Back to the Moon for Real: A Conversation with Private-Spaceflight Evangelist Charles Miller

The future that never happened: A bustling Mon base as envisioned by a NASA study in 1986. (Credit: NASA/Dennis M. Davidson) NASA's human spaceflight program has been in a state of uncertainty pretty much from the moment the Apollo 17 crew left the surface of the Moon 45 years ago this month. The Space Shuttle never became the hoped-for workhorse that would makes space access cheap and routine; the International Space Station never became a glorious gateway to deep-space exploration. Now NASA faces yet another U-turn as President Trump has directed the agency's administrator to send astronauts back to the moon. One problem: There is no NASA administrator (the Senate hasn't voted on the nominee, Rep. Jim Bridenstine, so he'll have to be renominated when congress reconvenes next month). Another problem: There is no budget to support another Apollo-style venture. So where do we go from here? I spoke with Charles Miller -- a veteran of both NASA and commercial space ventures, and president of consulting company NexGen Space -- to get an insider's perspective. Miller was part of the Trump transition team, advising the incoming administration on space policy, so he's privy to some of the internal conversations. On the other hand, he's not a current NASA employee or member of the new National Space Council, so he can speak candidly. That combination made for an interesting conversation -- interesting enough that I'm going to run it in two parts. What follows is an edited version of part one of our exchange. Why has it been so hard to establish a vision that would get astronauts back into deep space? I've been in the industry nearly 30 years. I've watched multiple attempts at an American return to deep space collapse. There were three times where the old traditional way of doing this has been proposed, and every time it's failed. The first time was when the Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew, tried to set up a continuation of Apollo, and that collapsed. It had absolutely no support. Then Bush 41 and his Space Exploration Initiative was the second time it completely collapsed. Then the third time was with Bush 43 and the Constellation Program. If you try something three times and it collapses each time—clearly you need to do something different. What makes you confident that private companies can help save us from another failed plan for human space exploration? I've actually done the analysis, so when other people are giving opinions I can show some research to back it up. Let me provide some context. I'm a serial space entrepreneur. I started a company called Constellation Services back in the late '90s, focusing on satellite servicing. We pivoted to Space Station cargo delivery in the early 2000s after the satellite telecommunications collapse. [Miller also co-founded NanoRacks, which supports small-scale experiments on the ISS, and started ProSpace, a commercial-space lobbying organization.] Then in 2009 I went to work for NASA for three years as senior advisor for commercial space, so I saw the other side of the firebreak. I got a team at six NASA centers to do an initial analysis that clearly showed returning to the Moon with commercial partnerships was much lower cost in near term, but it went nowhere. There was a lot of quiet support, but it was politically incorrect to push commercial partnerships inside NASA. When I got out, I put in a proposal with my consulting company, NexGen Space.