“Cook has been closely involved in Aerojet Rocketdyne’s development of the AR-1 engine - a candidate to replace the Russian RD-180 on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation rocket.”
“Greg Autry, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California. Autry has written extensively in support of commercial spaceflight ... (He) took a harder line on the SLS. ‘We will discontinue spending on Space Launch System (SLS), a giant government rocket, lacking both innovation and a mission,’ he wrote. ‘While SLS has consumed the largest single piece of NASA’s budget for years, private sector operators like SpaceX and Blue Origin have leapfrogged it with more efficient, reusable boosters.’”
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Jack Burns has been an advocate for lunar exploration, serving as director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), a network of universities and NASA centers that studied the use of the moon to support space science research.
Commenter (not me) on the site posted:
“Rodney Liesveld is a pal of Chris Shank’s from Mike Griffin’s time at NASA. Steve Cook was one of Griffin’s confidants. Sandy Magnus has long-standing ties with Griffin via their positions at AIAA. The presence of Shank, Cook, Liesveld, and Magnus is further proof that Mike Griffin is lurking in the distance plotting a return to NASA. This is more of a Griffin ‘Boarding Party’ than a ‘Landing Team’. Adding Jack Burns, an overt lunar exploration advocate, indicates that a pivot from #JourneyToMars toward #BackToTheMoon is in the cards.’”
You’ve got two choices; either make it so that there’s little cost in lifting materials from earth, or make it so you can harvest materials from outside the gravity well. Until you solve ONE of those two problems, you’re sending very very expensive gadgets into space. Great for TV images from Mars, not so much for actually exploring via humans.
I disagree with mr autry’s position on SLS. We need a heavy lift capability