Planetary scientists are starting to get stirred up by Starship’s potential

Jennifer Heldmann stared at the computer screens on her desk, watching as a rocket's upper stage slammed into a crater near the South Pole of the Moon. In the name of science, a 2.3-ton chunk of steel struck the Moon with the force of 2 tons of TNT.

 

It was October 2009, and Heldmann tracked the impact from inside the Science Operations Center at NASA Ames in California. As a 33-year-old planetary scientist, she was working her first major mission for NASA by coordinating observations of the impact with ground-based telescopes.

 

NASA sought to "touch the ice" with the LCROSS mission. Although the Apollo landings in the 1960s and early 1970s had found a gray and barren world, scientists had since come to believe that pockets of ice were trapped below the rims of craters in permanent darkness at the poles, the remnants of billions of years of cometary impacts. Centaur's mission was to blast one of these craters and see if the scientists were right.

 

After poring over the data, NASA declared that it had indeed found water in the vapor plume kicked up by the Centaur impact, as well as material ejected by the blast.

 

For Heldmann, this was a pivotal moment in her career. The experience cemented her interest as a planetary scientist in following the water. "It is truly amazing how the results of that mission have been so profound," she said.

 

The discovery of water ice on the Moon highlighted an era in which planetary scientists were finding ice and water all over the Solar System—on the ice-encrusted moons of Europa and Enceladus, on and beneath the surface of Mars, and potentially in even more far-flung locations, such as the interior of Pluto or Neptune's largest moon, Triton. As they looked beyond Earth, scientists discovered, water was nearly everywhere.

 

These discoveries raised all manner of tantalizing prospects. Where there is water—or once was—life might have developed. Scientists were therefore no longer just looking for fossils in long-dry lake beds on Mars; they began seeking out living organisms in the large oceans of Europa, Enceladus, and elsewhere. For human exploration, too, the proliferation of water offered a great opportunity. Where there is water, there are the components for rocket fuel—liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

 

In no small way, these discoveries have influenced the focus of NASA's science and human spaceflight programs. NASA has increasingly leveraged its annual planetary science budget, about $3 billion a year, to support missions that may find past or even present life on other worlds. And during the last four years, the space agency has been formulating a plan to send astronauts to the Moon, possibly to extract water there, as a precursor to sending humans to Mars.

 

For scientists, there are always more questions than answers. And there are always many more missions they want to fly than funds available to fly them. The ubiquity of water has only heightened scientists' desire to get robots out into the Solar System to definitively find ice deposits and subsurface oceans and to characterize them. Just as we're learning that the Solar System holds far more secrets than we might have imagined—which makes our inability to fly out there and unlock them especially frustrating.

 

But what if we could?

 

Some planetary scientists have started warming to the idea that SpaceX's new Starship rocket, with its unprecedented lift capabilities and potentially paradigm-shattering low costs, could open up the Solar System to a new era of exploration. Imagine sending a lander to Europa, which harbors a vast, warm, subsurface ocean. During recent NASA planning meetings, scientists contemplated sending a complex spacecraft, costing billions of dollars, to conduct science on Europa. At best, they were hoping to land a payload of science instruments about the size and mass of a mini-refrigerator there.

 

With Starship, by contrast, NASA might land a cache of scientific payloads the size of a single-story unfurnished house.

 

"You can really take advantage of the Starship architecture and get to the outer Solar System in ways we haven't thought about before," Heldmann said. "It could provide a revolutionary new way of exploring these worlds."

Starship’s origins

Engineers at SpaceX have been working seriously on the development of Starship for about five years, and over the last dozen months or so, they have completed several early test flights. Much technical work remains, but the company appears to be well on its way to delivering a superheavy-lift rocket that is fully reusable, low-cost, and potentially capable of delivering as much as 100 tons to the surface of most bodies in the Solar System.

 

SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, view Starship as the key rocket to take humans to Mars and eventually build a self-sustaining settlement there. But such a vehicle would have myriad other uses for science, exploration, and defense purposes.

 

A highly reliable version of Starship likely remains several years away, but the vehicle could begin a series of orbital test flights in early 2022. NASA's human exploration program now has so much confidence in Starship that the space agency selected the vehicle to serve as the landing system of its Artemis Moon Program. Now, if Starship fails, NASA isn't going back to the Moon.

 

"Starship can bring unprecedented amounts of payload to Mars and elsewhere," Heldmann said. "Planetary scientists need to be thinking about how we can take advantage of this capability because it’s extraordinary. And if we want to take advantage of these opportunities, to have payloads on the uncrewed test flights, we need to get going."

 

SpaceX first approached the planetary science community in 2018 with a series of "Mars workshops" that addressed basic questions such as potential landing sites on the planet and gaps in knowledge that need to be filled before people can safely live and work on the surface.

 

The company invited prominent names from the Mars research community, and several dozen participated. Some had already bought into SpaceX's vision, but others were skeptical. Over time, as SpaceX built and tested prototypes, even some of the skeptics began to buy in, believing that Starship was really going to happen.

 

"As Starship has begun to seem more real, it has changed people's minds," said Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist and Mars expert who participated in the meetings. "Starship being selected for the lunar missions was a huge credibility boost."

New white paper

Earlier this year, many of the workshop participants began to recognize the urgency of getting NASA on board with using Starship for science missions. So they wrote a white paper (see PDF), with Heldmann as the lead author, titled "Accelerating Martian and Lunar Science through SpaceX Starship Missions."

 

Two dozen other Mars researchers from academia, industry, and SpaceX—Harrison included—signed on to the paper. It issued a clarion call to NASA's leadership to begin providing funding for scientific payloads that could fly on Starship.

 

"NASA must develop a funded program aligned with the development approach for Starship, including a rapid development schedule, relatively high risk tolerance compared to traditional planetary science missions, and ultimately a high ratio of potential science value for the dollars spent if successful," the scientists and engineers wrote.

 

Starship's key differentiator is mass. Today, when a scientist plans a mission to explore another world, there are two big constraints: cost and mass. Starship may have some effect on cost by offering more rocket for less money. But the biggest change is that scientists will no longer need to be hyperfocused on mass. They can carry more instruments, more shielding, more whatever. "It completely changes the game," Harrison said.

 

For years, NASA's highest planetary exploration priority has been the return of sample rocks from Mars to study in high-tech laboratories on Earth. Finally, the agency has come up with a baseline plan, worked a partnership with the European Space Agency, and started to secure some funding for the Mars Sample Return mission. If all goes well, NASA hopes to bring a few kilograms of rocks back from Mars by 2031.

 

Because Starship can take off from other worlds in addition to landing on them, it could completely transform a Mars sample return mission. Instead of being able to handle 2 kilograms of rocks, Starship might be able to return 2 metric tons.

 

This kind of potential really excites planetary scientists, and not just the younger generation. Brown University's James Head helped NASA select Apollo landing sites in the 1960s and trained the astronauts who landed there. He has since gone on to a distinguished planetary science career.

 

Head enthusiastically signed the white paper and said he appreciates that SpaceX has a compelling vision and is diligently working toward that goal. At SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Head said he saw the kind of youth, energy, and determination that propelled the Apollo program.

 

"Being on the floor of the SpaceX factory is the closest I’ve felt to having been in the Apollo program," Head said.

Would NASA?

Creating a program to specifically fund NASA science payloads on Starship seems like a stretch at this time. NASA generally prefers to competitively award programs to multiple bidders, not create a specific program for a specific vehicle.

 

And even if NASA's leadership decided it wanted to create a Starship-specific program for science payloads, it's doubtful that Congress (or perhaps even the White House) would go along. Members of Congress like jobs in their districts and states, and NASA's traditional contractors provide this. SpaceX, by contrast, focuses heavily on cutting costs and efficiency. It works in comparatively few states and employs fewer subcontractors.

 

When NASA held a competition for the Human Landing System and ultimately selected SpaceX's Starship as the sole option, Congress protested hotly. But that reaction probably would be tame compared to Congressional fury at selecting a SpaceX-only science payload program to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

 

Consider the Mars Sample Return mission. NASA plans to partner with an important ally in space, the European Space Agency, to launch a sample retrieval rover (developed in Europe) and an ascent vehicle, built for NASA by Northrop Grumman. This mission, launching no earlier than 2026, could perhaps fly on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. Then, a European-built return orbiter would launch on an European Ariane 6 rocket to bring the small cache of samples back to Earth.

 

Such a mission would likely have a broad array of political support because it would fund multiple US contractors and bolster ties with Europe. By contrast, a SpaceX-only mission on Starship would upset NASA's other contractors, the European Space Agency, and the politicians who back their interests.

 

Still, the white paper authors felt it was important to underscore the potential value of Starship, despite the political headwinds.

 

"That is the political reality, you're right," Head said. "On the other hand, if we don't point this out, it will never happen." The development of Starship is a golden opportunity for NASA to rethink how it has done exploration for more than a half- century, he said. Missing that would be a shame.

 

There are other options available. Several people interviewed for this article suggested that NASA create a "Commercial Mars Payload Services" program, whereby it awards contracts for the development and delivery of science payloads to Mars.

Borrowing from CLPS

This project would be modeled on the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program, which awards money to private companies to build spacecraft that can carry NASA payloads to the surface of the Moon. NASA has awarded a half-dozen contracts so far to a diverse array of bidders and has a total budget of $2.6 billion through 2028.

 

Such an idea has already been proposed by scientists in the influential Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, which suggested that "a Mars-focused CLPS-like program could allow technology development for future exploration as well as delivery of science payloads."

 

With a commercial Mars program, NASA might offer money to its field centers and the academic community for payload development and then put the responsibility on the scientists to buy transportation to Mars. This might ease some of the political strain on NASA.

 

NASA's overall leader for science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen, has also championed the CLPS program and its willingness to accept some risk of failure. He said the agency should consider all large rockets coming online in the next few years and take advantage of their capabilities.

 

"On a 10-year timescale, the availability of heavy launch, whether it is Starship, the Space Launch System, or other large rockets, is a really important ingredient that needs to be considered," Zurbuchen said in an interview.

 

Another senior official at NASA spoke to Ars and was granted anonymity in order to speak freely.

 

"I do think the planetary science community is paying attention," the official said. "They’re watching. And I think there are big changes coming. At some point, the risk will be low enough that people will start proposing a Discovery-class mission as a rideshare on a Starship. We just launched Lucy, and Psyche is in development. Both missions were selected at the same time, and both are going to asteroids. Maybe those two could have gone together on a Starship."

All the things we could do

As scientists start to think less about mass as a constraint, they will run into other barriers to building more planetary spacecraft. Only a relatively small number of people in the world know how to build such vehicles, and training more will take time. There are also a limited number of ground-based facilities where the spacecraft can be subject to vacuum and vibration testing. Then there's cost—the most expensive part of a launch with a scientific probe is not the rocket but the spacecraft.

 

"Just because Starship is flying, I don’t expect that all of a sudden the Science Mission Directorate’s budget is going to double," the NASA official said.

 

However, Starship might eventually be able to pare back those costs, especially with the capability to launch frequently.

 

Consider that SpaceX might provide a regular rideshare flight to Jupiter every two years. Several large and small probes might be carried by a single Starship, using its power and propulsion to reach the Jupiter system. Once there, each spacecraft could fly into their orbits or destinations and rely on Starship for a communications relay back to Earth. This would provide a huge mass and propellant savings on each spacecraft.

 

SpaceX could fly its first Starship to Mars in 2024; it will probably be little more than a test flight to prove that the massive vehicle can execute a trans-Mars injection and then go into orbit around the red planet. The schedule is tight for NASA to squeeze any science probes onto this first flight, but the next Mars window opens at the end of 2026. That seems like a more reasonable target for both SpaceX and NASA.

 

There are an impressive range of possibilities for NASA if it wanted to load up Starships headed to Mars in that time frame. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory could build a duplicate of the Perseverance rover with a wholly different set of science instruments. The space agency might fly a pair of Mars Reconnaissance Observer clones to replace its aging communications infrastructure on Mars. Engineers could scale up the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, to produce oxygen in much larger quantities from the Martian atmosphere. NASA could also send a bigger drill to dig deep into the subsurface to see if the interior really is warmer and wetter.

 

"We'd also be happy to fill up a Starship with Ingenuities," the NASA source said, referring to the wildly successful helicopter still flying on Mars after landing early this year.

 

Musk himself recognizes the importance of engaging with the science community and promoting the viability of Starship. One night last month, Musk spoke to scientists at the prestigious National Academies for more than an hour, taking question after question from the scientists about Starship, planetary science, and other, more esoteric topics.

 

"Starship is designed to be a generalized transport mechanism for the greater Solar System," Musk told the scientists. "You could get a 100-ton object to the surface of Europa. It's a lot more than you could do with a smaller rocket. So I think it's very exciting. Obviously, we still have a lot to prove. But architecturally, it is capable of transporting almost any arbitrary mass to any solid surface in the Solar System."

 

It was somewhat odd—and somewhat endearing—to behold. Here was Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, so contentious on Twitter, so controversial in today's political discourse, seeming to win over some of the smartest people in the country. The scientists were appreciative of his time and eager to learn more about how Starship might help their research.

 

There may be ice all over the Solar System, but that night, Musk succeeded in melting some of it back here on Earth.