>>15461934
> When Sowers and his team released a series of papers showing how an architecture with refueling and depots would enable a human exploration program using existing commercial rockets, Boeing officials became furious and tried to get him fired. While Sowers was protected by his company's leadership, he was banned from uttering the word "depot."
> At the same time, a powerful US Senator, Richard Shelby of Alabama, was adding billions of dollars to NASA's budget for the Space Launch System. This vehicle was being designed and managed at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state. He, too, told NASA officials to stop talking about depots. Before then, NASA had been considering funding some experiments with United Launch Alliance on propellant storage in space.
Boeing strikes again
> Shelby retired at the end of 2022. One long-time advocate of propellant depots, Jonathan Goff, does not believe this is coincidental to the space agency's renewed interest in depots.
> Like Sowers, he welcomed NASA's entry into an era of reusable spaceflight. But Goff noted that it is really only happening because two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are aggressively pushing the idea forward.
> Although developing Starship, Blue Moon, and their refueling capabilities will be challenging, Goff said they are engineering projects and not basic science. In other words, we know this will work. Humans have built plenty of rockets before, and with the Falcon 9, we know that rapid reuse is possible. The physics and engineering of propellant storage and transfer is solid; it just needs to be done.
> "I think we could have done a lot of this in the 1960s if we had put our minds to it," he said. "The only reason we haven’t done it by now is because it’s hard to get the money to do it. Until now, most people assumed a big rocket, like with Apollo, was the only way."