a space program without a little bit of
get space cadet in you. And so there's twofold what
(06:12):
to think about. And those same people are going to
see are going to favor keep using this space program
as a way to keep feeding good people into their
governmental management structure. And so that means they are going
to be a space force. And I'm not using it
in terms of the Trump As, but they're going to
be a force in space that will have to be
(06:32):
contended with for probably a very long time. What do
you think of the privatization of space? I mean, we've
got all these companies popping up already, you know, launching,
and what's your take on that. Well, let's use little history.
I'm a historian, so let's look at history over the
last half century. When in the and this is what genesis,
(06:54):
my book Genesis, Story of Palaway basically talked about how
we won the space race in the sixties, but it
taught us all the wrong lessons. We won that space
race to prove that freedom, private enterprise, capitalism, and competition
are the way to make a great society and to
achieve great things. But to do to win a space race,
(07:16):
we built it on a space program, a Soviet model,
and the lesson the nation took from that is, let's
have more space programs, let's have big government, let's do
let's become the Soviet Union. Literally, that's what became. And
so the last fifty years we have not done very
much in space. We really didn't accomplish very much. Government
doesn't achieve these things very well. They're not a capable
(07:38):
of it. And what's most interesting is how quickly when
you allow private enterprise to be your team here to
make things work, you suddenly get incredible innovation and you
disrupt the industry and you suddenly get things happening that
for years we're not happening. And then example, I always
(08:01):
talk about this, and I've talked about this on your
show before, but it bears repeating. Is that for fifty years,
and I'm been a historian on this subject for decades,
and I've been following space since I was a teenager
in the sixties, four decades. Managers and engineers at all
the major rocket companies repeatedly told said, and they told
(08:21):
me personally repeatedly as a journalist, that it is impossible
to reuse any part of your rocket. You can't learn
landed vertically. You can't. Even if you could, you'd waste
so much fuel, you couldn't get your payload into orbit.
And even if you have successfully landed and gotten your
payload into orbit, the first stage is just not going
(08:43):
to be in a usable state to launch again. Wrong?
How wrong could they be? Right? They couldn't be farther wrong?
And the reason it happened is that SpaceX is being
run by a private individual who had dreams of his
own and decided to take risks and innovate and not
accept that accepted wisdom and because he thaw a way
(09:05):
to make a lot of money, he saw that if
he could reduce the cost of launch, he would pull
in a lot of business that others weren't trying to get.
And the fact is that SpaceX and the Elon Musk
in the last decade has literally stolen the entire market
share of rocket launches that Russia had about a third
(09:25):
of what Europad and I would say about twenty percent
of what the other American launch companies had. Isn't that dramatic?
And the result is he's making a very lot of money.
Money that he see that he of course he keeps
himself he should, but most of what he pumps back
into the company to do more innovation, to keep himself
(09:50):
ahead of the game. Give an example, this week they
launched they made their forced launch for the year, and
when they did, they launched sixteen new satellites in they
have stall linked constellation. This is SpaceX trying to do
a constellation to provide worldwide Internet capabilities. And now they've
already put up one hundred and eighty satellites of that
(10:11):
and within less than a year, they because they've leapfrogged
every other satellite communications constellation company in the world, and
they now have the biggest constellation. It's only begun. They're
going to put a lot more satellites up before the
years over. But their goal is to provide internet services
for the world at of a cheap cost, and they're
(10:33):
using the Salcon nine rocket to launch it. And all right,
so SpaceX has the satellites and they now have the rocket.
That rocket um the first stage of the rockets that
they launched. This was the fourth time they'd used it.
You realize how they have another customer, they reduced the cost,
(10:54):
but they don't have to bring the cost down a
lot because no one else can match them. So they
make a lot of profit when they've got other customers,
but when it's their own payload going into orbit, that's
a lot of money they're saving, which means when they
get their constellation launched, they'll be able to provide that
worldwide Internet service almost certainly at a price much less
(11:16):
than any other satellite constellation. And there are others trying
to do the same thing. And so you see how
this builds upon itself, and so competition and private enterprise
creates innovation and reduces the cost for everybody. And so
this is what you know. We're back in the Cold War.
You've got a Chinese space program, centralized run by the government,
(11:37):
competing now with the American concept of competition, freedom and
private enterprise. I'll put my money on the private enterprise
thing any day of the week. But where it's the
same Cold War as before, and we have to fight it,
we have to be aware of it. What would you say, Robert,
has been over the last few years the most dramatic
(12:00):
thing you've seen for space? Well, it depends on whether
you're talking about the science and the actual exploration going on,
or if you're talking about commercial space and the ability
to get into space better. I mean, to me, probably
the most exciting in terms of rocketry and getting into space,
(12:23):
the most exciting moment in the last oh I would
say forty years since the landing on the Moon. Well,
maybe there's other things in between, but one of the
most earth shattering exciting moments was when SpaceX successfully landed
its first stage for the very first time. Because once
(12:45):
again I had been hearing that this was impossible for decades.
I you know, and what can I say, I'm not
an engineer. I got accept on face value what people
were telling me, but they said they were going to
do it. And when I was at the speech where
land Musk announced he was going to try to do this,
and I said, gee, those teams told me that wasn't
going to work. He made it work. And then they
proceeded to reuse the first stages and then they proceeded
(13:07):
to land it on a barge out in the ocean,
and they said, oh my gosh, and this is earth
shattering because it changes how you look at rockets. We're
no longer looking And this gets back to the first
stage of the Falcon nine launched this week. They had
used that stage four times. It is no longer a
rocket that's expendable. It's a ship. It's a ship that's
(13:30):
being reused like an airplane now, if not yet at
the stage of airplanes where they can fly, you know,
millions of miles and last for forty years and endless flights,
but it's it's getting very close. In fact, SpaceX has
two different first stages right now that they've launched four
times and they're going to use again. So that's eight
(13:51):
launches where they didn't have to build a new first
stage with new engines. They could reuse those engines once again,
the savings and cost this gigantic. Another way to look
at it is they have developed technology that makes it
possible to reuse the first stage entirely. They are trying
to develop a technology to reuse the fairings that protect
(14:13):
the payloads during launch, and they've had some success with that.
Those two combined is about seventy percent of their rocket.
What's the remaining thirty percent, Well, that's the upper stage
that gets into orbit. They right now have to discard
that first stage. That second stage. Well, you know, when
you look at it, the Space Shuttle essentially recovered its
(14:34):
upper stage. That was the Shuttle itself, So the technology
exists to recover for a second stage as well. And
so what is SpaceX doing. They are developing Starship and
super Heavy, which is their next generation rocket. The first
stage the Super Heavy is much bigger than the Falcon
nine first stage, but it's essentially using the same technology
(14:55):
that they have and they know how to do so
they'll be able to make that first stage heavy work.
I have no doubt about it, because they have the
knowledge and that the technology. In the fact, they've already
done a launch a test flight with the engines for
that to show that they can control it and bring
it back vertically and landed. The second stage of Starship
(15:17):
super Heavy. Starship is a reusable ship, basically taking advantage
of the knowledge that we have from the Space Shuttle
and applying their engines to it and their ability to
land vertically, and they're going to be able to have
a reusable second stage, and the two combined will cost
per launch if Elon Musk's predictions are right, and he's
(15:40):
been pretty good. If his predictions are right, the launch
cost will be comparable to what you pay now for
like a Falcon heavy launch, about one hundred million dollars reusable,
and it will be putting into orbit equivalent to a
Satin five rocket one hundred plus tons. When do we
go back to the Moon or Mars with astronauts, Well,
(16:02):
you see, now that's the interesting question. This is what
his company is developing. This ties right into what I'm
just saying now, George. So his company is developing this
and they're hoping to start to launch this within the
next three to five years. Meanwhile, for the last twenty years,
NASA has been trying to develop its version of a
new Saturn five rocket, called the Space Launch System. I've
(16:26):
written about this. They have spent they're going to send up,
spending close to sixty billion dollars to develop it. It
maybe could launch once every year. Each launch is going
to cost, depending on how you want to amatize the
development costs, anywhere from two to fourteen billion dollars. They've
(16:47):
spent twenty years developing if they're still three years away
from launching. This is the rocket that the Trump administration
is depending on to get back to the Moon by
twenty twenty four during his can term assume any wins,
It is to my mind, highly unlikely that will happen.
(17:09):
If it does happen, it doesn't really get us very
much because the cost of the rocket and the cumberson
nature which it's designed makes it very difficult to really
have a long term a space effort. You all you'll
do is what we did in the sixth teas. You'll
do a stunt launch or two and that'll be it.
So maybe they'll get back to the Moon with that,
(17:31):
with people on a mission or by twenty twenty four thereabouts,
But that's not getting us to the moon. I think
what needs to happen to get to the Moon is
exactly what SpaceX is doing. Private enterprise competing to come
up with good ideas, and I think that SpaceX will
probably be able to achieve that based on their track record.
(17:56):
You know, things cannot go wrong, but based on their
track record, I think they could probably do it almost
as fast, and they'll be doing it with something that
will cost pennies. In comparison, when was the last manned
Moon launch? That was in the nineteen seventy three So
if we had continued, if we had continued and not
(18:17):
stop then in seventy three, what would the Moon look
like now? Would we have bases there and everything else?
You know, it's a difficult question to answer because the
assumption has to be that Americans would have been continued too,
willing to spend the money with the Saturn five rocket
to launch many missions. And even though one of von
(18:37):
Brun designed that rockets as a vehicle four colonizing the
entire Solar System, and it had the capability because it
could put one hundred tons into orbit, much like SLS
is trying to do, and much like Starship is trying
to do, it costs a lot. It costs too much,
and since Americans have always looked with skepticism on the
(18:59):
idea of using government coerced tax dollars, the political will
was just not there. Listen to more Coast to Coast
AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to
Coast to Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Norry
with you. Robert Zimmerman joining US Award winning science journalist historian.
He has written a number of books and numerous articles
and science engineering, the history of space, exploration and technology.
Some include Genesis, The Universe in a Mirror, Leaving Earth,
(00:22):
The Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space. His website is
Behind the Black dot com, and of course he also
reports on space and science news at his website Beyond
Behind the Black dot Com. Robert, welcome back, my friend.
Have you band George. It's always a pleasure to be here.
You know, it's been too long. It has been a
(00:43):
while since since we talked. They're talking more about the
Space Force. Congress's past laws, the Senate's past laws. We're
gonna get funding for What do you think of that?
You know, it's about the Space Force. That was Everyone
makes a big deal about how, oh my god, Trump
wants to have people in uniform with guns in space,
(01:04):
firing lasers and phases. The real reason he proposed that
was to get the military space bureaucracy reorganized. The military
has been trying to get this to happen for about
ten years. It's spread over, it was spread over many
different agencies. It did not have a voice in the
(01:26):
Washington bureaucracy. The Air Force ran it mostly and they
have their own interests that have a separate from space.
And so there's been an effort in the Pentagon to
get it reorganized, and they couldn't get it off the ground.
And Trump, being very clever about these things, announced We're
going to have a space force, and of course that
(01:47):
gets a lot of press discussion, and the result is
that they got they got the thing off the ground.
And so what's really happened here is that bureaucracy has
now been reorganized. Now I don't know if long run
this is going to work, because Washington bureaucracies tend to
grow and not save you any money and don't necessarily
make things more efficient. But the concept, the idea was
(02:10):
to make things more efficient and to give give that
the needs of the nation in terms of military space
a focus. And so we will see if that transpires
over the next few years. But at least it was
where I see it coming, and I think I think
the concept was a good one. We'll see you once
again how it plays out. Well, if we don't do
(02:32):
it another nation, Well Robert, well, yeah, you know what.
The fact is that the Chinese, who are an undeniable
threat to the United States, trying very hard to become
the next superpower. They want to literally replace the Soviet
(02:54):
Union in the world competition for power, and they are
part of the way they're doing that is to have
a very aggressive and well planned space program. And it
is a military program. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not
(03:15):
paying attention. They their military runs the entire operation, and
that's what their goals are. Anything they do in space
is specifically even if it's a civilian effort, a man
civilian effort, it's a scientific probe to the far side
(03:35):
of the moon, a rover. They have. All the technology
that they develop there is fed right back into their
military industrial complex, and so they are something to pay
attention to. They in a sense, already have their space force.
One of the things a lot of Americans don't know
(03:55):
about China to talk about this is that they have
been using their space industry as a training program for
their political leadership. So they're provincial governors. At Semifou state governors,
they're not elected, they are appointed. It's a it's a
it's this is very confusion in concept. They have a
(04:17):
management arrangement how they run their country as they have
the thousands of years. In the past, they used to
have this test where you had to take a literature
test in Chinese and anyone could take it, no matter
how poor you were, and if you succeeded in passing,
you would in line in the track to become a major, important,
powerful bureaucrat or manager or even leader within the Chinese government.
(04:42):
Thousands of years. Well, it didn't really work. It got corrupted.
You know, passing a test on literature doesn't necessarily make
you a good manager politically, especially when you start to
have to compete against technological countries from the west, and
they lapsed in the nineteenth century. They couldn't compete, and
so they now instead use their space program as that test.
(05:06):
And of their provincial governors, about half came out of
the space management, the management of their space program, and
they so they're governors that ruin the rule. Their provinces
came out of their space program. Would be like in
the United States. You want to become a governor of
New York State or California, you've got to be a
(05:27):
successful manager at NASA and have successfully run a program there. Now,
I don't necessarily agree with that approach, but what it
means twofold in China is they have found a way
to develop an effective management system in their government in
the modern technological world. That's one, and that makes them
(05:51):
a definitive threat, or at least competitive with US. And
the second thing is it means that their space program
is going to be treated probably by their government because
so many people came out of it, and you don't
go into a space program without a little bit of
get space cadet in you. And so there's twofold what
(06:12):
to think about. And those same people are going to
see are going to favor keep using this space program
as a way to keep feeding good people into their
governmental management structure. And so that means they are going
to be a space force. And I'm not using it
in terms of the Trump As, but they're going to
be a force in space that will have to be
(06:32):
contended with for probably a very long time. What do
you think of the privatization of space? I mean, we've
got all these companies popping up already, you know, launching,
and what's your take on that. Well, let's use little history.
I'm a historian, so let's look at history over the
last half century. When in the and this is what genesis,
(06:54):
my book Genesis, Story of Palaway basically talked about how
we won the space race in the sixties, but it
taught us all the wrong lessons. We won that space
race to prove that freedom, private enterprise, capitalism, and competition
are the way to make a great society and to
achieve great things. But to do to win a space race,
(07:16):
we built it on a space program, a Soviet model,
and the lesson the nation took from that is, let's
have more space programs, let's have big government, let's do
let's become the Soviet Union. Literally, that's what became. And
so the last fifty years we have not done very
much in space. We really didn't accomplish very much. Government
doesn't achieve these things very well. They're not a capable
(07:38):
of it. And what's most interesting is how quickly when
you allow private enterprise to be your team here to
make things work, you suddenly get incredible innovation and you
disrupt the industry and you suddenly get things happening that
for years we're not happening. And then example, I always
(08:01):
talk about this, and I've talked about this on your
show before, but it bears repeating. Is that for fifty years,
and I'm been a historian on this subject for decades,
and I've been following space since I was a teenager
in the sixties, four decades. Managers and engineers at all
the major rocket companies repeatedly told said, and they told
(08:21):
me personally repeatedly as a journalist, that it is impossible
to reuse any part of your rocket. You can't learn
landed vertically. You can't. Even if you could, you'd waste
so much fuel, you couldn't get your payload into orbit.
And even if you have successfully landed and gotten your
payload into orbit, the first stage is just not going
(08:43):
to be in a usable state to launch again. Wrong?
How wrong could they be? Right? They couldn't be farther wrong?
And the reason it happened is that SpaceX is being
run by a private individual who had dreams of his
own and decided to take risks and innovate and not
accept that accepted wisdom and because he thaw a way
(09:05):
to make a lot of money, he saw that if
he could reduce the cost of launch, he would pull
in a lot of business that others weren't trying to get.
And the fact is that SpaceX and the Elon Musk
in the last decade has literally stolen the entire market
share of rocket launches that Russia had about a third
(09:25):
of what Europad and I would say about twenty percent
of what the other American launch companies had. Isn't that dramatic?
And the result is he's making a very lot of money.
Money that he see that he of course he keeps
himself he should, but most of what he pumps back
into the company to do more innovation, to keep himself
(09:50):
ahead of the game. Give an example, this week they
launched they made their forced launch for the year, and
when they did, they launched sixteen new satellites in they
have stall linked constellation. This is SpaceX trying to do
a constellation to provide worldwide Internet capabilities. And now they've
already put up one hundred and eighty satellites of that
(10:11):
and within less than a year, they because they've leapfrogged
every other satellite communications constellation company in the world, and
they now have the biggest constellation. It's only begun. They're
going to put a lot more satellites up before the
years over. But their goal is to provide internet services
for the world at of a cheap cost, and they're
(10:33):
using the Salcon nine rocket to launch it. And all right,
so SpaceX has the satellites and they now have the rocket.
That rocket um the first stage of the rockets that
they launched. This was the fourth time they'd used it.
You realize how they have another customer, they reduced the cost,
(10:54):
but they don't have to bring the cost down a
lot because no one else can match them. So they
make a lot of profit when they've got other customers,
but when it's their own payload going into orbit, that's
a lot of money they're saving, which means when they
get their constellation launched, they'll be able to provide that
worldwide Internet service almost certainly at a price much less
(11:16):
than any other satellite constellation. And there are others trying
to do the same thing. And so you see how
this builds upon itself, and so competition and private enterprise
creates innovation and reduces the cost for everybody. And so
this is what you know. We're back in the Cold War.
You've got a Chinese space program, centralized run by the government,
(11:37):
competing now with the American concept of competition, freedom and
private enterprise. I'll put my money on the private enterprise
thing any day of the week. But where it's the
same Cold War as before, and we have to fight it,
we have to be aware of it. What would you say, Robert,
has been over the last few years the most dramatic
(12:00):
thing you've seen for space? Well, it depends on whether
you're talking about the science and the actual exploration going on,
or if you're talking about commercial space and the ability
to get into space better. I mean, to me, probably
the most exciting in terms of rocketry and getting into space,
(12:23):
the most exciting moment in the last oh I would
say forty years since the landing on the Moon. Well,
maybe there's other things in between, but one of the
most earth shattering exciting moments was when SpaceX successfully landed
its first stage for the very first time. Because once
(12:45):
again I had been hearing that this was impossible for decades.
I you know, and what can I say, I'm not
an engineer. I got accept on face value what people
were telling me, but they said they were going to
do it. And when I was at the speech where
land Musk announced he was going to try to do this,
and I said, gee, those teams told me that wasn't
going to work. He made it work. And then they
proceeded to reuse the first stages and then they proceeded
(13:07):
to land it on a barge out in the ocean,
and they said, oh my gosh, and this is earth
shattering because it changes how you look at rockets. We're
no longer looking And this gets back to the first
stage of the Falcon nine launched this week. They had
used that stage four times. It is no longer a
rocket that's expendable. It's a ship. It's a ship that's
(13:30):
being reused like an airplane now, if not yet at
the stage of airplanes where they can fly, you know,
millions of miles and last for forty years and endless flights,
but it's it's getting very close. In fact, SpaceX has
two different first stages right now that they've launched four
times and they're going to use again. So that's eight
(13:51):
launches where they didn't have to build a new first
stage with new engines. They could reuse those engines once again,
the savings and cost this gigantic. Another way to look
at it is they have developed technology that makes it
possible to reuse the first stage entirely. They are trying
to develop a technology to reuse the fairings that protect
(14:13):
the payloads during launch, and they've had some success with that.
Those two combined is about seventy percent of their rocket.
What's the remaining thirty percent, Well, that's the upper stage
that gets into orbit. They right now have to discard
that first stage. That second stage. Well, you know, when
you look at it, the Space Shuttle essentially recovered its
(14:34):
upper stage. That was the Shuttle itself, So the technology
exists to recover for a second stage as well. And
so what is SpaceX doing. They are developing Starship and
super Heavy, which is their next generation rocket. The first
stage the Super Heavy is much bigger than the Falcon
nine first stage, but it's essentially using the same technology
(14:55):
that they have and they know how to do so
they'll be able to make that first stage heavy work.
I have no doubt about it, because they have the
knowledge and that the technology. In the fact, they've already
done a launch a test flight with the engines for
that to show that they can control it and bring
it back vertically and landed. The second stage of Starship
(15:17):
super Heavy. Starship is a reusable ship, basically taking advantage
of the knowledge that we have from the Space Shuttle
and applying their engines to it and their ability to
land vertically, and they're going to be able to have
a reusable second stage, and the two combined will cost
per launch if Elon Musk's predictions are right, and he's
(15:40):
been pretty good. If his predictions are right, the launch
cost will be comparable to what you pay now for
like a Falcon heavy launch, about one hundred million dollars reusable,
and it will be putting into orbit equivalent to a
Satin five rocket one hundred plus tons. When do we
go back to the Moon or Mars with astronauts, Well,
(16:02):
you see, now that's the interesting question. This is what
his company is developing. This ties right into what I'm
just saying now, George. So his company is developing this
and they're hoping to start to launch this within the
next three to five years. Meanwhile, for the last twenty years,
NASA has been trying to develop its version of a
new Saturn five rocket, called the Space Launch System. I've
(16:26):
written about this. They have spent they're going to send up,
spending close to sixty billion dollars to develop it. It
maybe could launch once every year. Each launch is going
to cost, depending on how you want to amatize the
development costs, anywhere from two to fourteen billion dollars. They've
(16:47):
spent twenty years developing if they're still three years away
from launching. This is the rocket that the Trump administration
is depending on to get back to the Moon by
twenty twenty four during his can term assume any wins,
It is to my mind, highly unlikely that will happen.
(17:09):
If it does happen, it doesn't really get us very
much because the cost of the rocket and the cumberson
nature which it's designed makes it very difficult to really
have a long term a space effort. You all you'll
do is what we did in the sixth teas. You'll
do a stunt launch or two and that'll be it.
So maybe they'll get back to the Moon with that,
(17:31):
with people on a mission or by twenty twenty four thereabouts,
But that's not getting us to the moon. I think
what needs to happen to get to the Moon is
exactly what SpaceX is doing. Private enterprise competing to come
up with good ideas, and I think that SpaceX will
probably be able to achieve that based on their track record.
(17:56):
You know, things cannot go wrong, but based on their
track record, I think they could probably do it almost
as fast, and they'll be doing it with something that
will cost pennies. In comparison, when was the last manned
Moon launch? That was in the nineteen seventy three So
if we had continued, if we had continued and not
(18:17):
stop then in seventy three, what would the Moon look
like now? Would we have bases there and everything else?
You know, it's a difficult question to answer because the
assumption has to be that Americans would have been continued too,
willing to spend the money with the Saturn five rocket
to launch many missions. And even though one of von
(18:37):
Brun designed that rockets as a vehicle four colonizing the
entire Solar System, and it had the capability because it
could put one hundred tons into orbit, much like SLS
is trying to do, and much like Starship is trying
to do, it costs a lot. It costs too much,
and since Americans have always looked with skepticism on the
(18:59):
idea of using government coerced tax dollars, the political will
was just not there. Listen to more Coast to Coast
AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to
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