(dramatic music)
- [Loren] At the Michoud Assembly Facility
in New Orleans, big things are afoot.
This massive factory floor
holds major components
for NASA's new rocket, the
Space Launch System, or SLS.
It's the centerpiece for
NASA's Artemis Program,
a series of missions that will send
the first woman to the Moon.
When the SLS is finished,
it's going to be something to behold.
Standing taller than
the Statue of Liberty,
the finished version of the
rocket will rival the power
of the Saturn V that took humans
to the Moon during Apollo.
- [Launch Control] Engine run-up, liftoff!
- SLS is really going to be the backbone
for going and exploring deep space.
There's no other rocket
out there that can do that.
- [Loren] But the finished rocket
has been years away... for years.
- So between now and June of 2020,
we'd have to make that a reality.
- This is 2019.
- Yes, sir.
- [Loren] The project has been plagued
with delays and cost overruns,
and today, 50 years
after the Moon landing,
it's worth asking whether the US
can reclaim its Apollo mojo.
- [Mission Control] Apollo 11,
this is Houston at one minute.
Trajectory and guidance look good
and the stage is good, over.
(radio beeping)
- The heart of the
problem may be that NASA's
trying to do things too
similarly to Apollo,
and that might not work today.
The perfect storm of money and politics
that helped Apollo succeed
just may never happen again.
Apollo occurred during
a very volatile time.
It was the height of the Cold War,
and the US needed a show of strength
against the Soviet Union.
President John F. Kennedy
was advised that space
could be a great way to
prove America's worth
on the global stage,
so he called on NASA to
send a person to the Moon
by the end of the 1960s.
- We choose to go to the Moon.
- [Loren] Congress backed
up the proposal with cash,
and NASA's annual budget
grew to more than 4 percent
of the total federal budget in 1965.
Today, NASA is maybe half a percent.
Industry also rose to the challenge.
NASA assembled an army of contractors,
including Boeing, North American Aviation,
Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM.
Together, they built the
giant Saturn V rocket
that eventually took humans to the Moon.
(rocket rumbling)
(violin music)
Kennedy's call to arms paid off.
- [Neil] That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
(dramatic music)
- [Loren] Today, a half-century later,
NASA still wants to do big
things with big rockets,
and to build the SLS,
they're playing their greatest hits
in hardware and expertise.
The Space Launch System has
a lot of Saturn V vibes,
but some of that is dictated by physics.
If you want to launch a lot of stuff
off of Earth in one piece,
you need a big rocket to break free
of our planet's gravity.
But the SLS also shares
a lot of technology
from NASA vehicles of the past.
For one, the SLS will be
using the same main engines
as the Space Shuttle, which
flew from 1981 till 2011.
- We know those engines very well.
They've flown so many
missions on the shuttle,
so there's not a lot of risk in those.
And in engines, you know,
new development of
engines can be expensive,
so we really traded risk
versus the cost-benefit of it.
- [Loren] Many of the Saturn V contractors
have stayed in NASA's inner circle, too,
Boeing in particular.
They acquired Douglas and North American,
and they're now the prime
contractor on the SLS.
Overall, the endeavor
is a big job creator,
responsible for thousands
of jobs in Florida,
Louisiana, Texas, and more.
Michoud itself is deeply
embedded in the regional economy.
- This facility actually
was built to support
the war effort in World War II,
and it developed and we took it over
at the Saturn program in the '60s,
and NASA's been here ever since.
- [Loren] All in all,
the vehicle's development
can be found across America.
- I would struggle to find a
state that didn't have a piece.
The whole country's involved.
- [Loren] But that deep history,
all the way back to Apollo,
might also be a liability.
- So human spaceflight
programs since Apollo
have made up the majority
of the NASA budget,
and the majority of those programs
are performed by aerospace contractors.
- [Loren] This is Lori Garver.
She was the deputy administrator for NASA
under President Obama.
Lori says those contracts
have been so long lived
that they've locked NASA
into certain technologies,
mindsets, and dollars.
- No one wanted to compete,
and competition is where
you drive down cost
and advance innovation.
This has been something that unfortunately
has held back the program.
- [Loren] The SLS has cost
around $14 billion so far,
which seems like a lot until
you consider that Apollo
cost roughly $264 billion
in today's dollars,
according to analysis from
the Planetary Society.
Congress would probably never give NASA
an Apollo-era budget again,
but NASA is still trying to pull off
an Apollo-like program
for less with contractors
who don't have a
reputation for cost saving,
and some policymakers are taking notice.
- NASA and the contractors
have to execute.
Failure to do so could have
dire consequences for the program,
and there will be no one else to blame.
- [Loren] The politics
of cutting the program
entirely are tricky.
Lori told us a very revealing story.
During her tenure as deputy,
she actually tried to
cancel NASA's last big plan
to return humans to the Moon:
the Constellation program.
The way she tells it,
that didn't go over well.
- The military industrial complex
didn't want to let go of their contracts,
and that is a huge
force to overcome.
- Ms. Garver's plan would
cede control of the heavens
to the Russians and the Chinese,
probably for most of our lifetime.
- And we weren't able to overcome it.
A combination of the contractors,
some of the people within NASA
who are really committed
to keeping these jobs,
sold Congress, and we
were given an ultimatum
that we had to do a big
rocket or we wouldn't get
Commercial Crew and
the technology programs
and the Earth sciences
programs that we wanted.
So we took the deal.
- [Loren] Constellation
was ultimately canceled.
- This is because the old strategy,
including the Constellation program,
was not fulfilling its
promise in many ways.
- [Loren] But the contractors
and hardware endured,
and one of the proposed
rockets for Constellation
was resurrected as SLS.
And today, in spite of all
the delays and overruns,
there's a faction in
Congress, led by lawmakers
from states where the SLS is built,
who are dedicated to
continuing the rocket,
seemingly at any cost.
- What's important is to build that rocket
and build it right, isn't it?
- [James] Yes, sir.
- [Loren] This all adds up
to a feeling that the SLS
has become too big to fail,
that NASA is trapped by its own mythology.
- We have been trying to relive Apollo.
- [Loren] So NASA's core philosophy
hasn't changed much in 50 years,
but what has changed?
An entire private space
industry has appeared,
and they're building capable rockets
with a lot of power.
In 2018, SpaceX debuted
its Falcon Heavy rocket,
which is currently the
most powerful in the world.
And other players like
The United Launch Alliance
and Blue Origin are
developing heavy-lift rockets
that could also get a lot
of cargo into deep space.
None of these rockets are as powerful
as the SLS will be when it's finished,
but they represent serious competition.
Some critics suggest that
these private players
could supplant the SLS entirely,
getting NASA out of the
business of building rockets.
- [Journalist] The mighty
Delta IV Heavy rocket.
- [Loren] NASA obviously
disagrees that any one rocket
needs to beat out the others.
- It's not an either/or, it's an and.
We need all these pieces.
We've got to have all of us
working together,
public and private.
I can see in the future
where it's kind of like
the intercontinental railroad
where they were built,
they were funded by the government,
but eventually they were self-sustaining,
and people could travel across the country
and move and live elsewhere.
That'll happen in the future.
- [Loren] Lori agrees that
the commercial industry alone
won't take us back to the Moon.
There's just no money in it yet.
- Going back to the Moon,
I'm not sure what the private market is.
Certainly Mars, same question.
I know we have very wealthy
people interested in doing it,
and that's wonderful.
We need to be realistic about
the fact that the government
will continue to lead those
programs as they did launch
for quite a long time.
- [Loren] NASA is working with
private industry more, too.
Rather than building their
own human lunar lander,
they plan to pick a
commercial company or two
to develop vehicles in their own way.
Companies would get a lump sum of money,
build the hardware, and
would ultimately own
the design and tech when they're done.
NASA is confident that we will
return to the Moon in 2024,
but maybe what's missing
is why we're going back.
NASA claims that the Moon
is a great stepping stone to Mars
as it will help prove
out the technology needed
to survive on the Red Planet.
They say there's more science to do.
There are minerals and water to mine,
and eventually, companies
could make money there.
But again, the urgency of the
Cold War just isn't there,
and multiple polls show
that most Americans
don't see the value in
going to the Moon either.
Lori, for one, thinks NASA needs
to become essential again,
and today, that might
not mean building rockets
or going to deep space at all.
- My view, we need to win
at something right now
that NASA is uniquely skilled to do,
and that is address climate change.
The science is there;
we have satellites 24/7,
public and private, and
recognizing that the things
that we can do to fix it,
we must do in the next 10 years.
NASA, given that mandate,
could take that hill.
- [Loren] NASA, on the
other hand, still sees space
as a cause to rally behind.
They've come this far with the SLS,
and it's still NASA's job to rally.
- We don't leave any
dollars on the Moon, right?
Every dollar we spend
is here in this country
putting this together and going,
but it's the learning we get
and the benefits for humanity
that come out of this.
We are on the leading edge,
and we can choose as a country
to follow or we can lead the world,
and I choose to lead.
(dramatic music)
- [Mission Control] Apollo
11, this is Houston.
You are go for TLI, over.
(radio beeping)
- [Astronaut] Apollo 11, thank you.
- [Mission Control] Roger that.
