(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.