When SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket debuted this month, China’s

aerospace community was mostly envious, noting that their

equivalent rocket, the Long March 9, would not be ready for another
decade. One story in state media observed that “to put it more bluntly,
this time the Americans showed us Chinese with pure power why
they are still the strongest country in the world.”
The head of Europe’s space program watched the US
company launch its enormous, largely reusable new rocket, and was also
inspired.
“Totally new ideas are needed and Europe must now prove it still
possesses that traditional strength to surpass itself and break out
beyond existing borders,” wrote Jan Wörner, director general of the
European Space Agency, on his official blog. He expressed dismay
that rockets now being built by Europe’s space company,
Arianespace, won’t be reusable, which puts them at a deep cost
disadvantage to SpaceX. He called for a re-thinking of Europe’s
rocket program.
This attitude didn’t last long. A few days later, Wörner wrote an
apologetic sequel to his post, emphasizing that Arianespace’s current
rocket plan was correct and would be completed as intended. He
was merely exercising his prerogative as head of the continent’s
space agency for “turning our minds to systems still far off in the
future,” he said.
Reading between the lines, the abrupt about-face can be attributed
to the stakeholders of contractors and government policymakers,
who weren’t pleased with Wörner’s public fretting. This speaks to
space exploration’s tendency to become industrial policy, more
about jobs than science, which is a key reason why 1970s space
visions of lunar bases and enormous space stations aren’t a reality.
If China and European officials are envious of the new American
rocket, the US space program is decidedly more circumspect about
its future.

Rocket rivals
While NASA praised the Falcon Heavy’s debut and its own critical role
enabling SpaceX to develop the rocket, its acting administrator’s
future plans for the rocket is simply “the integration of a new class
of launch vehicle into our Nation’s space program.” Before the
rocket flew, Scott Pace, the executive director of the National Space
Council, said large rockets would always be “strategic national
assets, like aircraft carriers,” not commercial services.
Discussions to fly a NASA test payload on the risky first flight never
got past informal talks. Lori Garver, a former NASA executive who
helped develop the public-private partnerships behind SpaceX’s
success, wrote last week that NASA does—and should—see the new
rocket as competition for its own projects.
Consider that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy was built to help realize Elon
Musk’s dreams of a multi-planetary civilization. When deployed in its
final form later this summer—perhaps in June, to launch some
experimental hardware for the US Air Force and NASA—it is
expected to be able to deliver some 70 tons to low-earth orbit, or less
than 20 tons to Mars, while costing around $150 million per
mission. According to Musk, the rocket cost somewhere north of
$500 million to develop.
Then look at the Space Launch System (SLS) being built under
NASA’s instruction by Boeing, also to explore the solar system.
According to the new NASA budget released last week, it will fly for
the first time in 2020, capable of carrying some 77 tons to low earth
orbit at a cost of about $1 billion a flight. The total costs of the
program are tough to estimate but exceed $10 billion; last year,
NASA spent $2 billion on the rocket, and expects to spend a similar
amount annually for the next five years.
SLS will be more powerful, but the Falcon Heavy is here now, and
costs less. It’s the nature of disruptive companies to produce a less
capable, much cheaper alternative to the status quo—which in this
case is a blank space where a bigger rocket should be. Today, the
Falcon Heavy should compete handily with largest rocket currently
built in the US, the Delta IV produced by the Boeing and Lockheed
Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance, which costs more than
$350 million a launch.

National assets?
When the rocket launched a Tesla roadster into a solar orbit earlier
this month, the “marketing wheeze,” in Wörner’s words, was the
biggest event in the space world for years. While the stunt attracted
both criticism and applause, it was a shot across the bows of the
space establishment: If a private company can put a car up there,
what else can they do? One Chinese state newspaper put the
argument in terms that might be echoed at NASA’s Marshall Space
Center: “what our country has to desperately catch up with is
actually a private U.S. enterprise.”
Boeing spacecraft executive John Mulholland has argued that the
Falcon Heavy is not big enough for Mars missions, and the space
establishment’s skeptical line on the new rocket was perhaps best
expressed in a back-handed compliment from German astronaut
Alexander Gerst, currently training for a mission to the
International Space Station. He told Ars Technica’s Eric Berger “let’s
not confuse that with a ‘Journey to Mars,'” the term NASA adopted
for its space ambitions under the Obama administration. (Musk
appears to have come to the same conclusion, putting his hopes for
multi-planetary civilization in his next rocket, the BFR.)
The Trump administration has determined that the US should re-
orient itself toward lunar exploration, and its first step will be
funding the development of a piece of space hardware called the
“power and propulsion element,” which will be placed in orbit
around the moon in 2022 as the cornerstone of a human outpost,
possibly by a privately owned rocket like the Falcon Heavy.
Meanwhile, this year China plans to land a robotic mission, Chang’e-4,
on the dark side of the moon—something no other space power has
done.
It’s not clear what role the new Falcon Heavy will play in helping US
space exploration in the near term; to be sure, it may take time for
space project managers to work the long-delayed vehicle into their
plans, if they are willing to do so. A meeting of the National Space
Council on Feb. 21 —already fraught with jockeying between rival
rocket-makers—may shed more light on NASA’s plans. The White
House has asked for $150 million to fund public-private
partnerships to send robotic explorers to the moon, and it is
possible the Falcon Heavy will be a vehicle for some of these
experiments.
But America’s “Journey to Mars” has been pushed into a nebulous
future; the phrase doesn’t even appear in NASA’s new budget,
because NASA can’t afford to go to Mars. At least, not with its
current rocket.