Will we return to the Moon in 2025?

What might be in store for space travel in 2025? Well, the answer to that hinges on how much Donald Trump’s incoming administration seeks to utilise NASA and other enterprises like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. We put in a call to space scientist and author David Whitehouse…

David - In the Trump administration, which is no respecter of tradition, and for which success and achievement counts more than heritage, it may well be that Elon Musk is able to overrule many of the directions and programmes that NASA has particularly in its human space program. Because there was a study just released, which showed how America plans to get to the Moon. The astronauts at the moment is going to go to the moon on the Orion capsule. They're going to transfer to the Starship, go down to the surface, and then come up again and transfer back to the Orion capsule to come back to Earth. When that plan was actually put in visual terms and we saw pictures of it, people started saying, but Orion is tiny, Starship is enormous. This doesn't look right, this doesn't look compatible. This looks very strange.' Now either that's the way to go to the Moon, or it's telling us something about meshing the government's expensive long-term space effort to go to the moon with Elon Musk's nimbler, faster, more risky approach. Elon Musk has launched more than anybody else put together into space. His Starship could be launched 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times a year as you get going. The space launch system that launches the Orion capsule, that's to take astronauts to the Moon, probably cannot launch more than once every two years. So these are two very incompatible systems that people are beginning to realise that perhaps even though power is too much with Elon Musk, one would argue, he might be the way to get back to the moon before the Chinese.

Chris - You've written some really powerful words because you said 2025 will be the most important year in human space flight since 1969. Very, very powerful. What do you think is going to happen then in 2025 to justify those words?

David - Well, I think this is the year of decisions. This is about how to go back to the Moon. Since we've been to the Moon, we've had basically the space shuttle and the space station. And the space shuttle we know was a flawed system and we are going to have to face Elon Musk's, one of its big tasks, is going to have to face the same problem as the space shuttle had when putting people on board his Starship. Because the Starship is a capsule and when he does put people on board it seems that he wants to design it for a crude flight relatively quickly. His main problem is that at the moment there doesn't seem to be an abort system in the sense that the crew are inside the capsule and the rocket and the capsule are next to each other as was the space shuttle. And when Challenger blew up, the crew had no way to get out. So he has got to address when he puts people on board the star ship. And that's part of going back to the Moon because, at the current plan, the crew will transfer to the star ship to go down to the Moon's surface and come back again. He's got to work out the safety issues of that. And that is going to be very difficult no matter what his ability to send the Starship around the solar system. And we expect to see him send an un crewed one to Mars in the next couple of years. That is a fundamental human safety problem that he is going to face. But success is everything at the moment with the Trump administration and the decisions for going back to the Moon. For what capsules America uses and how it explores the solar system will probably be made this year. Because at the moment you have the Starship, the up and coming what could be a very versatile, very powerful spaceship to take people into space, to the Moon and possibly onto Mars. You have got the Dragon capsule, which is also SpaceX that takes people up to and from the Space station. You've got Boeing's Starliner capsule, which had all these problems and wasn't able to bring the crew back from the Space Station earlier this year because they had problems with the thrusters and those are still not resolved. And you've got the expensive and capable Orion capsule that is going to take astronauts to the Moon and is complicated and has problems with its heat shield at the moment. So those overlooking the American space program and Trump will say this to Musk. Musk will say, how come we have the Starship Starliner, Dragon, and Orion? Do we need four ways to put American astronauts into space? Surely with wanting to save money and be more efficient and achieve more, which is what SpaceX has shown us it can do, something's got to go. So I would argue big decisions this year, next year and the year after. And that will set the agenda and the goal, the technological direction to go back to the moon, which I think is going to be much later than we thought now, and possibly onto Mars.